Transcript
On a rooftop, a hero and sidekick hide around a corner from a figure with a gun. The sidekick gets ready to fire their own weapon.
Hero: Stop! We kill monsters, not humans.
Sidekick: So are we just going to let him shoot us?
Hero: I have a two-part plan.
The hero runs at the enemy, whose shots are wildly off the mark.
Hero: First, count on him to aim really badly as I rush him.
The hero grabs the figure by the ankle and holds him over the edge of the roof.
Hero: Second, I’ll throw him off the roof.
Sidekick: Won’t that kill him?
Hero: Ha, of course not! The ground will kill him.
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Good one again, Bunny and Chris!
It’s essentially the Batman problem: sure, he doesn’t outright kill any mooks, but he leaves them lying around severely injured, which can very much mean they’ll die before any medical attention is given.
Or their spinal column could be severely damaged and they could be left severly handicapped or paraplegic for life. And many of those henchmen/petty criminals may be working with the big bad because they have no other choice or to feed their families, or because they resent the social injustice they face.
The lack of concern given to henchmen/petty criminals in superhero, spy or crime fiction is the primary reason I can’t enjoy those genres.
Real heroes wouldn’t even bother with the hires and followers, but rather go straight for the boss.
They’d also focus on systemic problems rather than celebrity vigilantism, but that’s another topic altogether.
>Hero: Stop! We kill monsters, not humans.
Sidekick: So are we just going to let him shoot us?
Hero: I have a two-part plan.
Hero: First, we transform him into a monster…
Very perceptive, Dave. That’s how people actually do it in real life.
Especially on the internet. Look at all the violent threats some people make on twitter. They couldn’t justify treating humans that way.
So … they declare those humans whose opinions differ from their own to be monsters.
Those alleged monsters could be humans who didn’t do any wrong, just asked for basic things like, say, safety from violence, the provision of which would inconvenience a more powerful group very slightly.
To support such allegiations, often, farfetched claims are used to pretend that the alleged monsters harmed someone. “Group X having opinions I disagree with causes group Y to murder my people!” is a popular one, with the groups X and Y being completely seperate, yes, even enemies with each other, and no realistic way for group X to influence what group Y does.
Humanity really didn’t change all that much ever since “This woman who rejected me is actually a witch, and she magically caused my fields to be destroyed by a hailstorm, which also destroyed her own fields, but she did that on purpose so she’d look innocent!” was a good way of getting back at uppity women.
Is this a call out on “cancel culture”? If so, it wasn’t subtle at all. That people would call evil people monsters is a very normal thing in society, since our actions and views cam make us into monsters from a moral standpoint.
Besides, witch hunts were basically the Medieval equivalent of the idea that the Chinese wanted to create the Virus as weapon against the West or whatever and is more or less a conspiracy theory to a great disaster. It has nothing to do with “cancel culture “.
I doubt this is about ‘cancel culture.’
It’s an old strategy to paint the enemy as ‘lesser’ than oneself. They are barbarians, they are heathens, they are savages, they can’t be argued with – that is then the excuse for killing them, invading their countries, or commit other crimes against them. ‘They are monsters’ is just one more version of that.
Witch hunts were mostly carried out by an interaction between the witch hunter (who in some countries only got paid if they found a witch because they were paid out of the witch’s possessions) and the locals. The arrival of a witch hunter meant that locals could get rid of that neighbour they hated in a legal way. It is often forgotten that there were male witches as well and that usually the ‘catch’ of one witch led to a large number of locals being convicted of witchcraft and executed. That is why the more clever villages sent the witch hunters packing as soon as they arrived.
Good one again!
The heroes need not fear– if they shoot him in an artery, the blood loss will kill him.
Wouldn’t the same logic apply? After all, it was the bullet that killed him…
And then the “hero” realizes he’s wearing a red shirt…