Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing
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@Gustav said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
I, for one, believe not killing the wrong people anymore is a good change.
Do you know how many times it's been proven, after the fact, that a person executed by capital punishment in the USA was the wrong person? In the entire history of the country?
Zero.
Not only that, it's not even particularly close. Despite endless heaps of FUD layered onto the subject by activists, you have to go all the way back to the Lincoln administration to find someone who's even a strongly plausible candidate for a wrongfully lawfully executed individual. There's a very strong system of checks and balances in place to keep from executing the wrong person, and it works! Period.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
and widespread willful blindness to consequences.
I find it noteworthy that when Brandon Sanderson, quite possibly the greatest man alive when it comes to the art of thinking through the larger ramifications of powers on worldbuilding, wrote a superhero-world story, he made the good guys explicitly a team of assassins-of-supervillains rather than "crime fighters."
Seriously--that fight in the first Avengers movie in NYC? Did almost as much damage to the city as the nuke would have.
Not even close. Sorry, but I strongly disagree with this point. There are several points in the Battle Of New York that exist for the sole purpose of showing that the heroes are taking certain steps specifically to contain the fight, and to limit and minimize the damage done.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Gustav said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
I, for one, believe not killing the wrong people anymore is a good change.
Do you know how many times it's been proven, after the fact, that a person executed by capital punishment in the USA was the wrong person? In the entire history of the country?
Zero.
Do you know how many times it's been CHECKED, after the fact, WHETHER a person executed by capital punishment in the USA was the wrong person? In the entire history of the country?
Zero.
Because there is no procedure for checking after the fact whether a person was rightly executed (and why would there be - it would be exactly the same as the initial investigation, except the main opposing party is now dead. It would be nothing but a waste of money, EVEN IF they executed the wrong person.)
Granted, coming from a post-soviet state (which, back in soviet times, was very keen on sentencing inconvenient people to death), I may have a different look on how likely it is for the government to overreach when given legal tools to end someone's life.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
Seriously--that fight in the first Avengers movie in NYC? Did almost as much damage to the city as the nuke would have.
Not even close. Sorry, but I strongly disagree with this point. There are several points in the Battle Of New York that exist for the sole purpose of showing that the heroes are taking certain steps specifically to contain the fight, and to limit and minimize the damage done.
Sure. They took steps. But you know what? Nukes aren't as bad as they're depicted either. The kind you can put on a plane that size (without straining the laws of physics...oh wait. I couldn't finish that statement without laughing, since we're already well past the "any of this makes any sense" stage when we start with superheros) is a tactical nuke, which would maybe take out a few square miles. And the kind of structural damage that would (if they weren't handwaving it) be caused by the heroes' actions (let alone those of the enemy) would have actually brought down most of those buildings entirely.
Sure, the heroes were heroic by trying to contain the damage. But every time two super-powered people fight, everyone else suffers. 99.99% of those movies (and every other comic property with fights) is gratuitous property damage. Pretending that it's somehow ok just feeds into the 'paper thin, crappy worldbuilding' issue.
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@Gustav said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Gustav said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
I, for one, believe not killing the wrong people anymore is a good change.
Do you know how many times it's been proven, after the fact, that a person executed by capital punishment in the USA was the wrong person? In the entire history of the country?
Zero.
Do you know how many times it's been CHECKED, after the fact, WHETHER a person executed by capital punishment in the USA was the wrong person? In the entire history of the country?
Zero.
On the contrary, activists have been poring over every case they can find for decades. That's where the long list of FUD comes from! But for all their research, the one thing they've never managed to come up with, for any case ever, is actual solid, exculpatory evidence. Just a bunch of innuendos and he-said-she-said claims.
Because there is no procedure for checking after the fact whether a person was rightly executed (and why would there be - it would be exactly the same as the initial investigation, except the main opposing party is now dead. It would be nothing but a waste of money, EVEN IF they executed the wrong person.)
Oh, you mean by the government? No, of course not; what would be the point? With multiple years and layers of review in between conviction and execution, that part's guaranteed to have already happened long since.
Granted, coming from a post-soviet state (which, back in soviet times, was very keen on sentencing inconvenient people to death), I may have a different look on how likely it is for the government to overreach when given legal tools to end someone's life.
