I'm going to be honest with you. Your world sounds pretty screwed up and it sounds to me like the way the law has responded to how screwed up it is might be keeping order, but that doesn't mean it's doing it the best way it could be.
That said, I also know sometimes it's hard to have things be ideal, after they get really broken. During the Annihilation War, it sure would've been nice to have things like Geneva conventions, or the ability to take prisoners. It would've been nice to not need to nuke planets to oblivion or use biological warfare. It just wasn't that kind of war -- and that's something I'm sure the people of the UP wouldn't understand if I had to talk about it.
But -- and here's the but -- when I had to make those hard choices, when I had to choose the things that I knew were wrong, but had no better choices, I never stopped seeing them as a sign it was all broken. They never started being right. I never started talking about them like they were normal.
I understand why you're frustrated. If you're just eating your Wheaties in the mess, nobody should be coming up to you and picking a fight. And I think even when we are talking about your world, it'd be a lot more productive to just help you find things you can take back to help it.
But you also talk about all of it like you can't even imagine it being different. Like comic books are a natural opiate of the masses. Uniformly. Objectively. Like there's one rigid truth. And there's not. That's what people are reacting to. [He shrugs.] Plenty of people eat sugar without getting addicted. Drink alcohol. In some worlds, kids read comics without ever dreaming of joining street gangs.
If I were to say that in every single world, superpowered vigilantes should absolutely be necessary, when even in my world it's necessary but not ideal, how would that sound? I'd sound crazy for treating that as some kind of objective truth. "Every world needs superheroes" -- when not all of them have the same problems, when some of them might have the same problems but better systems set up to handle them.
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That said, I also know sometimes it's hard to have things be ideal, after they get really broken. During the Annihilation War, it sure would've been nice to have things like Geneva conventions, or the ability to take prisoners. It would've been nice to not need to nuke planets to oblivion or use biological warfare. It just wasn't that kind of war -- and that's something I'm sure the people of the UP wouldn't understand if I had to talk about it.
But -- and here's the but -- when I had to make those hard choices, when I had to choose the things that I knew were wrong, but had no better choices, I never stopped seeing them as a sign it was all broken. They never started being right. I never started talking about them like they were normal.
I understand why you're frustrated. If you're just eating your Wheaties in the mess, nobody should be coming up to you and picking a fight. And I think even when we are talking about your world, it'd be a lot more productive to just help you find things you can take back to help it.
But you also talk about all of it like you can't even imagine it being different. Like comic books are a natural opiate of the masses. Uniformly. Objectively. Like there's one rigid truth. And there's not. That's what people are reacting to. [He shrugs.] Plenty of people eat sugar without getting addicted. Drink alcohol. In some worlds, kids read comics without ever dreaming of joining street gangs.
If I were to say that in every single world, superpowered vigilantes should absolutely be necessary, when even in my world it's necessary but not ideal, how would that sound? I'd sound crazy for treating that as some kind of objective truth. "Every world needs superheroes" -- when not all of them have the same problems, when some of them might have the same problems but better systems set up to handle them.