Arrow really needs Laurel out of the plot. I don't mean a dramatic death, I mean just gone. Like, "Oh, Laurel? Off feeding orphans in Latveria." Or some such shit.
Arrow really needs Laurel out of the plot. I don't mean a dramatic death, I mean just gone. Like, "Oh, Laurel? Off feeding orphans in Bialya." Or some such shit.
Arrow really needs Laurel out of the plot. I don't mean a dramatic death, I mean just gone. Like, "Oh, Laurel? Off feeding orphans in Latveria." Or some such shit.
Yeah, she doesn't deserve a plot serving exit, plus then we would have an entire season of Oliver doing something else stupid (like refusing to kill) to honor her memory like he did with Tommy.
I don't know why they spend like a third of the trailer rehashing season 2, but the actual season 3 parts were nice. Glad to see my two favorite guest stars are coming back for season 3.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
Arrow really needs Laurel out of the plot. I don't mean a dramatic death, I mean just gone. Like, "Oh, Laurel? Off feeding orphans in Latveria." Or some such shit.
Yeah, she doesn't deserve a plot serving exit, plus then we would have an entire season of Oliver doing something else stupid (like refusing to kill) to honor her memory like he did with Tommy.
How was the thing with Tommy stupid? Tommy's thing was that he didn't like the (Green) Arrow because he killed people. After being traumatized by his death (Why else would he go back to Lian Yu?), he obviously internalized that by choosing to not kill people. Now, I would like him to kill some people on occasion, but unless he brings back the stupid boxing glove arrow, I'm fine with his Modus Operandi right now. Also, much like the Punisher, and some Darkness villains, killing everyone makes it hard to have recurring villains, so there's a writing angle as well.
Plus, I'm glad Deadshot wasn't unceremoniously killed off like I thought, and I hope
Deathstroke might go back to his comic roots as a merc now that the mirakuru isn't messing with his head.
Speaking of Deadshot, does anyone look at him and get a Robert Patrick Kelly vibe from his actor?
Arrow really needs Laurel out of the plot. I don't mean a dramatic death, I mean just gone. Like, "Oh, Laurel? Off feeding orphans in Latveria." Or some such shit.
Yeah, she doesn't deserve a plot serving exit, plus then we would have an entire season of Oliver doing something else stupid (like refusing to kill) to honor her memory like he did with Tommy.
How was the thing with Tommy stupid? Tommy's thing was that he didn't like the (Green) Arrow because he killed people. -snip-
And that was stupid. And Ollie compounded it by taking it to heart. Arrow set up a serious(ish) somewhat unique tone, then went back on it in a weak attempt at moral superiority or something.
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minor incidentexpert in a dying fieldnjRegistered Userregular
Basically it's the exact same thing, but with 30 seconds of slow pans around Ra's al Ghul at the end (no, it doesn't show the actor yet, just the costume)
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
Arrow really needs Laurel out of the plot. I don't mean a dramatic death, I mean just gone. Like, "Oh, Laurel? Off feeding orphans in Latveria." Or some such shit.
Yeah, she doesn't deserve a plot serving exit, plus then we would have an entire season of Oliver doing something else stupid (like refusing to kill) to honor her memory like he did with Tommy.
How was the thing with Tommy stupid? Tommy's thing was that he didn't like the (Green) Arrow because he killed people. -snip-
And that was stupid. And Ollie compounded it by taking it to heart. Arrow set up a serious(ish) somewhat unique tone, then went back on it in a weak attempt at moral superiority or something.
Exactly this. If he had used the Tommy thing to maybe make killing not his first go to, but still something he was willing to do when the situation demanded it, it would have been fine. The biggest problem with the killing in the first season was that he would kill a hundred guards and then give the person on his list that he was actually after a second chance. However instead of just cutting back on that some, he goes cold turkey and starts refusing to kill completely, even when trying to find another way only served to put more people at risk.
Instead, Goyer and the other writers went straight to the source, and brought in Celaya to play Zed, who is a former lover of Constantine's in the original Hellblazer series. A few changes were made to the pilot to accommodate this, including the addition of one spoilerific baddie that shows up at the end of the episode.
hoooooly shit.
They're going with -that- storyline.
oh man.
also posted in other DC thread because way too many threads
That was basically exactly how he handled it, since he still killed in season 2 - Count Vertigo, for example.
Except he has to be physically forced into it at the last second at the expense of lives. It was refreshing not to have the "Batman Problem" on a superhero show for once. Flash is going to do the same shit, but he'll start like that instead of being 'better' and backtracking so it won't stick out as much. It'll be part of the deal from the start. Arrow pulled a bait and switch.
I'm entirely unsympathetic to people who are caboose clobbered over Ollie's character growth away from being cavalier about murder and I narrow my eyes in general at someone who uses the phrase "Batman Problem" to refer to superheroes opting not to use lethal force.
I'm entirely unsympathetic to people who are caboose clobbered over Ollie's character growth away from being cavalier about murder and I narrow my eyes in general at someone who uses the phrase "Batman Problem" to refer to superheroes opting not to use lethal force.
