A supposedly ultimate rule, an order handed down by God himself, that all good people(especially comic book heroes) should abide by. A virtue, a strength.
In truth, it is a weakness. A hypocritical doctrine that keeps monsters alive and well, on our streets, or safe in their homes instead of in hell where they belong.
-and nowhere, but nowhere, is this nonsense shown for what it is as clearly as in comic books.
See, in the silver age, the Comics Code Authority laid down a bunch of well, codes that the writers had to abide by. One of which being that the heroes were not to kill and today's writers grew up with that, and now preach that for better or... Nah, just worse.
In the Golden Age, things were way different. Hell, in his first year, it was common to see Batman dealing with murderous scum as any normal person in his position would...
By killing them to protect his own life. Now don't let me steer you wrong, he was no Punisher, he was more like The Avengers of the MCU, willing to use lethal force should it be necessary, which in such conditions, it often is.
He also had little sympathy for said murderous scum, should they die from say, a little "accident".
* Heh... indeed.
Superman, of the Golden Age had similar views:
* Sucks for YOU, slimeball! Hahahaha...
In all seriousness, I personally see these versions, these heroes fully willing to kill the bad guys as the true heroes.
Yes, even when the bad guys are helpless.
You can yell "this is murder" until you're blue in the face, but that don't change the fact that thanks to heroes like these there are less murderers of the innocent in their worlds, a distinction which all-too-many blatantly ignore.
I like to think I made some pretty good arguments for my case during one of my many adventures on TvTropes, back before they effectively locked out all potential troublemakers like yours truly.(which I'm more than a little proud I had a hand in. :D)
Though that page and, well, let's face it, the entire site is packed with arrogant dumbshits, I gotta admit, inidiana404 seemed pretty sharp. That guy gets it.
Anyway, here's my list of reasons why this no-kill rule is bull. ...Shit.
1.Self-defense or defense of others are perfectly valid reasons to take the life of another.
If it's absolutely necessary to use lethal force to protect you or someone else, there shouldn't be any moral issue.
Yet, many in the comic industry and elsewhere fail to understand even that, with Wonder Woman's killing of Maxwell Lord being treated as, and even called, murder.
Keep in mind Lord had full control of Superman, was right about to use him to kill Batman,(for starters.) and had told WW, under the spell of the Lasso of Truth(gets the absolute truth out of anyone in it's hold) that the only way to stop him, was to kill him. Right then, right there.(she was later tried and acquitted.)
Oh, and in a Batgirl issue of the new 52, things get even more batshit. Ha ha? See what I did there? Bat-shit? Hahahahaha! Ha. Ha. Haaa...
...ahem. So basically, the psychopathic James Gordon Junior(Brother of Barbara Gordon aka Batgirl) is about to kill their mother when Babs chucks a Batarang in his eye. Despite her clearly acting in the direct defense of another, James Gordon Senior reads her the riot act and tells her he's all but about to arrest her right there. Yeah.
A goddamn cop who's almost certainly been in the exact same situation and done the exact same thing is telling his daughter an action anyone in her position would have been cleared for is suddenly an arrestable offence.
As for the Man of Steel fanboy fiasco? Oh, don't even get me started... suffice to say, I believe this small collection of panels sums up my and (the modern-day) Superman's feelings on the matter:
2.Hypocrisy. If you're going to have a rule such as this, it must apply to all intelligent beings.
If it talks like a (hu)man and thinks like a (hu)man, it deserves the same treatment has a (hu)man.
You can't have a Superman who was perfectly fine with wasting Ben Boxer(robot) up until the nanosecond he heard a heartbeat, or one who'll gladly try to smash another universe's Brainac(the robot version of whom he's been fine with killing before) into goo and only stop because he finds out the artificial being is organic, not mechanical.
Or a Batman who threatens to kill Gorilla Grodd because his code "doesn't apply to apes". This being an ape who thinks and feels just like us.
Same with vampires, aliens, monsters, etc.
You don't get to play favorites with a rule like this.
3.Sometimes... Violence is the only option and Murder is the best solution.
Now, I'm one of the few who believes the Joker should not be killed by Batman or anyone else for that matter whilst believing in the execution of evildoers.
That is because, as I pointed out on TvTropes, Joker is insane.
It's been shown countless times that there is a decent, sane man buried beneath the madness.
