i maintain that both helen and elias are characters that exist to make you ask yourself when does the punishment fit the crime.
with helen you have like, the struggling with the picture of a perfect victim being broken or symphatizing with someone who was really quite a bad person and trying to make sense of that; whereas with elias the tragedy was more like, he was really still very young and it was just a ton of wasted potential in terms of him now not being able to grow as a person.
could elias have been a better person if given the chance? does the crime of being middle class and sort of entitled and coasting through life with the help of money and the privilege of daddy’s status deserve the punishment of being killed and worn as a skin suit?
is feeling guilty for the death of a woman immoral if the woman was a bad person? did she deserve everything and anything bad that happened to her? is the tragedy that you felt bad for her, or that you can’t feel bad for her anymore, or that you wanted her punished but not like this? how do you separate yourself from the senseless violence of it when you feel personally responsible?
do horrible things only matter if they’re done to innocent people?
can you escape the horrors of capitalism even with all that privilege, and should we care if someone with all that privilege gets killed?
how much privilege is too much?
how much participation with capitalism is too much to be refused rehabilitation?
how do you know the person was a lost cause if they’re now dead without any push from anyone to figure out they should change?
actually i think “do horrible things only matter if they’re done to innocent people” is a big question in tma in general.
is the hunt and most hunt characters bad because you risk killing innocent people, or because vigilante justice and institutionalized policing are both bad? is killing bad people okay? what is the line between person and monster? if you shift the line between person and monster how long does it take for the definition to change?
what makes a monster a monster? if you can convince enough people that something is monstrous. is daisy worse than julia and trevor, or do we see institutionalized policing as inherently more violent and immoral than vigilante justice? why do we see it that way? what is dangerous enough to be killed? at what point is rehabilitation not viable anymore? were julia and trevor rehabilitatable, and do we care? was the issue with daisy that not enough people believed that the people she hurt or killed were monsters? if given enough time and power could she have shifted the definition back? would it have justified it? how do we know the current definition isnt hurting non-monsters? does it matter if they’re really monsters? if daisy wasn’t tainted by murdering monsters and people alike but tainted by doing it as a cop, does that reveal something about how we as leftists perceive community policing? state versus individual? who gets to choose where the line lies between murder and protecting the community? can those describe the same thing? daisy moved from being a cop to being a vigilante because her actions were too extreme for the police force, but we still see her worst action as her being a cop.
is vigilante justice better than police violence? can you be a good vigilante the way you can’t be a good cop?
what is a monster?
is the death penalty bad because it’s state enacted murder or is it bad because murder is bad. is the death penalty bad because you risk killing innocent people or because killing people is bad. who deserves to die? who decides it? does it matter who decides it? does it matter who does it?
did daisy have to be rehabilitated from being a cop or from hunting people down to kill them because of her own trauma and inability to see things as anything but me (and the singular person i trust to be on my side) versus them? me versus everyone out to get me? me versus the things that cannot continue to live because they are too dangerous?
do we expect trevor and julia to be rehabilitated from the exact same mindset?
what is a monster, and who gets to kill them, and how do we determine innocence, and does innocence matter when debating the ethics of killing.
in a fight between a killer cop trying to rid the world of monsters and dangerous people, and a vigilante traveling around with the goal of purging the earth of monsters, who is morally in the right? is there an answer? what is the issue with killing people? when is killing for the greater good no longer for the greater good, and can it ever be that to begin with?
does innocence matter?