Y'know, I think it actually comes from not liking GUN PEOPLE. Like, I know some SWORD GUYS I find insufferable (the kind who, unlike Damien who actually can provide educational context for sword information, are just kinda fucked in the head and uncomfortable to be around). I like John Wick movies. I run body horror and honestly, almost cartoonishly violent TTRPGs. I write superhero, sci-fi, and fantasy fiction in which violence becomes both the solution to, and the cause of, all of life's problems, as Homer Simpson once said. But it's the GUN PEOPLE and the way they engage with media that gross me out.
Like anyone who jumps into a GI Joe thread to piss and moan about the scale of Hawk's grease gun or whinge that the first wave guns were sci-fi and not realistic or the caliber of ordnance on a HISS tank isn't right... I instantly like and trust that person less. Too much of their head space is taken up by GUN CULTURE instantly. At best I find them insufferable and boring; at worst I wonder where they were on January 6.
But that's a me problem, I guess, and it's a proximity issue - we have so many of these fuckin' guys in the U.S. and they've had a stranglehold on pop culture since 9/11. I'm sick of them. If we had KNIFE GUYS who did this all the time I'd probably be sick to death of them, too, but KNIFE GUYS mostly post their masturbatory everyday-carry photos on Twitter and stay out of the way, I can roll with those guys, they're over there talking about watches and stuff too. There are CAR GUYS who can be that kind of insufferable, but car guys don't sea lion a Bluesky post because a car's engine didn't make the right sound effect in a chase scene. They bitch about it amongst themselves, more like.
GI Joe (and, I guess, stuff like Punisher) just run into that thing where the silly cartoon guy and gun guy thing overlap on the Venn diagram so of course we're going to run into each other.
But I mean, this is entirely a me thing. I needed a movie that would keep my attention while running on the treadmill in 90-100 degree weather today and was like "okay, so I need VIOLENCE so I don't get bored or tired" so it's not like I'm a pacifist in the media I love. I think I'm just suffering from how everything's been gun porn and military propaganda since, like, the first episode of 24 came out and I'm bored and annoyed by it.
(BTW, my only moment of being a dickhead American while living in Ireland was when some old timers told me as we were passing through Limerick that it was known as Stab City and I laughed. They were appalled and I just said I'm sorry, I just know I can outrun a knife but I've been shot at in a drive-by back home and I know I can't outrun a bullet, so knife crime just feels weird to say to me growing up in a suburban war zone.)