In a case like his, the best choice would be to use the advanced tech or magic of the DC universe to cure him and all of Arkham's inmates.
As for the others, however... I think Kingdom Come put it best:
"Who bagged Eclipso, huh? Who toasted Ra's al Ghul? Guys like us, that's who! We saved lives, man!"
Threats like these need to be stopped, permanently. Even the Phantom Zone or Limbo or the Green Lantern's central battery or the Raft, or the N-Zone... these super-prisons are temporary solutions which can be bypassed. Prisons can be broke into, scum can be busted out, and criminals like the kind I speak of below can lay waste on a far larger scale than, say, Victor Zsasz, and as such, the normal rules should not apply to them. They need a solution that merits the threat they represent.
After all, it'd be a hell of a lot harder for Ultraman, Doomsday, or Superboy-Prime to bargain their way out of Hell then get sprung from the above places...
Which they did.(except for JLU's Doomsday... I think)
Ultraman and the rest of the Crime Syndikate(because poor literacy is kewl, right double L?), were freed and came back time and time again to try to kill the Justice League before being put into another very similar prison where their stay admittedly lasted... until the new 52 retconned the shit out of 'em, along with everything else.(Lucky break for you, huh capes?)
As for Superboy-Prime?
He got loose and went on to slaughter billions.
He killed heroes, civilians, villains(props) and even entire planets, killing Earth-15's Justice League before destroying the Earth itself, and did the same to Earth-51 in a fight with another extremely powerful villain, Monarch.
Earth-51, by the way lost it's bad-fucking-ass Punisher-esque Batman(props to him this time) thanks to yet another version of the Crime Syndicate.
By all rights, Prime should've been executed the second they captured him, but to let him go on to do all of this because they didn't want to get blood on their hands!?
That is not being a hero, that is being preposterous.
Eventually, they do use an almost permanent solution. Superboy and Supergirl shove him into the Source Wall to stay frozen for all eternity. So, given they plan to leave him frozen for all time... how is that different from killing him? Oh, right, because now Darkseid, the previous owner, has an evil superman(on steroids) gift-wrapped for him to use at his leisure.
Marvel has the same issue with it's beings of mass destruction. How many times have they basically sent Galactus off to devour someone else's planet instead of just putting the planet-eater down?
4.If You Kill Him You Will Be Just Like Him is bullshit.
The Punisher: (2004)
Joan Rivers: "Say you kill them all. What happens? What makes you any different from them?"
The Punisher: "...they got something to lose."
Personally, I would've said something like "My family didn't deserve to die. They do."
There are no end of differences between people like The Punisher and evildoers.
Hell, I can give you a short list right here and now:
1.True antiheroes don't kill or badly injure innocents, bad guys do.
2.True antiheroes kill the evildoers because of the evil they commit. Evildoers kill whoever they want for personal gain or satisfaction(or the hell of it)
3.True antiheroes are killers/torturers of those who deserve it. They are not:
Rapists(we're gonna have words about that one day, Devin), child molesters, animal torturers, the kind who'd kill their enemies friends/families for fun, the kind who kill/torture for sexual thrills, etc. They are not evil.
As long as killers of the evil are going after the evil because they are evil,(and working to protect the good as well) they will never be the same as them.
5. The rest of the world... the government, the law? It fuckin' sucks at keeping these monsters locked away.
Every prison in the DCU is made of Cardboard, the only difference is how durable the brand. One way or another, all of them fail. The Marvel universe does a barely better job at keeping threats contained, but like the DCU, it never lasts. Villains wreak havoc as long as they live.
Of course, the corruption doesn't help. Suicide Squad of DC gives them a Get-Out-Of-Jail free card if they survive the suicide mission in question, the military has employed the use of Major Force, a convicted rapist, after giving him superpowers, and the idiots of the Marvel U were dumb enough to give Norman Osborn, a notorious super-villain who bombed his arraignment hearing on live television Fury's old job and a handful of super-psychos to be his own private Avengers and X-Men.
Long story short, the gov spends more time helping supervillains than punishing them, and has created their share of them to boot.
As for the law... Well, simply put, the law by it's very nature is ineffectual in any universe, but... Thanks to their over-reliance on the capes, it always comes down to the never-ever-ever kill goody-two shoes boy scouts to handle things, which always leaves the bad guys alive and killin'.
It's not a sniper's job to stop Joker or Two-Face from bombing the shit out of the city, it's Batman's.
