So is it okay to kill villains that have the potential to kill hundreds of people...

So is it okay to kill villains that have the potential to kill hundreds of people? I thought Superman would have to actually answer Manchester Black's arguments about killing Atomic Skull but instead it turns out he was just another might-makes-right wanker.

Go to the court, except if he is endangering someone, then you have to do anything in your power to stop him, killing if necessary.

Physical confrontation was inevitable. The Elite was trying to pull an Authority on the DCEarth. If not Superman, then the JL would have intervened. It was bound to get messy.

Anyone knows what happened to Mooonchester Black?

>So is it okay to kill villains that have the potential to kill hundreds of people?
That's how tokusatsu gets away with it. But in America villains that do something villainous unironically get called problematic.

He's around, sorta.

Mooing and making milk, mostly.

I find it strange. Superman has indeed killed in the past and had the intent to do so when fighting things like Doomsday and Darkseid (failing due both of them being very op). Sure, it's not his first choice and only does it when there is no other choice.

It's literally only capes and saturday morning cartoons that have this issue. It's part 'we can't let any villains die because what if we need them later for another story' and part 'heroes are the bastion of all that is good and morally righteous and shouldn't kill'.

Tokusatsu is somewhat more grounded in that it can be a bit grey at times as well as the heroes being less 'superheroes who are always there to help everyone' and more like 'there are monsters out there who we need to deal with because we're the only ones who can'.

this movie was garbage and totally ruined the meaning of the original ending, by shitting all over it and changing it

>original
>Black:YOU'RE NO BETTER THAN US WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO LOBOTOMIZE ME?
>Supes: I AM better than you because it's only temporary. and your friends are all just knocked out.

>Movie
>Black:YOU'RE NO BETTER THAN US WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO LOBOTOMIZE ME?
>Supes:I am better than you. therefore I'm gonna permanently depower all of your friends

The meaning is still "I'm right and you're wrong because I beat you in a fight" though.

If a villain had the capability and intent, I would kill them.

I think it's okay.

This isn't the meaning, retard.

That's exactly what happened, though.

Supes didn't address anything the Elite said. All he did was beat them in a fight, and apparently that just meant he was right.

That whole movie/comic was fucking retarded. Superman killed several people. He's not an idiot, he knows that it's sometimes necessary. And unlike what superfags would you believe he doesn't hold back in fights when the fate of the Earth is on the line, even if it would kill bis opponent.

Even the original was garbage. It was a shitty strawmanning of The Authority based on the wrong-headed notion that either Ellis or the readers of the book considered the Authority to be "heroes".

Nope.

He decided that he wasn't going to change his ways. He wasn't going to kill because a bunch of British assholes decided that kill is cool.

>letting mass murderers who tried to take over the world keep their powers
Somehow even more retarded than sparing Atomic Skull. I don't know how but the comic managed to be even worse than the movie. The nadir of quality was probably when Superman said that killing terrorists who were seconds away from nuking a city of fifteen million people makes you Literally Hitler.

>Superman killed several people
[citation needed]

>poisons Zod to death with Kryptonite
>wipes Darkseid from existence
>beats Doomsday to death
>poisons Faora and Non to death with Kryptonite
>disintegrates and kills the last incarnation of Brainiac by sending him back to the big bang with a boom tube
>does the same to Imperiex
Whoever wrote this movie clearly doesn't get Superman.

Superman will kill an enemy if their existence threatens a large group of people.

I don't know about Ellis, but I'm pretty certain his readership is the same as those that read Watchmen and thought Rorschach was the hero.

>the nazi holocaust pales by comparison
I chuckle at the thought of the reaction this line would cause if it were written in this era.

I mean, it's totally true. The scale often gets downplayed because Supes at his heart is a pulp sci fi hero, but someone like Brainiac is literally millions of times worse than Hitler.

user, it's literally all "we can't kill popular villains" and "Heroes shouldn't kill" is only used to justify that in story.

the real issue was that The Elite had no restraint and no concern for either overkill or civilian casualties, not to mention Black himself is a psychopath who was willing to fry Metropolis just to ensure Superman wouldn't bring in the JLA

it's less that Superman won't kill at all(at least post crisis), it's more that Superman prefers to avoid lethal measures unless he has no other option, so let's analyze those specific instances;

>Zod & company had genocided an alternate Earth and if left alive vowed to find a way to restore their powers, find Superman's Earth, and kill everyone there as well
>Doomsday had already almost killed the Justice League, and had proven so dangerous that Superman had no choice but to use his full strength to take Doomsday down(and considering Doomsday keeps coming back he's justified in that manner)
>Brainiac 13 and Imperiex were both trying to destroy/conquer the universe on a scale that required such solutions
>Darkseid was literally trying to drag all of existence into a Black Hole Hell that his death was generating, not to mention he was also trying to hijack the Miracle Machine that Superman was going to use to save the universe

the main problem there being that they are morons and made most of their villains mass murderers that keeping them alive makes no sense from a Watsonian angle, really we need to pull back to the Late Silver Age/Early Bronze Age where a recurring villain killing anyone was a relatively rare thing

Superman has killed, but less than a handful of times compared to the countless times he's saved the day, and even then only in extreme situations where he's considered or tried every possible other option and knows for a fact they won't work. And every time he has to kill it hurts him, deeply, and he tries even harder to find an alternative next time.
For the Elite, killing was plan A, and they didn't have a plan B.