Yeah. The way the USA handles the process is very, very different from the Soviet system. It's designed at every step of the way to err on the side of caution, and demonstrably does so quite frequently!
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Gustav said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Gustav said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
I, for one, believe not killing the wrong people anymore is a good change.
Do you know how many times it's been proven, after the fact, that a person executed by capital punishment in the USA was the wrong person? In the entire history of the country?
Zero.
Do you know how many times it's been CHECKED, after the fact, WHETHER a person executed by capital punishment in the USA was the wrong person? In the entire history of the country?
Zero.
On the contrary, activists have been poring over every case they can find for decades.
And they have also proven a few cases beyond any doubt. But since you're discarding their findings, why wouldn't I discard their investigations? It's zero here and zero there. Either that, or both are non-zero.
If you want to continue this discussion, I'd like to ask for two things.
- Move it to garage.
- Specify the exact criteria when a proof of innocence counts and when it doesn't. Because while I enjoy finding counterexamples to people's theses, I don't fancy chasing an ever-moving goalpost,
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@Gustav said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
If you want to continue this discussion, I'd like to ask for two things.
- Move it to garage.
This. Y'all know where it is.
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@loopback0 said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Gustav said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
If you want to continue this discussion, I'd like to ask for two things.
- Move it to garage.
This. Y'all know where it is.
I second this. This thread can be about superheros. The moral/political stuff is garage fodder.
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@Benjamin-Hall bruh it's MCU. It's ALL politics. Especially of the "is it okay to kill" kind.
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@Gustav said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Benjamin-Hall bruh it's MCU. It's ALL politics. Especially of the "is it okay to kill" kind.
As long as it's confined to the morality as expressed and defined within the fictional universes, that's just fine in my book. But when we start bringing in real-world politics, law, and morality, it's garage fodder.
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WRT the superhero morality thing, I've long been of the opinion that heroes have it all wrong. When you're in a world where it is well-known to the general public that
- superpowered villains exist
- prisons cannot effectively hold them
- superpowered villains commonly kill their victims, or take actions that indirectly but predictably lead to the deaths of innocents
the only moral course of action for a superhero when confronting a supervillain is summary execution.
In The Killing Joke, Joker tells Batman in so many words that if Batman doesn't kill him here and now, he'll kill more people in the future. And Batman doesn't. And the Joker does. This puts at least some portion of the blood of every Joker victim after this point on Batman's hands, and that's an issue that I'm not aware of any Batman comic ever actually discussing seriously.
(Please note that my position on the subject is predicated on the three criteria stated above, which are known aspects of superhero worlds and do not apply to our world. This should not in any way be interpreted as me being in favor of summary execution of common street criminals by police, or anything similar to that.)
This was one of the things that made Falcon and the Winter Soldier such a terrible show: the entire narrative structure of the series revolves around Walker's killing of Nico. He was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing, both as a soldier in general and in his role as Captain America, (and indeed following in the original Cap's footsteps,) but both the cinematography and the in-universe reactions treat him as an unhinged psychopath for it. Much ex falso quodlibet ensues.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
WRT the superhero morality thing, I've long been of the opinion that heroes have it all wrong. When you're in a world where it is well-known to the general public that
- superpowered villains exist
- prisons cannot effectively hold them
- superpowered villains commonly kill their victims, or take actions that indirectly but predictably lead to the deaths of innocents
the only moral course of action for a superhero when confronting a supervillain is summary execution.
In The Killing Joke, Joker tells Batman in so many words that if Batman doesn't kill him here and now, he'll kill more people in the future. And Batman doesn't. And the Joker does. This puts at least some portion of the blood of every Joker victim after this point on Batman's hands, and that's an issue that I'm not aware of any Batman comic ever actually discussing seriously.
(Please note that my position on the subject is predicated on the three criteria stated above, which are known aspects of superhero worlds and do not apply to our world. This should not in any way be interpreted as me being in favor of summary execution of common street criminals by police, or anything similar to that.)
I mostly agree. A similar dilemma is faced in fantasy world such as D&D where powerful people (spellcasters, monsters, etc) exist and require extreme means to even sort-of control.
I'll also add another premise
4. And where mind control strong and reliable enough to actually brainwash the villains into being "good" is also considered morally fraught (or doesn't exist at all)Otherwise, the repugnant "just force them to think only good thoughts" option also exists.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
Yeah. The way the USA handles the process is very, very different from the Soviet system. It's designed at every step of the way to err on the side of caution, and demonstrably does so quite frequently!
