Very Bad Wizards · Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro

Episode 320: Forgive Me (Kafka's "A Hunger Artist")

November 11, 2025·1 hr 29 min·5 clips

Kolitz's 33-question questionnaire turns gooning into a social-science subject.

1. Very Bad Wizards spends this episode on Daniel Kolitz's Harper's article "The Goon Squad" and Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist." 2. Tamler Summers, from the University of Houston, and psychologist Dave Pizarro use the episode to connect internet subculture analysis with Kafka interpretation. 3. The opening question is why a group of young men would turn edging, PMVs, and Discord into a ritualized identity. 4. Kolitz's article describes "freebase pornography" and "schizophrenic porn mosaics" cut from hundreds of clips into a few minutes. 5. Tamler and Dave describe gooners who share screens, swap clips, and meet in hotel rooms to watch porn together. 6. They discuss labels like "pornosexuals" and "vol cells" while the hosts doubt how literal those self-descriptions are. 7. One participant says porn avoids disease risk, while another worries that a partner might be bored or silent about what she wants. 8. Dave's quoted exchange between Fuiji and Beta Loser adds tenderness, apology, and "miss you so much y'all" to the picture. 9. The hosts connect that scene to Gen Z comfort with bisexual, trans, and misgendered identity categories, plus strict rules against pedos. 10. Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" is introduced as a 1922 story written near the end of Kafka's life, when he was dying at 40 from tuberculosis. 11. The story centers on a man who starves himself in a cage for public display, first as a headline attraction and later as a sideshow act. 12. Tamler and Dave note the story's 40-day fasting limit and the way audiences stop counting once the attraction loses novelty. 13. The article's darker claim is that sustained porn use can become so repetitive that the medium stops working as a numbing agent. 14. The hosts argue that the outside world can feel less controllable than a room full of screens, lube, and familiar clips. 15. They treat the no-pedos moderation, color-coded bracelets, and watch-party logistics as signs of a bounded moral order. 16. In the Kafka discussion, Tamler keeps asking whether the story is an allegory or whether it should simply be read as a story. 17. Dave's Tolkien comparison sharpens that point by treating allegory as optional rather than mandatory. 18. The episode starts in a joking register with Kant, masturbation, and family disagreement, then slows into careful literary criticism. 19. Listeners who like Kafka, sexual subcultures, and interpretive debates will get the most from it. 20. People looking for a plot-only summary or no porn discussion will probably skip it.

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