With Great Power...
The villain is dangling by a hand from a ledge above a pool of acid, or maybe lava. It's his own fault he's there--he chased the hero too hard, or his own diabolical device exploded and caused him to lose his footing. "Give me your hand!" the hero cries, trying to save his archenemy. But the villain refuses to grab the hand and tries to stab the hero and so falls to his death (until the sequel). Or Luke swings his saber around like he means to kill somebody, but Vader and the Emperor kill each other while he lies on the floor. The rule is: the bad guy has to die, but the hero wants to save him so Karma finishes him off.
Or, how about this one: the hero has to choose between saving his girlfriend or somebody else? "Ha, ha," says the villain, "Now your morality is your weakness!" But the hero invariably saves everybody. Seriously. Or the one where the hero has to put down his gun and get captured because somebody is being held hostage? The hero always surrenders and it always works out okay. Or where Catwoman is technically a thief but she also helped Batman so when he tries to catch her at the end of the episode she's allowed to get away?
It's interesting because it's so not real life. In real life, we have "acceptable losses" and the hero would need to let some hostages die to stop the villain from hurting anybody else. But Real Heroes don't have moral dilemmas like we real people do. I mean, the characters do, but the writers always know what the Hero Code says the hero will do next. Your tone has to be super-dark for the hero to deliberately make any sort of moral compromise.
I guess the main reasons for not acting like a hero is that it's not practical. Superman will risk the catastrophic consequences of reversing earth's rotation to save one reporter's life; he of course succeeds, but the potential for tearing the planet apart makes such a maneuver unreasonable outside of the movies. And there are laws against vigilanteism.
Still, there is a culturally acknowledged moral code, one clear and simple enough that the sorts of people who write Saturday-morning cartoons can understand it. We know what is the Right Thing to do because we read comic books.
Or, how about this one: the hero has to choose between saving his girlfriend or somebody else? "Ha, ha," says the villain, "Now your morality is your weakness!" But the hero invariably saves everybody. Seriously. Or the one where the hero has to put down his gun and get captured because somebody is being held hostage? The hero always surrenders and it always works out okay. Or where Catwoman is technically a thief but she also helped Batman so when he tries to catch her at the end of the episode she's allowed to get away?
It's interesting because it's so not real life. In real life, we have "acceptable losses" and the hero would need to let some hostages die to stop the villain from hurting anybody else. But Real Heroes don't have moral dilemmas like we real people do. I mean, the characters do, but the writers always know what the Hero Code says the hero will do next. Your tone has to be super-dark for the hero to deliberately make any sort of moral compromise.
I guess the main reasons for not acting like a hero is that it's not practical. Superman will risk the catastrophic consequences of reversing earth's rotation to save one reporter's life; he of course succeeds, but the potential for tearing the planet apart makes such a maneuver unreasonable outside of the movies. And there are laws against vigilanteism.
Still, there is a culturally acknowledged moral code, one clear and simple enough that the sorts of people who write Saturday-morning cartoons can understand it. We know what is the Right Thing to do because we read comic books.