[ SECRET POST #4386 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4386 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 33 secrets from Secret Submission Post #628.
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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I read an article a while back about people who killed someone in unavoidable accidents and could not get over it. I don't think it's unreasonable for a character to feel bad about killing someone in self defense. It's pretty realistic

[soldatsasha]

Yeah, I think a lot of people who assume they wouldn't feel bad aren't really thinking it through. Many people in cases of unavoidable accidental death go through years or decades of extreme trauma and recovery. (Lots of people who run over a kid with their car never drive again or are even unable to be in vehicles at all, for example). And if you're talking about deliberately killing someone, like in self defense, that trauma can be even more huge. That's why militaries and police training and gangs and whatnot go to extreme lengths to condition their people to view their targets as "not people".

It's not bad to NOT feel bad, of course. Especially if it really was unavoidable, like you were protecting your kid from a rapist or something. But it's also realistic that someone would really struggle with it, and for a really long time.

Like, hypothetically, you're walking home from work and you get jumped. The attacker is a mid-30s black dude who's been in and out of the joint for his whole adult life. You hit him over the head with a brick and kill him, it's all caught on security cameras, the trial is short, and your life goes on just fine.

But at the trial, this dude's mom is there, and his friends. You find out he had a kid. Now in your mind he has people who loved him. You're going to randomly be reminded over and over again about these people, and how they must feel.

And maybe later on you're reading an article talking about the school to prison pipeline, the same system your attacker was dragged into as a teenager. Now you're thinking of him as a little boy growing up in a bad neighborhood, and how his whole life was probably this inevitable storm of shit until someone like you killed him.

And then the holidays roll around, and you're thinking about how his kid doesn't have a dad this year. And so on.

Killing someone doesn't end when they die. In your mind, it keeps going forever as things remind you that this person isn't in the world anymore.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, there's a certain biological reaction in any traumatic situation, obviously, but I don't think that's the same as the kind of moral doubt OP is talking about

idk

[(Anonymous)]

That's all fine.

But the narrative in media is ALWAYS that the person is traumatized. ALWAYS. I watch a lot of adventure/cop/whatever shows and I can't think of a single one where they killed a bad guy and didn't feel bad about it.

[(Anonymous)]

I feel like there's a difference between, "I accidentally killed someone in a situation where I could not have avoided killing them" and "I defended my life or the life of a loved one" I can see how someone could be traumatized by the first. Their intention wasn't to kill someone. That just happened. But when you actively defend your own life or someone else, your intention is to cause harm. Yeah, some people would be traumatized by that, but I also believe that some people would not be. I, too, hate that the only thing you ever see in TV shows is what amounts to survivor's guilt. I want some people to be like, "That was terrifying. Glad that human is dead though and not me"

[(Anonymous)]

+1

There's also a huge difference between killing an innocent person accidentally, and killing someone in self-defense who meant to do you harm. In the latter case, that person could have avoided getting killed really easily, by just not attacking you. Violent people should surely understand that they're not going to win every fight they start. Goes with the territory of attacking or threatening people. And honestly, with a lot of people like that, if you kill them in self-defense, you might also actually be saving lives of people who might have been their future victims if they were still around attacking people.

I kind of disagree with this: But when you actively defend your own life or someone else, your intention is to cause harm.

It might be part of the intention but it's not the primary intention: your primary intention is to protect yourself and/or someone else. If you could do that without causing harm, you probably would. But if you can't, maybe you do really have to cause harm. And I totally get that it could be traumatizing. But it's right to do almost always, I think. If you don't go around attacking people, you really do deserve to live more than someone who does, don't you? Even more so if you do it to protect someone who can't protect themselves.