- Location
- Australia
No, she didn't. Missy was in costume, showing Brian and Aisha around their new PRT-supplied quarters. Aisha and Missy got along pretty good.
Ah; so that was the symbolism of his death, the man who lived two lives getting his throat cut twice. I figured out what it was in the other timeline - Coil being hung with a coil of rope - but not with the real timeline death.
Okibruez
(Verified Mid-Boss)
- Location
- Dreams
If the only choices you have are bad ones, then picking the least bad option does not make it the right option.
Deciding the least bad option was the right option is how you eventually moralize atrocities.
- Location
- England
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Coil hung himself in that timeline, which is also symbolic. The man with two lives getting two different, but equally symbolic deaths. Note that in the timeline he ended, he killed himself, but in the other timeline Atropos ended she killed him.
Hestia&theCourt
Turns out we're plural too.
- Location
- In transition
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Reminds us of this specific scene from El Goonish Shive, actually. Makes the same point you just did, but a bit more dramatically. To swing this back around towards being on-topic, our general personal consensus is that Atropos doesn't quite have the moral high ground here, in spite of all of her victims kinda having it coming.
Danny's point of "I don't think anything less would work" comes from a place of ignorance about what Atropos is actually capable of. "Effectiveness" is kind of a moot point, with her power. She can handle any situation in any number of different ways as long as it still fits the theme of having ended something, so she doesn't have to assassinate people to get her power to work at all. She's choosing to do this in the most murder-y way possible for the purpose of dramatics, and that's not really morally defensible regardless of the moral fiber or lack thereof of her victims.
Which, to be clear, doesn't stop this from being an entertaining story. Fiction doesn't have to adhere to what would be moral in real life. But as far as I'm concerned, Atropos is a Villain Protagonist, who we root for primarily because everyone she fights is objectively much worse than she is.
Which isn't far off from canon, actually: in both cases Taylor can be a compelling protagonist without being any sort of role model.
I don't think this is 100% correct. PtE can't just end stuff, it can only direct Taylor to the methods and tools that can. So that's an actual limitation she has. Not much of one for the most time but it means the harder the target, the fewer options to end it she has.
I'm sure there were paths to end the gang influence in Brockton Bay without killing anyone. That doesn't make them automatically better or more moral. They could have had hundreds of steps and taken more time to implement, resulting in more victims in the meantime. Or perhaps they'd kept the gang leaders alive but destroyed them as a person. There are things worse than death...
As Pieser, from Path to Munchies, can personally attest.
Okibruez
(Verified Mid-Boss)
- Location
- Dreams
Honestly, half my point was that Atropos isn't morally justified here. Whether it is the only acceptable option, she is still ultra-murdering people. The fact that she's leaning into the dramatics of it for fun and flavor is just another point down the alignment scale.
And I knew I'd heard that argument somewhere before. Good taste in webcomics.
Hestia&theCourt
Turns out we're plural too.
- Location
- In transition
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It kinda does make those paths more moral, actually, assuming those paths don't substitute war crimes for murder (which would be required for any fates worse than death you might bring up). Killing based on your own personal moral code is banned from every worthwhile society for damn good reason: you fundamentally cannot trust a random person off the street to accurately be judge, jury, and executioner.
No matter what their power is, or what they claim their power is, or who the victims are, or whether the existing justice system has failed to appropriately mete out justice, to accept that even one person has a right to choose to kill people under their own authority is to say that anybody can earn that right, and even if you accept the base premise that Atropos is justified in killing these people, nobody can possibly be as precise or as accurate as Atropos has been so far.
As it stands, people are going to try and copy Atropos; not in Brockton Bay, surely, not while she lives and can stop it, but in other cities that she doesn't care about, people are gonna say that yeah, Atropos made it work, surely so can I. And they will inevitably do something wrong.
In the best-case scenario, their inevitable mistake won't be something irreversible, but nobody's that lucky all the time. They'll get a bunch of other people killed as collateral, or they'll kill someone who didn't actually need to be killed, and it will demonstrate that bypassing an existing justice system to kill without oversight is a fundamentally wrong moral position because nobody can be sure that they can kill only people who deserve it, all the time, every time.