I think I'm going to steal caboose clobbered.
So much classier sounding the butt hurt.
I have to agree, it was getting really hard to remember that Ollie is supposed to be a good guy when he's jumping around killing hired guards just because they happened to be working for assholes. Sure, some of them may have been geese fully deserving to be executed by some masked vigilante (we never know because the show doesn't tell us anything beyond "faceless goon"), but some of them are likely just trying to do the job so they can pay the bills and put food on the table.
Can't blame them for the fact that their paychecks are signed by a dick.
I mean it is also the case that in any work of fiction you can always have fun with the reasons why this particular extremely impressive person can manage to disable without permanent damage any foe. I really dislike it when it's seen as some sort of hump to work over like we're actually putting together a plan to break into Axis Chemicals for real.
I'm entirely unsympathetic to people who are caboose clobbered over Ollie's character growth away from being cavalier about murder and I narrow my eyes in general at someone who uses the phrase "Batman Problem" to refer to superheroes opting not to use lethal force.
Narrow your eyes at the guy who doesn't kill and then is responsible for the deaths of <lots> that didn't have to die. It's taking to insane lengths with Batman as his entire roster of bad guys have a revolving door policy with incarceration, but the point stands with anyone. Ollie (like Bats but worse in his vulnerabilities) ISN'T a "super" hero. Those poor guys just paying the bills? They put a bullet in him in the course of the food buying activities and whelp, he's dead. Or maybe worse, he's just captured, exposed, and his family pays. And the city is fucked still. All of this was handled well in season 1. He was never "Gee, I'm bored. Lets go out tonight and drop some bodies." about it. It was never murder. If it was, what the hell are Felicity and Diggle doing around still? Why didn't they turn him in? Stop him themselves the first time he killed someone? (Other than because it would end the show...). Because it was necessary and justified even if they didn't like it. Then the "character growth" crapped all over common sense for the fantasy where he can feel better because he's just indirectly getting people killed now and the guy who wants to buy crack/food for his new baby gets to live to follow the orders of people who DO want to murder people for fun and profit. It's not character growth, it's putting his hands over his eyes and going LALALALA really loud and wishful thinking that just so happens to (mostly...sometimes) work out because he has Plot Armor.
If Oliver wasn't so damn bad at it (separate problem), making corpses of everyone would have solved like all of the current problems! With more people still alive! Does anywhere here actually think keeping Slade around is going to turn out well?!?!
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minor incidentexpert in a dying fieldnjRegistered Userregular
Of course it won't turn out well, but as Oliver explained, trying to kill Slade, rather than cure him, is exactly what caused ALL of this mess. All the death and destruction. It's easy to see why he would try a different tack this time.
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
No, we saw what happened. The start of his inability to create corpses of the main bad guys started everything. There was no way in hell to cure Slade then and it be stupid to try now. Oliver tried reason over and over and over and over again. The 100th time, well, that thing about expecting different results despite doing the same thing... Guess that would explain it. He lost his mind when Tommy died.
Of course it won't turn out well, but as Oliver explained, trying to kill Slade, rather than cure him, is exactly what caused ALL of this mess. All the death and destruction. It's easy to see why he would try a different tack this time.
But at the same time half cocked ideas like, "let me just turn him into the police with zero evidence to back up that he has done anything wrong," don't work at all and got people killed when he got out (not to mention Lance losing his job).
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minor incidentexpert in a dying fieldnjRegistered Userregular
I hate to use the "lolcomics" excuse, but, uh, it kinda seems like some of you guys are demanding too much real world serious reasoning and critical decision making from a guy who went crazy on a deserted island and came back home so he could dress up in a costume and fight crime.
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
I'm entirely unsympathetic to people who are caboose clobbered over Ollie's character growth away from being cavalier about murder and I narrow my eyes in general at someone who uses the phrase "Batman Problem" to refer to superheroes opting not to use lethal force.
Narrow your eyes at the guy who doesn't kill and then is responsible for the deaths of <lots> that didn't have to die. It's taking to insane lengths with Batman as his entire roster of bad guys have a revolving door policy with incarceration,
Yeeeeeeeeeeahhhhh
No.
NoNo.
No.
You want the easy and true answer? Because its a comic.
And for the same exact reason it wouldn't make a lick of difference. Another supervillian would just appear (In the most likely case CONNECTED to the other dead supervillian) and kill those people.
The reason theres a *Batman problem* in the first place is because a lot of american comics reuse their superheroes and villians to no end. Theres no plotline that truly ends. So they keep coming back. They can actually be killed and THEY WILL STILL COME BACK.
I'm entirely unsympathetic to people who are caboose clobbered over Ollie's character growth away from being cavalier about murder and I narrow my eyes in general at someone who uses the phrase "Batman Problem" to refer to superheroes opting not to use lethal force.
Narrow your eyes at the guy who doesn't kill and then is responsible for the deaths of <lots> that didn't have to die. It's taking to insane lengths with Batman as his entire roster of bad guys have a revolving door policy with incarceration,
Yeeeeeeeeeeahhhhh
No.
NoNo.
No.
You want the easy and true answer? Because its a comic.
