Villain by circumstances, sure, but this is a bit inaccurate. Lisa was already acting as a villain before Coil recruited her, though covertly and in plainclothes (which one has to think is how most non-combat Thinkers would do it). Brian apparently had been running as a solo villain for years, presumably because he didn't think (probably correctly) that him being a Ward would do anything useful for Aisha.
So you're rebuttal to my assertion that forcibly recruiting people is a bad plan is to bring up, an abject failure of the forcibly recruiting system?
Hess is everything wrong. She's uncooperative, she's toxic to morale and discipline, she toes the line exactly as much as she can be forced to and not a millimeter further, and goes off the reservation the second somebody isn't looking, repeatedly. Nothing about her changed, except her opinion of the organization she was drafted into went down.
If she was sent to juvie, and mandatory counseling they might have had a chance at actually reforming her. Instead they let her psychosis stew, and simplly had their pet psychopath gain the ability to hide behind the thin blue line while she kept doing the exact same violent vigilantism as they arrested her for in the first place.
Crazael
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No. Hess is an example of an independent who causes more trouble outside of the PRTs control than her attitude and bahavior causes them while she's under their control. Yeah, she's toxic to morale, but as far as the PRT are concerned, that's better than her staying out in the street as well as better than sticking her in juvie for a couple years.
As for mandatory counseling, in theory, that is part of being in the Wards, in addition to letting them keep a closer eye on her and putting her in a group of more well adjusted teens rather than dumping her in with a bunch of violent criminals. Remember, that they failed to provide the support she needed because Brockton Bay is a shithole isnt actually relevant to the effectiveness of recruiting from the courtroom like that.
How do you figure?
She didn't change her behavior at all. She's still doing the same things.
So for no changes in her, they picked up a morale and discipline problem, and a PR disaster waiting to happen when she eventually goes too far while they were supposed to be preventing her from going too far.
I'm not seeing any positive to this situation yet.
Crazael
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Nonlethal ammunition.
She is (as far as they know) following strict guidelines and rules on where and when to patrol.
She is experiencing a positive social environment with her peers. (That she refuses to engage with it is irrelevant.)
She is not as liable to accidentally start a gangwar or get herself killed.
She is a shining example of how beneficial it is to join up instead of being a vigilante because she is also highly effective at stopping crimes.
The downsides are she is difficult to get along with for her coworkers and so theres a small hit to morale when she is present, and she complains a lot about how they don't do enough.
None of these things are true.
But all of them appear to be true to people who aren't sufficiently scrutinizing the situation, and are supposed to be true according to the set policies.
Which doesn't help in the reality on the ground but does bear on evaluating the main decision.
So we started with "This is stupid and a bad plan".
And now you're saying, the reason they're doing is that they are stupid.
Uhh. Yes.
The organizational failures undermine the ability to blame the consequences on the plan. The plan was for all those things to be true. I'm not sure if canon actually explains how the PRT managed to instead make none of them true. But the result is such a botch job that it says as much about the quality of the plan as a structure assembled by slow 8 year olds falling over says about the quality of the concept of artificial shelter.
The plan might still be bad, but the Shadow Stalker fiasco doesn't do much to prove the point.
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Considering it failed on every possible level? I'd say it does.
That's like saying the plan is to retire rich and then wondering why robbing banks isn't working out for you while you sit in a cell. The entire point I made at the start of this was this is a bad plan that won't work, and is in fact virtually guaranteed to not just fail, but hilariously backfire too.
No, it's like saying the plan is to rob a bank and wondering why walking up in a balaclava and horizontal black-and-white stripes while carrying a giant sack with a dollar sign on it and then threatening the cashier with a banana didn't go well. The plan might be bad to begin with, but the execution issues eclipse that completely.
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This whole debate on drafting wards sounds like practically the whole "Implacable" thread on Spacebattles.
If you want to see Taylor drafted into the Wards, read that, or "Just a Phase" by FirstSelector, or this snippet by @menja9201.
Conscription was used in the U.S. military during virtually all conflicts up to and including Vietnam. The draft hasn't been used since 1972, which means that nobody under 50 remembers the draft. They also had the first and only peacetime draft during the Cold War.
Mandatory retirement age was 55 until 2018 when they raised it to 62.
It's doubtful there are any people left in the military who remember the draft in 2011. None who would have been drafted are still there.
Institutional memory tends to be shaped by how long the people tend to be there. Old lessons tend to be forgotten when the people who learned them are no longer there and their successors have in turn been replaced, such that nobody there remembers those lessons, and their apprentices have been replaced by their apprentices.
If you want to see Taylor drafted into the Wards, read that, or "Just a Phase" by FirstSelector, or this snippet by @menja9201.
Conscription was used in the U.S. military during virtually all conflicts up to and including Vietnam. The draft hasn't been used since 1972, which means that nobody under 50 remembers the draft. They also had the first and only peacetime draft during the Cold War.