Even Atropos herself can't be trusted to do that, because Path to Ending may be infallible but Taylor isn't, and her power presumably won't stop her if she asks it for a Path to end someone who doesn't actually warrant that strong of a response. And if she decides that something warrants death that really doesn't... how, exactly, can you stop her from enforcing that?
Besides, as we understand it, most fair self-defense laws operate under the principle that even in defense of self or others, there is such a thing as disproportionate action. Usually there's a sort of sliding scale, where the less certain you are that the circumstances and resources you have access to would allow you to defend yourself/others without killing, the more lenience you have if you do kill in those circumstances.
But the key there is that it comes down to capability: if you're found to have had, and known about having, a reasonable ability to defend yourself/others non-lethally without putting yourself/others at undue risk, you're still on the hook if you kill them anyway. You can't or at least shouldn't get away with shooting someone in the heart if they clearly intend to hurt you but are also clearly unarmed, too far away to hit you immediately, and you're close enough to your car that you can easily get in and drive away.
And when it comes to capability to end situations non-lethally, Atropos is or at least ought to be very competent at it, given our understanding of how her power works. She clearly has the ability to give her power certain parameters to fill: if she can say "give me the most dramatic and ironic Path to Ending possible", she can also say "give me a Path to Ending that doesn't kill anyone". And we know for a fact that at least in hand-to-hand, she has the option to pull her punches even if her power gives her a lethal path, so it seems pretty reasonable to assume that her power would probably let her get away with ending the gang leaders' influence without ending their lives.
And if it turns out that her power won't actually allow that for some reason, at least she'll have made the effort to plan a non-lethal takedown before jumping right to killing people. Instead, she jumped right from "warning people to back off" to "killing them if they don't heed the warning" without even looking into any intermediate steps along the way. Path to Ending has the same problem as Path to Victory, in other words: if the user doesn't think to ask for a non-lethal option, they're not gonna get one.
Not to mention, Atropos's strategy can only work for so long: she can only keep this up until she dies of old age, then everything will collapse again like a house of cards. And actually, Atropos dying and everyone else having to pick up the pieces is the preferable scenario. If she instead uses Path to Ending to find a way to end her own mortality somehow? I can think of no better situation to create an unstoppable, unkillable, immortal dictator. Big Sister is watching, and she can kill you for things you haven't even done yet, and you can't even try to plan a way to get rid of her because she will know and end you.
Basically, it's less about the details of these specific deaths and more about the fact that considering Atropos in the right for executing these people is an unacceptable moral precedent. You cannot fix an unacceptable situation (which I will concede, Brockton Bay the way canon showed it is also an unacceptable precedent) by doing something else unacceptable: that just leads to a status quo that is differently bad rather than actually making a better society.
As much as I dislike the PRT and Protectorate for entirely unrelated reasons, they're right to want to stop Atropos, even if they're also right to conclude that they can't actually win this fight without better information and that it's not worth breaking themselves to try.
No matter what their power is, or what they claim their power is, or who the victims are, or whether the existing justice system has failed to appropriately mete out justice, to accept that even one person has a right to choose to kill people under their own authority is to say that anybody can earn that right, and even if you accept the base premise that Atropos is justified in killing these people, nobody can possibly be as precise or as accurate as Atropos has been so far.
As it stands, people are going to try and copy Atropos; not in Brockton Bay, surely, not while she lives and can stop it, but in other cities that she doesn't care about, people are gonna say that yeah, Atropos made it work, surely so can I. And they will inevitably do something wrong.
In the best-case scenario, their inevitable mistake won't be something irreversible, but nobody's that lucky all the time. They'll get a bunch of other people killed as collateral, or they'll kill someone who didn't actually need to be killed, and it will demonstrate that bypassing an existing justice system to kill without oversight is a fundamentally wrong moral position because nobody can be sure that they can kill only people who deserve it, all the time, every time.
Even Atropos herself can't be trusted to do that, because Path to Ending may be infallible but Taylor isn't, and her power presumably won't stop her if she asks it for a Path to end someone who doesn't actually warrant that strong of a response. And if she decides that something warrants death that really doesn't... how, exactly, can you stop her from enforcing that?
Besides, as we understand it, most fair self-defense laws operate under the principle that even in defense of self or others, there is such a thing as disproportionate action. Usually there's a sort of sliding scale, where the less certain you are that the circumstances and resources you have access to would allow you to defend yourself/others without killing, the more lenience you have if you do kill in those circumstances.
