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Is The Assassin Romanticized In Modern Fiction?

Fernandel said:
So here we have a scene where...
  1. A group of people are ordered to kill another by an authority figure,
  2. Where the first perpetrator tries to shift the blame to the victim for this situation occurring, seeking to demean him, but nonetheless refusing to pull the trigger,
  3. The second perpetrator egging him on to pull the trigger, at which point the first one shoots,
  4. The second perpetrator taking the gun from the first and shooting several more times, making it a group act. (Conspicuously, he's not the on
This is a pretty fascinating and very much accurate exploration of how gang killings occur, as described by Grossman and many others.

The difference between what we see here and what we see of the assassin archetype in fiction is quite: the assassin generally works alone, his actions spurred on by his own moral decisions, and he generally kills with little hesitation and recrimination. People like this definitely do exist, mind, but they're not really reflective of how most criminals start out killing.

Hell, there's been rumours of US gangs trying to convince members to join the US military in order to gain weapons and combat experience, though how much of that is rumour and whether they actually succeed is another matter.
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Yep, there's also further irony. Besides being friends, the first perp is the one who always talks the toughest about violence (and we do see him engage in it when he beats up someone who tried to steal his drugs, rather brutally). And yet when it came time to pull the trigger, he hesitated and kept on trying to psych himself up for it.

Also, your last point is cut off for some reason.
 
Fernandel said:
This is a pretty fascinating and very much accurate exploration of how gang killings occur, as described by Grossman and many others.
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A real world example for this is Richard Leonard Kuklinsk aka the Ice man. His story (Confessions of a Mafia Killer) is terrifying, but shows most of these points in action.
 
Also, the magnificent bastard assassin archetype who operates by using indirect means and subterfuge like poisoning and shit, well... things don't always go that smoothly in real life. The various attempts of Castro's life by the CIA bordered on Looney Tunes shit. It took over 600 tries before they finally got him with old age.

There's also the Morag Tong in Morrowind, who are a pulpy assassination guild of honourable ninjas who legitimately murder people as a function in Dunmer society. Buuuut because of the quirks of Morrowind's engine unless you got your hands on some of the better spells and shit, the simplest method for the more public assassinations is to run up to the guy, stab the shit out of him, run away from any of his buddies trying to give you a public beatdown, and run to the nearest cop waving your writ of execution in his face. Or you can intentionally piss him off the target with insults and start a fight, because that's so much more dignified right? Also, a good chunk of the targets are just random-ass people just like in Skyrim and Oblivion, except here they mostly just ran afoul of the political system.

Also, obviously not as a realistic work as the Wire. But Goodfellas has a pretty believable scenario where Joe Pesci is led to an empty room under the pretence of making him a capo, and just shooting him in the head from behind.

 
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Fernandel said:
So here we have a scene where...
  1. A group of people are ordered to kill another by an authority figure,
  2. Where the first perpetrator tries to shift the blame to the victim for this situation occurring, seeking to demean him, but nonetheless refusing to pull the trigger,
  3. The second perpetrator egging him on to pull the trigger, at which point the first one shoots,
  4. The second perpetrator taking the gun from the first and shooting several more times, making it a group act. (Conspicuously, he's not the one to try to perform the killing first, having apparently left the task to the first).
This is a pretty fascinating and very much accurate exploration of how gang killings occur, as described by Grossman and many others.

The difference between what we see here and what we see of the assassin archetype in fiction is quite clear: the assassin generally works alone, his actions spurred on by his own moral decisions, and he generally kills with little hesitation and recrimination. People like this definitely do exist, mind, but they're not really reflective of how most criminals start out killing.

Hell, there's been rumours of US gangs trying to convince members to join the US military in order to gain weapons and combat experience, though how much of that is rumour and whether they actually succeed is another matter.
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I feel that I should point out while this is all true, it kind of diverts from the premise of an assassin that we're discussing. Criminals killing for the first time and killing for their dozenth (word?) is going to be quite different. Of course an assassin who has murdered tons of people before aren't going to be nearly as hesitant or remorseful as someone whose never killed in their life. Most depictions of assassins are those of seasoned vetetans.
 
Numby said:
I feel that I should point out while this is all true, it kind of diverts from the premise of an assassin that we're discussing. Criminals killing for the first time and killing for their dozenth (word?) is going to be quite different. Of course an assassin who has murdered tons of people before aren't going to be nearly as hesitant or remorseful as someone whose never killed in their life. Most depictions of assassins are those of seasoned vetetans.
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I will point out..."Seasoned veterans"? What do you think the murder rate in America even is?

And even besides that, the way the assassination was otherwise depicted is also pretty honest. Get a person alone, shoot them, walk away.

What great and awesome skills you bring to the table! I mean, that's the other point. There's nothing noble or even grand about Wallace's death. Nobody runs up the side of a building to plant a special bomb that will knock down the chandelier.
 
The Laurent said:
I will point out..."Seasoned veterans"? What do you think the murder rate in America even is?

And even besides that, the way the assassination was otherwise depicted is also pretty honest. Get a person alone, shoot them, walk away.

What great and awesome skills you bring to the table!
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I'm talking about fictionalized assassins who murders not only the target but the dozens of people protecting them, not actual RL hitmen.
 
