Is the superhero genre inherently predisposed toward right wing politics?

[The Romulan Republic]

One thing to consider with the discussion of killing super villains- death in superhero stories really isn't sure to be permanent. Killing someone isn't necessarily a more permanent solution than locking them up.

[Adam Reynolds]

One thing to consider with the discussion of killing super villains- death in superhero stories really isn't sure to be permanent. Killing someone isn't necessarily a more permanent solution than locking them up.

That is another point that annoys me. Killing in fiction should be permanent. Doing otherwise ruins the dramatic effect of death in general over time.

Or what I said earlier in this same thread:

Even if characters in such films do die they might survive anyway given the current trend in Marvel movies of "killing" characters only for them to survive later, something used in every film between the two Avengers movies. While this is almost always fine in individual films, it doesn't work as an overall trend as it means that character death is almost entirely off the table in the long run. This in many ways defeats the point of even having violence from a storytelling standpoint. If death is not at least a possibility for main characters, then it eventually ruins the drama of having it appear.

Even in something like Star Wars, in which we know the heroes will survive, there is still a sense that they might not because of this effect. In a Marvel movie this doesn't apply. Even when he dies he might just come back later.

[The Romulan Republic]

One thing to consider with the discussion of killing super villains- death in superhero stories really isn't sure to be permanent. Killing someone isn't necessarily a more permanent solution than locking them up.

That is another point that annoys me. Killing in fiction should be permanent. Doing otherwise ruins the dramatic effect of death in general over time.

Or what I said earlier in this same thread:

Even if characters in such films do die they might survive anyway given the current trend in Marvel movies of "killing" characters only for them to survive later, something used in every film between the two Avengers movies. While this is almost always fine in individual films, it doesn't work as an overall trend as it means that character death is almost entirely off the table in the long run. This in many ways defeats the point of even having violence from a storytelling standpoint. If death is not at least a possibility for main characters, then it eventually ruins the drama of having it appear.

Even in something like Star Wars, in which we know the heroes will survive, there is still a sense that they might not because of this effect. In a Marvel movie this doesn't apply. Even when he dies he might just come back later.

What if its a setting where magic (which often includes resurrection), is a major part of the setting?

Besides, I do feel that occasional resurrections can work well. Overdo it and it becomes silly and repetitive, and of course lessens the supposed permanence of death considerably, but done very rarely it can work well. It didn't cheapen Buffy the Vampire Slayer for me, really, when Buffy was resurrected, but it was part of the basis of two seasons' worth of material where the consequences were explored and it was actually shown that the death, and the resurrection, had significant impacts on the setting and characters.

Casual resurrection or routine resurrection would be a lot more problematic in this respect.

[Simon_Jester]

Conversely, if the state refuses to put the Joker to death no matter how many people he kills, who is Batman, a private citizen, to argue with them?

I think there's a legitimate argument to be made that there can only be a few reasons why Joker continues to go on living:

--He's being held extrajudicially whenever arrested, indefinitely without trial. This appears to be how Arkham works. Catch a super-villain in the act, undeniable proof of what he's done, etc, literal 'blood on their hands', arrest him and fling him into Arkham. Similar protocols seem to be followed by most comic-book universes; we rarely see the super-villains being tried, and when they do get tried, it's usually an occasion for escape or judicial farce...

This is frankly rather unrealistic when applied to the more overt villains. Lex Luthor or the Penguin may be able to escape prosecution.

But the Joker wears very distinctive clothing, has physiologically distinctive features, commits terrorist threats and ghastly murders on camera. It should be stupidly easy to build a criminal case against the Joker, and he is literally a cartoonishly easy target for competent prosecutors.

I mean, take The Dark Knight, where he's physically in a police station, then escapes and commits numerous bombings and terrorist actions. Which he publicizes and announces to all of Gotham.

The same objection applies to many other villains with actual superpowers. If a ten foot tall radioactive giant spreads a trail of destruction through downtown Portville and is stopped by Bouncing Guy or whatever, it should not be too hard to prove that this particular ten foot tall radioactive giant committed the crimes in question and should be held accountable for dozens of acts of premeditated murder. We manage to put real serial and spree killers on trial; giving them superpowers shouldn't change the basic principles.

