Board Thread:Clean up Concerns/@comment-15895329-20171029005512/@comment-15895329-20171029205417

Wireblade wrote: depends how far a vigilante goes.. all vigilantes (yes even Batman) are criminals.. they are all hypocritical, really unpleasant individuals but they are usually seen as heroic due to motives and what they will NOT do.. that's what separates them from other criminals.. like soldiers having a code of conduct separates them from mercenaries or terrorists.

for a vigilante to be considered a villain they need to go to Punisher level extremes, since torture and cold-blooded murder of criminals is just as evil as crime itself (yes people argue all the time about "heroes killing people like Joker is a good thing" - no it's really not.. because after Joker is dead they kill some guy for breaking into a car, then they torture someone to death for jaywalking and before you know it you have Injustice Superman or the Justice Lords or that time Tony Stark decided to lock up pretty much every person in Marvel that didn't agree with the flawed fascist piece of "law" known as Superhuman Registration).

also remember that heroes ALWAYS end up going insane at some point.. Green Lantern killed half of DC alone when he became Parallax, Superman goes evil every second Tuesday.. Captain America went evil.. Tony Stark (as mentioned before) is a revolving face-heel character and these days many comics are doing the awful 90s revival of having heroes be Nazis and villains so as to explore "new" ideas and politics.. which really aren't that new and are as about as useful to social commentary as your average facebook profile. Several problems with the above:

1) Not ALL vigilantes/heroes are hypocrites, that is an overgeneralization. I don't even think Punisher, Jason, etc. are hypocrites; just murderous vigilantes who's methods are too extreme to be defensible. But I see Arrowverse Oliver Queen the same way. It's not a question of whether or not they are hypocrites, but whether or not their methods are acceptable (and they aren't).

2) Arrow DOES go to Punisher-level extremes, IE: cold-blooded murder and torture, which he regularly employs (not to mention skinning someone alive)

3) Saying that heroes "always go insane at some point" is another false overgeneralization, and in any event, there is a difference between a one-off moment of madness owing to mind control, reality being altered by Cosmic Cube, and so on, and a character completely in control of their faculties who is consistently and as a matter of routine employing unsavory methods. Arrow is the latter, not the former.