And for the same exact reason it wouldn't make a lick of difference. Another supervillian would just appear (In the most likely case CONNECTED to the other dead supervillian) and kill those people.
The reason theres a *Batman problem* in the first place is because a lot of american comics reuse their superheroes and villians to no end. Theres no plotline that truly ends. So they keep coming back. They can actually be killed and THEY WILL STILL COME BACK.
Arrow was running into the Punisher problem. Not only is it hard to develop a cast of villains when every episode ends with the bad guy dead, but it becomes harder and harder to reconcile the growing body count with the idea that your hero is, well, a hero. The Punisher gets around this problem by making Frank Castle a somewhat sympathetic nutcase, but that's obviously not the direction they wanted to take Oliver Queen.
I'm entirely unsympathetic to people who are caboose clobbered over Ollie's character growth away from being cavalier about murder and I narrow my eyes in general at someone who uses the phrase "Batman Problem" to refer to superheroes opting not to use lethal force.
Narrow your eyes at the guy who doesn't kill and then is responsible for the deaths of <lots> that didn't have to die. It's taking to insane lengths with Batman as his entire roster of bad guys have a revolving door policy with incarceration,
Yeeeeeeeeeeahhhhh
No.
NoNo.
No.
You want the easy and true answer? Because its a comic.
And for the same exact reason it wouldn't make a lick of difference. Another supervillian would just appear (In the most likely case CONNECTED to the other dead supervillian) and kill those people.
The reason theres a *Batman problem* in the first place is because a lot of american comics reuse their superheroes and villians to no end. Theres no plotline that truly ends. So they keep coming back. They can actually be killed and THEY WILL STILL COME BACK.
Arrow was running into the Punisher problem. Not only is it hard to develop a cast of villains when every episode ends with the bad guy dead, but it becomes harder and harder to reconcile the growing body count with the idea that your hero is, well, a hero. The Punisher gets around this problem by making Frank Castle a somewhat sympathetic nutcase, but that's obviously not the direction they wanted to take Oliver Queen.
Actually they get around the Punisher problem by making Frank Castle a FUCKING MURDERER who is scorned by near every member of the superhero community.
I'm entirely unsympathetic to people who are caboose clobbered over Ollie's character growth away from being cavalier about murder and I narrow my eyes in general at someone who uses the phrase "Batman Problem" to refer to superheroes opting not to use lethal force.
Narrow your eyes at the guy who doesn't kill and then is responsible for the deaths of <lots> that didn't have to die. It's taking to insane lengths with Batman as his entire roster of bad guys have a revolving door policy with incarceration,
Yeeeeeeeeeeahhhhh
No.
NoNo.
No.
You want the easy and true answer? Because its a comic.
And for the same exact reason it wouldn't make a lick of difference. Another supervillian would just appear (In the most likely case CONNECTED to the other dead supervillian) and kill those people.
The reason theres a *Batman problem* in the first place is because a lot of american comics reuse their superheroes and villians to no end. Theres no plotline that truly ends. So they keep coming back. They can actually be killed and THEY WILL STILL COME BACK.
Arrow was running into the Punisher problem. Not only is it hard to develop a cast of villains when every episode ends with the bad guy dead, but it becomes harder and harder to reconcile the growing body count with the idea that your hero is, well, a hero. The Punisher gets around this problem by making Frank Castle a somewhat sympathetic nutcase, but that's obviously not the direction they wanted to take Oliver Queen.
Actually they get around the Punisher problem by making Frank Castle a FUCKING MURDERER who is scorned by near every member of the superhero community.
Because he is.
And feared by a vast majority of villains.
And yeah. Frank tends to be respected by military types and scorned by superheroes.
Also the case study for S1 Oliver is actually fascinating.
He's obviously suffering from a SEVERE amount of PTSD compounded by the fact that his father left him a pretty fucked up mission statement while also revealing that Starling City was basically a shinier Gotham, where instead of Mob families you had the hyper untouchable rich fucking everything up, and you have a perfect storm for Season 1 Ollie.
He isn't as much of a murderer as someone who was severely mentally traumatized(and still is).
That's who needs to show up in Stirling City: The Punisher. Come on DC-Marvel crossover! Then we'd get some new villains that don't make Ollie look stupid for still being around.
There are essentially two arguments in favor of super-heroes (and by super-heroes, I'm lumping in every extra-judicial vigilante who throws on a mask or costumed identity in fiction to fight crime, regardless of whether or not they have super-powers, so Batman and Green Arrow count here) using lethal force: Stoppage necessity and recidivism prevention.
They're two separate points, so I'm going to tackle them separately. This is also going to be a long post, because this is actually something I give a shit about on a two-fold professional level (I went to college for law enforcement, I've written indie comics, etc.) and I've got opinions on it. This is also an argument that comes up in super-hero related threads from time to time with stupid names like "Batman Problem" and other shit the Internet made up and I feel like rather than let people go back and forth on this for ten pages I'll just address it directly, since I helped start the fight in the first place.
