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JuniperCake posted:This is the problem I have with it too. Though I don't get the impression she is supposed to be going mad or losing her mind. Rather, it comes across to me as the writer just being unsure on how they want to write the character. They don't know if they want a serious silent vigilante avenger or an over the top super villain who cracks jokes and tries to make things sporting for the fun of it. A big flaming stink posted:she explained why she killed them a few pages ago. they all did terrible things on their tours and so they deserve to be killed in her eyes. i'm not saying she's not a pretty lovely person but the only way she could be described as crazy is that she thinks killing people Is Not That Big Of A Deal. Were there not any Jurors for the rape trial that she could have gone after? Or reporters who put out articles favoring the rapists over the victim? I really hope that there is some explanation for why she decided to go all Predator in the barn shed because right now it looks like the author is trying really hard to make her seem intimidating when that was already accomplished back at the gas station.
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Sep 28, 2014 03:36
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Brought To You By posted:I would agree that the writer seems to be unsure of how to develop Moonshadow but that would require me knowing what the end goal of her character will be (as far as this chapter is concerned). Yeah there might be a goal at the end where all of this makes sense so for me to say it's muddled is definitely premature. We'd at least have to wait for the chapter to finish. But I do still think the barn scene is a bit jarring and out of synch with how the character has been portrayed so far. The saturday morning villain style banter in her rigged death trap barn just feels really out of place. Especially when the other guardians mention her, they imply she is mostly quiet, easy to miss, and tends to keep to herself a lot and has suffered a great deal. Her intense conversation with someone she sees as a fellow victim makes sense, but the saturday morning villain style banter in her rigged death trap barn just feels really out of place. It implies she is someone who thinks of this as a kind of game, when before she seemed to be far more serious about everything. Though I agree with you. I think the biggest problem is that it's hard to figure out what this scene is supposed to establish. We already know she is a very capable combatant who has flexible morals and has some intense grudges she intends to settle by murder. I suppose the intangible mode is new information, but that could have been established without this whole barn business. Guess we'll have to see where this goes.
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Sep 28, 2014 06:33
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It's the birth of a new supervillain. Over the top displays of how bad they are is pretty standard, especially since this comic likes to make points about things.Brought To You By posted:My problem is that we have no reason to believe that she would single out this specific group of mercenaries for any reason other than they are "bad people". If she had a problem with what one of these mercenaries did she should be trying to knife every career or retired soldier who committed a war atrocity. When she was targeting people involved with the rape case she was a focused villain with a specific purpose and agenda, she has lost that. Well, presumably those are on the docket for later. She's only got one knife, you know? A journey of a thousand kills starts with a single throat.
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Sep 28, 2014 07:17
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Tendales posted:The alt-text a couple strips back about her endorphin high makes me think that Moonshadow has become addicted to Yes. I posted all this pages ago only without the benefit of seeing the alt text. She's a serial killer.
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Sep 28, 2014 07:28
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JuniperCake posted:Especially when the other guardians mention her, they imply she is mostly quiet, easy to miss, and tends to keep to herself a lot and has suffered a great deal. Her intense conversation with someone she sees as a fellow victim makes sense, but the saturday morning villain style banter in her rigged death trap barn just feels really out of place. Every neighbor's of every serial killer ever.
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Sep 28, 2014 07:30
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She's quiet and solitary when around people. She loves the scared-as-poo poo attention she gets from her victims, as if it were a drug.
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Sep 28, 2014 11:01
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I dunno if the Guardians saying she was quiet is really reliable, that could easily mean "she only spouted off 10 catchphrases a battle instead of 20."
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Sep 28, 2014 11:45
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reignonyourparade posted:I dunno if the Guardians saying she was quiet is really reliable, that could easily mean "she only spouted off 10 catchphrases a battle instead of 20." Eh for Hector and Allison that's fair enough but when Brad says he rarely hears someone utter even 5 words together then that says something. Dude is pretty sympathetic and is shown to actually care and try to listen to people and is unique among the guardians in that respect. So that makes her pretty introverted and hard to get to know. Don't think she is a textbook serial killer though in the literal physically incapable of feeling real emotion sense. It probably still is a whole vigilante justice taken too far bit. I would not be surprised if Moonshadow or someone very close to her was victimized in some way before she became a super. That would make her powers pretty poetically fitting even with victims often feeling like they are isolated/invisible, without any control in their lives. This might be her way to regain control of her life. That would make her power trip in the barn, literally playing with lives she knows she can take whenever she wants, a bit more fitting but I still think the scene is just a bit too camp given the very serious subject matter in the chapter. JuniperCake fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Sep 28, 2014 |
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Sep 28, 2014 19:58
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Still like the idea that her knife is one of Cleaver's shards.
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Sep 29, 2014 02:15
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Mr.Pibbleton posted:Still like the idea that her knife is one of Cleaver's shards. Same.
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Sep 29, 2014 02:24
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Seems a little too not gray-green for that though 
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Sep 29, 2014 02:58
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Holy Christ Moonshadow.
