The Authority - The Magnificent Kevin #4

[history79]

Comments

[janegray]

Really liked this scene, it was so good :)

[kd_the_movie]

What ive always liked about the Kev series is that the later books really emphasize the point that being Military Special Forces is a horrible existence.

Yes, you're considered the top of the line, A1 Badasses of the entire military, but you're still a cog in the Military Industrial Complex, you're constantly in danger zones where many of your compatriots don't make it out alive (and if they do, its not unscathed), you see horrors beyond imagination, and your expendable and considered even MORE so once you're out of the service.

[janegray]

Agreed. Tiny's suicide in particular was a total subversion of the "retired badass" clichè.

[shadur]

Also, you get sent out on the kind of jobs where, if something goes wrong and you get killed, your country will pretend never to even have heard of you.

Funny thing is, that's come up more than once

[chortles81]

Usually supposed to be a "that's how badass he is" trait though.

The idea has come up more than once in Ennis works

[chortles81]

Indeed, Microchip's pitch to Punisher in the first MAX arc fell flat--and got Microchip on Punisher's own hit list--because Punisher knew as much, and both he and Tommy Monaghan had a thing about picking their own targets.

Hell, recent stories about alleged "look the other way" policy re: bacha bazi (TW: child abuse if you look the stories up) illustrate that the moral dilemma isn't limited to special operations forces either.

[sagrada]

It's kind of amazing how much unconscious contorting there is whenever writers run up against the taboo against hurting women.

Obviously in the story letting her live would have been a grave mistake, but the belaboring of the point that she was "asking for it", the way her Ice Queen snootiness and dismissive attitude all came crowding in at that worst of all possible moments, says a lot under the surface egalitarianism of Kevin blowing out the brains of an unarmed yet very powerful woman for a change. Just like how there's the unthinking wisdom that there has to be a reason somebody in a story to not be the cultural default for that role, it follows that you need a reason to take them out.

Anyway, yeah, this is a wholly expected and very well executed part of the atory.