If you kill me, you'll be just like me!

how is that true in any sense

Actually, it was pretty much only Batman who acted like Supes was worse than Hitler at that moment. Superman was pretty justified, and everyone else knew it.

It was later on when Superman started acting like an asshole dictator that everyone started treating him like an asshole dictator.

That was the end of the campaign, but the salt lingered.

In the sense that you can only really define conflicting morals if they have something to conflict against. If good is the only thing around, then it's just the status quo. You can't be "the good guy" if that's just normal for everyone.
But that doesn't actually mean anything other than dumb wordplay, so who cares.

Good and evil are on opposite sides of the same axis. Labeling an action as "evil" necessarily implies that there is some"good" that the evil action is in violation of.

I think comics have developed a lot of that shit out of function. The whole "if you kill me, you'll be just like me!" line is pretty convenient for things like keeping the same characters alive for 70 years or whatever

The reason why it's such a big thing in the Superhero genre is that they need recurring villains popular enough to sell comics and merchandise, and the villains are often the bigger draw than the heroes. In addition, if you kill off villains, you have to replace them with new ones, something no one wants to do because it means that you have to start from scratch making a villain popular with readers.

As such, villains may change in aesthetics and attitude over time, but they'll almost never be killed off for good unless DC/Marvel can't picture being able to squeeze more money out of them showing up again.

Well, yeah. I've heard that nowadays, the writers seem to realize how fucking absurd the Joker situation is, so every comic where he's defeated ends not with him being carted away to Arkham, so he can escape five minutes later, but seemingly dying.

The proper response *should* be to take advantage of one of their every-six-months at this point Major Retcons to reconfigure the Joker back into NOT BEING A COMPLETELY UNUSABLE CHARACTER.
But no, Alan Moore was a genius, so we can't possibly make the Joker anything other then a painfully boring serial killer who's only interesting because of Nicholson, Hamill, and Ledger.

.Kills them

"Strange. I don't feel any different. Friend Paladin, and I pinging evil?"

"Nope."

"Then I guess moral relativism really is mealy-mouthed bullshit."

...

>if you kill me, you'll be just like me!
>kill him anyways
>he possesses you and you turn into him

The absence of evil implies the absence of a moral structure which judges actions, therefore "good" as a concept loses meaning. There is no good or evil, only things that happen.

>They don't gonna stop! It, that world, is not only made of me.
>You can't end this
Kiddo forgets we have mass destruction spells because MAGIK

What did he mean by this?

>They don't gonna stop! It, that world, is not only made of me.
Sure, we can't fix the whole world, but we can make it just a little bit better. *blam*

He's one of these parasites, but he born as "parasite human"

So he's important and thinks we can't destroy every of them.

So that happened;

They could just shelve both the heroes -and- villains. Let the stories END.

You know pretty damn well why it's impossible.

I don't care WHY. I'm sick of capeshit being the same fucking shit.

But then they wouldn't be able to cash in on fans' multi-decade emotional investment into the characters. Moder cape writers can't make audiences invested in their characters, so they have to parasite off of existing investment.

That's why they couldn't have a comic about a female asgardian or cancer-Jane getting powers some other way, it had to be Lady Thor.

I give you the last two, but
>if you kill me, you'll be just like me!
\is great when done right. Hannibal series was a great deal about it and it was awesome.

In other words, it's a borderline incestual industry where new ideas are pigeonholed into the same old formula.

Why are so many people talking about moral relativism in this thread? The only relativistic statement in the OP is the last one, and that's just a good idea executed poorly. Aside from the rare born psycho, everyone who does evil things has reasons why they do, and everyone thinks of themselves as the good guys. Even cultures that mercilessly slaughter and pillage other groups are filled with people with their own hopes, ideals, and loved ones. The trick is that none of that changes that sometimes the best way to stop someone from doing bad shit is to put a bit of metal through their brain.

>no one ever hurt anybody

Why hasn't Joker been sentenced to execution a court of law? The guy is a mass murderer who has been escaping the highest security facilities for almost a century, you'd think by now a jury would have given him the death penalty.

