Annotated 48-38
Choice comment, from belatedEpiphany: King-Killer Keynes.
FB: Everybody speculates about whether they’d go back in time and kill Hitler as a child. But would you kill a child who was ALREADY Hitler?
Amusing as Flo found this question when I brought it up, her answer would be “no,” whereas I probably would have found it within me to do it. In fact, I probably would’ve ended this page with the lethal blow, and spent the next one on Bandit looking into herself and deciding she was fine with it. Lucky for Taro (in the short term anyway) that this wasn’t my plot. Flo’s note on this part said: “Most of the readers want to see a Villain die. I want to see a Hero prevail. So here we are.”
Why not just go back a bit further and give momma hitler a headache on the proper day? No more baby hitler and no murdering a baby issues.
That’s robbing us of the revenge component!
Also: I’m not completely sure if removing Hitler from history would have made things much better. A little, sure, but the guy didn’t show up and took Germany by force, he had an army of followers without whom he would have stayed an insignificant weirdo racist. Unfortunately, racism (and particularly antisemitism) was completely fine with a ton of people in central Europe at the time. He was just doing it slightly worse than the others. They wouldn’t have had him as a central figure, but Mussolini and Franco would have done their thing anyway, and I’m pretty sure Germany would have gone fascist, too, just in a different (and hopefully somewhat less-bloody) way.
I’m suspecting that killing Hitler just *after* he had started rampaging through Europe might have sent a signal and might have influenced a bunch of other states and their populations, in a good way. Although that’s all speculation, of course, and I definitely wouldn’t want to test that hypothesis.
Racism and antisemitism were fine with a lot of people OUTSIDE of central Europe, too.
Still are, unfortunately.
So, you want to make copies of Hitler, so you can keep getting revenge on him every day?
Always scale up moral questions, just to see if they change :p ;)
Is it weird to have wanted John to show Taro’s nose as broken in the last panel? Just a little bent askew from Bandit’s punch?
From a purely Bandit perspective, I’m with Flo here.
That’s the essence of her character conflict, whether to succumb to her urges to break the law (as sen in her axemas tale) or to channel them to do good. She was once already in this same conflict, with Byron, and succumbed. Her actions in the prologue make much more sense if this time she shows she can rise above it.
Which just adds an interesting layer to the ethical questions. SHOULD we look at this from “a purely Bandit perspective”? Or is her own moral arc outweighed by the need to be sure that a tyrant is removed from power, decisively and without future opportunity to regain that power, before he kills more innocents?
(Of course, there are ways to do this that DON’T involve killing him on the spot, but in the moment, Bandit can’t be sure that any of them will take, especially as she can’t trust the “Iwatanian” justice system right now. Killing him will DEFINITELY take.)
Huh?
It’s only Bandit there, OF COURSE we should look at it from a purely Bandit perspective. It would have been different had Syr’nj been there, but she’s not.
For Bandit, the question of whether she should kill Taro to prevent him from possibly hurting others might be an interesting philosophical debate, but not one she’s having right now. She isn’t calmly weighing the moral pros and cons, she has at her mercy a person who has hurt her home, her friends and her person, repeatedly, including 5 seconds ago. It’s not a super ego decision, it’s a restraining of the id.
…the same id she did not restrain some time ago, with Byron, and now she notices and considers whether that is really the “right” thing to do.
I’m thinking that if she had gone ahead and knifed Taro, she would have taken a very different road afterwards. It would have been understandeable, but it’s very healthy for her that she manages to not give in to the urge this time.
Yes, these are both points I made in my first comment. Thank you for reiterating them.
point taken. I think I was too tired to notice…
One quibblet:
Her impetus is not to break every law. It is in her nature to specifically steal.
She’s never shown any sort of “wanton murder” or “premeditated murder” patterns, not counting the entirely prudent “Stab the zerk-zombie until it stays down” incident.
I would prolly try to help child Hitler get better at art and failing that, off the lad.
Which by certain laws of time travel would mean that while Adolf in his youth was never interested in arts, a stranger arrived one day and insisted in training him in the way of it, kindling in him a passion of sorts. And though he was unsure about it being truly his passion, the stranger was very persuasive. And then Adolf still found himself still denied access to institutions to further his art. Already angry and bitter from this turn of events after years of training , Adolf then suddenly had to fight for his life, when the kind and supportive stranger sought to end his life. Managing to evade his own death, Adolf vowed to get back to the evil people who had denied and even tried to kill him, and that no matter how high the cost might rise, he would create a better world where all people were molded from the same cast and no-one would have to feel like he did now.
Pretty much exactly my thought. If I can go back in time and change history in that manner, then I don’t need to kill him. I could take him away from whatever family circumstances made him a viciously hateful narcissistic criminal and raise him right.
I’ve always found it pretty disturbing how people just automatically leap to the killing him option when there are so many more ethical choices available.
I don’t know about the Hitlers, but by all historical records Fritz and Katharina Goebbles were wonderful, loving parents to young Joseph
I think I would go back to 1914 and try grabbing Gavrilo Princip before he shoots Franz Ferdinand, setting of the chain leading to world war one. No world war one, no stage for the Nazis or world war two. Plus millions of lives saved in world war one alone. Plus you don’t have to kill anyone.
If you don’t want to wrestle Princip, arriving some time before the murder and telling a police officer that you think that man has a gun (point at Princip), would also work.
Good thinking there, I agree!
Although WW1 might not be that easy to avert because by the time of the assassination, there was already a lot of very bad blood between many of the later participants of WW1, and several sides had already decided they wanted a war and were looking for an excuse to “continue politics by other means”.
That aside: I’m not sure how the attempt on their life affected their art, but I hope preventing it would not remove Franz Ferdinand’s music from history!
