Not Good Company 2015-05-14

[DSL]

I'm with Timotheus. The paramedics and cops who catch this call are gonna need lots of counseling. And so will their counselors.

[AnotherFairportfan]

I'm with Timotheus. The paramedics and cops who catch this call are gonna need lots of counseling. And so will their counselors.

Not if the paramedics are MiB paramedics, who we've already seen cleaning up after Suzie once before.

[Thor]

Based on Suzi saying the cops were called due to screaming and found the kid in the oven, we can be relatively sure, In This Case, that Suzi has 'the right man'...

Nonetheless, it occurred to me that she might be bullsh*tting the dude as he expires, just to twist the knife, so to speak.

I thought about that, and I really, *REALLY* hope not

SUZIE: Out of sight, out of mind. No one should be forgotten, or made to feel that they don't matter. That's how vampires are made!

Yeah, but the thing here is that it is all so vague. Suzie's not exactly reciting a carefully calibrated recipe for instant vampire. It's almost like saying "From bird and beast and garden plot, that's where omelets come from." It's technically true, but if you have a rabbit and a quail in a strawberry patch, you aren't going to get the breakfast you might be hoping for.

[shadowinthelight]

I'm with Timotheus. The paramedics and cops who catch this call are gonna need lots of counseling. And so will their counselors.

Not if the paramedics are MiB paramedics, who we've already seen cleaning up after Suzie once before.

Depending on if they are some other species of paranormal they may regard the mess as "leftovers".

[Catawampus]

I'm thinking I could 'tech' for Suzi and eat pizza between instrument passes... and I do not consider myself a violent or vengeful man.

I dó consider myself a violent man. . . .Knówing I have that tendency, but not giving in to it, and let our justice sysyem deal with the real nasties, is far more important to me than letting my short-term primitive urges towards revenge rule my doings.

If someone shoots at me, I'll shoot back, but when he's finally down, say with a 9mm throug his shattered hand&wrist, i will patch him up, and call the paramedics.

But, then again, that's how I taught myself to function. Suze is just a loose cannon that only gets away with it because the MIB will keep this under wraps. She's nòt motivated by justice, but only by vengeance, and especially towards men, because of her past.

I used to be and still have the potential to be an extremely violent person. I grew up in an extremely violent environment, and the only way to survive was to meet even the slightest sign of threat with either running away or, if that wasn't a likely option, with all-out attack (learning to react with a graduated response was probably one of the hardest things I had to do when I eventually managed to join civilised society). I probably wasn't much older than Castela's character the first time I had to kill somebody, and doing it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I was never the sort who would just go out and murder people for the fun of it, or because they cut me off in traffic, or anything like that, but I never had any problem with it if I sincerely thought that they were a genuine threat to myself or to somebody who was under my protection. It's my feeling that they're making the choice to act as they do, and so they have to accept the consequences of their actions. This is obviously a rather controversial attitude, but fortunately after I got out of my initial situation I never had to put it to the test anywhere outside of my work for the military (where it's considered much more socially acceptable). It is something that I do worry about fairly often, though: what will happen if I have to chose between the standards of the society that I'm trying to fit into on the one hand, and being absolutely sure that somebody won't be a threat to somebody else on the other? It might be a good thing that I'm familiar with police investigative techniques, in case I ever need to hide my tracks. . .

