John has sweet memories of his time in weapons training. Considering that he takes weapons training with Joy, I am beginning to believe he is a masochist. For all of Joy’s complaints about his technique, John doesn’t actually learn anything. Perhaps if he stopped drooling over his instructor and started paying attention… but that’s another matter.
And in other news, Joy demands that John address her as “Sergeant Phim” when training.
Also, for somebody who has to put up with Joy every minute of every day, John is awfully naive. He was apparently under the impression that being able to hit a target 70% of the time counted as pretty good, before Joy disabused him of that notion. Or should I say, “abused him”?1 She berates him for actually taking the time to aim his shotgun instead of just shooting from the hip like Rambo, and whacks him with a tree branch. Because Abuse Is Okay When It’s Female On Male! [2]
I should point out that a shotgun is designed to be fired from the shoulder. Shooting from the hip will just scatter the shells everywhere and likely get everyone except your target killed. Of course, Joy cares nothing about collateral damage.
But John finally has enough. He grabs the switch from Joy’s hands and smacks her with it. Then he yells, “You’re not one of those fucking monks teaching me judo,”3 and storms off to the car. What Joy did was out of line, but since this is John we’re talking about, he comes off as a whiny asshole. The people tasked to save the world have the maturity level of anime characters. The world is so doomed.
Of course they kiss and make up, but since Joy is incapable of feeling guilty or sorry about anything, she flips John’s plate of dinner upside-down into his lap.
She has pegged my Sue-dometer. I need to go back to the store and get it fixed now.
…
After this leads to yet another fight, Joy walks out of the house and John is worried sick. If I were in his shoes, I’d be glad to be rid of that crazy bitch. For some reason Joy went back to their office building in the middle of the night, even though Rummel acknowledges that in 1908 anybody outside after dark was assumed to be a criminal, and as an Asian woman Joy would be assumed to be a prostitute, so she has no business ever being outside anyway. In any case, we learn that Joy did this to guilt-trip John into buying her flowers, and later says that John should control his temper. She is such a manipulative Jerk Sue, and neither Rummel nor his Self-Insert can see it. If Joy were male and did what she did, I am sure that those actions would not be justified by the narrative.
Joy is horrified when John shoots a bird during a later training session.
“You killed it,” she exclaimed in a horrified voice. Joy was sad for the rest of the day and kept mumbling, “Poor thing. I hope it didn’t have little ones to feed.” (page 191)
Remember this when Joy has no compunctions whatsoever about killing human beings. This is just like the schizophrenia over death in the Inheritance Cycle, only worse because Rummel doesn’t even have the excuse that there is a war on. In fact, his characters want to prevent wars, so they should be above reproach. Yet as you can see, they are clearly below it.
The next few paragraphs make me wonder if Rummel has any military experience, because in them John has to learn how to crawl the way they do in basic training, and Joy inevitably tells him that he’s doing it wrong.4 How would she know? The reason I ask is because Rummel never actually tells us what John is doing that is so bad. Is this a way of hiding his own ignorance?
Within a year, John becomes almost as good a shot as Joy. Of course, we are told this and not shown this, but I can’t really complain because the previous training sessions were nothing but Joy being abusive. Still, it would have been nice to see John actually hit a target for once. Instead, that sentence is replaced with a puerile sex joke. Just so you know, Rummel was born in 1932.
Then we get this, which proves beyond a doubt that Rummel has never even held a firearm in his life:
For the drill, I had on a suit with a shoulder holster and a .45 caliber semiautomatic. I was to stand relaxed and wait until she pulled the target toward me and yelled “Gun,” when I was to go into a partial crouch while pulling the gun out of my holster. Using two hands, I would then shoot the enemy in the chest. The first time I tried it, I thought I did pretty good. I got him in the stomach.
Joy said, “Too slow. Again.” (page 192)
Any hunter or law enforcement officer will tell you that a semiautomatic is completely excessive unless you are going off to war, which John and Joy are not. When they start their assassinations, they will either be execution-style, or just hiring organized crime syndicates to do their dirty work for them. Only somebody who is Ax Crazy would use a semiautomatic rifle for the situation our protagonists will be in. It is also obvious that Rummel’s characters don’t know any more about guns than their creator, considering that Joy once again chastises John for being too slow. It is a very well-known fact that machine guns are fast. They’re called “automatic” for a reason: modern ones can fire dozens of rounds in a second. I don’t think that anybody who is unarmed, or merely has a pistol or melee weapon, would stand a chance. Therefore, Joy is being completely unreasonable once again.
I also must wonder where they are getting their ammunition from. No gun store in 1908 would stock ammo for a firearm that will not be invented for almost four decades. I know that Tor’s groupies sent them capsules full of ammo, but that’s a limited supply. John and Joy have no idea how much they will need, and if they run out, then all their advanced weaponry will be useless. It seems like a waste to me.
