Up to episode 2:
I’ve been a bit underwhelmed by the generational struggle, to be honest; it all seems a bit cliched. Oh no, daddy wasn’t there for me, because he had to go off save the world! It feels like a bit of forced drama to me. Lots of kids grow up with absent parents, single working mothers and whatnot—at least your parents are widely beloved around the world, instead of treated like garbage while working shit jobs.
I’m also not quite sure about the central conflict that’s being set up.
So Utopian’s son, Paragon, kills the supervillain Blackstar (or his clone/doppelganger/whatever), after the latter had been mopping the floor with the entire… uhm, Justice Union? I forgot the name. Three heroes had already been killed, and he seemed about to ‘go nuclear’, which would’ve killed the rest of them and taken out ‘half the state’. Paragon, who’d earlier failed to effectively engage a woman in a robot suit, one-punch kills Blackstar, bashing his face in, seemingly at the last second.
This is a breach of ‘the Code’ which the earlier generation of superheroes had set up, which apparently includes a strict ‘no killing, for no reason, not ever’-rule. This is equated with ‘no justice through executions without due process’—which strikes me as a sound principle. But it’s a far cry from ‘no killing’; indeed, virtually every legal code includes provisions for self-defense, and since Paragon (and potentially hundreds, if not thousands, of others) would’ve been killed, and no other option seemed at all forthcoming, that would seem like good grounds for self-defense.
Now, one could maybe argue, that superheroes, with their superior abilities, ought to be subject to stricter rules. And I think that’s a good point; police, etc., are not subject to the same rules as civilians when it comes to the application of force. But in the given case, all of the people involved were superpowered; indeed, Blackstar’s powers seemed to dwarf anything the combined Union could throw at him. So if the Code says, no killing even if that’s the last resort to prevent you and others from certain death, then well, the Code’s just stupid—and with that, all the drama regarding whether one should hold up the Code or if it should be changed to account for a changing world evaporates: yeah, change the Code.
The trouble with this is that it could’ve been easily avoided. Have things be just a little more ambiguous; have Paragon act rashly, rather than out of an obviously last-resort desperation; establish that there might be another potential way to resolve the situation without resorting to lethal action. Then, we could still set up the conflict, but have it be driven by actually sensible moral considerations, rather than just by ‘that’s the Code because Utopian says it is, and not following it is bad’.
Wow, I guess I had more to say about this than I thought…