The Laurent said:
So the answer is: "Yes, they're unrealistically romanticized by creating a fake paradigm of how it even works"?
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I'm... no longer following. There was a mini discussion about how there is unrealistic depiction of assassins killing since criminals killing for the first time are very hesitant and need a lot of motivation to do so, and I said that the assassins we see in fiction usually have killed many times before so it doesn't really apply.

I'm not really sure what you're saying now.
 
Fernandel said:
The whole idea of the "calm lone killer" is in many ways incredibly unrealistic, yes. That was my point.

...I'm honestly not sure what you are getting at.
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What I was getting at is that this mainly applies to people who haven't killed before. Most depictions of professional assassins aren't that of people who've haven't killed before because they're, you know, professional assassins, with a high bodycount as part of their backstory. If they continued to feel just as bad and be just as hesitant, then they wouldn't be a professional assassin in the first place. If they don't get used to it, then they'd eventually crash.
 
Numby said:
What I was getting at is that this mainly applies to people who haven't killed before. Most depictions of professional assassins aren't that of people who've haven't killed before because they're, you know, professional assassins, with a high bodycount as part of their backstory. If they continued to feel just as bad and be just as hesitant, then they wouldn't be a professional assassin in the first place. If they don't get used to it, then they'd eventually crash.
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But that doesn't get into the secondary point of how assassinations actually happen? Most media portrays assassins as, like, carefully poisoning the chandelier so that when it lands on someone they die of tetantus, or whatever. Not just ganging up on someone and shooting them in the head, hesitation or not.

Edit: Let me admit that I do have a slightly soft spot for elaborate assassination methods, but it's silly and sort of part of the romanticization that's going on.
 
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Numby said:
What I was getting at is that this mainly applies to people who haven't killed before.
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It really doesn't, though. That's the point.

Grossman emphasises in On Killing how hugely important, and continuously so, the effects of things like orders and directions from established authority figures, working in a group, legitimacy through law or societal honour, social expectations and the fear of failure are in driving people to be able to kill, both in groups like gangs and military platoons, and it doesn't stop being relevant because people have killed before. Previous experience with killing makes things easier, yes, and Grossman makes a specific note of that; but the above factors never stop being relevant when people decide whether or not to kill. Even veteran units need leadership that ensure that the ranks don't break and that the enemy is engaged, and criminal gangs quickly fall apart once the driving leadership that encourages killing is removed (unless, of course, equally violent others take their place, which happens often enough). Previous experience in killing is definitely a relevant factor, but Grossman clearly notes that it's rarely the most relevant one. If that was even remotely true, rehabilitation of murderers and resocialisation of soldiers and those trained to kill, or those who have deliberately killed in other situations would be impossible.

The media archetype of the assassin or hired killer that acts of his own volition, without support, and with a complete lack of hesitation and passion does exist in real life, of course, but they are thankfully far more rare than fiction would have us believe. That's the point.
 
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The Laurent said:
But that doesn't get into the secondary point of how assassinations actually happen? Most media portrays assassins as, like, carefully poisoning the chandelier so that when it lands on someone they die of tetantus, or whatever. Not just ganging up on someone and shooting them in the head, hesitation or not.

Edit: Let me admit that I do have a slightly soft spot for elaborate assassination methods, but it's silly and sort of part of the romanticization that's going on.
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I believe I understand tbe confusion. Assassins are unrealistic and romanticized. My original comment wasn't arguing that they aren't, I was pointing out how that particular argument didn't make sense to me.

For me, it's not the fact that they're calm and sometimes enthusiastic about violence, it's the fact that this is seen as a good thing instead of someone devoid of empathy. Someone who is so blasè about it, even in a cause that is "good", is not a sign that they're a harass, but who is now as mentally detached as psychopath.
 
Edit: Nevermind, this was a really clumsily worded and formatted mess filled with bad arguments.
 
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Fernandel said:
Now, I forgot another kind of assassin archetype -- the "military/spy" assassin, who has been trained by a government in order to kill the state's enemies, whose past has been erased, and who generally has a military background and is trained well enough to actually have those superb skill that make the assassin who he is. They overlap a lot with other types, of course, but it's still a reasonably common archetyp -- Jason Bourne, John Wick, and so many others.
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And this one reminds me of that one shootout months ago -- a former military guy became a rumored mob boss' bodyguard, killed the mob boss, tried to kill the driver as well but failed, failed to scram from the crime scene because he did it in the middle of a highway so he started to empty all his gun clips on everyone else. Four civvies died iirc, and he did it just to get the 'I'm not sane' pardon.

If there is the John Wick/Jason Bourne type out there, I pray to God almighty he never has to go desperado because that just meant he's gonna stack his bodycount with well-meaning civilians.
 
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Let me toss in another- Ninja.

Ninja are trained assassins with a Japanese bent and often weird powers. Now some of them nowadays are pretty heroic and non-assassin-y but even in there the assassin ties are often not forgotten. Shredder certainly doesn't have a problem assassinating people, and in the original comic the turtles were trained to assassinate him- and succeeded! Kakashi has done assassin work, as well as Itachi, Sasuke takes a stab at it, etc..



Oh, hm, and not ninja but other supernatural assassins, but Dragonball has Tao Pai Pai, and Hit.
 
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