Weird how so many arguments over the ethics of a “no-kill rule” in superhero stories are focused on the question, “If the real world had super-powered vigilantes, would this be practical or good in real life? Would it work to have such-and-such decision always made by super-powered vigilantes, in the ways that such-and-such story portrays them making that sort of decision?”

But to me, the point is more… What works in the context of a particular story about a particular superhero? What works with the point the story is trying to convey?

In a lot of cases, the point of a superhero story is to be a power fantasy. And not just any fantasy about having power– but specifically, a fantasy about a good person having power, and using it for good.

Specifically, making better choices with it than the choices made by most people who have power in real life.

And depending on the writer and the audience, and the particulars of the story being told… this idea of “power being used in an atypically good, ethical way” might mean different things.

For some, it might mean “never using power to kill, always using it to bring people to justice in a fair trial with due process.” This might be a fantasy you’d want to explore, if your idea of bad people using power in the real world involved a lot of anger about extrajudicial killings, and their perpetrators escaping justice.

You might feel so strongly about powerful people who get away with murder, that the idea of a superhero doing the same, even to them, might leave a bad taste in your mouth.

And so maybe the good approach you want to see a superhero taking, in contrast, is just to stop villains from killing any more and bring them to legal justice– fair trial, due process in court.

The fantasy is not so much about what makes logical and ethical sense in general. It’s more about a contrast between what bad people with power do in the real world, and what you want to imagine a good person with power doing instead.

It’s a momentary escape from certain evil parts of reality. A cleansing daydream about the opposite.

But of course, even a fantasy requires some suspension of disbelief.

And this fantasy requires the writer and reader to accept some trust in the judicial system, at least as it’s portrayed in the story. To be immersed in this wish-fulfilment, you have to let yourself believe that 1. the hero has correctly identified the criminal; 2. the court will bring that criminal to justice in a way that effectively and ethically prevents further crimes, and 3. none of this is going to lead to worse consequences than the alternatives.

If the story asks us to accept that the hero is a good person– one who knows the right thing to do, and always has the wisdom and strength and integrity to do it– then it will ask us to trust that this hero is right in handing over the freshly-captured villain to the courts.

If the whole basis of the fantasy is something we can accept– that the hero’s really a good person, doing good with power– then we can be confident that the hero knows the best choice here and has made it.

We don’t necessarily have to accept that this would be the correct choice in every setting, or that real-world justice should always function on the same principles. We are only asked to accept (at least, if we’re treating the story as a fantasy wish-fulfilment) that it was the right outcome in this case.

But… for some of us this is still a tall order.

Especially if we’re somewhat familiar with the many horrific flaws of courts, police, prisons and mental institutions in the real world. A lot of these superhero stories just end with the villain in prison, or in an insane asylum, and act as if that means the problem is solved.

Which is flawed not only in the real world, but often within the superhero narrative itself! Another installment, later on, will show the villain breaking out, just as evil as before, and continuing the crime spree. And with this sort of handling of the story, you might really wonder what the point is.

But that is the nature of a medium that’s never allowed to come to any true ending. Villains have to keep coming back. And the society can never be improved enough to prevent crime at the root; it has to keep spawning villains, for the story to go on.

Furthermore, that story is continued by many writers and artists, one after another, all with different goals. So an approach to superhero ethics that works within the fantasy of one installment might fall apart when you see it in the context of the rest of the story.

The approach to ethics does change from one writer to another, even if they generally try to follow the same rules. For some of them the point might not even be a power fantasy or wish fulfilment at all, but some other sort of idea they want to explore.

And for others, the power fantasy may be different.

The other side of the debate– a hero who does kill– is a related but opposite power fantasy.

It may similarly stem from anger at powerful people in the real world who get away with their crimes. But this anger may be focused especially on how the criminal justice system often fails to improve anything. How even when arrested, powerful criminals often manage to get acquitted, and even when sent to prison they often find a way out… just as evil as before, and just as dangerous.

In this case, the fantasy still imagines that the hero acts in contrast to the choices made by those who have power in reality.

But in this case, the contrasting choice is to eliminate the threat-- in a way that is certainly effective, but that the real-world legal system would never follow through on.

Again, it’s a fantasy of a hero using power in a better way than it’s used by real people. The difference from the no-kill fantasy is the author’s idea of what would be “better.”

And this fantasy, also, requires some suspension of disbelief; some acceptance of premises that may not be ones we’d ever want to live by in reality.

It requires us to accept that 1. the hero knows beyond all doubt that the villain is guilty of the crime; 2. there is no possible way to rehabilitate or redeem this villain; 3. the villain cannot be entrusted to the legal system because the risk of escape is too great, and 4. this will have more positive than negative effects for the society that the hero is trying to protect.

And this, too, can be a tall order. In reality, we see that extrajudicial killing often picks the wrong target, and rarely makes anything better– even if the person killed was powerful and immensely harmful, another villain usually just steps in to take the same place in the web of evil, and all the problems of society go on.

But again, if we’re approaching the story as a fantasy, we may be able to ride along and accept the premise long enough to enjoy it… to imagine that, in this case, in this story, the right thing happened– or at least, the ending was satisfying to our usually-unsatisfied sense of justice.

Which is the point of it all, really.

Fiction isn’t there to put forth a manifesto for how everything in the real world should work.

Fiction is there to satisfy something within us that’s yearning.

What that is, depends on the person and the theme and the story.

And I’m not about to say there’s one true right way to do it. “Being certain about what’s right” is very often just another part of the power fantasy.