So, first there's Stoppage Necessity. This means stopping a bad guy, right the fuck now, from harming people. Stoppage necessity, in the real world, is the only acceptable excuse for the application of lethal force by law enforcement (recidivism prevention, a different issue, is more the province of the death penalty which I'll get into later in this post). Someone has a gun to people's heads, or is about to blow up an orphanage, or whatever, and your only option to stop them from killing other people is to kill them. In real life with real cops it's an unfortunate but societally acceptable application of lethal force, the idea being that you are accepting that there was no other stoppage solution to that situation to prevent the loss of further life without taking the life of someone who was an imminent threat.
In real life, lethal force is the most final form of stoppage available. Less-than-lethal implements, like tasers, pepper spray, batons, etc. are utilized when possible against some assailants if it is believed at the time that would be an adequate way to stop them while ensuring that they would not reasonably continue to be an imminent lethal threat to others. A guy who rushes a cop with a knife doesn't necessarily need to get shot with a gun, sometimes a taser does the job... but sometimes not. Sometimes the reactionary gap is too small. Sometimes the cop legitimately believes that it won't be enough. etc.
If someone else has a gun, then forget about it, of course a cop is going to meet that lethal force with lethal force of their own, because the stoppage necessity there is to prevent them from killing people (which includes the officers themselves) and you can't play games with that.
But super-heroes aren't cops. They're not. Not just in the sense that they don't have the arrest powers of police (or the red tape or due process), but they also don't have the limitations of law enforcement in reality. So their stoppage necessity will almost always include non-lethal options, unless the writer decides that for some reason they don't. This is a reality of how the characters and their capabilities have already been established, the powers and abilities they have at their disposal.
This is true of some characters more than others, of course. Spider-Man has a much easier time of being non-lethal, because he has a bullet-dodging spider-sense, superhuman agility and strength, and webs he can shoot to disarm and bind people. The dude is a walking, personified LTL implement. This is less true of say... Wolverine, whose primary offensive capability is blades that come out of his fists, but even then he's often shown doing things like slicing people's guns in half or making non-lethal slashes (at least, in the comics. Movie Wolverine tends to have fewer fucks to give). The Flash has super-speed, and can basically just bludgeon the bajeezus out of someone and disarm them and so on, so he doesn't need to be killing people to stop them from being lethal threats.
Even non-superpowered super-heroes like Batman and Green Arrow are still festooned with non-lethal gadgets (this is more true in Arrow season 2 than season 1), and they are hyper-competent kung fu bad-asses who can deftly evade the gunfire of a dozen mooks with submachineguns with nothing but agility and shadows. Even if they don't have "super-powers" in an outright sense they're not normal people and are on no level comparable to cops. When you write a character as having smoke bombs and flashbangs and bolas and can kick the shit out of nearly anyone, it's a tough pill to swallow that they really need to kill a bad guy unless it's literally a gun-to-the-head kind of situation. And even then, finding a "third way" and managing to save the day without killing the villain is kind of what makes them super-heroes instead of morally dark-grey vengeance-mongers like Frank Castle.
Some writers nowadays think they're being very "clever" or "edgy" to make super-heroes more "realistic" or "gritty" to have them casually murder people when they don't have to. This usually involves overlooking how they've already established the character's powers, abilities, tools, tactics, and way of thinking to write them into some kind of contrived situation where the only way out is to snap the villain's neck and then scream all anguished about it like there was no other way, and other stupid bullshit like that.
I wouldn't consider Arrow to have gone in this direction in the first season, because it was part of an arc. Yes, Ollie did casually murder people in the first season when many times there was no need to, but as has been pointed out, Ollie was still massively and clearly suffering from PTSD and was all kinds of fucked up and didn't really see himself as a hero. He saw himself as an avenging vigilante with an agenda. It was only due to the reactions of other characters to his cavalier attitude to lethal force (people talk about Tommy a lot, but Diggle and Felicity also gave him a lot of shit for it and helped cement his attitude on that) and his potential to actually be a heroic figure and a good person that made him rethink this stance.
So, the "stoppage necessity" angle is kind of bogus. It's bogus for super-heroes. From time to time it might make sense (there's a villain in season 2 that Ollie kills because it's a literal gun-to-the-head situation and it made sense at the time and nobody was really all that broken up about it even though it was after Ollie had declared he was done killing, because it was necessary), but when it's done to add "drama" and "grittiness' to a character and just give them angst and anguish it's contrived and hollow. Especially when it's established earlier in the same fiction that they could've just... not done that. Super-heroes are super-heroes because they're not normal people, because they can be heroes that don't exist in the real world, and if you have them just killing people because "well, in that situation, a cop would've just shot a guy", I think you're missing the point of super-heroes in general.
That brings me to the next point, the so-called "Batman Problem", which in real life is actually called Recidivism Prevention. The idea behind this argument is that in super-hero fiction (especially in comic books), incarcerated super-criminals will escape and trouble the world again, and in the case of especially murderous ones (the Joker, for example), every time they get out that's an increased body count. Due to the cyclical nature of comic book storytelling, and the fact that authors can't just let a fantastic villain like the Joker sit in prison forever and they want to write new Batman vs. the Joker stories, yes inevitably no matter what prison you put him in, the Joker will break out and he will kill again, and after this happens so many times, god damn it Batman why don't you just kill the Joker?
