In fiction, and broadly in aesthetics, punk is largely anti-authoritarian but non-revolutionary. In the political compass sense, it tends towards the bottom or “libertarian” end (caveat: people who claim to be libertarian in the US political sense are not and never will be punk. Don’t @ me.) In narrative media, this tends towards a somewhat mythic structure (similar to the thing I called “the millennial monomyth” a while back), a paradigm that all -punk stories usually follow, similar to 19th century realism or naturalism in many ways. Consider a capable but fairly normal person who wishes to be largely left alone; consider some powerful agency or circumstance that will not do that. The story is the Rube Goldberg interaction that arises here.

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