That being said, though, I'm not approving of what all Suzie has done here. Let's assume that she knew that the guy was guilty, and even that she was convinced that the only way to keep him from harming anybody else was to kill him then and there. Okay, fine. Then she ought to have done just that. But she didn't. She instead chose to engage in a long torture session for vague and probably poorly-defined reasons. Yes, I have hit or threatened people before when I needed to get important information out of them as quickly as possible. But I've never gone off and performed some elaborate painful process on somebody just because I felt that they were "guilty" or that they "deserved it", no matter how I personally felt about what they'd done. When some men killed my wife and daughter so as to send me a message, that's about as personal as you can get. But when I tracked them down, I never really had any ideas on long drawn-out scenarios to make them suffer or whatever. I just killed them quickly to make sure as soon as possible that they'd never be able to hurt me or anybody else ever again. They felt justified in doing more than that to people, so what would be the point in doing the same to them in order to get rid of them if I was just going to take their role myself? Torturing people--even bad people--just to hurt them and to make yourself feel better pretty much invalidates whatever other justifications you make because you're only transferring the problem from them into you.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter, and I do tend to think about these sorts of things fairly often. And presumably getting us to think about and discuss things such as these, and suicide, and rape, and persecution, and all of these other dark and nasty and family-unfriendly matters is the reason why Mr. Taylor chooses to incorporate them into his plotlines. That may make for unpleasant stories occasionally, but unpleasant doesn't necessarily mean badly done. He's made a number of decisions over the years in this comic that I didn't really care for, both technical and story-wise, but overall I can't say that the comic has ever really been too shallow or uninteresting. I'm perfectly willing to see where this latest bit of unpleasantness goes; even if the comic may end up going somewhere that I wouldn't have chosen, that doesn't mean that it will be going somewhere that isn't worth going to.

[Catawampus]

Suzi is very close to going over the edge with this. While she may feel justified she is not. She is acting by herself in deciding what should be done to a criminal rather than letting society to handle it. She set herself above the social contract and legal system.

One of the curious things to me is the back-and-forth nature of Suzie's feelings on this sort of thing. When we first met her, we had a flashback to her having killed a criminal. But when she and Lily were being yelled at shortly thereafter, she mentioned that determining guilt should have been left to the court system. And now she's gone ahead and taken things into her own hands again. So even she seems to think that she shouldn't be doing what she's doing. It's like some sort of an addiction or compulsion. So, will she decide that maybe she ought to try not doing it, and if so will she try getting help from somebody else?

No one is commenting on the fact that Suz is, I believe, the first mortal to confirm there's an afterlife?

We've known for a good while that there's an afterlife. It's been confirmed that there are souls and that they go somewhere after death. It's just that the nature of the afterlife (reincarnation, paradise and hell, merging with the great cosmic soul, whatever) has been left vague.

It's entirely possible that Suzie herself doesn't actually know, and is just saying what she believes to be true or is just making up stuff to mess with the guy even more.

I think you've pointed out the most important reason to walk away from this sort of vengeance. "Justice" and "honor" and "payback" are somewhat subjective, and if you allow the "eye for an eye" mentality to take control, you run the risk of setting up just the sort of positive-feedback revenge-for-revenge loop we've seen all too many times.

That's what a good system of justice does... it applies enough negative feedback against misbehavior (adequate deterrence and punishment, and isolation of those who will not be deterred) without allowing the sort of excessive overreactions that lead to tit-for-tat vigilante atrocities.

Years ago in one of the universities I went to, I studied the philosophy of law and authority. One of the ideas that we went over was the concept of justice systems. One common theory about justice systems is that justice is actually mostly irrelevant in them, and could even be harmful. After all, "justice" and "fairness" are extremely slippery and subjective concepts. The basic purpose of a justice system isn't about establishing justice, but rather about providing a culturally-approved method of resolving instances where the social contracts between people have been frayed or broken. The exact hows and whys don't matter in that theory, rather it's all a matter of setting up a system where the majority of people involved are willing to accept whatever rules have been set up so that they can all tidy up the problem and society can go on with its life.

According to that theory, any forms of trial, investigation, punishment, and so on (or even a total lack of any of those) is perfectly acceptable so long as the end result is that the majority of people are happy with how things turn out and things remain stable. A good justice system is therefore not judged based on what rules it follows, but rather solely by its results.

I wonder what the results of a "vampires chase down and eat the suspects" justice system would end up being in Minneapolis?

And Suzie does know. If he weren't guilty. she' be screaming on the floor, with blood running out of her eyes.

That's exactly the point I was going to bring up that some seem to be forgetting. Vampires in the Wapsiverse appear to have a built in paranormal guilt-o-meter. Suzie is not standing on a slippery slope, there is a big damn wall to keep her in check. If vampires were able to kill whoever they wanted they probably wouldn't be viewed as so weak by other paranormals.