In the comic, The Elite were causing massive collateral damage whenever they dealt with a super villain or monster, and Superman was mostly telling them to stop doing it that way. The Elite, being assholes, told him to fuck off and let them do things their way. Superman called them out on their hypocrisy of killing villains because they also pretty much killed others in the process. Superman taught them a lesson in the comic: he beat the shit out of them and scared them so they could see that they were wrong. Basically put them in the shoes of their victims to see how they liked it. The whole point wasn't "might equals right", it was Superman telling a bunch of shitty kids to stop being messy assholes and not kill indiscriminately. That was it. The movie made them more sympathetic and less shit, but they still did stupid shit like kill two military leaders without realizing that wasn't going to solve years of conflict among the nations fighting each other.

they wanted him to change his ways. instead of killing when he really had no other choice, they wanted him to kill no matter who it was as plan A.

he faked it and it scared the shit out of them and everyone watching

Reminder that killing the pocket dimension phantom zone criminals bothered Clark so much so that he exiled himself from the solar system and in the Aliens crossover refused to kill the fucking xenomorphs vowing NEVER AGAIN.

Ellis wrote Black Summer as a way of saying "no seriously The Authority and the idea that you can make the world a better place if you just make enough bodies is retarded".

America's legal system allows you to use lethal force in defense of yourself as well as in defense of others.
If a guy with a gun is threatening someone, you have the legal right to shoot them.
So it stands to reason that if a guy with superpowers is threatening someone, you have the legal right to use your superpowers to kill him.

The morality of it is irrelevant, since every hero has their own personal moral compass. But in terms of legality, it's 100% okay.

He wrote it over three centuries too late.

>So is it okay to kill villains that have the potential to kill hundreds of people?
are they actively attacking you or someone else?
if yes? then it is legitimate self-defense
no? then you probably won, take him to jail, where he will be given an appropriate sentence

It's not Superman's job to kill villains, only stop them. If it comes to the point that the only way to spare innocent lives is to kill the villain then he should, but as Superman he's powerful enough that there are few situations where that's the case.

Like Superman's basically a cop. Why on earth are people clamoring for Superman to use lethal force when he stopped Atomic Skull just fine. They should be clamoring to City Hall to argue what to do after he's been caught.

Like the only time it's remotely on the table that a super hero should use more lethal force is with Batman just because part of the setting is how completely corrupt the city is so only capturing villains is clearly short sighted. (But then you have the problem that apparently corruption in Gotham can be used to get the Joker out easy but can't be used to push the death penalty after his last trash barge of joker gas threatened every mob boss in the city).

thread over, lets go home

Because wrights (generally liberal/anti killing) impose their morality system upon a world that is vastly different on a fundamental level.

Not only are some individuals capable of being megadeath events, but a good number actively try to be, and a fair few have succeeded.

If you want to see how that works in a cape-like medium just look at Punisher. He doesn't exactly have great villains because he doesn't let most of them live to become truly great.

I mean, who does he have for exclusive (i.e. not shared with other street level Marvel supes like Kingpin or Bullseye) outside of vaguely Italian mob boss #12046, vaguely Russian dope dealer #1647, and Negro pimp #21467? Jigsaw and Barracuda are the only ones that really come to mind, and I've read most of Punisher up to Remender's run. And Barracuda is dead too.

If capes could kill their rogue's gallery off permanently like he does we'd run out of interesting stories to tell. I mean, not that it's a creative wonderland right now but part of the reason Superman, Batman, and Spider-man are the S-tier heroes in terms of sales is because they have great rogue's galleries.

Superhero genre is by necessity unreal. Attempts to bring in complexity will break it.

And that's beside the fact that in reality there's no such thing as non-lethal violence.

Tokusatsu is barely grey when most MotW are just that. Monsters.
Sure you have the few exceptions but 90% of the time they're straight up Chaotic Evil.

"what's so funny about truth justice and the american way" is one hell of a cheesy title

>bothered Clark so much so that he exiled himself from the solar system
Yeah, he got sad. Then he came back and fucking got over it and proceeded to kill more dangerous villains like Brainiac 13 and Doomsday. Because Superman is a hero, and while he detests killing and violence in general, the lives of the innocent are his first priority.

Killing criminals when there's no more options is okay, Super criminals just fall to this category. It's like killing a terrorist before he blows a whole neighborhood when there's no more chance of negotiation.

After the kill happens, you discuss what could have done to prevent such situation of happening, try to learn from whatever mistakes you did and move on.

Superman used the Elite's methods against them and it showed both the Elite and the world just how flawed the Elite's methods were.

You know dairy cows have to have a calf to make milk, if Black doesn’t escape soon he’s in for some trouble

Heroes outside the Big Two, like Midnighter, Apollo, etc. illustrate how 'No Kill' Dr. Who fortune cookie shit is insane.

Potential means nothing. Every person you know has the potential to kill you; that does not give you the right to kill them. Defensive violence is justified only when someone is a direct, immediate, and viable threat to yourself or others. Pre-emptive violence is bullshit.