I prefer when the villain says something along the lines of "I knew you wouldn't do it" when the Hero is about to kill the bad guy but stops.

More importantly, why hasn't Gotham's obviously corrupt police force ensured he had an 'accident' on the way to the trial or prison? Sure some of the guys there might as well just be mobsters with badges, but even the mobsters in Gotham have families and dislike the Joker.

I would had thought at some point a guard or officer would have just shot him as soon they gained custody of him.

You have merely embraced the dark. I was born in it.

Batman would then proceed to make the life of that officer a living hell for killing his gay lover and drive him insane, because murder is bad, no nuance possible.
And then Joker would turn out to just faked his death somehow. Come on, you know how the comics work.

>But OP, how can you put emphasis on just how irredeemably evil your villains are without them spouting stupid moral relativist shit like this?
by having them not even care that what they are doing is evil? unless you are trying to go for this thing where the villain seems like this big, menacing beast only to discover that he's quite pathetic when you finally meet him in person.

I'm sure that some have tried, and that such attempts have resulted in some of his numerous escapes.

Well that's because comics need to keep him around since they want to keep selling him; from a story perspective the Joker really should be dead.

Probably true. Personally, I think it'd be better to just not have the Joker be quite as efficient at the whole mass murder thing. I mean, I've seen Joker gas range from killing someone in seconds with a smile on their face, to causing laughing fits that last for days before eventually making them comatose, but having a possible cure for that.

There's a lot less reason to kill the joker in such a spiteful way if rather than killing hundreds or thousands whenever he uses his signature gas in a plot, he just hospitalizes them instead.

That actually makes Batman's constant fighting of him still helpful, since the Joker running rampant would basically just grind the city to a standstill as people flee the city to get their loved ones to hospitals.

You'd still have people arguing to kill him, since he'd still be a skilled knife-fighter and sociopath on top of this who would probably kill several people along the way in his plans anyway, but it would be on a scale of a normal serial killer, rather than having a terrorist-level death toll occurring whenever he breaks out of prison.

For some reason this is making the popularity of manga and anime make a little bit more sense to me.

"Nah."

>if you kill me, you'll be just like me!
>"That's not true. I won't be such a push-over.""

>HUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRR BATMAN DOESN'T KILL!!!!!!!!!!

>Batman brings the Joker in batcuffs and tied with batrope. Gives the insane murderer a stern look and turns him over the the gaurds, knowing full well the Joker just escape to kill more people, and justifying his own dementia.

Guards take him, Batman walk off, hears a single gunshot. He whirls around to see the Joker facedown, contents of his skull scattered across the cracked linoleum, and a squad of SWAT officers overseeing the cleanup.

I had a GM who loved to do that kind of monologue BS to try and get us to consider how out party and the BBEG weren't so different. Just that the BBEG was an insane king who ran his country into the ground with dumb demands and pointless wars, one of which lead us to kicking in his door.

So the GM reads off this minute and a half long prepared speech and looks at us, hoping we'll have some kind of deep revelation.
>mfw the barbarian just took a warhammer to his face and we all went to have lunch and watch the capital burn

GM was a cool dude, but he was bad at drama

There's been more than one Joker

>I would had thought at some point a guard or officer would have just shot him as soon they gained custody of him.

Daily reminder that these characters came about pre-9/11, when we were still trying to have ideals, or at least pretending to strive for higher standards of justice.

You say this about cape comics, which were just emerging from the edgefest of the 90s at the time.

>user somehow missed the butlering
Come for the video game tonight in, stick around for Alfred pennyworth's sick Burns

I would think there is a difference between holding a higher standard of ideas and taking a mass murder to the same jail that he already has broken out of like 20 times. There should be a shot to kill order out on him.

>taking a mass murder
At what point does Mass order cross over into genocide/crimes against humanity. Because the joker has used both chemical and nuclear weapons to kill people. And we were executing folks like that with glee long before the planes hit the wtc

So, do they have to have a significantly lower rape/pillage frequency than humans to justify not genociding them, or can they be in the same ballpark?

