fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3648 ]

[ SECRET POST #3648 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3648 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 07 secrets from Secret Submission Post #521.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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07. http://i.imgur.com/L443PKo.png

I can understand it to a degree with Batman, because he's made it so clear that if he doesn't have this hard limit, then he's damn certain he'd jump straight off the slippery slope; but that doesn't explain why he goes to such lengths to keep other people from killing the Joker.

[I mean, from a Doylist perspective, it's obviously because the writers are unadventurous and unwilling to take the risk of shooting The Actual Joker square in his smug little face, but w/e]

Yep, this. I can understand the reasoning from a Doylist perspective like you said, but then writers have a tough job rationalizing it in the narrative and that rarely works for me.

This is why I'm a Jason Todd fan.

Batman's whole no kill rule is honestly pulled apart when you use the joker as an example. As much as everyone shits on Jason Todd. He has a point. Just kill the joker. Or let other people kill him. Batman's insane need to keep the joker around is what makes him fucking nuts. He resuscitated him when Dick beat him to death and also got him off death row when he was framed for a crime. Just let him die. He must have filled a small country with dead people at this point.

Superman at least kills or does worse when he deems it necessary.

Likewise Wonder Woman gives no shits and breaks necks left and right.

Batman is just the outlier and he's so nuts people don't cross the kill rule because he will be on their ass with his messed up sense of morality.

Interesting to see this secret today. I just watched a small YTer named Leon Thomas do his analysis on the Dark Knight trilogy, and he goes into discussion about how vigilantes choose to reason that they are helping society by bringing justice to the world in their own ways. He goes into all sorts of things like what is justice, nihilism, and if in fact it's all a form of fascism even if that's not the intent of said superhero.

Of course, I understand it's all fictional, so there's a level of suspension of disbelief with going into the world of someone like Superman, but these worlds draw inspirations from our world and it's interesting to absorb these ideas and conflicts and theorize upon them.

Worth a watch if you're interested in it. Just look up "Renegade Cut Dark Knight trilogy".

This is one of the reasons my favorite Batman will always be TAS Batman because it totally makes sense for there to be no killing when the Villains really aren't that bad. No one ever gets hurt, it's more like a weird prank war combined with some theft and the occasional kidnapping. (Incidentally, this made the whole prepubescent-sidekick thing a lot less child soldier-y)

Same. Plus, TAS was beautiful and had fantastic (if occasionally soul-destroying) writing.

The Joker does eventually die for good in TAS timeline as well. Granted, it's in a storyline that skirted as close to if not completely crossed the darkness line that the show had previously danced around quite well. Though Batman Beyond was always a little darker than the original run anyway (probably why it never caught on as much, idk.)

This has always been the most frustrating thing about comics/comic book movies specifically, but all fiction (including movies) really.

If there's a rabid/wild/otherwise dangerous animal running around killing people, you don't generally see people try to catch it & take it to the vet & a cage. They kill it. The Joker (etc) is the same, except when he's put in a cage, he ALWAYS gets out.

It just makes no logical sense to not just kill him.

Matt's a hypocrite. That's the point. He's an awful self righteous human being with a huge bonus of catholic guilt. That's what makes him so fascinating, and I say this as a fan of daredevil. It's why a lot of his lectures to the punisher come off as empty because he has done the same thing at some point. It also doesn't help that OMD retconned the fuck out of Matt being friends with Spidey so Peter can't verbally slap him around anymore when he's being a douche canoe.

Batman is crazy. He's just as pathologically driven to be as idiosyncratic as his villains that his need to keep saving the joker is just as insane as his villains. He uses the slope excuse but Under The Red Hood pointed out those flaws and say what you will about Jason Todd, he is right.

The rest of the DC-verse doesn't really have the no kill rule. Hell. Some of them you would wish kill instead since the Flash and Superman have done things worse than death.

That is why I like Jason Todd! Or someone like the Punisher. They get that some supervillains who have killed dozens or hundreds of people can't be helped and need to be put down.

Eh, I prefer it, tbh. It actually does ring as very heroic to me to not kill. I don't respect killing defeated enemies.

Obviously, this assumes that there is a prison system that can hold the villain in question, or at least in good faith can be assumed to be able to do so.

I don't think the problem is characters deciding to step back and not kill an enemy that's already neutralized so much as it is characters who look at the guy who's five seconds away from nuking the entire planet and say "okay, but in the course of making sure he doesn't kill literally everyone on Earth, we better pull our punches so we don't kill him".

Killing downed enemies =/= Justifiable homicide in the name of saving a city full of innocents

I used to argue that Batman should kill the Joker. Now I argue that if Batman doesn't kill the Joker, there's no reason there needs to be a Batman at all. If the court system can be trusted to sentence criminals, why can't Jim Gordon be trusted to arrest them? Or conversely, if the police aren't equipped to handle supervillains, what makes the court system any more equipped to deal with them?

In retrospect, maybe the whole "super registration act" deal has a point to it. If superheroes are ultimately just an extension of the law, acting to fulfill the will of the law and bring criminals into the court system, why not officialize it and make superheroes another type of cop? It's not like it could make the concept of a superhero any more fascist than it already is.