--Another possibility is that, for whatever reason, the DCU doesn't have a death penalty law. This is probably false as I believe there's occasional mentions of sending people to the chair or whatever. Still, this may vary per state in the DCU America as it does here.

This is at least plausible, but it ties back into my point- if the public and the actual legitimate judiciary are so convinced that the death penalty is unconstitutional, and are so adamant about this that they stick to that principle even when the Joker is murdering hundreds for literal giggles...

Then what standing do random private vigilantes have to ignore that? How can we justly say they "should" ignore a judicial principle so important to the general public that the people are willing to die by hundreds or thousands in order to uphold?

It's like, if you lived in a nation that forswears war, and the September 11 attacks occurred in your country, and there weren't masses of protesters demanding that you go to war, and it happened again and again and there still weren't- sure, some protesters but not many...

At some point, as a private citizen, arming up to go kill the bad guys is just ignoring and disrespecting your own legal system.

--Finally, the easy answer for Arkham: It's for the 'criminally insane', people who are considered mentally incompetent to stand trial. In which case one would think the security at Arkham wouldn't be as laughable as it is... anyway, Joker doesn't get executed because he's obviously insane. But where is the line drawn? How many people does he have to kill before the court decides to put a permanent end to it? (Possibly more proof for the 'no death penalty' thing?)

The issue here is that criminal insanity is defined as being unable to perceive the line between right and wrong actions. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Joker has made it very clear in statements that were recorded that he does understand that society thinks what he's doing is wrong.

IF, however, the courts in Gotham (or whomever would try someone like the Joker) DO have a death penalty, and Joker is ruled competent to stand trial... I see no way, other than a broken court/obscenely bribed or corrupted jury, that he would escape the death penalty. And if there's a 'no double jeopardy' rule like we have in the US, the prosecutor wouldn't necessarily be able to appeal unless a mistrial was declared.

Thing is, the Joker has committed so many murders and terrorist attacks that he couldn't plausibly escape trial over and over. And his recidivism rate being like 10000% and the manifest inability of the state penitentiary system to build an asylum capable of holding him... again, in real life we don't have that problem of there being no escape-proof prisons, but I would think that the Supreme Court would have come around on the death penalty if we did.

]There is little practical difference between a vigilante with a computer telling them what to do, and a vigilante with a shadowy organization telling them what to do... until you have the shadowy organization reveal its own agenda. But the computer can have an agenda too.

Indeed it can, and Person of Interest started to feature that idea more and more as time went on. Though the problem with an organization is that it has resources and if those resources aren't used it begs the question of why. It's like the criticisms of Iron Man 3 not featuring SHIELD. There really was no good reason for them to become involved even after Killian abducted the US President. Iron Man may have been taking care of things, but that hardly stopped them from getting involved the last time.

At a guess, because the events of Captain America 2 were happening more or less simultaneously? There may be some kind of disproof of this, but I'm not familiar with it, so I think it's at least a good guess. It would also explain why Cap didn't call for Stark to help him take down the hovercarriers.

But then the proper argument is that the judiciary should respond by increasing their security measures (which in comic book settings they do; they can restrain supervillains at least for a time). The judiciary might also reasonably consider the death penalty.

That would be the ideal situation, but it is terrible writing to have a bad guy continually escape from custody and still have our heroes(including Gorden, a sworn police officer who is legally authorized to use force in such a situation) refuse to kill them, even when they are a reasonable threat in the moment(as in that particular scene). Had Gorden simply shot the Joker it would have been a perfectly justified shooting as he was armed with a knife and about to cause great bodily injury to another.

My point here is that we should not place the blame specifically on Batman, who across most of his various portrayals has consistently refused to kill.

It's not his job to decide that criminals are super-evil and should die. His role, which he has chosen, again in many incarnations not just one movie, is to oppose, detect, and capture criminals. Not to act as judge, jury, or especially as executioner.

There may be some plot holes where he does some stunt in an action scene that would logically result in deaths. But that doesn't invalidate the basic principle.