Holy fucking shit, underage detected. You say that as though we had ideals after the kikes got us into WWII or something.

>defend yourself after being attacked
>losing ideals
If anything, ideals were lost once we started dicking around in other countries like the Euros were doing at the time.

>objective morality
>not using your goddamn brain to decide what to do

And if you need a roleplaying game manual to tell you right from wrong, then frankly you have bigger problems to deal with.

>Nah. I'll still be alive.

Anyone who tries that with any of my characters, no matter how LG they are, gets executed on the spot. Any enemy who tries mind-games, especially cliche ones, is an enemy that's better off dead.

It's simple: moral relativism is the most degenerate and vile thing someone can believe in.

This, yea.

Injustice Supes only really started to be regarded as the villain when he was rounding up entire prison populations to be executed. Practically no one blamed him for Joker besides Batman.

Still though, that talk before the final fight in 2 was super good.

I have a True Neutral Cleric who believes in a mantra similar to Yin and Yang. Yes, it is true that Good cannot exist with Evil, but balance must be maintained.
And it is often true that Evil has a much greater weight to it that Good, so he has absolutely no problems killing rampaging Orcs or a Lich or keeping the peace in general. Men must be greedy to pursue progress and greater things, they must have foes to fight and challenge themselves against or they will become weak and complacent, there must be the temptation of Evil for the Pure of Heart to fight against lest they fall to their own vices and bigotry without something greater than themselves to stand against.

So long story short, he had no problems caving in the BBEG's face as soon as he tried to have some big epic speech to try and persuade the party. You burned down a village to prove a point, you threw all the Yin and Yang to the Nine Hells you narcissistic grandstanding twit.

Under Texas law, he never stole a horse.

...

Act like this guy one time during a session, get kicked out of the group.

DM: You could of reeducate them!
Me: I'm here to kill, maim, burn.

I dunno, man.

You get free candy.
You get free vegetables.

Vegetables are not as good a get as candy, so now are you saying it's evil to get free vegetables?

At any rate, it's less-good. So 'evil' is a pretty slidy scale.

Because they're modern day super HEROES.

HEROES don't kill people. Villians use guns, heroes use fists. Villians kill people, heroes capture and turn them in and save innocents.

This doesn't mean Villians are immortal or necessarily always 'spared', when the bad guy drops to zero HP his jet pack might malfunction and send him flying into the sun, or his acid powers might overflow and spill on him sure, but the HEROES never killed him.

This is how you play super HEROES. If your characters kill people they aren't heroes, they might be good modern vigilantees but don't call them Heroes.

Are you complaining about something in particular or just complaining because you don't actually hage a real game to talk about?

Have some Ramos

I kind of feels like the slippery slope argument.
And when he started slipping, only batman with his super strict morals cared.

Why the fuck would a DM put this shitty old dilemma into his game if he's only gonna accept one answer? Not sure i believe you.

You're a faggot.

Your view of heroism belongs to TV for young children.

Heroes can absolutely kill people.

Heroism has to do with why you do things and the net result for the greater good.

If you have to kill a serial killer to make that happen because the evidence required to get a conviction has been destroyed, then that's what you do.

Spotted the fat-ass.

You mean like this?

youtube.com/watch?v=PfH3bDPNGHw

>I didn't expect you to be -this- dumb, honestly.
>Interesting theory. Let's see how that works out for you.
I wouldn't deign the last one with a response. The villain is dead anyway.

I am glad that this did not happen to me when I played in my superhero game last saturday...

We basically had to try and stop an outbreak of zombies first in India, then in China: when we got to India we found there were two carriers of the virus who were infecting people: they were a teleporter and a ghost, two very annoying types of enemies. Basically what the teleporter did was just teleport away for thousands of miles to China.