(Mind you, the only superhero story I'm currently following is Boku no Hero Academia. That's a setting where super registration has won so thoroughly and spectacularly that even using superpowers in self-defense will get you arrested, and it looks like a large part of the story will be about all the ways in which this system has failed and created even more villains.)

Edited 2016-12-30 00:00 (UTC)

I see your point in a sense about Batman. But the argument falls apart when you consider that Jim Gordon and Dick Grayson have both tried to kill Joker through crime of passion and Btaman saved his life both times and when the Joker was put on trial another time, Batman went out of his way to prove his innocence. Gotham is corrupt and that's the point but there's a point where it reaches justifiable homicide levels. To quote Jason Todd: "it's not The Penguin or Scarecrow or Dent. It's just him."

Joker has filled mass graveyards at this point. If Batman doesn't want to kill him fine. But stop stopping others from doing the deed.

It's a conceit that the genre couldn't really function without, so I'm fine with it

(or, more generally, you need some kind of conceit to deal with the fact that superheroes can't really be evaluated through human moral frames)

The Joker is the one that keeps coming up for this, and honestly I think that's because the Joker is the one bad guy who actually should die. In the meta sense, I mean, I'm not arguing morality. DC should actually kill him off, at least partially because he keeps coming up for this. Batman's no kill rule does make sense and it's something I would support in a hero, but the Joker doesn't add tension to that anymore, he just flatly and repeatedly makes it look stupid.

I know why they don't. The Joker is iconic. But. Past a certain point, you actually have to consider if it's worth keeping a character around any more.

Also, there's a lot of places you can go by killing him. Actually, for real killing him. The Joker has made his mark. He doesn't actually need to be around in person anymore, because he is as iconic as he is, because he has become such an embedded part of the mythos, because so much of Gotham has been shaped by him. Even if you kill him he'll still be there, the shadow and the fear of him. He'd like that. There's that whole thing, the relief and the fear at his death, the legacy, people realising his legacy, imitators, copycats, reactions and responses. There's a lot can be milked from that, especially if it's real, if the consequences stick long term. He changed Gotham as much as Batman did. There's something in having Gotham realise that, in having realise that even the Joker's death doesn't take away what he's done to them. The Joker is one of those characters where you actually can permanently kill him off and yet still have him, because after all this time his shadow really is that long.

I don't think Batman should kill him, though. The Joker would enjoy it, for a start. Knowing he won that way at the last. I don't think any of the heroes should do it, because then we'll all just get bogged right back down in the same old endless debate about vigilante morality and shit. I think ... I kinda think it should be like Omar in The Wire. Something small, something stupid. A terrified cop got a lucky shot in a shoot-out. A terrified henchman finally snapped and shot him in the face in a blind panic. An alien invasion that the League struggles to stop drops a weapon or something on Gotham and in the midst of all the horror and grief there's this sickening lurch of relief because it hit the Joker too. By accident. Something stupid and silly and blind chance. The Joker might even get a laugh out of that too, it'd fit with his sometime-nihilism. Sometimes the universe just shoots people in the face, and sometimes we're glad because that someone was the Joker. It'd kind of loop a bit back around to Bruce as well, Bruce and his parents (or some versions of it, at least). Sometimes there's no heroes or villains, no grand conspiracy, sometimes there's just a mugging gone wrong or a rock from space, and sometimes it destroys lives and sometimes it kills something that a whole city was tired of being afraid of, and either way you just have to deal with it.

I just ... they really should kill the Joker. He's tired. They really should just kill him.

I think they should just let the Joker secretly retire and then move to Paraguay to raise Llama or something. It'd be the best joke. Can you imagine Batsy and co getting more and more wound up the longer the gap without Joker related killings, waiting for the other shoe to drop, getting more and more frantic assuming they are obviously missing something, reading Joker involvement into unrelated crimes and getting sidetracked all the time, and he's content on his farm doing nothing but they'll never know. They. Will. Never. Know.

Oh that would be fun to read.

I'm not sure the Joker would have the patience for that. Or DC, for that matter. It'd work just as well if he was shot in the head by some two-bit nobody who was too terrified to tell anyone, and everyone spent years waiting for the other shoe to drop but he was dead and they didn't know.

To be fair, the Joker probably find that as funny too. Terrifying people from beyond the grave and all that.

It is a lot funnier if they are working themselves up as he is being a law abiding citizen somewhere. Now I'll agree DC might not have the balls or patience to do it, but the Joker himself is insane enough to. Demanding death is more about your liking the idea of killing, and that says more about you than anything else.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2016-12-30 01:28 (UTC) - Expand

Agree with everything you said. DC will never kill him because $$$ and fanboys but like you said it creates the problem where Batman looks just as insane for keeping him alive and DC can't and has failed to justify Batman's no kill rule when it comes to Joker. It's not even that Batman can't kill him. It's Bruce. There's been 6 (7?) Batmen. Fine Bruce won't do it but Jean/Dick/Gordon/Terry/Damian/Jason/Kate should and have proven they have the capacity and willingness to.

The latter part is just incredibly lazy storytelling. The writers don't want to engage with the shades of grey having a hero who kills people would involve, which is fair, but they also don't want to put in the work to figure out a plausibly nonlethal way to deal with the villains and their mooks, so they cheap out and just expect the audience to believe everyone walks away fine after being thrown head first into a wall.

Ehh, their hells aren't any better at keeping people in than their prisons

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