Mandatory retirement age was 55 until 2018 when they raised it to 62.
It's doubtful there are any people left in the military who remember the draft in 2011. None who would have been drafted are still there.
Institutional memory tends to be shaped by how long the people tend to be there. Old lessons tend to be forgotten when the people who learned them are no longer there and their successors have in turn been replaced, such that nobody there remembers those lessons, and their apprentices have been replaced by their apprentices.
Crazael
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But they are all true. She uses tranquilizer darts, she goes on regular supervised patrols, she spends time with the other Wards while on patrol, during on base downtime, training exercises and PR events, the aforementioned supervision means she is much less likely to accidentally do something that sparks a major event, and, lastly, she appears to everyone in management to be a shining example of a violent vigilante who has been brought in and converted into an official government sponsored hero.
Except that she also does unauthorized solo patrols off the clock and there's the time she put a very sharp crossbow bolt into Grue.
Crazael
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But that isnt relevant to my point. Because my point is what the PRTs perslecive is. And they dont know about that. To the PRT, all of those are perfectly true. And all of those are reasons why they do things like recruit from the courtroom. Because from their perspective, it works. Maybe not always perfectly, after all, Sophia clearly struggles to get along with her fellow Wards, but thats a fairly minor interpersonal problem, and one that is mostly just a case of conflicting personalities, and you'd get those sorts of peoblems anywhere.
Edit: Also, didn't the Grue thing happen before she became a ward?
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Mainly because the plot railroads it that way, instead of, for example somebody like Wyvern who is forcibly recruited turning the Rig into molten slag in a rage. Or even them actually monitoring Sophia enough to realize what she is actually doing. Heck, even the major gangs are carefully tailored to be as unappealing as possible to explain why more rebellious parahumans don't just join them.
"Fragging" was a thing even in real life, with people who don't have a "conflict drive" and the power to do major damage all by themselves. It's going to be much worse with parahumans. Realistically, I'd expect the result of forced recruitment to be a regular drumbeat of dead Protectorate and PRT.
Would you really want to be in the same room as a forcibly recruited, constantly enraged Purity knowing that she's probably thinking about how easy and satisfying it would be to just turn and hose the room with energy blasts? I wouldn't.
EDIT: Also thinking about it, being a parahuman drafted into the Protectorate and constantly sent out to fight "villains" in life-or-death struggles is much closer to being drafted and sent to the front lines in Vietnam than it is the "spend a few years basically doing nothing" versions of national service some people have been bringing up in examples. The very same conditions that did create plenty of fragging incidents.
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It's not a common room massacre you really should worry about. Parahumans may tend violent and reckless but they also tend to respond to threats fairly well. Sophia didn't shoot people on base where she'd be immediately caught and punished, and Purity almost certainly wouldn't either. But just because someone probably won't openly murder you doesn't mean they're someone to trust at your back in combat situations where they could easily get you killed either deliberately or negligently with a good chance of not being held accountable.
Harping on Vietnam as a reference for conscription in general is a mistake - US morale in the Vietnam got very very bad for a multitude of reasons. Some of them were strongly related to the draft, but there were a lot of others as well. Conscription was used on both sides of the US Civil War, most or all sides of both World Wars, and in the Korean war. None of those carry the same reputation as Vietnam.
On the other hand, conscription isn't really the right analogue for 'probationary' Wards/Protectorate membership either.
There was also far, far more social pressure to join the military in those earlier wars than during Vietnam.
Which makes it much more analogous to being forced into the Wards/Protectorate than those earlier wars. Nobody outside the PRT/Protectorate is likely to openly despise somebody for not joining. And the practice of having a secret identity means that out of costume few if any people will even know to condemn the parahuman even if they care; which massively reduces the effect of social pressure.
Crazael
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And it only goes badly because the plot railroads it that way because Wildbow wanted a broken system for his protagonist to fight against.
There is precedent in the form of "Join the army or go to jail". It was only abolished in the 1980's.
Lots of young men did accept and turn their lives around.
Also from the PRT's perspective, Shadow Stalker was a young woman who wanted to be a hero but was merely misguided in how she went about doing things.
They probably checked her school records and found that she was a track star with decent grades and no disciplinary record* (remember that the teachers and principal are not doing anything about the bullying so there probably isn't anything in Sophia's file. Taylor's file probably has a mention of numerous "false" complaints against popular "model students" like track star Sophia Hess and beauty queen Emma Barnes). I don't blame the PRT from missing what is going on at school, that was the school's responsibility to investigate Taylor's complaints and deal with the situation. The Locker hadn't happened yet at the time Sophia was inducted, so there was nothing in the PRT's jurisdiction that would allow them to do more than check the school records and maybe talk to some teachers.