But the key there is that it comes down to capability: if you're found to have had, and known about having, a reasonable ability to defend yourself/others non-lethally without putting yourself/others at undue risk, you're still on the hook if you kill them anyway. You can't or at least shouldn't get away with shooting someone in the heart if they clearly intend to hurt you but are also clearly unarmed, too far away to hit you immediately, and you're close enough to your car that you can easily get in and drive away.
And when it comes to capability to end situations non-lethally, Atropos is or at least ought to be very competent at it, given our understanding of how her power works. She clearly has the ability to give her power certain parameters to fill: if she can say "give me the most dramatic and ironic Path to Ending possible", she can also say "give me a Path to Ending that doesn't kill anyone". And we know for a fact that at least in hand-to-hand, she has the option to pull her punches even if her power gives her a lethal path, so it seems pretty reasonable to assume that her power would probably let her get away with ending the gang leaders' influence without ending their lives.
And if it turns out that her power won't actually allow that for some reason, at least she'll have made the effort to plan a non-lethal takedown before jumping right to killing people. Instead, she jumped right from "warning people to back off" to "killing them if they don't heed the warning" without even looking into any intermediate steps along the way. Path to Ending has the same problem as Path to Victory, in other words: if the user doesn't think to ask for a non-lethal option, they're not gonna get one.
Not to mention, Atropos's strategy can only work for so long: she can only keep this up until she dies of old age, then everything will collapse again like a house of cards. And actually, Atropos dying and everyone else having to pick up the pieces is the preferable scenario. If she instead uses Path to Ending to find a way to end her own mortality somehow? I can think of no better situation to create an unstoppable, unkillable, immortal dictator. Big Sister is watching, and she can kill you for things you haven't even done yet, and you can't even try to plan a way to get rid of her because she will know and end you.
Basically, it's less about the details of these specific deaths and more about the fact that considering Atropos in the right for executing these people is an unacceptable moral precedent. You cannot fix an unacceptable situation (which I will concede, Brockton Bay the way canon showed it is also an unacceptable precedent) by doing something else unacceptable: that just leads to a status quo that is differently bad rather than actually making a better society.
As much as I dislike the PRT and Protectorate for entirely unrelated reasons, they're right to want to stop Atropos, even if they're also right to conclude that they can't actually win this fight without better information and that it's not worth breaking themselves to try.
In short, it's never moral to bypass the human right for a fair trial to kill someone, no matter how badly they deserve it. Human rights have to also apply to horrible people, or else those rights lose their ability to protect anyone at all because you can always construct an argument for why this person you just killed is actually a horrible person and therefore deserves to die. And even Atropos can never be sure that everyone she kills needs to die, but also nobody can stop her if she decides to go off the deep end.
Hence, my firm opinion that Atropos is a Villain Protagonist, since she didn't even try to find a non-lethal option before jumping right into the plans that let her kill people. She's basically the Punisher with less collateral damage and a better sense of style at this point, and it's not like the Punisher was ever intended to be the good guy in his stories. Just the less-worse guy.
EDIT: Which, again, to be clear, doesn't mean I'm not enjoying the story. Just that I'm very, very glad there isn't an Atropos in real life.
Prester Fred
The Mad Procrastinator
- Location
- Timonium, MD
Given their respective economic status, I'd have to say not on the likely.
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It can happen, but Aisha will be the outlier for it. Then again if Brian makes it a condition on joining Protectorate as well.
I agree with that completely but that wasn't the point I made. If you had also quoted the next line of my post, I wouldn't have to repeat it here.
If a longer, more complicated path means that the gangs kill a dozen people until Taylor can stop them, then trading the lives of 4 villains for them is not a bad thing.
That doesn't make her morally right or a hero, but it is a mitigating factor.
Oh, she's obviously a villain and a murderer. She deserves respect for avoiding nearly all collateral damage and sparing quite a few people she could have killed easily though. Sounds weird but in her current mental state she doesn't really care about lives. So holding back so some may live takes actual effort for her.
We don't know if she looked for a non-lethal path. Perhaps she did and realized it was too much effort, that killing the gang leaders was more efficient.
Crazael
Rehydrated Demon King
- Location
- Lost to the vagaries of time.