If you’re going to off Hitler, why not do it during World War 1? He wasn’t an innocent baby then, and lord knows there were bodies dropping left and right all over the place back then; history certainly wouldn’t miss one more or less.
Good point. I guess the trouble is finding him in the crowds of similarly uniformed germans.
Which is why we have all those Find Waldo books.
They’re part of a cultural development project so we’re ready when we get time machines.
“Paint like your life depends on it, little Adolf”
I am sure that would make him a balanced lad.
Don’t care if he’s a child or not, Taro is pure evil and a willing and happy murderer. Removing him is doing the world a favor.
Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play in it, for good or evil, before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.
Honestly I think Bandit would be fine with killing him in the heat of the moment. We saw that with Byron. But it’s another thing to execute someone in cold blood.
+1 for the quote.
Bandit might have gone ahead in the rush of things, but becoming self-aware in the middle of it and continuing requires a very different character than Bandit’s.
“Pity stayed his hand. It’s a pity I’ve run out of bullets, he thought…
“Removing him” would be a mercy for people like Taro. That way, they don’t have to live with the knowledge that they failed and were defeated. Forcing people like him to live with their failure is a far better and more appropriate punishment than just killing them.
And who knows? Maybe some day he’d actually heal his broken mind and feel remorse.
Are we into making people suffer for their crimes, now? Rather than containing them and hoping they change their ways?
I’m pretty sure my final sentence addresses that point.
Not killing Taro means she will have to arrest him. Excellent composition in last panel!
So how old is Taro at this point?
I feel like that will have a significant impact on how I feel about killing/not killing him here.
Old enough to have committed several sadistic murders and at least one war crime.
Did you consider the poisoning of his own family as only one sadistic murder? Or am I too fussy in my definition of “several”? ;)
I got noticed~!
I dont remember if I ever got a gold star.
Likewise, I dont recall if I was operating on the deeper level of recognizing that bandit keynes was a gnome name that she regrets and king-killer keynes likewise would have crowned her arc
Puts me in mind of “Old Stoneface”, killer of the last crowned king of Ankh-Morpork in the Discworld series. Facing a legal system that would never punish the king for his acts, he considered himself acting as executioner for the people, and apparently died without regrets… but his family would bear the name “Regicide” for generations.
I thought this page was a pretty great callback to where Bandit kills Byron. Without ever admitting it, the way she spares someone who definitely deserves to die here after she killed someone who arguably didn’t deserve to die(???) when she killed Byron sets you up to look at all the backlash she got for that earlier killing. In a weird sort of way Bandits’ is a very circular sort of story arc. Is sparing Taro a mistake? Was killing Byron? I can almost hear Syringe yelling at Bandit in the background here.
And its made all the more murky by the fact that she didn’t actually kill Byron; Brother Tom did that earlier and what Bandit dealt with was already an empty shell. Sure, she and Syr’ng didn’t know that, but we do, so it has to be taken into account when we think about this.
Ultimately, I do think she did wrong by Byron, because she was blaming him for the actions of others (i.e. HR and Brother Tom). And her PTSD over previously being “apparently killed” in the mighty MMO manner is no excuse. And I think she did right here by not killing Taro, because no single person is entitled to be the judge, jury, and executioner like that.
I just wish Taro hadn’t ended up consumed by the chaos that HR is about to unleash, because he definitely deserved to live with the knowledge that he failed and was being judged by his betters who he considered his lessers. The sheer narcissistic injury of that knowledge would have been a fate worse than death for him.
Here’s the thing: Taro is not the source of all evil. He’s merely a grotesquely vicious sociopath that was raised by a family of backstabbing despots. He’s everything but unique. Kill Taro, and another just one like him will crawl out of the woodwork sooner or later. Taro is a problem, a very big one, but he’s not the problem.
Venom might die along with the snake, but evil does not die along with the evildoer. You can -and should- penalize wrongdoing, of course.
The debate about justice and all is interesting, but in a case like this, the only real question is: can I afford to take this dangerous person into custody, or is he too much of an immediate danger and has to be killed before he kills me/us?
Taro is physically a child with no magical ability. Bandit alone might struggle with subduing him, but she’s got Sunder right there, and she knows it, so subduing Taro would not be hard. So, she ought to not kill him here.
As for Byron, he was a ticking time-bomb and everybody knew it, especially Byron himself. Only Syr’ng was blind about it. With Byron in berserker mode plus a berserker-infection/possession super-spreader, taking him down as quickly and totally as possible was both necessary and justified.
Agreed on both terms. I think the thing that brought Syr’Nj up against her was the fact that she didn’t back off when Syr’Nj had the serum ready, kept going after he was dead, and replied in a less-than-respectful tone when Syr’Nj got angry about that.
…all of which is totally understandable, especially given Bandit’s history, but I bet she’s been having second thoughts about it. She won’t apologize for it (which is also fine because Syr’Nj leveraged her position to retaliate and probably will also not apologize.), but I bet it still gives her pause every so often. Bandit needs to believe about herself that she is in control of her actions and not some mindless revenge killer. So she kind of needs this moment in order to reassure herself that she is not the person Syr’Nj’s made her out to be.
Honestly, Taro is clearly a narcissistic sociopath who has killed many and has shown no remorse, even for his own family. That fact he incredibly bright yet only really finds joy in controlling others or hurting others makes it pretty clear that he is a monster that no one would miss he got taken out before harming anyone else. That said, fictional characters and all, Bandit story arc is more important. I’m never one who would preach that ‘hero’s shouldn’t kill’ because I find that incredibly naive but it’s also something that should carry allot of weight with a character from that point forward.
I found Bandit’s facial expressions to be very Shanna-like in the past few pages.
Shanna found that she had to kill JJ, who was still a real and present danger.
Bandit finds that she does not have to kill Taro, who is now a spent force…