Like people start to question, at what point does it not become Batman (or society's) fault for not just executing this psychopath, since they know god damn well that imprisoning him is impossible?
You know what the problem is with this argument? It's stupid. I don't normally just shit on an opinion like that but it's an argument I can't take seriously because it is in fact in writing what is known as a metatextual argument. You're arguing that the characters should, essentially, become self-aware of the archetypal and cyclical nature of their own storytelling world in exactly one respect you find galling and unbelievable, but not in other respects you find acceptable or within your suspension of disbelief.
The idea that people should "know" that Joker will always get out is based first of all on the idea that every single story in which Joker (or any super-villain, for that matter) breaks out of their prison or goes back to being evil takes place in the same continuity (which it doesn't) and that characters in that continuity should all be somehow cognitively aware of that (which they're not). The idea of super-villain prisons being cardboard-barred temporary holding facilities they break out of at any time convenient to the plot is a memetic notion, reinforced by many different adaptations of the same source material all telling the same kinds of stories. X-Men 2 is about super-villains getting out of prison. Arkham Asylum is about super-villains getting out of prison. Episodes of Justice League Unlimited are about super-villains getting out of prison. Episodes of Arrow are about super-villains getting out of prison. All of these stories feature a previously established super-villain who was imprisoned in a previous story breaking out and causing havoc again, which feeds into this idea that shouldn't people in a super-hero universe just cotton on to the idea that this is just a thing that happens?
Well no, that's stupid. They're completely different stories about completely different characters in completely different continuities. Why should they "know" that? Should they have some kind of meta-awareness they live in a comic book universe with comic book universe rules? No, every comic book character is not Deadpool, sorry.
There actually isn't an especially good reason in most stories for super-heroes to believe that guys they put away won't stay away. After all, the only reason they even come back in the first place is because later on, a new story wants to get told using that same villain and they need him again, and when that is the reason it actually makes absolutely no difference how they are imprisoned, plot finds a way.
With that in mind, having super-heroes kill super-villains from an argument of recidivism prevention in this metatextual way is still stupid because if they were actually in some way cognitively aware of the crazy comic book universe they live in where villains escape from prison at the demands of plot... they'd know that they do the same thing with death. Characters, both heroes and villains, stay dead as long as the plot demands they do. When someone comes along that wants to write stories with that character again, well... then I guess that character is back again!
Very rarely do comic book characters have some kind of metatextual awareness of how cheap death is, either, although in recent years that's become a thing in some comics and I frown hard at writers who think they're oh-so-clever for having characters referencing the number of times Jean Grey has died or some shit.
So, to TL;DR this fuckin' post for some of you, stoppage necessity is a real reason real cops sometimes kill people. It is not a legitimate reason for super-heroes to kill people unless the writer decides it is, and usually when they do it's pretty contrived (or the character isn't much of a super-hero). Recidivism prevention is a stupid reason for super-heroes to use lethal force, the so-called "Batman Problem" exists only in the minds of comic book nerds on the internet and post-90's comic book writers who think they're really clever when they're not. The illusion of that problem is just a side-effect of the cyclical nature and adaptive memetics of super-hero storytelling, and killing villains off would do nothing to change that.
The Marvel Studio movies, for all their light tone, all have heroes who kill. No one remarks on this because the killings are shown in the context of the character's larger roles - Captain America is a soldier and spy, Tony Stark is a walking weapons platform, Thor is a warrior god and the Hulk wants those soldiers to leave him the hell alone.
It's interesting to me that it works because the movies don't do the grimdark thing or obsess over the morality of the actions. You just have characters who aren't going out their way to kill anyone but will if the need arises.
The Marvel Studio movies, for all their light tone, all have heroes who kill. No one remarks on this because the killings are shown in the context of the character's larger roles - Captain America is a soldier and spy, Tony Stark is a walking weapons platform, Thor is a warrior god and the Hulk wants those soldiers to leave him the hell alone.
It's interesting to me that it works because the movies don't do the grimdark thing or obsess over the morality of the actions. You just have characters who aren't going out their way to kill anyone but will if the need arises.
They are also shown to be willing to capture if possible or practical. Thor captures a bunch of rampaging bandits in the opening of the Dark World, Cap does likewise in the opening of TWS and Tony... well the scene where the thug just plain quits his job in mid fight in Iron Man 3 is one of the funniest moments in the film... and Tony lets him leave.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
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Oh sweet baby Jesus that was a great trailer. Really hype for the new season. Also:
Steam: adamjnet
Yeah, she doesn't deserve a plot serving exit, plus then we would have an entire season of Oliver doing something else stupid (like refusing to kill) to honor her memory like he did with Tommy.
pleasepaypreacher.net
How was the thing with Tommy stupid? Tommy's thing was that he didn't like the (Green) Arrow because he killed people. After being traumatized by his death (Why else would he go back to Lian Yu?), he obviously internalized that by choosing to not kill people. Now, I would like him to kill some people on occasion, but unless he brings back the stupid boxing glove arrow, I'm fine with his Modus Operandi right now. Also, much like the Punisher, and some Darkness villains, killing everyone makes it hard to have recurring villains, so there's a writing angle as well.
