The issue of lethal force and whether or not certain comic villains like the Joker, Red Skull, Magneto etc should be killed by the heroes has been debated for decades.
With this in mind if you were a comic book hero what would it take for a villain to cross the threshold from “Defeat and surrender to the authorities” to “Defeat and kill immediately”?
The likes of Joker and Carnage are often cited as villains who should be killed without hesitation but given the fact that so many different villains use violence the matter isn’t as clear. What about villains with small body counts or that only kill as a means to an end? What would you do with the likes of Clayface, Deadshot, Mystique, Hydro Man, Paladin, Penguin etc who have all killed numerous people but aren’t bloodthirsty psychopaths that want to raze the world?
Certainly if they ever did something that would justify the killing of a henchman. I mean, like, if it’s just taken for granted that I’d be justified in killing a henchman to get to the big bad, then I’m obviously not going to go out of my way to spare the life of the big bad, you know?
Please note, I’m not talking summary execution. If the big bad (or a henchman!) can be taken alive, then of course they should be. But the idea that a superhero would mow down a bunch of henchmen without a second thought, but then go out of their way to avoid delivering a killing blow to a villain who is employing deadly force at that moment is…perverse. The lives of underlings shouldn’t matter less just because they aren’t a featured character. If anything. Their lives should be more worthy of consideration and, I daresay, heroic efforts to preserve, not less.
But then again, the entire idea of heroes in the comic book sense is perverse, so… :shrug:.
If I was a superman as @MrDibble suggests, my threshold would be the opposite. The only societally useful condition for villains is dead. By definition. As rapidly as my superpowers permitted they’d all be slaughtered without a thought.
I would maintain caution to not destabilize the whole political and economic world at once as I cleaned house in the halls of power worldwide. And then use ongoing vigilance to eliminate up-and-comers before they had an opportunity to do significant bad.
Fred Dryer’s detective Hunter used to end every episode like your summation. But it got so repetitive, and so obvious that I thought Hunter was faking weakness (turning away) JUST so the baddie would make one last attempt and then he could kill the baddie, and “keep the paperwork clean”.
Yeah. I’d thought about the transition after the “superhero as universal psychopath & sociopath exterminator” finally died of old age or exhaustion or whatever. The backlash might have been really spectacularly bad.
I didn’t say just for superheroes. I’ve seen the trope many times, from superhero franchises to cop shows where it often happens to a rogue cop, who turned in his badge and gun, but ignored warnings to stay away from the case because he needs to get revenge pursue justice. But at the critical moment he realizes he still has his humanity and can’t just kill the bad guy in cold blood. Until he turns his back…
We live in a world where great evil can be done without super powers and I am asked if I’d kill a bad guy WITH super powers? Hell, yes.
But then I wouldn’t be the hero in this story, rather some Punisher-style vigilante. I’m cool with that, tights are stupid, but the hypothetical here is that I am the Hero.
So I would be a hero that would kill but then not be a hero.
In season one of Criminal Minds, the same thing always seemed to happen every single episode. It looks over, evil mastermind caught, but the good guys drop their guard, the bad guy draws a weapon, and boom, bad guy gone. I sardonically wondered if they were doing it on purpose as well. But they eventually started taking in the occasional bad guy alive.
Part of what made season 6 so phenomenally good was that Givens–the quintessential “kill the villain instead of arresting them” cop-- showed growth. Boyd gave him every reason under the sun to kill him, and Givens explicitly said he was gonna kill him. But in the final confrontation, Boyd dropped his gun, and Givens decided to arrest him rather than extract vengeance. It was a perfect ending.
Then season 7 came along and doubly fucked it up:
It ends with Givens confronting an unarmed villain and shooting him dead. Sure, the villain was reaching into his pocket for a cassette tape, and Givens thought it was a gun–but c’mon, man, what bad guy is gonna tell a deputy US marshall that he wants a shootout, then break into the marshall’s girlfriend’s house in the middle of the night, then reach into his back pocket and not reach for a gun? It was goddamned ridiculous, a totally implausble setup just to force Givens to shoot an unarmed man.
Givens’s decision to spare Boyd’s life was predicated on the idea that Boyd was gonna go away for life and not be able to go on another rampage of violence. As such, it was clearly the right call. WIth Boyd’s escape at the end of season 7, his call becomes much more questionable.
I, uh, I have feelings about that season 7 finale.
If supervillains (even non-powered ones like the Joker) were real, I suspect that the legal status of Outlaw - Wikipedia -someone who has forfeited all protection of the law- would be revived, by constitutional amendment if necessary.