From the way that their chief and Phix said it, I got the impression that it's a case of they can only enter a residence if they're either invited, or if the person living there is "guilty" (just what the threshold level of guiltiness for that is and what they have to be guilty of, I have no idea). If they can catch somebody outside, or indoors in a building that isn't protected in that way (perhaps a public building), then there wouldn't be anything preventing them from killing a "guilty" or "innocent" person.

[Mark N]

I can see the future now... A medium sized meeting room with coffee and donuts on a table at one end. A group of beings sitting in a large circle, some sitting comfortably and others looking nervous. It is a bit quiet but than we see a bespectacled woman stand up and after thinking about her words for a moment she says "Hello, my name is Susie and I am a vengeance addict...."

[Warrl]

From the way that their chief and Phix said it, I got the impression that it's a case of they can only enter a residence if they're either invited, or if the person living there is "guilty" (just what the threshold level of guiltiness for that is and what they have to be guilty of, I have no idea).

I predict that, if and when the comic ever gets around to dealing with that question, the qualifying offenses could plausibly be described and categorized as "blood crimes". (Whether Paul would actually use that term - rather less likely, but quite plausible.)

It would fit the vampire theme, and also fits the two cases we've seen to date.

[jwhouk]

And that third one at the Hennepin County Mental Health Center all those years ago...

[BrickJAK]

Something I think people concerned with the well being of the paramedics who Suzi called in have glossed over are her words ...

" ... paramedics I called to fuck around with you. ... "

Sure, she may have been speaking of them working on him in a futile attempt to save him.

But the ones she called may be a type of pain-eater para. They know he's going to die but have ways of extending the misery as long as possible.

Akin to the "civilized" ghoul family in the Iron Druid series. They provide crime scene clean up service as their cover ... but get called in by the paranormal community to do "specialized" clean-up for the scenes that need that special touch.

Everything has its niche.

[kingklash]

I can see the future now... A medium sized meeting room with coffee and donuts on a table at one end. A group of beings sitting in a large circle, some sitting comfortably and others looking nervous. It is a bit quiet but than we see a bespectacled woman stand up and after thinking about her words for a moment she says "Hello, my name is Susie and I am a vengeance addict...."

"And if any of you rat me out, I'll get you! I'll get each and every one of you! See if I don't!"

[scantrontb]

"And if any of you rat me out, I'll get you! I'll get each and every one of you! See if I don't!"

Why? oh why, do i hear that in a James Cagney Gangster accent...

[Atomic]

"Welcome to the Psychiatric Crisis Hotline!

If you're Obsessive-Compulsive, press 1 repeatedly.
If you're Co-Dependent, have someone press 2 for you.
If you're Schizophrenic, press 3 and 5.
If you're Narcissist, you could press 4, but you're better than that.
And if your Paranoid, don't press anything -- we already know about you."

[AnotherFairportfan]

Well, well, well.

Judging by the latest posting at Paul's eBay page, he's spent a fair amount of time working out how to draw Devyn.

Odds on whether we're getting a new cast member?

[tophoo]

Well, well, well.

Judging by the latest posting at Paul's eBay page, he's spent a fair amount of time working out how to draw Devyn.

Odds on whether we're getting a new cast member?

heh.
One of the scribbled notes on the 'Devyn Studies' rather tickled me: "very square hairstyle".
Would I be the only one thinking, "Aaaand, would be terribly different from..?"

Don't mistake me- love the style, but Paolo be drawin' some square-headed ladies 'round here.

[AnotherFairportfan]

Well, well, well.

Judging by the latest posting at Paul's eBay page, he's spent a fair amount of time working out how to draw Devyn.

Odds on whether we're getting a new cast member?

heh.
One of the scribbled notes on the 'Devyn Studies' rather tickled me: "very square hairstyle".
Would I be the only one thinking, "Aaaand, would be terribly different from..?"

Don't mistake me- love the style, but Paolo be drawin' some square-headed ladies 'round here.

Might be referring to "square" as in "not like the cool kids"...