Where the PRT dropped the ball was when Sophia's handler covered for Sophia and sided against Taylor in that meeting.
Also why wasn't there a police investigation into The Locker? Was it quashed by Sophia's handler?
How were the circumstances for a student to get sent to the hospital in an ambulance comatose and covered in blood like Taylor was not investigated by the police?
Granted Taylor wasn't in any condition to talk so how did they convince the paramedics that the police were not necessary and that it was just "a prank gone wrong?".
As for Sophia still using the deadly crossbow bolts, well the PRT needs to hear a complaint before they can act. Given that most of the victims were criminals, it is quite possible that none of them went to the hospital for treatment. If they were all Empire gang members, it is quite possible that Orthella treated them in order to avoid being asked uncomfortable questions at the hospital. Recall that Grue went to an unlicensed physician after being shot by Sophia to avoid a hospital.
If nobody is talking about Shadow Stalker shooting criminals with real crossbow bolts, the PRT probably won't know, although they might catch wind of her "unauthorized patrols" via "cape watchers" on places like PHO spotting her in costume. That doesn't mean she's using the deadly ammo, unless somebody reports seeing her shoot somebody or they get a picture where it's obvious that those aren't the bolts Armsmaster gave her.
It's just that until The Locker, I can excuse the PRT for not knowing. Instead I blame the school. I shouldn't, it seems like SOP for how to handle bullying in a public school. Actually, I'm surprised that Taylor wasn't punished for any of the incidents, but I guess they weren't violent enough or destroyed any school property besides textbooks (which Taylor had to pay for) so the school didn't take action the way they did for me "getting involved in multiple violent incidents with multiple people" when I never started a single fight or threw the first punch.
That's probably not true, though I don't think canon establishes anything to speak of.
Criminal parole terms can be (read, generally are) extremely invasive. While probationary Ward status seems to stand on different legal foundation (since it doesn't seem to be court-imposed at all) there's no reason it couldn't and little reason to think it wouldn't authorize the PRT to climb into every bit of the Ward's personal affairs.
Crazael
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I think that can largely be blamed on Wildbow's lack of research. Or his desire to make Taylor's life miserable at all costs.
I said, they checked her school records, and the records probably said she was a good student, which also probably contributed to why she was given the option of joining the Wards instead of being sent to juvenile detention for such serious charges. This was a chance to teach her how to be a hero legally, and they thought that she was trying and just made a mistake.
They had no reason to suspect there was anything else. Especially when they had a character witness from that school.
If her record had shown numerous times she'd been disciplined for bullying and harassing innocent students, she probably would have been sent to jail as they don't want that kind of person in law enforcement where they can further abuse the power to harass others and get away with it.
Which is why I blame the school, not the PRT.
It was only after The Locker when Sophia was named that I start to blame the PRT, especially when her handler was there covering for Sophia. Before that I don't blame the PRT, only the school because the PRT had no reason to suspect anything. They had a handler to report any disciplinary problems with Sophia, and since Sophia wasn't being disciplined, they had no idea what was going on.
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Well, just because they probably had the authority to look doesn't mean the paramilitary clown team ENE would actually do so effectively.
Sure, but you did say "there was nothing in the PRT's jurisdiction that would allow them to do more". And I contest that the contracts and regulations around probationary ward status almost certainly would allow them to go through Sophia's life with a fine-toothed comb just about however they please. They could still choose not to, for good reasons or ill.
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I should mention that they probably should have cracked down on Sophia's unauthorized and unscheduled patrols. She was supposed to be supervised because she had shown she didn't know the proper way to go about things and it had been less than a year.
If anybody had posted on P.H.O. that they spotted Shadow Stalker when she wasn't scheduled to do a patrol, or remarked that she seemed to be operating solo or with some unknown redheaded cape (if you believe fannon), Sophia should have been in a world of trouble over that.
Also her going off on her own during scheduled patrols should have been cracked down on. At least when she was in her probationary period. Somebody like Vista who had several years under her belt could be excused, but not a newbie like Sophia who is on probation because she doesn't know the legal way to do things.
Note that in the preceding paragraph I'm generalizing things, and taking the PRT's POV that Sophia is just some kid who wanted to be a hero but used excessive force and landed herself in legal hot water.
If anybody had posted on P.H.O. that they spotted Shadow Stalker when she wasn't scheduled to do a patrol, or remarked that she seemed to be operating solo or with some unknown redheaded cape (if you believe fannon), Sophia should have been in a world of trouble over that.
Also her going off on her own during scheduled patrols should have been cracked down on. At least when she was in her probationary period. Somebody like Vista who had several years under her belt could be excused, but not a newbie like Sophia who is on probation because she doesn't know the legal way to do things.
Note that in the preceding paragraph I'm generalizing things, and taking the PRT's POV that Sophia is just some kid who wanted to be a hero but used excessive force and landed herself in legal hot water.