Vigilante Man: Difference between revisions

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* [[Tom Clancy]] dipped into this genre with ''Without Remorse'', which probably owes some inspiration to [[The Punisher]]. Desconstructed in that the protagonist himself is a little worried by his own lack of guilt over some [[Cold-Blooded Torture|pretty]] [[Nightmare Fuel|unpleasant]] methods of questioning, even on an unrepentant [[Complete Monster]].

* The Bluejay, also known as {{spoiler|Mortimer Folchart}} in ''[[The Inkworld Trilogy (Literature)|The Inkworld Trilogy]]'' shows shades of this, particularly in the third book.

* Vigilante man? Try vigilante GENERAL!!! [http://tcrane.tripod.com/johnstn.html Ben Raines of the Ashes series] by [http://www.williamjohnstone.net/Ashes.html William Johnstone]. Imagine if the Punisher saved America by being the post-apocalyptic George Washington. Imagine the rest of the world is made of alternately criminal drug-running dictators or tree-hugging communist hippies. And now imagine he's just been elected president. And you still only have a TENTH of the insanity of this world. [[What the Hell, Hero?|Raines does such downright crazy and morally black shit]] sometimes that not even [[Warhammer 40 K|The Emperor]] would approve of (like blitzing a city of war orphans being brainwashed into child soldiers just so it won't cost him a single Red-White-And-Blue-Blooded American life, or monologuing about how children who grow up in slums can never know what the good life is to reporters, then gunning them down on live television), and that's a crapsack UNIVERSE. Essentially, he commits vast atrocities on par or above standard [[Crapsack World]] characters, both heroes and villains, simply because he is as risk-averse as a cuddly soccer mom. A cuddly soccer mom with nuclear arms, miles of artillery shells, [[Apocalypse Now|and a fetish for napalm and fuel bombs]]. Small wonder anybody with any semblance of religious leaning considers him the Antichrist. (A lot of it scarily justified through 'sins of the father/brother/sister/mother' arguments, [[Knight Templar|then again the author's father]] was a [[Black and White Morality|fire and brimstone kind of minister]].)

* Vigilante man? Try vigilante GENERAL!!! [http://tcrane.tripod.com/johnstn.html Ben Raines of the Ashes series] by [http://www.williamjohnstone.net/Ashes.html William Johnstone]. Imagine if the Punisher saved America by being the post-apocalyptic George Washington. Imagine the rest of the world is made of alternately criminal drug-running dictators or tree-hugging communist hippies. And now imagine he's just been elected president. And you still only have a TENTH of the insanity of this world. [[What the Hell, Hero?|Raines does such downright crazy and morally black shit]] sometimes that not even [[Warhammer 40000 (Tabletop Game)|The Emperor]] would approve of (like blitzing a city of war orphans being brainwashed into child soldiers just so it won't cost him a single Red-White-And-Blue-Blooded American life, or monologuing about how children who grow up in slums can never know what the good life is to reporters, then gunning them down on live television), and that's a crapsack UNIVERSE. Essentially, he commits vast atrocities on par or above standard [[Crapsack World]] characters, both heroes and villains, simply because he is as risk-averse as a cuddly soccer mom. A cuddly soccer mom with nuclear arms, miles of artillery shells, [[Apocalypse Now|and a fetish for napalm and fuel bombs]]. Small wonder anybody with any semblance of religious leaning considers him the Antichrist. (A lot of it scarily justified through 'sins of the father/brother/sister/mother' arguments, [[Knight Templar|then again the author's father]] was a [[Black and White Morality|fire and brimstone kind of minister]].)

* In Ian [[Mc Ewan]]'s novella 'Black Dogs' the narrator becomes a Good [[Vigilante Man]] after he sees a man in a restaurant ''smack his kid across the face so hard the kid's chair is knocked over backwards and cracks on the floor.'' The narrator challenges the man to "fight someone his own size" and then manages to break the guy's nose and knock him out with a few punches. He is called off by a waitress and stops him just before he becomes [[He Who Fights Monsters]] and kicks the guy to death. This moment provides a contrast from the [[Grey and Gray Morality]] of the rest of the book.

* ''[[Nuklear Age]]'' presents The Civil Defender, a crazed vigilante hell-bent on eliminating all crime, no matter how small. Complete with machine gun and futuristic body armor, the Civil Defender took up being a vigilante when his sandwich was stolen, and gives out tickets written on notebook paper when he's sane enough to have his finger off the trigger of his machine gun. He has repeatedly given out tickets for littering because of the pile of other tickets he personally threw to the ground.