Fair enough.
I never disputed this. Why are you even bringing it up?
Because it shows how obsessed they were with capturing him. They weren't
thinking, they were
acting.
Much as I'm guessing they acted when they got the information about who he was.
He could have killed Lightstar. Easily. He didn't. He
chose not to. A man known to be a murderer, chose not to kill. That's a pretty significant act.
Once again, telling them that there's an innocent little girl in there =/= telling them it's his daughter.
It still tells them that there's a little girl in there. One who bears an unmistakeable family resemblance to him (so that cat would be very shortly out of the bag).
So yes, telling them there's a little girl in there DOES EQUAL telling them his daughter is in there, just as soon as they see her.
And even if it doesn't, how exactly are the Brigade going to react? Walk away? Not a fucking hope in hell. No, what they'd want to do is remove her from the situation. That is,
they would want to remove her (ie, 'rescue' her from Marquis). Which he would
not allow.
End result: bad things happen.
Tell me that's
not how it would go down. Give me a more plausible scenario.
And does so in such a deliberately obtuse way that it almost comes across to me as though he doesn't want them to believe him.
When he's asking them to avoid the closet, to move away, he's trying to do so
without telling them that she's there, for the above stated reasons.
They see this as a weakness, and don't wonder if what he's protecting is actually worth protecting. They just see it as something that
he thinks is worth protecting. So they use
another selfless impulse of his against him. And as a result, Brandish nearly kills a little girl.
And if they'd misread him, or the strength of his principles, Brandish would be dead.
Or to put it another way: using your opponent's unwillingness to go all out against him is usually the
villain's ploy.
We don't expect the hero to break his principles in that situation, but that's the hero. When heroes use it against the villain, and it works, that says to me that the heroes are acting just a little villainous, and the villain is acting a little heroic.
I mean, seriously, he could have just gone "fuck it" and killed her. Physically, it wouldn't have been hard.
But he didn't.
That is not the act of an irredeemably evil man.
When he could have defused the risk to Amelia by simply telling them there was an innocent bystander nearby.
I've already stated why that wouldn't work.
True. Of course, it never occurred to them that there would be anyone on the premises at all. So either the Brigade are blindingly stupid... or they did some surveillance and found no indication that there was anyone else present, having missed the little girl who may never have left the house.
I find it amazingly unlikely that a little girl who lives on a large estate never
once went outside to run around and play on the lawn.
Nope, I personally angle toward the view that the Brigade jumped straight in without ever once checking. It fits their MO to this point.
The only difference between an excuse and a reason is that it's an excuse if the person acting already wants to but was holding back until it the excuse/reason comes up.
The difference between an excuse and a reason is that an excuse is subjective while a reason is objective. Excuses are tainted by what you, personally, want. Reasons exist outside of that. Him attacking the team after surrendering would have been a
reason. Him making an involuntary motion that she decided to interpret as a potentially hostile act, and then stabbing him before she found out for sure would have been an excuse.
Once again, telling them that there's an innocent little girl in there =/= telling them it's his daughter.
Once again, nope. That argument has been dealt with.
Because she lost control. She is, in fact, still human.
Not an aspect I would want coming to the fore in someone who aspires to be a poster child for superhero accountability.
She came close to murdering both Amelia and Marquis, the latter after he had agreed to surrender.
Had the positions been reversed, she would have been in far less danger from him.
So ... yeah ... the hero would have been safer from the villain than the villain was from the hero.
Just saying.
And? So they went after him in his civilian life. How many of his victims only had civilian lives? They attacked him in his own home. So, you think a criminal should be able to go home and get away with all his crimes scot-free? They attacked something he asked them not to attack. How many people do you think he killed that people asked him not to kill?
How do you think Fleur felt about it when
exactly the same fucking thing happened to her? Only ... wait, yeah, it was a bad guy attacking a hero. So the hero died.
Really great example they set.
The unwritten rules are a thing. They exist for a reason. The fact that the Brigade couldn't beat him except by screwing with one of the underpinnings of the superhero culture suggests to me that
maybe they should have spoken to the PRT first.
Welcome.
And how much medical treatment did he provide for the people he murdered?
Given that he very nearly ended up as a murder victim himself, that's probably not the question that should be asked.
As for people who had surrendered to him (and whose surrender he had accepted) I personally think that he would have treated them with a
touch more courtesy. (If only to piss them off).
No matter what you say about how the Brigade are these horrible, bad, evil people, I think we can safely say that Marquis was worse.
I'm saying that Brandish should never have put on a costume or been let anywhere
near children, and that as a group they were criminally incompetent at actually being superheroes, at least at that point.
Note the result of their influence in later years on Glory "
How many of his bones did you break?" Girl. Or the pressure (deliberate or otherwise) that they put on Amy to be a hero to the point that she felt actually guilty when she wasn't healing people.
Let's count their sins.
1) They didn't check for innocents. Little children leave their toys
everywhere. So it's safe to say that they simply
didn't bother to check.