Plus, I'm glad Deadshot wasn't unceremoniously killed off like I thought, and I hope
Speaking of Deadshot, does anyone look at him and get a Robert Patrick Kelly vibe from his actor?
And that was stupid. And Ollie compounded it by taking it to heart. Arrow set up a serious(ish) somewhat unique tone, then went back on it in a weak attempt at moral superiority or something.
Basically it's the exact same thing, but with 30 seconds of slow pans around Ra's al Ghul at the end (no, it doesn't show the actor yet, just the costume)
Exactly this. If he had used the Tommy thing to maybe make killing not his first go to, but still something he was willing to do when the situation demanded it, it would have been fine. The biggest problem with the killing in the first season was that he would kill a hundred guards and then give the person on his list that he was actually after a second chance. However instead of just cutting back on that some, he goes cold turkey and starts refusing to kill completely, even when trying to find another way only served to put more people at risk.
hoooooly shit.
They're going with -that- storyline.
oh man.
also posted in other DC thread because way too many threads
Except he has to be physically forced into it at the last second at the expense of lives. It was refreshing not to have the "Batman Problem" on a superhero show for once. Flash is going to do the same shit, but he'll start like that instead of being 'better' and backtracking so it won't stick out as much. It'll be part of the deal from the start. Arrow pulled a bait and switch.
I think I'm going to steal caboose clobbered.
So much classier sounding the butt hurt.
I have to agree, it was getting really hard to remember that Ollie is supposed to be a good guy when he's jumping around killing hired guards just because they happened to be working for assholes. Sure, some of them may have been geese fully deserving to be executed by some masked vigilante (we never know because the show doesn't tell us anything beyond "faceless goon"), but some of them are likely just trying to do the job so they can pay the bills and put food on the table.
Can't blame them for the fact that their paychecks are signed by a dick.
Narrow your eyes at the guy who doesn't kill and then is responsible for the deaths of <lots> that didn't have to die. It's taking to insane lengths with Batman as his entire roster of bad guys have a revolving door policy with incarceration, but the point stands with anyone. Ollie (like Bats but worse in his vulnerabilities) ISN'T a "super" hero. Those poor guys just paying the bills? They put a bullet in him in the course of the food buying activities and whelp, he's dead. Or maybe worse, he's just captured, exposed, and his family pays. And the city is fucked still. All of this was handled well in season 1. He was never "Gee, I'm bored. Lets go out tonight and drop some bodies." about it. It was never murder. If it was, what the hell are Felicity and Diggle doing around still? Why didn't they turn him in? Stop him themselves the first time he killed someone? (Other than because it would end the show...). Because it was necessary and justified even if they didn't like it. Then the "character growth" crapped all over common sense for the fantasy where he can feel better because he's just indirectly getting people killed now and the guy who wants to buy crack/food for his new baby gets to live to follow the orders of people who DO want to murder people for fun and profit. It's not character growth, it's putting his hands over his eyes and going LALALALA really loud and wishful thinking that just so happens to (mostly...sometimes) work out because he has Plot Armor.
If Oliver wasn't so damn bad at it (separate problem), making corpses of everyone would have solved like all of the current problems! With more people still alive! Does anywhere here actually think keeping Slade around is going to turn out well?!?!
But at the same time half cocked ideas like, "let me just turn him into the police with zero evidence to back up that he has done anything wrong," don't work at all and got people killed when he got out (not to mention Lance losing his job).
Yeeeeeeeeeeahhhhh
No.
NoNo.
No.
You want the easy and true answer? Because its a comic.
And for the same exact reason it wouldn't make a lick of difference. Another supervillian would just appear (In the most likely case CONNECTED to the other dead supervillian) and kill those people.
The reason theres a *Batman problem* in the first place is because a lot of american comics reuse their superheroes and villians to no end. Theres no plotline that truly ends. So they keep coming back. They can actually be killed and THEY WILL STILL COME BACK.
Wait the flash is wearing a superman shirt, green arrow a flash hat, and bruce wayne some shirt. GOD DAMN YOU ARE RUINING CONTINUITY!
pleasepaypreacher.net
Arrow was running into the Punisher problem. Not only is it hard to develop a cast of villains when every episode ends with the bad guy dead, but it becomes harder and harder to reconcile the growing body count with the idea that your hero is, well, a hero. The Punisher gets around this problem by making Frank Castle a somewhat sympathetic nutcase, but that's obviously not the direction they wanted to take Oliver Queen.
Actually they get around the Punisher problem by making Frank Castle a FUCKING MURDERER who is scorned by near every member of the superhero community.
Because he is.
And feared by a vast majority of villains.
And yeah. Frank tends to be respected by military types and scorned by superheroes.
// Switch: SW-5306-0651-6424 //
pleasepaypreacher.net
Or that the villians he faces are magically less evil and are not bad people deserving of death.
But the fact remains that Frank Castle is a psychotic murderer, plain and simple.