It's not up to the cops to put down Menace, it's Spider-Man's to knock him out and put him away until the next time he breaks out and slaughters some more innocents.
-and then of course, the courts or the prisons fail to prevent these menaces from coming back to kill people by the truckload.
Either by corruption, naivete, ignorance, stupidity...
Something always goes wrong and the cycle begins anew when it could so easily end.
6.There are no good arguments as to why killing the evil is wrong and the kind of arguments today's writers use prove it.
Did you know Punisher used to be a relatively nice guy? Well, maybe "nice" is a stretch... but there was no question he had a hero's heart. He was an ultimately good and noble man who's was driven primarily by the desire to prevent what happened to him happening to others.
The Punisher today would've called him soft.
In fact, in some ways, he could be seen as too soft, refusing to kill a child porn director apparently because it would've been in front of the children.(why he didn't drag him off and ice him is anyone's guess.)
He also refused to kill several female murderers for no other reason than because they were female.
Granted, all of the above were arrested, but that ain't how my Punisher rolls.
Anyway, my point is, he went from being the type to, for example, express sympathy for drug addicts, stating how they were pretty much victims themselves to, for example, being willing to kill a young woman being used as a shield because "it's a junkie".
Jason Todd is also a perfect example of this.
He goes from "Antihero-slash-Crime Boss with standards"(admittedly he did plan to kill Batman on several occasions but never went through with them)
to "Antihero targeting all criminals, including thieves and will even kill his fellow heroes if they provoke him enough."
to "Self-proclaimed homicidal maniac who now adds citizens and police officers to his list should they be in his way."
It's a classic example of dodging the argument. Don't give any good reasons why the other side is wrong, make the other guy so bad he's practically impossible to root for or admire.
Hell, sometimes, the writers do such a bad job you'd think they were on the other side.
Remember that Earth-51 and it's Bat-Punisher? Yeah, you know Batman's deep rooted fear that if he were to kill, he'd never stop? Well, Batman 51 is that Batman. Killed every super-criminal on the planet, which, in the end... turned it into a crime-free paradise. *GASP* Dear God! Of course, a later writer attempted to fix this "living violation of the One Rule, er, violation" with his little Monarch and Prime combo meal.
See, Monarch and the Syndicate saw it as the perfect opportunity. After all, a world living in peace is ill-equipped for war. Eventually, the entire thing is destroyed in a fight between Monarch and Superboy-Prime, that wacky genocidal maniac stronger than ten Supermen combined.
So, basically, Batman-51 and his Earth were doing just fine until supermaniacs from elsewhere killed him and then killed his Earth. The latter only happening because the genocidal Superboy-Prime was spared.
Additionally, the solutions for these extremely dangerous individuals are not only ineffective but are either the same as killing them or worse.
As I stated in Prime's case, it was death minus the blood. Actually, it's even worse as he's still conscious. Instead of ending his life, they leave him to suffer for all eternity. Which to be fair, is pretty much the fate of every villain who dies since there is in fact a Hell there, but then, that means at best, it is as moral as killing, not less.Source wall, Phantom Zone, Negative Zone... eternal punishments.
You lock someone away forever(in a state of conscious paralysis or in a nightmarish dimension to boot), that's either worse than killing him or just as bad depending on one's beliefs on the afterlife.
Then, there are the arguments that are just plain stupid:
* Grant Morrison's Superman: Providing logic so stupid it makes the universe explode.
-and I thought the worst ITL could do was blow your mind...
I mean, my God... this "logic". How am I the only that notices how stupid this is? All y'all dickriding geekoids are all like "This is THE perfect comic-in-a-nutshell moment!"
If anything, it's a perfect example of what an insane ignoramus Grant "I can't write my way out of a paper bag" Morrison is.
So the message here is "don't kill because the non-lethal methods are even worse." Or no, wait, maybe it's "don't kill because death is ultimately meaningless to them, so why bother?"
Even aside from- uh, well... whatever the piss this was trying to say, there's an easy answer right there: take control.
Take away Ra's('s?) pits, take away the time machines, take away the magic powers and whatever else they use to cheat death so they may face it. Simple enough, right? Right.
7.It's the better choice.
It's the choice that prevents these sick animals from ever hurting anyone again and that brings their victims peace of mind, closure, satisfaction.
No matter what you call it, how you try to reason against it, there is no arguing against these irrefutable facts.
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