God damn, that's some impressive level of naivety, even for an american.
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@MrL said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
Yeah. The way the USA handles the process is very, very different from the Soviet system. It's designed at every step of the way to err on the side of caution, and demonstrably does so quite frequently!
God damn, that's some impressive level of naivety, even for an american.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. From what I've seen, it's the system with the most checks and validations on the way, that still allows for legal execution in the end. So the next step would be to not have executions at all. But if you look at what people in the death row are convicted of, those tend to be people you really don't want to keep around.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
WRT the superhero morality thing, I've long been of the opinion that heroes have it all wrong. When you're in a world where it is well-known to the general public that
- superpowered villains exist
- prisons cannot effectively hold them
- superpowered villains commonly kill their victims, or take actions that indirectly but predictably lead to the deaths of innocents
the only moral course of action for a superhero when confronting a supervillain is summary execution.
Staying purely in superheroes-universes, I think I agree with that reasoning, if thinking about how a universe works (or should work). However I also think that this approach is bad in terms of story telling, for two reasons.
The first one is my original post on this topic, the fact that whether it makes sense or not in universe, our morality as readers of the story is that cold-blood killing is bad. If you were to argue (are arguing? but in the
then...) for similar killings in our world, you would quickly be labelled as utilitarian or some other name that, in this context, definitely is not a compliment -- what matters is not whether you would be right or not, but how people would see this point of view. So if a story writer has a hero do that, the hero will automatically take a dark turn in the readers' view (which isn't necessarily a bad thing for a writer to do, but might not be where they want to go!). And therefore if a writer wants to keep a hero pure as snow, they have to avoid this. Now morality is a changing thing and 19th century heroes (books, since that's before comics) have much less qualms about killing, which clearly illustrates that.The other thing is that "villains kills, therefore we must kill them before" is likely to lead to kill-inflation in the story lines. It would be very hard for a writer to introduce a new villain, build it up to a credible menace to the heroes, without the heroes killing them right away, before the reader has time to realise how much of a villain they are. It would probably make for good public order, but not good stories.
(the superheroes universes already suffer from the problem that every new villain must somehow have a way to have existed all the time before they were introduced to readers, while not having been villain-enough to have registered in the heroes' view -- if the heroes were to kill villains as soon as they emerge, this would be even harder as the villains would have to climb to the forefront even faster!)
But yeah, not following that line of reasoning makes for weak universes. I'm actually with @Benjamin-Hall on that, superheroes' universes are for me extremely thin (and stories of not much intellectual interest, even the ones that are acclaimed as deep and serious).
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Gustav said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
I, for one, believe not killing the wrong people anymore is a good change.
Do you know how many times it's been proven, after the fact, that a person executed by capital punishment in the USA was the wrong person? In the entire history of the country?
Zero.
There have been lots of exonerations of people on death row, and everywhere else. Which you'll of course count for your argument instead of against, but the reality is there's lots of wrongly convicted people on there. "After the fact" of execution it is literally not possible to prove anymore according to the standard you set, which makes it completely vacuous. Willful blindness.
This belongs
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@acrow said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@MrL said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
Yeah. The way the USA handles the process is very, very different from the Soviet system. It's designed at every step of the way to err on the side of caution, and demonstrably does so quite frequently!
God damn, that's some impressive level of naivety, even for an american.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. From what I've seen, it's the system with the most checks and validations on the way, that still allows for legal execution in the end.
Theoretical checks and validations, that's don't mean shit in practice.
So the next step would be to not have executions at all.
If US system is the best humanity can think of, then clearly there should be no executions at all, ever.
But if you look at what people in the death row are convicted of, those tend to be people you really don't want to keep around.
Sure, some crimes disgust us, so fuck those unlucky innocent ones.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
the only moral course of action for a superhero when confronting a supervillain is summary execution.
It hardly matters in those fictional universes anyway. How many times have we seen a previously-dead supervillan resurrect or otherwise return? Imprisoning and keeping an eye on them may be safer (and there's a bunch of fiction around that topic too).