2) They didn't pass on what information they had to the police or PRT. This is because either:
2a) They they knew (or thought they knew) that they would be told to back off, this is unwritten-rules territory,
and Marquis had to go down.
2b) They knew (or thought they knew) that the PRT would send the Protectorate and/or mundane troops in, and effect the capture themselves, and they couldn't have that because they had to capture him themselves, dammit!
2c) They simply didn't even think of it. Because
MARQUIS!
3) Home invasion. Now, I don't give a shit if vigilantes are legal in Worm. There are certain legal hoops that even the police have to jump through. Search warrants, for instance. Civilians, even powered vigilantes, are still bound by the law. Villain has his base in an abandoned warehouse? Sure, go right in. An alleged villain is
in his own home? Sorry, gonna need something to go with that.
TL
R - they
broke the fucking law, right there. (Of course, they did capture Marquis, so the PRT just brushed that under the carpet).
Now, just as an example, suppose they'd gotten bad info. They bust into the
wrong guy's house. He denies everything. They don't believe him. He looks enough like Marquis for them to attack him. End result? He's injured or dead, and they're in
a shit ton of trouble.
4) Using his
good points against him. You keep dismissing that, but that's still a dick move. Or a remarkably stupid one, if he gets desperate enough to decide that his principles aren't worth dying or getting captured. They put Brandish's life on the line, betting that he was willing to put himself at a disadvantage to avoid doing serious harm to her.
5) Letting Brandish anywhere near a costume, instead of insisting on therapy for her.
I'm willing to bet that, if someone had miscalculated and she'd gotten hurt, they would have pointed all blame at him. Because he didn't keep being stupid enough to try not to hurt her.
Your insistence on tryiing to paint a crime lord and multiple murderer -- apparently just because he puts on a gentlemanly air and won't hurt women or children, but does deliberately murder people -- as better than a group of people who risk their lives on a regular basis to stop criminals but don't go around knowingly attacking innocent people is, honestly, more than a little disturbing.
As a villain, he was better than most. As heroes, they were actually kind of sucky. Especially as they did some morally questionable things.
My point was that we don't know.
Evidence says that they weren't.
Really? Got a cite for this? Do we know for a fact that Amelia didn't just stay inside most of the time? Or does his home have big windows with the drapes open?
See above regarding little girls running around and playing on the lawn. Kids play in the back yard. It's a
thing. Also, toys would likely have been left around (ask any single parent of a six year old). I find it bordering on the ludicrous that they would not have picked up
any idea that there was a child living in the house if they'd done
any checking at all.
Actually, by itself I think this is a very interesting question- I mean, I guess that she could have just happened to be hiding in the closet for a game of hide and seek or something, but the more likely answer seems to be that Marquis heard the door being broken down, and had just enough time to shove her in there and tell her to stay hidden, with enough time left for him to get back to his armchair and wineglass in time to exchange quips.
He was standing by the armchair. This suggests to me that they had been having a father-daughter night in, and he'd been telling stories or even reading a book to her (there were bookshelves all around), he heard a noise and bundled her into the closet. They came smashing in, and he confronted them.
The thing is, if he had enough time to do that, he probably had enough time to tell Amelia to hide and then run. Draw the fight outside, where Amelia couldn't get injured. But he didn't do that, because that would be tantamount to admitting the Brigade could beat him, and his pride couldn't allow that. So he stayed, exchanged quips, and then fought with the Brigade while knowing Amelia was hidden nearby and he couldn't go all out for fear of harming her.
I'm of the opinion that he didn't have time to leave the room (probably only one door). Yes, he could have done the burrowing trick, but then they would have searched for him and probably discovered Amelia in the process.
His plan was probably to hide Amelia and deal with the heroes. He didn't count on Lady Photon being overly free with her laser salvos.
So yeah, that strikes me as a case of pride goeth before the fall mixed in with some rather questionable parenting.
As far as intention was concerned, he was a pretty good dad. He did dad things with her, and even did the pretend tea party. Up until the Brigade came into it, he was doing well. After that, it was a considerably fluid situation, with the heroes not really acting like heroes, which screwed him up.
And one more thing. Suppose revealing her had caused them to think twice. Suppose that they'd seen the girl and backed off. What then?
I'll tell you what then. They would have seen the resemblance, even if he hadn't told them that she was his daughter. They leave the site (either instead of, or after, having their asses handed to them). They go to the PRT and tell them what happened. Word starts getting around that Marquis has a daughter. The PRT is not a hermetically sealed environment, after all. Sooner or later (probably sooner) Marquis' enemies start hearing the same thing. And that's if they
haven't heard that Marquis actually lives on that big old estate up under the mountains. Which they probably would.
So what he fears would come to pass
anyway.
His only chance of keeping Amelia safe was
if nobody knew of her.
Unfortunately, the heroes seemed determined to endanger her, one way or the other.