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Sep 30, 2014 09:24
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Told y'all she wasn't right in the head.
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Sep 30, 2014 09:27
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The line "besides, you know why this is happening" suggests that there IS a specific thing she's killing them for here, not just generic war crimes. I'm going to go out a limb and bet that they raped someone.
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Sep 30, 2014 14:23
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As if every single person wouldn't fixate on something when asked that question with a knife in their back, even if they were a saint.
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Sep 30, 2014 14:41
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I'm just wondering who those words are for. Who does she expect to find this body?
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Sep 30, 2014 14:45
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Isn't the barn on fire? I bet no one finds the bodies if that's the case. Or at least can't tell about the cuts. I think she's just crazy.
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Sep 30, 2014 15:59
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idonotlikepeas posted:The line "besides, you know why this is happening" suggests that there IS a specific thing she's killing them for here, not just generic war crimes. I'm going to go out a limb and bet that they raped someone. "Generic" war crimes, huh? I guess lots of people think it's okay to murder a bunch of innocent civilians as long as they're brown people who live somewhere else. Makes sense that that's why so many people are against what she's doing. ChairMaster fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Sep 30, 2014 |
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Sep 30, 2014 16:03
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ChairMaster posted:"Generic" war crimes, huh? I guess lots of people think it's okay to murder a bunch of innocent civilians as long as they're brown people who live somewhere else. Makes sense that that's why so many people are against what she's doing. Yeah, that's a pretty callous way of describing what they supposedly did, but to be honest it's drat close to how Americans "talk" about those acts IRL.
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Sep 30, 2014 16:10
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ChairMaster posted:"Generic" war crimes, huh? I guess lots of people think it's okay to murder a bunch of innocent civilians as long as they're brown people who live somewhere else. Makes sense that that's why so many people are against what she's doing. In the real world, war crimes of any variety ought to be enough to put anybody in prison for life. In a work of fiction, "some guys might have killed some people, we think" is not a particularly good way of describing why someone thinks they ought to die.
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Sep 30, 2014 16:13
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Haha yea, I'm sure that's what you meant. As long as nobody important sees you do it it's okay. I also like how that post seems to imply that rape is worse than killing a bunch of people. I bet next you're gonna post about how terrible it would be if someone found and summarily executed that cop who murdered that black kid in Ferguson and is going to receive no punishment other than paid vacation for doing so.
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Sep 30, 2014 16:21
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Well if you want to start getting crazy starfish analogies up in here, here's one: Starfish like to eat oysters and clams, and fishermen who collect shellfish didn't like that, so in order to decrease the starfish population, they would fish out starfish, cut them in half, and throw them back. The only problem with this is that starfish are very good at regenerating, and if you cut them in half, you really will get two starfish growing back.
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Sep 30, 2014 16:22
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ChairMaster posted:Haha yea, I'm sure that's what you meant. It was. Feel free to use your own powers of telepathy to tell everybody else what I really meant, though; it's awesome when people do that. I stand by the statement that "these people are dying for something specific", even if we haven't been told what it is yet, is a lot more narratively satisfying than "these people probably committed unspecified war crimes".
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Sep 30, 2014 16:29
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ChairMaster posted:Haha yea, I'm sure that's what you meant. As long as nobody important sees you do it it's okay. What other crimes should result in automatic forfeiture of life without due process, in your opinion? Robbery? Fraud? Littering?
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Sep 30, 2014 16:52
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SlothfulCobra posted:Well if you want to start getting crazy starfish analogies up in here, here's one: And do you know who's also a starfish? Patrick. Also starfish are toxic and that little girl is touching them with her bare hands and you're bad at this, Moonshadow. Or maybe she's good at this and the starfish toxins are addictive. Level Slide fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Sep 30, 2014 |
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Sep 30, 2014 17:32
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Level Slide posted:And do you know who's also a starfish? Patrick.
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Sep 30, 2014 18:13
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I wonder if this is going to tie back into Patrick's reason for quitting the whole thing - all those superpowered kids with actual useful world-saving powers like generating electric power and talking to diseases dying young in suspicious ways. Maybe these guys are some of the tools used to kill some of the kids?
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Sep 30, 2014 18:18
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Maybe, but Moonshadow doesn't really strike me as someone who you could easily control, especially if your motivations were sinister. Rather like trying to pour hydrochloric acid on someone by cupping it in your hands.
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Sep 30, 2014 18:38
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Meanwhile Allison is trying to dam the entrance to the bay or something.
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Sep 30, 2014 18:56
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MikeJF posted:Meanwhile Allison is trying to dam the entrance to the bay or something. and causes an environmental disaster due to an insufficient understanding of the ecological consequences of damming.
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Sep 30, 2014 19:33
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Slashrat posted:What other crimes should result in automatic forfeiture of life without due process, in your opinion? Robbery? Fraud? Littering? War criminals, murderers who wear blue, and other such criminals who will never be prosecuted due to the prejudices of the culture they come from all seem like pretty good targets.  Moonshadows little monologue definitely feels like a response to the question Allison indirectly posed to the Guardians. She, like Hector, has opted for the "it still matters" approach but has taken it much further than Hector.