From an outside perspective: Not killing them just saves the writers a bit of effort in the sequels/spin-offs/whatever.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
I'll also add another premise
4. And where mind control strong and reliable enough to actually brainwash the villains into being "good" is also considered morally fraught (or doesn't exist at all)
Otherwise, the repugnant "just force them to think only good thoughts" option also exists.What about using it on people who aren't villains?
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Alright, I'm convinced. Execute all the superheroes.
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Although now that I think about it, Star Wars actually did that plot in one of the better games.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
Although now that I think about it, Star Wars actually did that plot in one of the better games.
I think it's clear from the movies that the Jedi Order were also villains. Yeah, the Sith were bad. But the Jedi were also flawed and corrupt.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
I'll also add another premise
4. And where mind control strong and reliable enough to actually brainwash the villains into being "good" is also considered morally fraught (or doesn't exist at all)
Otherwise, the repugnant "just force them to think only good thoughts" option also exists.What about using it on people who aren't villains?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
Although now that I think about it, Star Wars actually did that plot in one of the better games.
I think it's clear from the movies that the Jedi Order were also villains. Yeah, the Sith were bad. But the Jedi were also flawed and corrupt.
The Sith didn't deserve to win, but the Jedi Order absolutely did deserve to lose.Fact 1: The first question Qui-Gon asks Shmi upon realizing Anakin is Force-sensitive is who the father was, presumably because he can tell little Ani didn't get that from her. He knows full well that Force-sensitivity is hereditary; this would seem to be common knowledge among the Jedi.
Fact 2: The Jedi actively seek out Force-sensitive people in the galactic population and take them off for training.
Fact 3: The Jedi indoctrinate their followers into ridding themselves of "attachments," particularly of the romantic and familial varieties.
Conclusion: The Jedi are β whether deliberately or not doesn't particularly matter β running a de facto eugenics program with the end goal of culling Force-sensitivity from the galactic population.
No wonder the Sith defeated them when they are actively trying to lose!
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@Mason_Wheeler yeah same thing with priests amirite?
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
Conclusion: The Jedi are β whether deliberately or not doesn't particularly matter β running a de facto eugenics program with the end goal of culling Force-sensitivity from the galactic population.
No, they just want everything to be done with artificial insemination.
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@dkf Source?
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@dkf said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
Conclusion: The Jedi are β whether deliberately or not doesn't particularly matter β running a de facto eugenics program with the end goal of culling Force-sensitivity from the galactic population.
No, they just want everything to be done with artificial insemination.
That takes all the fun out of it.
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@dkf said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
Conclusion: The Jedi are β whether deliberately or not doesn't particularly matter β running a de facto eugenics program with the end goal of culling Force-sensitivity from the galactic population.
No, they just want everything to be done with artificial insemination.
"The Jedi? What a bunch of pikers."
β Bene Gesserit Coda
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@HardwareGeek said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@dkf said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
Conclusion: The Jedi are β whether deliberately or not doesn't particularly matter β running a de facto eugenics program with the end goal of culling Force-sensitivity from the galactic population.
No, they just want everything to be done with artificial insemination.
That takes all the fun out of it.
Probably the point.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@dkf Source?
No source (call it a low-value fan theory at best). The point being it is just designed to keep the genes in circulation without any of that awkward passion stuff. No fantastic technology needed, just turkey basters.
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@Mason_Wheeler The Jedi weren't celibate.
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@Carnage said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
The Jedi weren't celibate.
Their mind trick is super useful when picking up people in a bar.
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@cvi said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
@Carnage said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
The Jedi weren't celibate.
Their mind trick is super useful when picking up people in a bar.
Considering they were galactic superstars, they prolly got more pootang than they could fight off with their meat sabers.
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@Carnage said in Why the MCU is succeeding where the DCU is failing:
Considering they were galactic superstars, they prolly got more pootang than they could fight off with their meat sabers.
From Star Wars: ΠΡΡΡ Π² Π‘ΡΠ°ΠΊΠ°Π½Π΅, a full length Russian parody about militsiya (Jedi) cracking down on production of illegal alcohol (Trade Federations)... as much as the plot makes sense at any given time.
Pogon: You see, I have good connections. I know some deputies. Do you know who was his father?
Mama: Was drunk. I don't remember.
Pogon: ...
Mama: Neighbors are saying father was a Jedi. Like, who can remember them all, right?