It is the same issue with the World Security Council deciding that the best solution to an unknown portal was to launch a nuke at it in The Avengers. It allowed Iron Man and to a lesser extent Nick Fury to be awesome. Most audiences really don't even seem to notice this occurring. The problem in such stories is that our heroes are still reliant on that organization. While SHIELD fell apart due to Hyrda's involvement, it wasn't Hydra members that ordered a nuclear strike, it was the council that Hydra mostly killed(Jenny Agutter's character survived because Black Widow impersonated her).

It is fairly credible that world leaders might well do something ill-considered and likely to cause large scale death, when they don't understand or trust what the individuals on the spot are telling them. This is not strawmanning. We've seen a variety of real life crises that were mismanaged in similar ways, where top-level officials make the wrong choice because of groupthink, bad planning, political motives, and so on. Add in the actual threat of an alien invasion, and the use of nuclear weapons becomes more credible.

And if you point out "but using a nuclear weapon was illogical," I don't disagree but it's irrelevant, that's not the point, which is that bad decisions ARE a normal plausible thing in such scenarios.

We ask why Batman doesn't kill the Joker... but why don't we ask why the courts don't? There is no reasonable doubt that the Joker is responsible for numerous murders, and will commit many more murders if when he escapes custody next time.

So try him and execute him. Simple.

I'm sure that they could reasonably get the death penalty against someone like the Joker in something of a realistic setting. If nothing else, the Feds could try him on terrorism charges and get a much quicker death penalty than any state other than Texas.

But the underlying problem with comic book stories is that they never do anything like this...

Okay, but don't put the blame on the superheroes for refusing to "do the right thing" by committing more premeditated extrajudicial killings. Extrajudicial killings are generally not going to be a good answer to this problem.

Yes, but you can't help but notice at the same time he was drinking his own kool-aid. The Avengers, he says, will handle the big threats, maybe even set up a system so they can draw down as he wants a system that can handle the big threats before THEY are needed, who knows. But for the smaller threats, he will help SHIELD put in place a system to analyze, predict, and handle the small threats before they happen.

Okay, that's plausible.

But what I'm getting at is that Stark is still trying very hard to retain control over his own 'best' technology and isn't trusting others to use it, which is in keeping not only with his MCU portrayals but also with his comics.

[Gaidin]

Indeed it can, and Person of Interest started to feature that idea more and more as time went on. Though the problem with an organization is that it has resources and if those resources aren't used it begs the question of why. It's like the criticisms of Iron Man 3 not featuring SHIELD. There really was no good reason for them to become involved even after Killian abducted the US President. Iron Man may have been taking care of things, but that hardly stopped them from getting involved the last time.

At a guess, because the events of Captain America 2 were happening more or less simultaneously? There may be some kind of disproof of this, but I'm not familiar with it, so I think it's at least a good guess. It would also explain why Cap didn't call for Stark to help him take down the hovercarriers.

The MCU wikia has a sort of timeline. Iron Man 3 happened pretty much at best guess directly after Avengers and before Agents of SHIELD. Whereas, Winter Soldier happened after Coulson was revived and the mere knowledge he was alive was high clearance intel, how he was revived was Director level intel. People always ask questions of why Cap didn't call in his friends. But they always forget the little tricks SHIELD was playing in Avengers where if it had a wireless signal, any wireless signal at all, they were bugging it in attempt to find Loki. Cap and Fury had gone dark. In fact, Fury was relatively dead for a certain definition of dead. And for one who'd been working in SHIELD for at least a year should we not expect Cap to expect SHIELD to be watching people like Stark to get a call?

Let's play a game. If Cap, a war veteran, and possibly even a SHIELD veteran by now, made a suggestion of calling Stark or other Avengers, who'd have smacked him first and said SHIELD's watching them? Fury or Romanoff. The two most experienced people in the room in turning these situations around into a win. They were letting him call the plan, but to call in others? Doubtful.

Yes, but you can't help but notice at the same time he was drinking his own kool-aid. The Avengers, he says, will handle the big threats, maybe even set up a system so they can draw down as he wants a system that can handle the big threats before THEY are needed, who knows. But for the smaller threats, he will help SHIELD put in place a system to analyze, predict, and handle the small threats before they happen.

Okay, that's plausible.

But what I'm getting at is that Stark is still trying very hard to retain control over his own 'best' technology and isn't trusting others to use it, which is in keeping not only with his MCU portrayals but also with his comics.

