I’m sorry I haven’t updated the book diary in a while, but I was reading To Sleep in a Sea of Stars and that book is long so everything else was on hold. But I should get to it soon.
Also, there is definitely going to be a Note on Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and colonialism, even if there’s another blogger who already did a better post on it.
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On Heroes Who Do Not Kill
It is very common, especially in superhero fiction, for the narrative to spell out that the hero absolutely does not kill people. This makes it fairly easy to make the character a more sympathetic vigilante in many cases--he or she is not someone going around killing criminals or enemies or whatever. I think this is fine.
However.
There is a difficulty with writing this kind of character, especially when doing it for the screen, and that it’s really freaking difficult to show compelling action scenes this way. I mean, it isn’t, but then you get really loose definitions of “mortal injury.” Look, I love Daredevil, but the man repeatedly beats crooks in the head with a metal bar and this is considered non lethal because he isn’t using blades or bullets. That’s not… look, getting hit in the head a lot is a very bad thing.
The guy doesn’t have it as hard as Batman, although that might be in large part because there are just so many incarnations of Batman. But in the Arkham games him not killing is a large part of his character arc--Joker is first fascinated by him because he saves him when he’s falling off of a building instead of letting him die. And yet his own combat moves in-game are very brutal, leaving broken bones in mooks and supervillains. Him detonating small explosions under bad guys is apparently no big deal. Also he can chuck Batarangs at bad guys, which I remind you are essentially bat-shaped shurikens. Again, it’s not taken too seriously because he’s not using guns, knives, or swords.
The final game Arkham Knight makes it so much worse. One of the finishing moves involves slamming a mook’s head into a fuse box. The Batmobile can simultaneously run over and tase enemies. Also it shoots rubber bullets into peoples heads with a gun that looks like heavy artillery. Yeah, those guys are probably dead.
[Side note: Zack Snyder got a lot of flack over his Batman killing people (which he should), but no one at all seems to give this same amount of criticism to Tim Burton’s Batman, which is weird because that was one of the reasons I could never get into those movies.]
I realize of course that some of this can be chalked up to gameplay--the player isn’t necessarily told to run over criminals, but it feels like a very obvious outcome. And it still doesn’t explain Batman shoving people’s heads into fuse boxes and watching them get electrocuted, and acting like this is a perfectly non lethal way of dealing with enemies. I’m not saying “Oh no, people will think this is an okay thing to do!” because I have much higher faith in the audience, I just think it’s stupid. Yeah, it looks cool, but it goes against what you’re trying to say with the character.
What’s worse is when a story tells us that killing people is bad, and the hero lectures people about it, but then in actual action scenes the hero doesn’t care. BBC’s Robin Hood (beware sentences where this comes up) begins with the titular character firmly not killing people, but when he thinks Marian died in the first season finale he starts killing. He doesn’t kill in season two, I think, but in season three he still talks to other characters about how killing is wrong while the show inconsistently has him killing enemies because… I don’t know, not doing that was becoming difficult.
Also the writing in season three was abysmal.
Arrow inherited this problem. In the first season, Ollie doesn’t really care about whether or not he kills people, though he usually doesn’t--there’s a line in the pilot that most of the mooks he shoots with arrows survive, albeit with disabling injuries. In season two he decides to stop killing in honor of his friend Tommy (who died thinking he was a murderer). And he sticks to it! Until the next season, where he kills the main villain, and after that he kills and doesn’t depending on… nothing really.
There’s a scene in season five where his whole schtick is trying to convince Dinah not to kill the mobster who killed her partner, and then has a massive fight scene with the gang which involves him blowing up a helicopter???
There are ways to do cool action scenes without being this stupid! Agents of SHIELD, which DOESN’T have a no kill rule anyway, has the agents using these weapons called Icers, which are guns that shoot knockout rounds that stun enemies rather than pierce them with bullets. They’re introduced fairly early on and are used throughout the show’s run. Bam! Quick solution to the problem! You can have gun fights and not have enemies get killed.
So it’s frustrating when the narrative or the characters tell us “Killing is bad!” and then… don’t do that, or do it in a way that makes it clear that the writers don’t actually know what that entails. Some properties avoid it altogether to not have this problem--I don’t recall anyone in any of the Marvel movies ever talk about not killing enemies, for instance. But I don’t think it’s too difficult to do well! It’s just that a lot of times it isn’t. Because of really stupid writing or action choreography.
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