Generally, I think the whole 'code against killing' thing is great for certain characters, but there's no real reason it should be applied to all superheroes. It has been applied to them all in the past, obviously, because they were characters specifically designed to be sold to little kids, but they're not just for little kids anymore, so if the other aspects of the characters can evolve and be modernized, I have no problem with doing away with the killing ban for those characters in whom it doesn't really make sense.
Regard for life and basic compassion should always make sense. Defining lethal violence as a last resort is every bit as important for adults as it is for children, because adults become police officers and military officers and legislators and executives and are placed in situations where they actually have human lives in their hands. The idea that it's okay for adults to be callous about life and death is contemptible to me. Last year, an off-duty campus cop shot a black motorist dead for no reason just a couple of blocks from where I'm sitting now. The only reason I'm not living in terror right now is that I have the automatic protection of being a white male, but a lot of my neighbors aren't so lucky. That's what happens when you get a society where adults think that deadly force is a casual matter. So don't try to tell me that disliking deadly force only "makes sense" for children.
And I would say the vast majority of the marvel characters currently out there fall into that category: a lifelong weapons manufacturer, former assassin, former spy, former revolutionary, norse god raised in a warrior culture, uncontrollable rage monster, and a combat veteran whose very first act of heroism was volunteering to go to war and kill people.
And yet most of them were portrayed in the comics as preferring nonlethal tactics. Even the Hulk rarely killed by accident. Pointing out how they're portrayed in the movies to defend how they're portrayed in the movies is tautological. I'm talking about the difference from their conventional portrayal in the comics.
And there's a practical, legal reason for superheroes to eschew deadly force -- namely, the fact that they aren't state actors. They aren't cops or soldiers, so they don't have the authority of the state to back them up if they use deadly force. So that opens them up to potential criminal charges or wrongful-death lawsuits. Even if they could prove it was necessary due to self-defense or defense of others, they'd still need to expose their identities and go to court, and it would probably end their careers. So even aside from the basic morality of giving a damn about human life (which should be a given), there's a very logical, functional, pragmatic reason why superheroes shouldn't go around killing people if they can possibly avoid it.
I'm curious, though - why is it ok for Jessice Jones to just be reluctant to kill, even though she did kill in the end, but Superman doesn't get any credit for his reluctance?
Well, I could say that it's because he's
Superman, the archetype of all superheroes. He's supposed to be the best and purest of them all, while Jessica Jones was created specifically to be a darker, more flawed character. It makes no sense to treat them as interchangeable.
But the real answer is that it's not about the characters' choices. The characters don't exist. What I'm addressing is the choices made by the people writing about them. In comics, it's usually a given that heroes avoid killing, unless they're darker antihero types like Wolverine. Okay, it's less ubiquitous than it used to be, but there are still enough heroes with no-killing codes that it's not something that anyone would need to explain or justify to the audience. And yet here you are demanding that I justify the basic, fundamental morality of thinking that violence is bad. And that's because American movies have this longstanding habit of embracing violence, having the villains die at the end as a matter of formula. Historically, movie heroes have tended to be cops or soldiers or gritty private eyes or people seeking vengeance for their loved ones or other stories that have fallen into a kill-or-be-killed formula. So when superheroes get adapted to movies, they get forced into that conventional mold rather than being true to themselves. Even movies that pay lip service to superhero codes against killing still tend to have them make "exceptions" at the end, or at least having the villains end up getting themselves killed in one way or another.
And who did Ant-Man kill?
No, my point was that he was the only MCU movie hero who emphatically had a code
against killing. He was the exception to the general pro-deadly-force mentality of the movie characters. (And the moment where his teammate went back to get the unconscious guards out of the building was one of my favorite parts of the movie. Superheroes should be rescuers first, not soldiers or warriors. My favorite sequences in superhero stories are the rescues.)
Anyway, coming back to this thread, this team seems more along the lines of the Guardians model than the Daredevil model (villains, warriors, assassins), so I don't see a huge problem with it here, either. Perhaps the Atom or Firestorm should be a little more concerned about that - but then again, their entire mission is based on killing a man, so they know what they signed up for.
And that's something that's bugged me fro the start -- that someone like Ray is so sanguine about working alongside homicidal criminals. If they were
all characters more along the lines of Sara or Snart, something like the Suicide Squad, then that would make more sense. But it's weird for a Boy Scout like Ray to be so unconcerned with the moral issues of working alongside a guy (Mick) whose declared reason for joining the team was "I like to kill people."
Every time I read someone's post about Rory in this thread, for a second or two I think they're talking about Arthur Darvill.
That's why I try to call him "Mick" instead.
