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Samaritan Syndrome: Difference between revisions
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** There's a prose short story where he's about to get out of bed and begin a day of crime-fighting and people saving. His wife convinces him to stay in bed for just five more minutes of snuggling. Later, it turns out that during those five minutes, someone committed suicide, in a manner he easily could have stopped. [[Heroic BSOD]] ensues.
* Rorschach of ''[[Watchmen (comics)|Watchmen]]'' is what happens when this trope is taken off the far end. Walter Kovacs has no real friends, families, job, or anything of substance in his life as a civilian. His whole purpose of being is so Rorschach can gather information and continue to be a justice enforcing masked-hero, even though it eats away at his humanity. Given the book's [[Deconstruction]] status, this is to be expected, as Rorschach is meant to establish what would happen to people who felt responsible to bring punishment to others at their own expense.
** In fact, ''every'' hero in ''[[Watchmen]]'' shows what happens when so-called superheroes exist. Dr. Manhattan increasingly feel disconnected from humanity by his [[Physical God|god-like abilities]]; the Comedian ''snapped'' and became a sociopath in order to reconcile the horrors that he saw, Night-Owl held on to his idealism and punished himself for it later in life, and Rorschach lost his mind to his delusions, becoming the very thing he once hunted. And of course, {{spoiler|Ozymandias eventually felt that his heroing was too limited in scale and decided he needed to protect the world, even [[We Have Reserves|at the expense of a small part of it]]}}, basically taking the [["Three Laws
* Alluded to in B-list books like ''[[Animal Man]]'', where it's often [[Hand Wave|mentioned]] that someone more famous like Superman can't show up to [[Deus Ex Machina|upstage the hero]] because of an [[Eldritch Abomination]] or some such.
* In ''[[Irredeemable]]'' this is implied to have been a contributing factor to [[Beware the Superman|The Plutonian]] becoming [[Ax Crazy]].
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