PaRARGdox 21
Only a norm problem: I was thinking here of a scene from 24 (Season 2?), where Jack is forced to shoot and kill his boss (or someone boss-ish) to prevent the bad guy from detonating a nuke. But we see this happen in a lot of stories… “tell me the code to the Doomsday Machine so I can destroy Earth… or I will kill this puppy!”
On a side-note, these scenes of people sitting around eating are hard to make look interesting.
Anyway, Charisma Epoch has entered the building… and what’s this? She and Kaycee appear to be… talking?!
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Next update: Wednesday, April 8, 2020: What’s wrong with this picture?
You know, I think I saw two partial episodes of 24… it just never drew me in.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” – I won’t say a word 🤐😅
The first couple of seasons were must see (well, the parts that didn’t involve Jack’s daughter). The next couple were good but flawed. The rest range from “Okay” to “JUST WHY?”
(And despite what you may have heard, there was no such thing as “24: Legacy.”)
I made it through three seasons I think.
3×24 – Weekends off, plus Tuesdays and Thursdays 😁
Would you kill tyfoid marry in her teens if it meant she couldnt infect people as an adult
Nope.
Isolation would be equally effective without the same moral impact.
This makes me think that when the dilemma most likely arises, it’ll be Charisma who has to make the choice. She clearly tries to take herself out of the situation. “Would you let someone die to save many?” is something she immediately thinks of as referring to someone she doesn’t like. Therefore, she’s making the decision easier in her head (“I never liked them anyways”), rather than trying to understand the true moral dilemma. What you need to focus on in the situation, in my mind, is if it’s somebody you care about. And then here she’s treating it as something that just can’t happen to her. The entire idea of it seems wholly upsetting to her, and her dodging the entire idea can be detrimental to her.
Also, if it happens to be needing to go back in time to stop the scientists from leaving Magellan, I remember Charisma in Bad Karma was one who possibly could have done something in that regard, as she was in the dragon fight (while Kaycee was off facing Dragonklaw and Go!Anna was in a mental loop, for instance, so they wouldn’t have any possibility of helping if they hop back into their earlier bodies).
It also makes me think that if they hop back to Bad Karma times, they’d have the problem of potentially altering all the events that came after (well, Worst Field Trip Ever, Lockedown, and Redux, not really Stairway to Heaven, unless I missed Rochelle being in the survivors). Heck, it’s possible they’d be able to keep those events from happening altogether, as they’d have first-hand knowledge. I doubt the comic’s going to do such a retcon.
I think there’s more to Charisma’s poiont of view than simply “there’s no problem in killing someone I don’t like to save many”. With her saying that it’s only a problem for a norm I think she believes she’ll never be in a situation where her powers don’t offer her a third option.
It’s an idea you often see in fiction, when they’re faced with a trolley problem type dilemna the heroes finds a way to save everyone. I bet Superman has been put in those situations many time, but he always finds ways to resolve the problem without sacrificing lives because it’s a big part of his character and the narrative around him. He’s a parangon, he does not sacrifice the few for the many, he strives tosave everyone. And for a story where the hero will win that works. But reality isn’t so neat.
That reminds me of the webserial Citadel, where heroes in training had to writes papers on what they would do in hypothetical situations like save the victims of a train derailing or apprehend the supervillain responsible. Then afterward the teacher told them something along the line of “I accepted every answer except ‘My power allows me to do both’ because I don’t care what your power is, there are situations where it won’t be enough and you’ll have to prioritize something over something else.”
There was a solution to the trolley problem shown in XKCD: Jam the switch half-way, causing the trolley to derail, thus saving everybody standing on either rail down the way. Of course, it doesn’t do anybody on the trolley any good.
“They bought their tickets. They knew what they were getting into.” 😐😉
True, but that approach does rely on assumptions about the technology involved and its edge cases.
Yeah … I would complain how illogical it is when someone gives out codes to weapon killing millions of people just because the villain threatened to shot someone … except I suspect that it’s totally realistic. Even trained people are unlikely to think logically in such situation, and the fact that in movie, something usually happens which will prevent the destruction anyway are not helping: we are programmed to save live now and just hope the later event will be prevented by other way, no matter how unlikely that will be.
I love those nothing-happens sit-around moments in superhero stories. Yes, yes, I know, “too much would be too much,” Captain Obvious. But since they’re usually rare and sprinkled among scenes of kaboom crash eeeeyaagghh spoop (that last one is the sound effect for a planet imploding into a black hole), they are wonderful.
I’m a fan of these kind of scenes too – help build character, help build the world, help to round everything out.
I’ve been trying to get my various tabletop RPG groups to invest in a little more down-time roleplay. Quiet times like this where things other than the immediate situation can be discussed.
It’s not easy.
Definitely. Without the quiet scenes, the big ones have much less impact. So says one who realizes she needs to do more quiet scenes in her own comic.
I remember when I was in high school, I had a subscription to the comic Generation X (the run written by Scott Lobdell and primarily drawn by Chris Bachalo). The issues I got were primarily the down time, establishing characters. The first issue I got opened with the characters just taking a written exam (overseen by Beast), and there was so much character given in just showing what each character was doodling on their paper. The cliffhanger at the end of the issue was when Beast told Banshee and Emma Frost that he believed M was autistic, not anything bombastic. All of this helped me be more invested when in a later issue the school is attacked and the students are separated and on the run. Now I knew who they were and had a reason to want them to succeed, as well as a good idea of how they’d each react to such a scenario.
Didn’t hurt that the comic also featured my favorite duo in all of Marvel Comics: Artie and Leech! Best Marvel characters ever (especially Artie)! What a shame the movies completely upended who they were as characters (and never even had their versions meet). Hopefully the MCU, if they ever show them, treats those characters right.