Jolly Rogers

[verlaine]

I don't want to jinx anything, but the writing is going moderately well. I have a short story that I think I will make it to the end of, and another couple brewing for later. I am a slow and indolent writer, and only managing to produce ~1000 words a day, but who cares, I have no NaNoWriMo-style end-of-month target, and at least this is

Comments

[shewho]

actually those answers are all far to binary but i can't be bothered to explain because i'm off home and need feeding but imagine an explanation here

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kthxby

[verlaine]

I know, I know, but in my medium-long experience of these things, if you give intelligent, indecisive people more options than a brute binary, you just end up with a lot of votes for "it depends".

[mrlloyd]

Well said. Death to ambiguity.

[onebyone]

For my taste, choosing between two absurdly over-stated options in a false dichotomy is a bit too much like real politics.

[barrysarll]

The middle one really is as binary as that. Every murder the Joker has committed since at most his second capture, is on Batman.

The third one, though, is too binary. As in, I would like to but it often takes me a fair while to get round to such stuff and this reminds me I have a couple in my inbox since before christmas and oh dear I am a bad person (but not as bad as a mass-murdering psychopath).

[onebyone]

Every murder the Joker has committed since at most his second capture, is on Batman.

And on the duty sergeants who turned down the opportunity for an "accidental death in custody", the doctors who failed to negligently multiply his sedative dose by 10, the Arkham warders who opted to feed him, etc.

Batman does not take it upon himself to rule Gotham City as a God-King, above the law. We happen to know that, as the protagonist, he is the only person offered a genuine chance to do anything to stop the Joker. But he doesn't know that. It is in his character to believe that there are certain things which only he can do, but not to realise that mere mortals are comically inept and fundamentally worthless.

[barrysarll]

All those others are hirelings, with job descriptions and rules. Batman makes his own rules. That those rules include never killing - when even the police can sometimes kill - and worse, that his doctrinaire, self-defeating respect for life has more than once caused him to seek major medical intervention for a mortally wounded Joker is just proof that, like the monsters he fights, he is totally insane.