PaRARGdox 20
Who dies for the greater good?: Some more familiar faces… speedster Nadine, PherNian cephalomaid Fatima, super brainy Rochelle, gravity manipulator Sioni, and non-powered norm Kaycee. I’ll presume you’re all familiar enough with them to not need any links… after all they appeared in chapter one and have been seen at many points, in most stories, along the way.
But yes, the superhero Magellan did die for the greater good – sacrificing himself to stop the Q’Arth demon invasion of Earth in the process back in 1972! It’s mentioned throughout Magellan but shown in a flashback starting on page 4.04…
When I first introduced the red third year cadet uniforms back on page 4.161 in Bad Karma – and indeed, the concept of the colour coded years – I never realised how bright they would be en masse! (No wonder red shirts are an easy target!)
Patreon: By the way, should it be a thing that interests you, my Magellan patrons over at Patreon have been getting full previews three updates ahead of schedule. And you can too for as little as $1 a month… 😎
Families/Cемьи: New voting incentive featuring Red Vlad and Comrade Katya … page 4 up now!! Next update will be April 1 at 5pm Sydney/1am New York time. By voting you not only get a new page of this story but you help raise Magellan’s profile and help potential new readers find us.
Next update: Wednesday, April 5, 2020: Only a norm problem…
I’m getting some inkling of a suspicion that a certain pair of characters, not to mention the other people on that mission, might get sacrificed later in this story. Assuming they are not already dead.
No, Ambrosia undid their deaths just a few minutes ago. Which is worse? Dying in a bot explosion or getting reamed out by Ken Spence for their poor decision-making abilities?
You can be sure that Spence won’t forget, so long as all the parties make it through the storyline😬
Philosophically speaking, depending on how Ambrosia’s power actually works, she either saved two lives… or killed everyone else in the universe to “lose unsaved progress and reload a previous quick-save”. Ambrosia… universe delete-r and demiurge!
More discussion on the nature of Ambrosia’s power in ten or so pages which might answer that question…
Or, her power is actually just a really strong precognition, where she can look one minute into the future and imagine that the future really happened. There’s no way to tell whether she is simply seeing the future correctly, or actually sending her mind back in time one minute.
Nope, definitely time travel. It’ll be explained why (and how they know) during the course of the story.
What about looking at it this way: She first killed everyone in universe and then resurrected everyone including those two.
Thoughts on the questions posed by Kaycee.
I think that you could and would. I don’t think this holds for all of your classmates. As for the ethical question, whether you should, that’s… tricky.
In science we’ve decided that we should not sacrifice lives (of humans, we do sacrifice animals but as few as possible) even if it could save lives. But that hinges on the fact that science is about exploring the unknown: we’d be killing the few in an experiment that would potentially – not certainly – save the many. And from the nature of science also follows that no matter whether the experiment would give us the answer we were looking for and save the many or not, it would certainly open at least one probably several new questions of similar nature. Additionally, we generally do have the option to just let the research take decades longer and try to learn as much as possible from the very same deaths that we are ultimately trying to prevent.
Not very similar but this does raise an interesting point for you: are you 100% certain that you will save the many by sacrificing the few? While the idealistic goal must be to save everyone, maybe the pragmatic goal can be to not let anyone die in vain?
“One death is a tragedy. A million deaths bare a statistic”- Josef Stalin (Might have the quote off a little bit).
Kaycee raised a dangerous question. Because, you know: One Kill to save a Million, seems an easy calculus. But..once you open that door..how many does it become acceptable to kill to save? Half a million? 100,000? 1,000? 100? 10? 2? 1…?
For heroes, it is a dangerous question. And, once you let killing to save a life be a possibility, it will always be an option in your head. I think this is why Magellan avoids training in lethal measures.
For several of the students, their powers can already be considered lethal measures. If I, as a regular baseline human, was to get a punch from Billy, Lyta or Charisma, anything beyond a glancing blow would be instantly fatal; a glancing blow to my head would give me such a concussion that I would be unconscious for days and when I do wake up, my IQ would likely be cut in half. A kiss from Gabby (or Jesus) could wipe out my lungs almost instantly. What Jenna could do in a moment of inattention or carelessness would be mind-boggling devastating. This crew definitely needs to be taught how deal with the use of lethal force.
We saw Charisma knock out Gregor with a light tap to the head during the flag exercise near the beginning of Lock(e)down
That reminds me of a question! 😀Later in Lock(e)down, in the big fight scene inside Rose’s psyche, Gregor was able to at least momentarily stun Sistah Superior, who seems about as tough as Charisma, but in the capture the flag sequence you mentioned, Charisma didn’t appear to even feel his plasma bolt. Was he holding back so much in that fight? It seems like, knowing the invulnerability of the blue team members, he should have put enough force in that blast to do *something* to her.
