#aka who died and made you two the arbitrators of who's allowed to kill and be killed

[spandexinspace]

This week's issue of World's Finest brought an interesting issue back up to the surface.

There often is an in-universe expectation that all superpowered people should be willing and able to act like Superman, to avoid killing and stand strong in the face of the worst threats in the universe, but most of these people aren't Superman. Most of them would be turned into a fine paste long before Superman even broke a sweat.

Could all the heroes of Earth have repelled Darkseid? Possibly. But they would probably have suffered heavy losses and since this isn't the main universe there's actual a real risk that they could lose. Killing Gog solves the issue, at least for the time being, with next to no bloodshed. So the way Superman and Batman start laying into David feels a little... much. There's a real chance the narrative would have allowed them to kill here and would have justified that decision as righteous, even celebrated it, but only because Superman is so powerful and Batman is Batman. Other characters aren't afforded that level of trust.

It's a convention of the genre of course, but it raises some weird questions in universe. Is it really fair to expect everyone, even those far weaker, to live up to the same standards as some of the strongest mortals in the universe? To avoid killing and stand their ground until a point far beyond what they themselves can withstand? To lay down their own lives because the death of not only a murderer but a threat to existence itself is too sacred?

Comics occasionally like to tout that killing a murderer leaves the world with the same number of murderers, but that's only true once. And doesn't account for the number of murder victims.