I was reminded of this bit from an old review of a New York Times Review of a musical stage play adaptation of the movie “Heathers“…

This means — and how strange is this? — that “Heathers: The Musical” is nostalgic for a more innocent time, when a plot about killing off high school royalty wasn’t quite so sick a sick joke. This show also evokes a pre-”Hunger Games” era when fantasies about teenage revenge could be smaller and didn’t have to involve apocalyptic maneuvers.

… when I heard some excerpts from the “Manifesto” of the mass murderer at UCSB who… is the son of the film maker for the movie “Hunger Games”.  My thought upon hearing these excerpts was “Wow.  That’s… lame.”  Or… “if I were a mass murderer” of this sort, I would be embarrassed to claim this as my reason… even if you wouldn’t be able to hide it as something to be read in a Freudian subtext.

The spilling out and search for a reason takes its usual turns.  One person at slate tries to fit it into his own experiences, and my sense is the irony is that in the end his reason for the mass killing adds up to … he wants masses of people to read his pain and suffering and understand his pain and suffering.  Had he not had any reason to believe this would be hashed through the media I think he would ended up just killing himself.

And it takes me a moment to think this cartoon comes off one of the responses to this particular tragedy.  (At least I think it’s supposed to.)  I find the “hashtag Not All Males” versus “hashtag Yes All Women” line a little tedious and beside the point… two separate things… Plenty of male victims in this guy’s personal “War on Women” for it to fit.

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