True. Most of the cadets found their inner strengths in that mindscape melee!
Personally, I think it ought to be an option, especially in a world such as the Magellanverse. With hordes of psychos who cheerfully murder hundreds with their incredibly devastating powers, and even something as fancy as Locke Island not being enough to detain them for certain (see the previous arc and Sista Superior’s escape), a few more lethal responses (or at least death penalties) seem warranted.
In the same vein, great though the game design was, Batman Arkham City lost me on this. You spend several hours in the prison city, where such Batman villains who haven’t bothered to jail break this week are plotting bio-terrorism that’ll kill hundreds of civilians on the off chance that it might help one of their schemes. The enemy mook conversations you constantly overhear are 10% gameplay tips (“Couldn’t someone get into our lair via the stormdrain around the corner to my left?” “Yeah, but unless they got some way to disable electronics they’ll be electrocuted, so it’s fine”), 45% saying how much they love murder, torture and rape, and 45% how much worse their bosses are. Oh, and the previous game showed that in this Batman-verse, the greatest success a criminal therapy session can hope for is that the therapist leaves unharmed, so forget about rehabilitation*.
So when it turns out that the mysterious Protocol 10 you kept hearing about was a plan by the League of Shadows to kill off all the inmates, I was ready to hand them the matches to burn the place to the ground. That I was supposed to feel motivated to stop this plan was enough to take me out of it even discounting all the plotholes this introduces.
* That said, if at any point Magellan would introduce an occurence where an imprisoned villain is actually redeemed, I’d certainly be interested in reading that. And as a bonus, it makes Magellan’s mercy policy a bit more believable.
I think the only difference between our world and this one is how many people of this kind are there.
Killing one to save a million PROBABLY means the one is the one who’s endangering them in the first place.
That decision is easily–and regularly–made in the real world, where people lack superhero comics’ ability to decide whether their attacks are lethal or not. Even just to protect one person.
It’s a dangerous question, but not asking it won’t really help because to those cadets, it’s likely to appear later – when there is much less time to think about it.
And that question about being sure is extremely good one: Are you sure killing some person will save million people AND are you sure there wasn’t other way to do it? If that “some person” is villain about to fire some weapon, the answer would be easy. If that “some person” is just someone on bad place in bad time, it tends to be harder …
I’ve said it before. I adore Fatima. The way she malaprops the English language yet still manages to be understood. She’s one of my favorites.
They’re getting into topics here I discussed in my last comment. Of course, I know these pages are finished in advance (as evidenced by the Patrons being able to see them three updates early–I’m not a Patron, I should mention), so it wasn’t influenced by anything I said. I just may have tapped in to a similar throughline for the narrative. Of course, since this question is brought up, that definitely means that such a dilemma will present itself to the cadets. How they rise to the task is another question entirely.
Of course, I was kind of expecting this to be an April Fools page. But maybe the joke is that there is no joke?
Y’know, in the 16 years I’ve been doing this comic I don’t think I’ve ever once considered doing an April Fools page for an update… probably they’ve never synchronised before, and now that it finally HAS it never even occurred to me!! Missed opportunity!!
(And yes, quite the conversation on these themes too, over on the Patreon page.)
Sometimes police officers have to kill to restore public safety, in order to save other lives;kill one maniac who leaves you no other choice in order to save the people he wouldhave harmed. This is a decision that should never be taken lightly, but it does have to happen from time to time. The Magellan cadets may have to face that choice when they get out into society to protect themselves and others.
In a situation where they would face multiple attackers, Kaycee would be more likely to have to injure or kill her attackers than more powerful people, like Charisma, Billy or Lyta. Those powerhouses could allow most attackers to beat on them while arresting someone, before turning to deal with the next person. See “Mugging the Monster.” Kaycee, with her inherent squishiness, would need to be more active in protecting herself by incapacitating her opponents, particularly by causing serious injury or death.
Theories:
– Ambrosia dies/self-sacrifice/peer-pressure’d so that she can do a timeskip of more than mere minutes.
– Magellanites figure out the two lynchpin characters who bump up the Rarg invasion, and someone chooses to eliminate them in the past.
– Charisma (or another Beta Character) displays remarkable courage and self-sacrifices to prevent the world-destroying event.
They don’t have to eliminate them to accomplish that goal, though.
Don’t -have- to, no.
But still might.
I thought the same thing. We were already told several pages ago we’d be exploring the mental and physical consequences of what happens when Ambrosia does multiple or extended time skips. After all, if she goes back 1 minute, what stops her from going back 1 more minute within the first second?
Basically she doesn’t have enough energy for another slip for at least 60-90 seconds after a full 60 second slip.
