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Batman has his no kill rule, and depending on the movie or TV show you watch, two reasons exists Justice not Vengeance or not to lower himself to criminals that he stops.
Batman does however beat a lot of people up. It's never shown what happens to the people he beats up, they're either knocked out or run away.
What happens if a person dies because of injuries sustained from Batman beating somebody up? Does this violate his no kill rule?
It doesn't seem unlikely to me that a person might act in some way and, perhaps out of convenience or ignorance, disregard that their actions may in some way be against their own ethics.
In general, I would presume that the writers of comic books are focused more often on providing an entertaining story though perhaps on occasion there is an attempt to look at something less escapist.
1 hour ago, swiftcoder said:Comics and movies both are notoriously bad at sticking to their own rules.
To be fair, that is a terrible article. Most of the instances are either someone other than Bruce Wayne (Flashpoint, Azrael), really early Batman (before they established the no killing rule) or circumstances where it looked like Batman killed someone, but actually didn't.
That said, movie Batmen seem much more ok with killing, especially Burtons and Snyders.
3 hours ago, QueenSvetlana said:Batman has his no kill rule, and depending on the movie or TV show you watch, two reasons exists Justice not Vengeance or not to lower himself to criminals that he stops.
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You could also make the argument that Batman is at least partially responsible for some of the Jokers victims. He knows that Joker won't stop killing, so even if he doesn't want to "lower himself", that's just an excuse on his part.
But yeah, even in the "I just knocked them out" fight scenes, a lot of those guys are either dead or at the very least, extremely debilitated, and that is the case for nearly any media where someone is casually "knocked out".
"They'll wake up with a sore head" in movies = "they have severe concussion and probably brain damage" in reality.
Basically, don't overthink it. The reason Batman doesn't kill isn't some high-minded philosophy on the part of the writers... it's a pragmatic approach to storytelling. If you kill off the bad guys, you can't use them again.
This is mostly a writing/storytelling artifact. You want to have characters who are imperfect, fallible, breakable, conflicted, vulnerable, and have limitations. A story just isn't very interesting if the protagonist is an invincible machine of destruction because the audience ends up feeling like there isn't risk or high stakes. So, the writers have to invent exploitable weaknesses. Batman can't kill people. Superman is weak to kryptonite. etc. Some super heroes will even temporarily lose their abilities and have to deal with life for a day like the rest of us. The key is to create limitations for your protagonists and then throw novel obstacles at them to overcome, and as they try to overcome the obstacles which conflict with their character limitations, you increase the tension of a crisis so that it all comes down to one exciting climax where it is either resolved or not.
1 hour ago, slayemin said:So, the writers have to invent exploitable weaknesses. Superman is weak to kryptonite.
There's an urban legend that kryptonite was invented by the writers of the Superman radio show because the actor playing Superman wanted to go on vacation for a week, so they put Superman in a "kryptonite trap" and had a stand-in groan in pain for the episode.
Batman accidentally killed the joker while defending himself. Though it wasn't true, because comics. I guess he got electrocuted into transblackness, yet he survived somehow.
One of the key take aways I got from a story telling class years ago was that characters have to be fallible. It's the imperfections and contradictions in their character which makes them interesting, and also... relatable. If you read a lot of the super hero comics or watch the super hero shows/movies, you'll find that the script takes great effort to try to humanize the characters, and they just also happen to have a special power/ability which makes them unique and special. Everyone wants to feel like they're unique and special, so in a way, the audience projects themselves onto the characters in varying degrees.
I see something very curious with fan bases of franchises and universes expecting consistency and cannon:
When writing something which ends up being a serial (a work of art spanning multiple years, and sometimes multiple writers), many times, the creators of the original work do not know that they are writing a serial work. As such they put many things in the first installment(s) which must later be ignored. A good example is Star-Wars in which if you read about the development of Darth Vader: It only happened after the first movie was out. (I don't think G.L. was expecting to write a second film, much less 16). Another good example is star trek dates being completely made up at first, while fans later use them to try and invent a coherent cannon. Another example is "The Hobbit" vs "Lord of the Rings". "The Matrix...", "Lost", and so on.
At the time of their inception, these stories are not fully fleged, do not have a long ranging story skeleton, and so on. Many times they expect it to be a short running stint, and end up as a franchise by accident. As such, when the writers (sometimes new writers) find themselves needing to stretch the story, it is bound to be inconsistent with it's humble origins. Specifically because the origins were never robust enough to carry a franchise.
George RR martin might be an exception. (I don't know. He hasn't finished yet. Will he ever?). Also, I think Tolken might have been an exception once he realised he was creating a universe (definitely not the case when he was writing the "Hobbit")
Tolkien actually spend about twenty years on the world building part for the hobbit/LoTR universe. He was one of those crazy exceptions when it comes to writers. I think he alone is responsible for launching the epic fantasy genre of fiction?
There are also two types of writers: Discovery writers and outliners. The stories with the unanticipated inconsistencies usually stem from the discovery writing process or a shortage of world building, but these problems only start to surface later on. Usually the discovery writer will do world building on a JIT principle, but may go back a chapter or two in their writing to setup the scene so it doesn't feel as much like deus ex machina (ie, see J.K. Rowling). The outliners will create a massive outline which hits the major plot points of the story and how everything connects together, and then they go through and flesh it out in words. The advantage is that the story is much more organized and makes sense, but you can still get into trouble with inconsistencies if your outline only covers a fraction of the whole story series (as you've pointed out). I think the best way to avoid some of these problems is to spend a bit more time with world building and establishing the rule sets, then nailing down your characters and their strengths and limitations, and finally, it can be helpful to write the ending first so that you know where the story needs to go.
