"All Might vs. Superman: How Our Heroes Are Different"

I thought this was an interesting and thoughtful look at how superheroes are portrayed in some popular movies and manga/anime.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2016-04-29/all-might-vs-superman-how-our-heroes-are-different/.101590

Interesting stuff!

Do you tend to lean on one side or the other when it comes to the "hero registration" theme?

I guess I'd be more towards the anti-registration side, mostly because I'd think that once the government got it's hand into something like that, it'd only ruin it. Bureaucracy would be set up, bizarre rules and restrictions would be made, and given the mercurial nature of politics in the US, what was ok four years ago might be forbidden four years from now, or vice versa.

Guess that also reflects my pro-gun rights side, too. Personally, I don't use guns much, but I like having the liberty and the right to do own one if I should choose to.

I remember watching the animated movie for "The Dark Knight Returns" a few years ago, maybe the second one. There is a scene where Batman is trying to gather a bunch of hoodlum-like kids to his side, and he holds up a rifle one of them had, and said something like "These are the weapons of cowards". I recently watch the "Batman: Bad Blood" movie, and in one scene Batman chastises Batwoman for using guns, saying it made her no better then the criminals.

And I'm thinking. "Sure, Batman has all kinds of bat-gadgets and bat-weapons, some of which explode, that he can use, but using a gun somehow makes you like the bad guys? That's hilarious. Sorry for not being a multi-billionaire with free access to my companies R&D toys to keep me from being harmed or killed by the bad guys. All I can afford is normal weapons. Whoa is me!"

jazzact13 wrote:
And I'm thinking. "Sure, Batman has all kinds of bat-gadgets and bat-weapons, some of which explode, that he can use, but using a gun somehow makes you like the bad guys? That's hilarious. Sorry for not being a multi-billionaire with free access to my companies R&D toys to keep me from being harmed or killed by the bad guys. All I can afford is normal weapons. Whoa is me!"

Here's the kind of thing that bothers me about the registration or hero organization type of thing, for another manga series called "World Trigger".

Here's a brief summary of World Trigger. Beings from other dimensions/planets arrive on earth via gateways and create havoc, but are beaten back by people with special abilities called triggers. These people become part of an organization called Border, and they respond to the occasional enemies that come to our world.

Early in the story, a couple of these enemies arrive in an unexpected area, and civilians are in danger. One of the main characters, a trainee at Border, uses his trigger power to try to protect people. But as a trainee, it's against the rules of Border for him to use his trigger in such a situation, and some of the Border leadership want to give him the boot because he broke the rules.

There's good and bad that can be said for both sides, I suppose. Individual vigilantism can be very problematic, and we can point to things like the police and the military as being real-life things that would likely go very wrong if they become independent from a form of government oversight. But there are also many examples when those same kinds of police and military become bad when the government over them becomes tyrannical or paranoid.

I once chatted with a police officer about vigilantism and how it could potentially be modified to be legal. He pointed out Bounty Hunters, who are basically state-sanctioned vigilante's. And although one cop is not expert of the law, he said that provided someone in authority over him knew his identity, it could be kept secret from the rest of the department. So if someone really WANTED to do the "masked hero" bit, they potentially could!

That's probably the closest the two sides of the issue could come to "meeting in the middle".

Bounty hunters are an interesting twist on the idea, and that would be one way the vigilante kind of thing could be done.

Neither way is perfect, because the people who make up either way are not perfect. Theologically speaking, the individual vigilante and the people who would make up any hero association would all be fallen and sinful people. And while we might thing that oversight might work to restrain that, when the organization itself becomes corrupt then the potential for harm is all the worse.