70. Getting started on the Threats chapter.

There’s a lot of great text in the opening section of the Threats chapter, so we’re going to take our time going through the next 7 paragraphs. Let’s start with the opening paragraph and sentence:

Everyone and everything in Apocalypse World is a threat.

This is one of those sentences that ring in my ears for its simplicity and power. If I were to have my body tattooed with the critical sentences from the book Memento-style, I would put this one in the center of my chest so that it would be the first thing I’d see when I looked in the mirror, right below “Barf forth apocalyptica”. (Okay, I had never thought to do that before, but I must admit, I really love the idea now that it’s out there. Maybe a Photoshopped job of Guy Pierce’s tattooed torso would suffice. I’ll think about it.)

This sentence is what makes the image chosen for this chapter so brilliant. As I said way back in post No. 33, most of the images in the book are of badasses perpetrating badassery. It would seem obvious that one of those badasses would appear on the title page to a chapter called “Threats”?! Instead, we get the image of a woman breastfeeding a child. The woman’s eyes are sunk and give the impression of her being tired. The word “Threats” is across the woman’s breasts near the child’s face.

What better way to drive home that everyone and everything in Apocalypse World is a threat than to make the cover image an unarmed woman seemingly minding her own business? I love it because not only does it suggest that the woman is a threat to anyone who stands between her and what she needs, but that the baby itself is a threat, possibly even to their mother. And is the mother’s milk not a resource? Are not children themselves a valuable resource to a community? And the ability to bear children? So this one image combines people and resources to say that even those things that look most benign and common are both valuable and dangerous in Apocalypse World.

Damn that’s good.