Change millions into billions, and the cadets may be getting a practical exam on that question sooner than they think.
Doesn’t Kaycee have a unique viewpoint on this? I mean, she did “self-die” during Lock(e)down. She may not have pulled the trigger herself, but she did agree to it.
That was in Bad Karma I think. But yes, very true!!
Oops – I have been “binge-reading” during this mess and must have mixed it all up! Bad Karma it is!
It’s interesting to see the new hairstyles between the previous page and this one, and to also see which hairstyles -haven’t- changed.
Very interesting. Gives the world a more “lived in” feeling.
Grace, the red uniforms are still very sharp. And in all the nine years I have been reading this comic, I have been very much looking to seeing the main band of cadets wear them, as red is my favorite color.
In the real world, situations do occur where someone might have to use possibly-lethal force to stop someone else from doing something bad. So we have laws.
I’m not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but here’s my summary of what I understand to be the most common legal situation in the USA:
You are never allowed to kill. However, you are allowed to use potentially lethal force (force that MIGHT kill) in order to stop an immediate, otherwise unavoidable danger of death or grave bodily harm to the innocent.
Every element of the above formula must be present. There must be a danger, the danger must be “death or grave bodily harm”, the danger must be to the innocent, the danger must be immediate, and the danger must be otherwise unavoidable. If all of those apply, the law generally allows the use of potentially lethal force. (Note: rape is generally considered “grave bodily harm.”)
If you see a man outside an orphanage, and he has splashed gasoline all over the place, and he just pulled out a box of matches, and he’s about to light a deadly fire, and if you had a pistol and the training to use it correctly… could you shoot him? According to the above standard: yes, if that’s the only way you had to stop him. If you were standing right next to him, you should try to tackle him or grab the matches or do something else, but if you were too far away for that you could shoot.
Then, if you did shoot him, and he fell to the ground… you would have to stop shooting him. You don’t have authority to kill him, just to stop him; so if he’s stopped you have to stop shooting him. In fact if he threw the matches away when you started shooting you would have to stop.
What if he lights the match, successfully lights the orphanage on fire, and starts running away? You can’t shoot him because it’s too late to prevent the danger, and you don’t have authority to exact punishment on anyone. (If you somehow had certain knowledge that if he got away he would kill more people immediately, you could maybe shoot him on that basis; but that’s really an extreme edge case and I’ve never read about it happening in real life.) Note that even the police almost certainly wouldn’t shoot the fleeing arsonist in this situation; they operate on pretty much the same rules as I described.
Also, even if you do everything right, you will still be arrested and stand trial. The above would let you make an “affirmative defense”, where you say “I did shoot that man, but it was the only way I could prevent imminent harm” and hope the court rules in your favor. (Normally an accused person could say “not guilty” and hope that the court doesn’t have evidence to convict, but an “affirmative defense” is different. Trickier for you. I hope you have a good lawyer!)
And if you do it right and the court rules in your favor, the person you shot (if he survived) or his family or heirs (if he didn’t survive) can sue you again, in civil court, and if that goes against you you could owe more money than you ever had.
Also the above applies to any kind of possibly-lethal force. If you hit someone over the head with a baseball bat, that’s possibly lethal. Knives? Possibly lethal. And if you could shoot force beams from your eyes, those might be lethal too.
Again, I’m not a lawyer and for all you know I made all of the above up, so if you rely on anything I said you are crazy. Talk to a real lawyer if you have any doubt.
P.S. This web page is worth reading if you are really interested in this topic:
https://www.usconcealedcarry.com/blog/the-judicious-use-of-deadly-force/
That’s pretty much how I understand it too. There’s been a number of those CSI/L&O shows where someone killed in versions of the circumstances above.
Huh… Seeing a little quirk of WordPress that I’m not liking – not that I expect anything to be done about it, just grousing, ya know? I wanted to reply to one of your reply’s above, Grace, and I saw that it didn’t have the reply button. A glitch, I rationalized, but then I saw it for a few other replies as well! It looks like there’s a limit on nested replies, that when reached, doesn’t allow further nesting. I found that particularly irksome, that’s all 😐
It’s a setting in the Discussion widget… it was set on max. 5 nested. That might have been the default, can’t remember. Anyway, I’ve bumped it to 10, which is the max.
Oh… I didn’t think that would be an option you’d have control over. Thank you Grace! Sorry for being a kvetch 😞
No worries, I had sometimes wondered why the nesting of comments seemed limited… now we both know!
Go-o-o-o-o-od . . . daaaaammmmmn . . . iiiiit, GRACE!
Sioni’s statement to Fatima.
You are just Queen of Foreshadowing these days, aren’t you?