Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Screw, Marry, Murder? Piece of Cake.

Are you folks familiar with this setup? They call it a large number of different things, such as "Bed, Wed, Dead" or "Fuck, Marry, Kill" or "Date, Mate, Annihilate," or "Crush Kill Destroy" - no wait. That last one's not one of them. Unless you could use "crush" as in "have a crush on"? The idea maybe being something less formal than mawwage, twoo wove...? But no, that doesn't work because the moral dilemma aspect really calls for each of these to be pushed to the extreme limit: actual life-and-death stuff. Literally sex, or literally taking that death do us part leap, or literally death. Literally hypothetically, I mean! Literal in the hypothetical universe, where your interlocutor just put you. Literally in that world of pain where only you can choose - and where you have to.

Hm. Except if we use "crush" for sex, then "destroy" has to be marry. Hm.

I don't know. It could fit! But there are better fits, so let's leave C,K,D out of it, for clarity's sake.

Anyhow, the idea is: somebody names 3 people, or fictional characters or whatever, and you have to pick between them: hypothetically, you have to pick one to have sex with, another to marry, and another to kill. There's no rule that you can't kill the one you marry! I mean - I'm not your lawyer and I can't advise you, there probably are rules that say you can't do that, but the rules of the question don't prohibit it. Ditto there's nothing to say you can't have sex with the one you marry, either - there's really nothing in the rule that says you can't do ALL THREE to the person you pick to have sex with! But the point is, the additional two acts are totally non-compulsory. If that's how you roll, that's on you!

What's compulsory, under the scenario, is you have to pick one who you DEFINITELY have sex with, and pick a different one to definitely marry, which leaves the third one, who you have chosen to kill.

You see here how this so-called "innocent game" becomes in fact a moral dilemma in dead earnest. These are some issues here we're dealing with, potentially!

Folks, it's a hypothetical. Grow up. It's meant to be a moral dilemma, to test your ability to make a hard call when the chips that could never actually be down suddenly GET DOWN. If you're not up to it, if you're some kind of moral coward or intellectual overthinky objectioner, grow up - there's nothing really at stake here and no harm in pondering these quandaries.

I'll give you an example, because I bet I could do any number of these pretty easy!

Mark David Chapman, Peppermint Patty, Zooey Deschanel.

Easy.

I'd screw Zooey Deschanel, marry Peppermint Patty and murder Mark David Chapman.

How about another example? Drawn from Scooby Doo characters:

Velma, Shaggy, Scrappy Doo.

Now here you see where it really can force some hard choices! You have to work your way through it. For the sake of this answer, I'd like to mention I'm assuming that for each of my choices I get to do each as much as I like. There's nothing in the setup of the question to limit that, any more than there is to exclude you from adding on voluntary actions to the mandatory one you're forced to pick. There's just nothing in the scenario that forces the limitation (except, of course, the consent of any partner you haven't explicitly chosen to murder. That goes without saying, I hope).

So:

Velma, Shaggy, Scrappy Doo.

Screw Velma, marry Shaggy, murder Scrappy Doo. Easy!

Poor Shaggy in that case, though. I hate to lead a dude on, but #1 I was forced to choose, so lesser of several wrongs, sorry my man! It don't make a right, but when somebody holds a hypothetical gun to your head, what do you do? What do you do? #2, Shaggy strikes me as a pretty conscious dude. Pretty open-minded, and I bet he would want to help "strike a blow" for equal marriage rights, you know? Me and him could do that. #3 I do not support interspecies marriage or bestiality whatsoever. And #4, what the hey, as long as he's OK with me sex-partnering Velma whilst restricting myself to a more "platonic" bond with him, I guess could slip him a "scooby snack" every now and then. Strictly hypothetically, here.

And I want to be able to kill Scrappy Doo every god-damned time the mood strikes me.

Point is: it's a thought exercise. It's a test of character. It's a way to raise and explore greater issues, using some trumped up never-gonna-happen moral dilemma. Because how will you know? How will you know unless you ask yourself, what you'd really do in a difficult situation? How well do you know your self? How well do you want to know yourself - and do you really want to know the answer to that question? Some people don't, but I do.

So yeah, go ahead and pose me a trichotomy or few in the comments, if you want! I can knock these out bang bang bang like eating popcorn. How did I get so good at hypotheticals, at moral dilemmas?

Practice, practice, practice.

2 comments:

Pearl said...

How DID you get so good at the hypotheticals?

I'm assuming you and Scooby may BOTH be good at the ol' hypotheticals, if ya know what I mean.

And murdering Scrappy Doo? Oh, hell, yes. Is there a scenario here where I get to watch? Peep, Observe, Blatant Stare?

Hmm.

Pearl

dogimo said...

I'm not entirely sure I know what you're saying there, about my ol' pal-in-law Scoob.

Pearl, I'd be happy to subscribe you to the happymarriage-cam website feed for me and Shags, and give you a free entrée to the otherwise pay-per-view Scrappy Doo multiple-murdercam. However, what's between me and Velma stays between Velma and I.

There's probably not going to be much going on on the marriage-cam, except (one supposes) a lot of happy domesticity. I suspect Shaggy knows what to do with a mixing bowl, an apron, some oven-mitts and a brownie pan.