frigidmagi wrote:Yes, but that has nothing to do with my question Cat.
I'll repeat.
At what point is it okay for someone, not just people like Superman and Batman but any citizen, to say the Justice System has failed and to take matters into their own hands? So when it okay for anyone to kill someone like the Joker?
Let's not sidetrack, I would really like to try to hash out an answer to this one.
I was addressing a previous post, not yours. You can tell because my answer doesn't fit.
As for your question, let me backtrack. In super hero realities, the system is usually fundementaly broken. Who saves the Earth from annihilation? Its not the spend more than the next ten countries combined US military but a small band or singular superhuman. Who prevents Gotham City from completely melting down into a cesspool? A handful of extraordinary humans who beat up crooks, freaks, and maniacs and then do it all over again when the system fails to hold them/dumps them on the street. These are worlds where the US government decides to solve the mutant issue with giant killer robots and the Secretary of Defence is the Red Skull in disguise.
The social contract is failing in most super hero comic book universes as the state cannot contend with the forces attacking it. Thus the independent uberfolk are needed to save the day. Morally, there is no difference between Superman frying the Joker's cerebral cortex with his heat vision or Joe Average blasting it away with a .357, so yes its moral for the guy on the street to break the law to do the right thing. In doing so he takes on the risk that the law and/or other vigilantes will grind him under the wheels of justice, but that's a question of consequences not morality. Same thing as if I was running an underground railroad in 1850. It's illegal, I could get boned by the law, but it's moral.
Last edited by Cynical Cat on Sun Sep 13, 2009 11:50 am, edited 1 time in total.
It's not that I'm unforgiving, it's that most of the people who wrong me are unrepentant assholes.
Batman wrote:Exactly my point. I don't have the legal authority to kill the Joker however much I might want to.
I feel constrained to point out that you don't have the legal authority to do most of the things you do.
Technically true. But there seems to be an unspoken understanding between me and the GCPD (at least as long as Jim Gordon is in charge of it) that as long as I stay reasonably close to the bounds of what WOULD be my legal authority if I were a police officer (or stray farther in ways they'd TOLERATE to an extent from a police officer), they'll overlook the little technicality that I'm NOT a police officer.
This does not cover summary executions.
'I wonder how far the barometer sunk.'-'All der way. Trust me on dis.'
'Go ahead. Bake my quiche'.
'Undead or alive, you're coming with me.'
'Detritus?'-'Yessir?'-'Never go to Klatch'.-'Yessir.'
'Many fine old manuscripts in that place, I believe. Without price, I'm told.'-'Yes, sir. Certainly worthless, sir.'-'Is it possible you misunderstood what I just said, Commander?'
'Can't sing, can't dance, can handle a sword a little'
'Run away, and live to run away another day'-The Rincewind principle
'Hello, inner child. I'm the inner babysitter.'
Hotfoot wrote:Batman is Order. The Joker is Chaos. Superman is Good. Lex Luthor is Evil. That duality is what makes these combinations so classic. Instead of relying on gimmicks and power differences, it's the clashing of ideals that causes such great potential for storytelling. Likewise, you know how every hero is helped into greatness by his or her origin story? Well what best to finish the tale than with an ending?
...
Thoughts?
Malory killed off King Arthur six hundred years ago and he based his work on more ancient stuff. No-one worth mentioning brought Arthur back from the dead. That was not the end of the Arthur story nor did it undermine it. In fact, quite the opposite.
But there seems to be an unspoken understanding between me and the GCPD (at least as long as Jim Gordon is in charge of it) that as long as I stay reasonably close to the bounds of what WOULD be my legal authority if I were a police officer (or stray farther in ways they'd TOLERATE to an extent from a police officer), they'll overlook the little technicality that I'm NOT a police officer.