He's obviously suffering from a SEVERE amount of PTSD compounded by the fact that his father left him a pretty fucked up mission statement while also revealing that Starling City was basically a shinier Gotham, where instead of Mob families you had the hyper untouchable rich fucking everything up, and you have a perfect storm for Season 1 Ollie.
He isn't as much of a murderer as someone who was severely mentally traumatized(and still is).
There are essentially two arguments in favor of super-heroes (and by super-heroes, I'm lumping in every extra-judicial vigilante who throws on a mask or costumed identity in fiction to fight crime, regardless of whether or not they have super-powers, so Batman and Green Arrow count here) using lethal force: Stoppage necessity and recidivism prevention.
They're two separate points, so I'm going to tackle them separately. This is also going to be a long post, because this is actually something I give a shit about on a two-fold professional level (I went to college for law enforcement, I've written indie comics, etc.) and I've got opinions on it. This is also an argument that comes up in super-hero related threads from time to time with stupid names like "Batman Problem" and other shit the Internet made up and I feel like rather than let people go back and forth on this for ten pages I'll just address it directly, since I helped start the fight in the first place.
So, first there's Stoppage Necessity. This means stopping a bad guy, right the fuck now, from harming people. Stoppage necessity, in the real world, is the only acceptable excuse for the application of lethal force by law enforcement (recidivism prevention, a different issue, is more the province of the death penalty which I'll get into later in this post). Someone has a gun to people's heads, or is about to blow up an orphanage, or whatever, and your only option to stop them from killing other people is to kill them. In real life with real cops it's an unfortunate but societally acceptable application of lethal force, the idea being that you are accepting that there was no other stoppage solution to that situation to prevent the loss of further life without taking the life of someone who was an imminent threat.
In real life, lethal force is the most final form of stoppage available. Less-than-lethal implements, like tasers, pepper spray, batons, etc. are utilized when possible against some assailants if it is believed at the time that would be an adequate way to stop them while ensuring that they would not reasonably continue to be an imminent lethal threat to others. A guy who rushes a cop with a knife doesn't necessarily need to get shot with a gun, sometimes a taser does the job... but sometimes not. Sometimes the reactionary gap is too small. Sometimes the cop legitimately believes that it won't be enough. etc.
If someone else has a gun, then forget about it, of course a cop is going to meet that lethal force with lethal force of their own, because the stoppage necessity there is to prevent them from killing people (which includes the officers themselves) and you can't play games with that.
But super-heroes aren't cops. They're not. Not just in the sense that they don't have the arrest powers of police (or the red tape or due process), but they also don't have the limitations of law enforcement in reality. So their stoppage necessity will almost always include non-lethal options, unless the writer decides that for some reason they don't. This is a reality of how the characters and their capabilities have already been established, the powers and abilities they have at their disposal.
This is true of some characters more than others, of course. Spider-Man has a much easier time of being non-lethal, because he has a bullet-dodging spider-sense, superhuman agility and strength, and webs he can shoot to disarm and bind people. The dude is a walking, personified LTL implement. This is less true of say... Wolverine, whose primary offensive capability is blades that come out of his fists, but even then he's often shown doing things like slicing people's guns in half or making non-lethal slashes (at least, in the comics. Movie Wolverine tends to have fewer fucks to give). The Flash has super-speed, and can basically just bludgeon the bajeezus out of someone and disarm them and so on, so he doesn't need to be killing people to stop them from being lethal threats.
Even non-superpowered super-heroes like Batman and Green Arrow are still festooned with non-lethal gadgets (this is more true in Arrow season 2 than season 1), and they are hyper-competent kung fu bad-asses who can deftly evade the gunfire of a dozen mooks with submachineguns with nothing but agility and shadows. Even if they don't have "super-powers" in an outright sense they're not normal people and are on no level comparable to cops. When you write a character as having smoke bombs and flashbangs and bolas and can kick the shit out of nearly anyone, it's a tough pill to swallow that they really need to kill a bad guy unless it's literally a gun-to-the-head kind of situation. And even then, finding a "third way" and managing to save the day without killing the villain is kind of what makes them super-heroes instead of morally dark-grey vengeance-mongers like Frank Castle.
Some writers nowadays think they're being very "clever" or "edgy" to make super-heroes more "realistic" or "gritty" to have them casually murder people when they don't have to. This usually involves overlooking how they've already established the character's powers, abilities, tools, tactics, and way of thinking to write them into some kind of contrived situation where the only way out is to snap the villain's neck and then scream all anguished about it like there was no other way, and other stupid bullshit like that.
I wouldn't consider Arrow to have gone in this direction in the first season, because it was part of an arc. Yes, Ollie did casually murder people in the first season when many times there was no need to, but as has been pointed out, Ollie was still massively and clearly suffering from PTSD and was all kinds of fucked up and didn't really see himself as a hero. He saw himself as an avenging vigilante with an agenda. It was only due to the reactions of other characters to his cavalier attitude to lethal force (people talk about Tommy a lot, but Diggle and Felicity also gave him a lot of shit for it and helped cement his attitude on that) and his potential to actually be a heroic figure and a good person that made him rethink this stance.