Its important to remember that she always gives people an out. So far, most everyone has been too arrogant to take that out, but they are still given it.
Hestia&theCourt
Turns out we're plural too.
- Location
- In transition
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I skipped that sentence because my argument is that yes, killing the gang leaders is a bad thing, for reasons entirely unrelated to how many people the gangs are probably killing under their leadership in the time spent enacting a less lethal plan. "The gangs were probably killing people so I killed the gang leaders while they were doing something unrelated" is not a good argument in a court of law. The victims definitely appreciate being saved, obviously, and saving their lives isn't the bad part of this, but that doesn't make the bad parts of it not-bad, it just means the outcome of a bad choice had some benefits.
That being said, since it seems like we both broadly agree that what Taylor is doing is bad but with some good done along the way, I'm thinking that we disagree quite a bit less than I thought we did. I had interpreted your previous comments as meaning "Atropos is totally justified and did nothing wrong", which I wholeheartedly disagree with, rather than what appears to be your actual position of "Atropos shouldn't be doing this, but that doesn't mean there aren't benefits to what she's doing", which I disagree with quite a bit less.
Sure, I'll concede that point. A policy of "you get one strike" still isn't particularly good, but I do agree that it's better than just a contextless "You are already dead".
Crazael
Rehydrated Demon King
- Location
- Lost to the vagaries of time.
Im not sure I'd call it one strike. More that she's also including all the strikes that happened before her trigger.
- Location
- Australia
Of course, choosing not to make a choice is how the choice gets made for you, and it might be worse than the option you refused to take.
Oh, she's absolutely a remorseless murderer, and in most other situations, she'd be going way too far. But in the Wormverse, especially in Brockton Bay? It's been proven again and again that playing nice doesn't work. So she's just cutting to the chase, and making examples.
She's not the good guy. She's just the least bad guy.
That's true.
Okibruez
(Verified Mid-Boss)
- Location
- Dreams
Gotta hand it to her, she's got a way of getting to the heart of the matter in a real show stopping way.
This is a bit of an artificial situation, where a trial is unlikely to be allowed to actually work. As pointed out in-story, parahuman villains nearly always escape from custody; an issue that for Cauldron-shaped reasons the authorities won't fix.
While Atropos isn't a good person, she's living is a situation that has been deliberately manipulated so that trying to work with the system will fail. The system in the Bay is supposed to fail. She's the "least bad" option because the better options have been deliberately broken, and hasn't realized it yet.
Hestia&theCourt
Turns out we're plural too.
- Location
- In transition
- Pronouns
- She/Her
She's not the good guy. She's just the least bad guy.
Yup, that matches up with my stance pretty well.
The systemic brokenness is something she could end with Path to Ending, though, and that would be way more useful long-term than just killing people. It's understandable that the more immediately impactful option is where Atropos arrived at, but she uniquely has the power to fix the actual root of the problem where literally nobody else can because Contessa would stop them, and is not doing so, and doesn't even seem to be asking the right questions to let her eventually arrive at the conclusion that just killing and scaring the right people might not be enough to fix her city in the long-term. She seems to have arrived at "let's kill people" and is settling down there with no indication that she realizes that the foundation is only stable as long as she's directly supporting it.
Besides, the preferred response to morality not working shouldn't be "so let's throw away the morality".
- Location
- Australia
She's not a fan of doing stuff over and over.
So she's getting rid of the people who would get in the way of fixing the system.
Because you know they would. (As she noted herself: there were a lot of people who were invested in BB remaining a shitty crime-filled city).
To put it another way: right now, fixing the system is the difficult option. She's setting things up so that people other than her can clean up the city, and get it working right, without assholes putting obstacles in their way, every hour of the day.
Hestia&theCourt
Turns out we're plural too.
- Location
- In transition
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Ah, so she does have a sense of the long-term going on. Well, that's better than how I'd been reading her character previously, at least.
I mean, she is a teenager. One who grew up in a collapsing society surrounded by a system that consistently fails to work, at that. It makes sense that she'd go for the most direct, immediate option, and be a show-off about it at that.
Remember - this isn't some adult who has spent years of contemplation on how best to fix things, this is a teenager who's been handed a hammer. And now she's gonna go pound some nails.
- Location
- Australia
And not only is she going to pound some nails, she's also doing it in such a fashion that all the other nails get a ringside view.