We cleaned up the place of the outbreak and then the news we heard was there was an outbreak in China: so my character saw what these guys were doing... with the dead women and kids who were turned into zombies and went into a cold, murderous rage.

Once our own teleporter got us to the zone of China where there was an outbreak, we managed to find the teleporter and the ghost in a brothel, planning to infect more whores and cause the virus to spread. So we are teleported in, my character goes in first and drops the teleporter with a couple of well-rolled attacks. The team reaches us and manage to drop the ghost too...

Long story short, my character accompanies our teleporter and the ghost cannot be touched even in a power-nullifying cell. So what we do is teleport back to China, where my character blasts the unconscious teleporter who was starting to get conscious again, first back to unconsciousness and then to a dying state, killing him in a couple of rounds.

We took care of the ghost by teleporting him hundred of miles away from the earth and into space, after discovering that my character could not kill him because the ghost was effectively immortal.

Okay, thing about that story's goblins is that they are pure parasites who require human (or Demi-human) women to reproduce, use them up quickly and kill them, or let them die horribly. They are not a species that can sustain itself, and if they are allowed to run rampant they are basically an extinction event for humans and others, and then they'd quickly die out too because -oops, no more women!

They're parasites worse than bot-flies or tape worms or those horrible brain-eating fungi in insects. If humanity is to live, they need to die. Also I heard somewhere they are from the Moon. What's up with that?

"I guess I'll have to be someone else's evil" is my new favourite one-liner.

>kill someone without giving them a fair trial
>I'm the GOOD guy

Because he's legally insane so he keeps getting carted off to Arkham instead.

They DID once try to get him declared medically sane just so they could execute him, but then it turned out that the crime they were trying him for was actually somebody else framing him.

I don't know why they didn't try that shit again though.

You must have a hard time coping with reality.

Comicbooks need to come to an end, not be dragged on forever

I think someone does try to in Brubakers GCPD don't they? He just ends up escaping.

Why doesn't Superman just put Joker in the Phantom Zone?

Joker is not legally insane, he's entirely cognizant of the effects of his repeated terrorist attacks.

Comicbook writers just don't know shit about mental health or law, and certainly don't know what an "insanity plea" entails.

>but then it turned out that the crime they were trying him for was actually somebody else framing him.
Don't forget it was Batman the one who found the culprit because, as usual, NOT MUH JOKAH

Dragonball Super is the fucking worst, it has all the issues of shitty shonen AND neverending comicbooks packed into one terrible series.

Don't you know, good guys always have the answer and it's surprisingly always at the sharp end of a sword. Now move along, before a good guy sees you.

'Nah.'
'Okay, let's keep the evil to the bare minimum.'
'Raping and pillaging is not innocent.'

>>we're just innocent raping and pillaging species, you only kill us because we're labeled evil!
Actually really like this. when you have a people who are absolutely despicable but act like they are the victims.

Well, I assumed that went without saying.

Because heroes rogues galleries are usually fairly well insulated from each others and Superman HATES going to Gotham.
Batman got VERY uptight with Flash for instance when one of his Rogues killed Tim Drakes dad.

So Superman usually has very little interaction with the Joker as a result.
The exception being JLA cartoons which usually dampens down Jokers murdering a lot.

youtube.com/watch?v=ZmQEsjhEsLw

>Heroism has to do with why you do things and the net result for the greater good.

Edgy McEdgelord comes to join the thread.

'The greater good' is a fucking cliche. You can justify absolutely anything for the greater good. The US army burning Vietnamese children with napalm? It was necessary for the greater good. Supporting the Contras? Helped the greater good in the long run. Al-queda flying airplanes into buildings? Did it for the greater good etc.

Hey, did you know that if we just remove all the undesirables and destroy international communism it will usher in a thousand year era of peace and progress. What kind of monster would oppose an unparalleled age of total peace and prosperity for the whole human race just to save a few million lives? Bring on the holocaust!

>Namefag
What, you aren't even smart enough to figure out how to use a trip?

>all the good in the world takes turns being other people's evil so actual evil doesn't get a look in