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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   20021 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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We love the vigilante as a romantic hero, but his story always ends in tragic sacrifice

I would say that's a very culturally contingent reading. How many Batman comics end up with Bruce Wayne asking to be arrested? What about the murderer in the Christie's Orient Express? At the end of the Count of Monte Christo the count gets most but not all of his revenge and goes off east to live in happiness with his cute ex-slavegirl.

There are two main kinds of vigilante, one politically more ambivalent than the other. The first is the justicar, the knight, the semi-sanctioned or unsanctioned sheriff who corrects the mistake of a hopelessly and explicitly corrupt governing structure co-opted by explicitly political interests in a way that deprives the masses of justice. This is Batman. The second category is more explicitly right wing, the vigilante against anarchy-tyranny, against the criminal masses, against the mob. This is more explicitly right wing, Curtis Sliwa, Daniel Penny, that kind of thing.

The easy way to tell which kind of vigilante story it is is to ask yourself - “do the criminal villains in this story broadly and demographically represent the real perpetrators of most urban violent crime in the location in which this story is set?”. If no, it’s the former, if yes, it’s the latter.

What about the murderer in the Christie's Orient Express?

As opposed to the killer in Christie's Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None?

At the end of the Count of Monte Christo

I'm more familiar with the space version it inspired, The Stars My Destination, where the ending is all about the antihero's desire to be purged and punished and so achieve forgiveness. But that's probably from a similar era/culture as a lot of Westerns.

I never read ‘And Then There Were Nine’ but isn’t the killer a violent deluded maniac? Whereas the killer in the Orient Express is a symmetric group of people who saw a monstrous miscarriage of justice and felt bound to correct it.

The killer in 'And then there were none' was also someone who saw miscarriages of justice and felt bound to correct it -- everyone he called to the island to kill was someone he felt hadn't been sufficiently punished and deserved to die for what they'd done. One can quibble, perhaps, about whether his own death counts, dying as he was from an incurable disease prior to his suicide, and if he actually believes that he has done anything wrong in his murders.

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