Indeed yes. I just enjoy the fact that these plots seem to be more than a movie long when you look at the characters. It was a detail I felt worth pointing out.

[Elheru Aran]

--He's being held extrajudicially whenever arrested, indefinitely without trial. This appears to be how Arkham works. Catch a super-villain in the act, undeniable proof of what he's done, etc, literal 'blood on their hands', arrest him and fling him into Arkham. Similar protocols seem to be followed by most comic-book universes; we rarely see the super-villains being tried, and when they do get tried, it's usually an occasion for escape or judicial farce...

This is frankly rather unrealistic when applied to the more overt villains. Lex Luthor or the Penguin may be able to escape prosecution.

But the Joker wears very distinctive clothing, has physiologically distinctive features, commits terrorist threats and ghastly murders on camera. It should be stupidly easy to build a criminal case against the Joker, and he is literally a cartoonishly easy target for competent prosecutors.

I mean, take The Dark Knight, where he's physically in a police station, then escapes and commits numerous bombings and terrorist actions. Which he publicizes and announces to all of Gotham.

The same objection applies to many other villains with actual superpowers. If a ten foot tall radioactive giant spreads a trail of destruction through downtown Portville and is stopped by Bouncing Guy or whatever, it should not be too hard to prove that this particular ten foot tall radioactive giant committed the crimes in question and should be held accountable for dozens of acts of premeditated murder. We manage to put real serial and spree killers on trial; giving them superpowers shouldn't change the basic principles.

As I pointed out, obviously it would be difficult to link the smarter villains with their crimes. That they tend to be thrown into places like Arkham suggests a fundamental brokenness to the DCU criminal justice system.

Superman may be a literal super-hero, but legally, he still constitutes a vigilante do-gooder. He may conduct a private investigation that doesn't interfere with the police's investigation of criminal cases, but outside of that, as far as I know, he has no legal authority to capture Lex Luthor and throw him into Blackgate or whatever, even if Luthor is guilty as sin of a few massive crimes. He has no power to suspend habeas corpus. Granted, generally the supers tend to render their prisoners to the police for appropriate processing, but nonetheless, surely "Hey, I just caught this guy, he's committed xx crime, put him in jail for so many years" holds little force of law? If Spiderman captures a couple of muggers and leaves them trussed up for the police, how are the police to know he didn't just catch a couple of random guys and frame them?

Obviously, comic-book readers aren't particularly concerned with realism; having a functional legal system where criminals are caught and prosecuted in the normal manner would obviate most of the need for superheroes and render the medium moot, works like Watchmen aside. A certain blurring of the lines is to be expected. Nonetheless, after a certain point the suspension of doubt is so stretched to the point that it snaps when even slightly questioned.

--Another possibility is that, for whatever reason, the DCU doesn't have a death penalty law. This is probably false as I believe there's occasional mentions of sending people to the chair or whatever. Still, this may vary per state in the DCU America as it does here.

This is at least plausible, but it ties back into my point- if the public and the actual legitimate judiciary are so convinced that the death penalty is unconstitutional, and are so adamant about this that they stick to that principle even when the Joker is murdering hundreds for literal giggles...[snip for length]
At some point, as a private citizen, arming up to go kill the bad guys is just ignoring and disrespecting your own legal system.

At the same time though, if a legal system permits such massive recidivism and crime sprees and escapes, perhaps it needs fixing, no? I do not advocate vigilantism, but given the obvious guilt of a character like the Joker, I don't think there's much excuse they have for not taking a 'final solution' to that particular problem. Individual exceptions can always be made when there is an adequate rationale.

And no, just because character deaths don't always stick in the comic-book world isn't an excuse for not killing them. The civilians who get squashed never come back, do they? (barring some kind of magical or timey-wimey interference)

[Q99]

I will mention that in DC and Marvel, the Justice League and Avengers (and some but not all other teams) are organizations with legal standing, so there's a bit more to it legally than them being vigilantes. Unfortunately how the laws work is not gone into detail at either company.

PS238 interestingly had a 'super lawyer' help set up laws to be hero-friendly (allowing the passing of evidence without requiring revealing their ID).