It takes John several seconds to take the gun out and shoot the target. This seems a little fishy. Did Rummel do any research?
Exasperated, John hands his submachine gun to Joy so that he can measure her reaction time. Apparently, when he turns toward her the barrel of his rifle is inadvertently pointing at Joy’s chest. Without skipping a beat Joy kicks it out of his hands.
Number one, that was very dangerous (if the gun had gone off, both of them would be dead— this is why you always assume that a gun is loaded), and number two, THIS IS FORESHADOWING. It shows that Joy is a paranoiac psychopath convinced that even her @#$%-buddy is plotting to kill her. She is reminding me a lot of a certain man whose last name starts with the letter “S”…
And then Joy yells at John for not following proper gun safety! As if we didn’t see this coming. At this point, I like Joy Phim only slightly more than I like Rose Potter.5
John, and Rummel by proxy, describes Joy as having “almond eyes” that grow larger. I am not sure what this is supposed to mean. He can’t mean the color of the iris, and Joy has already pushed my Sue-dometer past its breaking point, so I think he is referring to the shape of her eyes. Yes Rummel, we know that Joy is Asian. We do not need to be reminded of this on every other page. Then there’s some bullshit about Joy getting in touch with her inner warrior or some such. She’s only shooting at a paper target, for Pete’s sake.
Joy fired three shots in 1.8 seconds. It takes John 3.6 seconds to fire just one. Now they are just mocking me.
And with John admitting that he is actually afraid of getting in a fight for real, the chapter ends.
Footnotes
2 Warning: TV Tropes link.
3 page 188
4 And of course feels the need to humiliate him by standing on his back and demanding he carry her to the goal.
5 She hasn’t carved words into anybody’s forehead… yet.
LoneWolf on 1 February 2013, 20:56 said:
Boring, I want them to finally get to the job of killing off dictators and such.
Tim on 1 February 2013, 21:09 said:
He means pistol, you wouldn’t carry a rifle in a shoulder holster unless you were a thirty-foot ogre. The real problem there is that it’s a .45; the .45 ACP round had existed since 1904 or so but it wasn’t popularised until the US Army adopted it in 1911. He should be using something like a .38 in 1908.
swenson on 1 February 2013, 21:40 said:
Wat. You’re not joking, this is a legitimate quote? That is… so out of character, I don’t even. Sure, her regular character is horrible, but it should at least be consistent.
Re: future weaponry: honestly, why? Guns back then killed people just fine. Sure, they weren’t nearly as good as modern firearms (there’s a reason we don’t use them anymore…), but it would be both easier to explain if anyone found them and easier to get ammo for. Unless they’re loading their own—and I doubt it.
(Although, to be fair, if they could get the right caliber—and as Tim points out, that’d be difficult at that time—I’m pretty sure it’d still work in modern guns.)
Tim on 1 February 2013, 22:21 said:
A semi-auto in 1908 wouldn’t necessarily be a future gun: there were already several designs knocking around from the 1890s and 1900s (Borchardt C93, Mauser C96, FN M1900 and M1903, Colt M1900 and M1903, Luger, etc). I think the “40 years” thing is Brendan confusing semi auto with full auto and thinking he’s using a select-fire assault rifle. Though there was actually one of those knocking around as early as 1915 (Fedorov Avtomat).
goldedge on 2 February 2013, 02:09 said:
Okay… not Mr. Teatime. I’m guessing Sephiroth.
Epke on 2 February 2013, 09:30 said:
Indeed. He’d be emotionally manipulating and abusing his girlfriend (not to mention throwing food at her in anger, which counts as physical abuse) so that she will feel it’s all her fault and she needs to improve to please her Man. Substitute flowers for obedience and/or sex, and that’s that. Of course, when it’s Joy and John, it’s “funny” because Joy is a woman and is doing the manipulation part, because all women are stereotypes.
Not sure if serious or troll… First: “Joy was sad” is telling, not showing. Considering we’ve seen Joy with the same emotional spectrum as a serial killer, I don’t think she can be sad, and just telling us she is, is bad writing.
Very fishy, and slow, too.
Yeah, “almond eyes” is a common way to describe an ideal, or perceived ideal, shape of the eyes. It’s not limited to Asians though.
Brendan Rizzo on 2 February 2013, 11:19 said:
Not joking, I’m afraid.
Actually, I was thinking Stalin.
Lone Wolf on 4 February 2013, 00:03 said:
Joy being so sad after John shoots a bird? Well, there’s a “human-hater animal-lover” character type, but it’s pretty unlikeable.