So, the "stoppage necessity" angle is kind of bogus. It's bogus for super-heroes. From time to time it might make sense (there's a villain in season 2 that Ollie kills because it's a literal gun-to-the-head situation and it made sense at the time and nobody was really all that broken up about it even though it was after Ollie had declared he was done killing, because it was necessary), but when it's done to add "drama" and "grittiness' to a character and just give them angst and anguish it's contrived and hollow. Especially when it's established earlier in the same fiction that they could've just... not done that. Super-heroes are super-heroes because they're not normal people, because they can be heroes that don't exist in the real world, and if you have them just killing people because "well, in that situation, a cop would've just shot a guy", I think you're missing the point of super-heroes in general.
That brings me to the next point, the so-called "Batman Problem", which in real life is actually called Recidivism Prevention. The idea behind this argument is that in super-hero fiction (especially in comic books), incarcerated super-criminals will escape and trouble the world again, and in the case of especially murderous ones (the Joker, for example), every time they get out that's an increased body count. Due to the cyclical nature of comic book storytelling, and the fact that authors can't just let a fantastic villain like the Joker sit in prison forever and they want to write new Batman vs. the Joker stories, yes inevitably no matter what prison you put him in, the Joker will break out and he will kill again, and after this happens so many times, god damn it Batman why don't you just kill the Joker?
Like people start to question, at what point does it not become Batman (or society's) fault for not just executing this psychopath, since they know god damn well that imprisoning him is impossible?
You know what the problem is with this argument? It's stupid. I don't normally just shit on an opinion like that but it's an argument I can't take seriously because it is in fact in writing what is known as a metatextual argument. You're arguing that the characters should, essentially, become self-aware of the archetypal and cyclical nature of their own storytelling world in exactly one respect you find galling and unbelievable, but not in other respects you find acceptable or within your suspension of disbelief.
The idea that people should "know" that Joker will always get out is based first of all on the idea that every single story in which Joker (or any super-villain, for that matter) breaks out of their prison or goes back to being evil takes place in the same continuity (which it doesn't) and that characters in that continuity should all be somehow cognitively aware of that (which they're not). The idea of super-villain prisons being cardboard-barred temporary holding facilities they break out of at any time convenient to the plot is a memetic notion, reinforced by many different adaptations of the same source material all telling the same kinds of stories. X-Men 2 is about super-villains getting out of prison. Arkham Asylum is about super-villains getting out of prison. Episodes of Justice League Unlimited are about super-villains getting out of prison. Episodes of Arrow are about super-villains getting out of prison. All of these stories feature a previously established super-villain who was imprisoned in a previous story breaking out and causing havoc again, which feeds into this idea that shouldn't people in a super-hero universe just cotton on to the idea that this is just a thing that happens?
Well no, that's stupid. They're completely different stories about completely different characters in completely different continuities. Why should they "know" that? Should they have some kind of meta-awareness they live in a comic book universe with comic book universe rules? No, every comic book character is not Deadpool, sorry.
There actually isn't an especially good reason in most stories for super-heroes to believe that guys they put away won't stay away. After all, the only reason they even come back in the first place is because later on, a new story wants to get told using that same villain and they need him again, and when that is the reason it actually makes absolutely no difference how they are imprisoned, plot finds a way.
With that in mind, having super-heroes kill super-villains from an argument of recidivism prevention in this metatextual way is still stupid because if they were actually in some way cognitively aware of the crazy comic book universe they live in where villains escape from prison at the demands of plot... they'd know that they do the same thing with death. Characters, both heroes and villains, stay dead as long as the plot demands they do. When someone comes along that wants to write stories with that character again, well... then I guess that character is back again!
Very rarely do comic book characters have some kind of metatextual awareness of how cheap death is, either, although in recent years that's become a thing in some comics and I frown hard at writers who think they're oh-so-clever for having characters referencing the number of times Jean Grey has died or some shit.
So, to TL;DR this fuckin' post for some of you, stoppage necessity is a real reason real cops sometimes kill people. It is not a legitimate reason for super-heroes to kill people unless the writer decides it is, and usually when they do it's pretty contrived (or the character isn't much of a super-hero). Recidivism prevention is a stupid reason for super-heroes to use lethal force, the so-called "Batman Problem" exists only in the minds of comic book nerds on the internet and post-90's comic book writers who think they're really clever when they're not. The illusion of that problem is just a side-effect of the cyclical nature and adaptive memetics of super-hero storytelling, and killing villains off would do nothing to change that.
It's interesting to me that it works because the movies don't do the grimdark thing or obsess over the morality of the actions. You just have characters who aren't going out their way to kill anyone but will if the need arises.
It has much more to do with how slow progress is made in comic books and how often things return to the status quo.
They are also shown to be willing to capture if possible or practical. Thor captures a bunch of rampaging bandits in the opening of the Dark World, Cap does likewise in the opening of TWS and Tony... well the scene where the thug just plain quits his job in mid fight in Iron Man 3 is one of the funniest moments in the film... and Tony lets him leave.