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Sep 30, 2014 19:52
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Whatever happened to two wrongs don't make a right anyway?  Vigilantism is wrong. So is criminals getting off on technicalities. Doesn't mean you can solve the latter with the former. As much as I might want to. In fact, Alison's conversation with Cleaver is about that in some ways.
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Sep 30, 2014 20:06
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Alopex posted:I wonder if this is going to tie back into Patrick's reason for quitting the whole thing - all those superpowered kids with actual useful world-saving powers like generating electric power and talking to diseases dying young in suspicious ways. That'd be neat, but why invite them to a party and why is Moonshadow so bad at pin the tail on the donkey?
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Sep 30, 2014 20:30
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I could also just be a story about what PTSD would do to teenage super soldiers.
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Sep 30, 2014 20:32
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Warmachine posted:Whatever happened to two wrongs don't make a right anyway? I'm actually willing to even oppose the idea that criminals getting off on technicalities is wrong. When people talk about "technicalities", what they mean is generally something like "the police didn't follow the rules when they collected evidence and it got thrown out of the trial". In that case, if the evidence DIDN'T get thrown out, the result would be that all police everywhere would just start ignoring those rules. Letting criminals go in that case is an integral and important part of our justice system. Our system is meant to be weighted to let guilty people go to minimize the number of innocent people that get punished, and that's really the better way of doing things. Vigilantes weight things the other way - they'll punish people they feel must have done something, which is a recipe for killing innocent people along with guilty since nobody's feelings can be right all the time. That's the main thing that's wrong with it; we have rules of evidence and procedure to boil away as many of the personal biases people have as we can so that we can take a bunch of imperfect parts (human beings) and turn them into a system that, by and large, does justice. It's a goal we're still working towards, as a society, and things are definitely not perfect right now (especially in, say, rape cases), but working on that system is much better than just throwing it all away and shooting whoever seems shifty. People sympathize with the vigilante, though, because we've all known cases where we feel like justice wasn't done, and it's so much easier to imagine that some person can just deal with it, simply, with no red tape and no arguments, even though the red tape and the arguments serve a purpose.
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Sep 30, 2014 21:23
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idonotlikepeas posted:I'm actually willing to even oppose the idea that criminals getting off on technicalities is wrong. When people talk about "technicalities", what they mean is generally something like "the police didn't follow the rules when they collected evidence and it got thrown out of the trial". In that case, if the evidence DIDN'T get thrown out, the result would be that all police everywhere would just start ignoring those rules. Letting criminals go in that case is an integral and important part of our justice system. In addition to avoiding the risk of innocent being targeted, blood feuds are another very good reason prevent vigilantism. One guy kills somebody that he or she feels absolutely deserves it, then somebody else comes along and kills that person for what they see as a heinous murder, and so on the cycle continues until a century later nobody remembers how the thing started, just that "those other people" need to be killed before they can kill you.
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Sep 30, 2014 22:23
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idonotlikepeas posted:I'm actually willing to even oppose the idea that criminals getting off on technicalities is wrong. When people talk about "technicalities", what they mean is generally something like "the police didn't follow the rules when they collected evidence and it got thrown out of the trial". In that case, if the evidence DIDN'T get thrown out, the result would be that all police everywhere would just start ignoring those rules. Letting criminals go in that case is an integral and important part of our justice system. I agree, but I think in this case I think "technicalities" was a poor choice of words. Sometimes guilty people go free not because of an inherent and necessary slant in the system but because of flat-out corruption and prejudice (and sometimes innocent people are declared guilty for the same reasons), which I think is what the comic is really trying to address: rapists going free because society believes rape is something only done by sinister strangers in dark alleys, war criminals going unnoticed by the justice system because we don't care when awful things happen to people in Iraq. The answer to these problems isn't vigilante justice, which is a terrible idea for a whole host of reasons we've already covered (and more besides), but they are problems. Having a fair justice system means we need to make concessions, and I'm as against throwing that out in the name of "getting our man" as you are, but I don't think that's the issue the comic is raising here. Opposing Farce fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Oct 1, 2014 |
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Oct 1, 2014 07:24
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Sure, that's fair. There are institutional problems, and many of them are hard to address as a matter of law. It's not as if we can make a rule saying "clean-cut white boys can still be guilty" or, rather, we DO have such a rule but it's impossible to force people to follow it. As long as our legal system involves human beings in any way, it's going to reflect society's biases.
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Oct 1, 2014 22:33
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idonotlikepeas posted:It was. Feel free to use your own powers of telepathy to tell everybody else what I really meant, though; it's awesome when people do that. We know at least one of those though, "gunning down a family of 5 in Fallujah". I think it would be safe to infer the other mercs had something similar in their past.
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Oct 2, 2014 02:07
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On another note: definitely supporting the hypothesis that there is Something Special about that knife. It's certainly not your average combat knife. I'm agreeing with the people guessing it used to be part of Daniel's blades and can cut Alison.
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Oct 2, 2014 18:49
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