#because at the micro scale you can usually justify killing any specific avatar on a number of grounds

[artbyblastweave]

I gotta say, as someone who really, deeply gets the appeal of revenge-horror fantasies, and of the siren song of vigilantism in general, there was something deeply, deeply satisfying about how thoroughly The Magnus Archives went “No, fuck you” in regards to that “ethical murder” post going around about how vampires should target billionaires or whatever, Santa Clarita style.

I’m deeply leery of flippant attempts to brush off the moral consequences of a vampiric lifestyle with “Oh, I’ll just target bad people! UwU.” That wouldn’t be sustainable! People go to school to try and figure out who’s deserving of punishment and death on a moral, legal and philosophical level, and we all know how that fucking goes!  What, are you gonna start working your way down the twitter callout list? Kill customers who’re rude to you in the hopes that that was the extent of their whole fucking personality? What happens when eight vampires show up at the house of the same convicted sex offender? How many corrupt politicians can you kill before people notice a pattern? For that matter, do you, personally, actually pay enough attention to politicians to tell the genuinely corrupt and abhorrent from the faintly slimy, or the decent ones targeted by the media?

Broadly speaking I’m deeply leery of most media that tries to pawn off vampires and werewolves and the like as misunderstood outcasts while also having them have to eat people to sustain themselves- if X-Men aren’t an ideal metaphor for marginalized groups because they have an inherent potential to be a threat, monsters suck when the narrative shows us that they really are just going to keep killing people, again and again and again, and the best we can hope for is that all the people that they’re shown killing are set up in advance as unpleasant or evil, so it’s all fine. 

It’s a copout. If there’s anything resembling a society of these bastards- or even a small community of them, a la The Magnus Archives- then all those charming supporting characters have almost certainly done something to earn themselves the death penalty a hundred times over.

And that’s what I love about TMA- there’s no ethical way to do it, and most of the avatars don’t bother pretending that there is, or pretending that they care enough to go out of their way to find one. The handful that do either wind up repudiating their power with mixed success (Melanie, Daisy, Martin) or spending all their time working damage control (Jon) and mostly failing anyway. The vigilante monsters (Daisy, Trevor) are arguably the worst, in that they explicitly get the wrong people quite often and then just brush it off as the cost of doing business. Adelard Dekker is the only vigilante in the setting who manages to walk that line without falling off, in that he only ever targets avatars who are actively, patently engaged in killing sprees or mass murder (Throne of melted corpses, anyone?) and he, himself doesn’t have any powers.

(Compare to settings like Worm, where the superpower system is inherently rooted in a person’s trauma and damage, and the “Avatars” thus tend to circle back to it in a way that’s unhealthy, but there are still paths to be productive and ethical within the confines of the system- they’re just really hard to find, and frequently beaten down by conventional human bureaucracy. Compare to The Boys, whose major saving grace was its near complete unwillingness to play ball with the “MCU Superheroes as a marginalized group“ dynamic.)

#Obviously I have complicated feelings on the hunt #because at the micro scale you can usually justify killing any specific avatar on a number of grounds #But at the same time it's extremely reasonable to be leery of someone who'd make it their day job to just hunt and kill avatars all day #But at the same time it runs the risk of valorizing inaction- if you KNOW vampires are murdering people and you think you can stop it #it doesn't make you a bad person to try #And of course you can't deal with the root cause by killing avatars #kill every avatar on the planet and the fears will just make more #but there's an inverse starfish logic #killing any given avatar will matter a hell of a lot to anyone said avatar is actively victimizing #I think they shouldn't have waited until season 5 to give Daisy her Alard dupont moment #I think they should have made it clear much earlier that she frequently got the wrong person #the magnus archives #TMA #parahumans #worm #wildbow #rusty quill #tma meta #vigilantism #thoughts #magnuspod #jon sims #daisy tonner #adelard dekker #melanie king #martin blackwood #magnus archives #discourse #meta #analysis