Grrl Power #922 – After action flippancy
Cora and Dabbler obviously have some shared history and sense of humor. Dabbler tries to not fly her “I’m an alien sex demon intergalactic woman of mystery and mayhem” TOO high while she’s on Earth, but sometimes it slips out. And if you’re thinking “Really? Cause she does lots of sex stuff.” Remember that she doesn’t orgy the team comatose every night, so yeah, she’s keeping herself pretty reigned in. That’s only possible because she gets herself some Super-grade tantric good good every so often.
You know how in cop shows, when a cop is involved in a fatal shooting, they make them go see the police psychologist just to make sure they’re doing okay and/or not reveling in the kill? That conversation was difficult with Dabbler because she didn’t have any sense of weight for the event. Not in a psychopathic way, which is definitely a flag in itself, just in a “I’m used to a more wild wild west system of justice where I’m a freelance bounty hunter and it’s accepted that killing inveterate recidivist felons objectively makes the universe a better place.” and eventually they were like “Look, just don’t kill anyone unless there’s no alternative or you can’t work with us.” and Dabbler’s like “Ug. Whatever, it’s your planet.”
If you think that attitude should disqualify her from law enforcement, well, that’s certainly arguable, but keep in mind that someone high up probably had the thought that if she hangs out on Earth for a while, maybe she’d share the thing that’s better than integrated circuits, or she’d leave her Astro-Phone laying on her dresser while she’s out on a mission, so who cares if a few criminals experience some space justice?
Cora… has not been through any of that screening stuff. She was just asked to try and not kill anyone.
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Yeah, this entire thing made me laugh, the way sidney describes it all the way up to how max reacted at the end
Dabbler’s face is a picture.
I think that’s the most alien that Dabbler’s ever looked.
Max’s reaction sells it.
Agreed. She’s like “You did WHAT?” with Cora at this point.
*shrug* He was bad.
The crusted blood on Sydney’s face did it for me. Her eyes, soooo wide…
When did Sydney get her chocker back? o_O
same time as her balls, it was taken off not destroyed.
I thought it tore when Concretia yanked it off.
PANEL 3: We (and Max) see Sydney has crusted blood on the back of her hands. Later we see that she’s got some on her forehead too.
That – plus a predator’s frustration at losing the prey – would explain Max’s uncharacteristic “WTF?”
Not to forget the stain on her previously-white shirt
oh yeah, and now that I look closely: all over the front of her boots.
She can take about 20 showers and I assume she can send the shirt to the laundry, but does she have to clean her own boots?
And a clean jacket. Which tells a pretty clear story of shields down, armour off of all your organs. Which 2+2 tells er Sydney was defenceless while being washed with blood.
The use of the Unwinder round was improper, not because it was Lethal, (lethal force was clearly justified), but because of the delay. You are only allowed to use lethal force to stop an immanent deadly threat. But the unwinder didn’t stop the Cowled Bad Guy immediately, it allowed several seconds of chat before killing him. An armed criminal can do a LOT of damage in that time, it was just luck (and incompetent villainy) that this one wanted to monologue instead.
It was also excessive, showy, and bad optics, but that’s more Arianna’s field than Maxima’s.
so next time she should use a caster shell that puts a forcefield around the target and then creates a micro-singularity to implode him safely within the forcefield.
Or use a caster shell that puts a forcefield around the target and then…thats it. Stop there, Cora.
or a crusher forcefield rendering the singularity unnecessary as it crushes the target into a sphere or cube, but as I mentioned that one some pages back on the same topic,
here’s one I haven’t mentioned before.
the magic cubes, doable as a spell as well as a forcefield projector.,
you can either incase the target into a large rectangular forcefield (the classic) or a mine craft looking body suit. the classic then uses forcefield edges to separate the body into segments, the classic just three big ones, the modified can be focused to much smaller boxes even separating the limbs into smaller sections.
these boxes then separate floating in the air with the severed body segments and either open up the bottom of the cubes to neatly drop the severed body parts or just vanish and let them splash down wherever.
this not only kills the target but has the psychological impact on their team mates making them flee or surrender as clearly you are an unhinged individual to do something so morbid yet playful at the same time.
for customers with specific aesthetics these can be modified with external projections to make the boxes look like magician boxes, birthday presents, Christmas presents, and various other options, so your sociopathic spell caster or high tech thematic character can deploy the same basic psychological warfare with their own flair.
Great book from many years ago that I read when I was young, the main character had a portable force field projector. It was tech he had picked up while on an alien world to keep him safe for the local environment. The locals used them as well it was standard practice. What stuck with me is at some point he ends up at gun point in a room full of bad guys. So he simply expands the field and walks out of the room, after removing the bad guys by applying them to the walls floor and ceiling.
In the John Ringo books the Posleen wars they build a force field mine. Similar to a Bouncing Betty except it projects a thin field a couple millimeters thick about fifty meters around it. These things are set up to go off randomly on the battle field so the Posleen don’t have the ability to detect them easily. Jump up kill a bunch then sneak away repeat. Yes they move around the battle field randomly as well, humans thinking outside the box and the whole thing was an accident when they figured it out. Guy who discovered it lost a hand and a foot and most of the side of the building he was in.
NO, they need to rearrange in space and reconnect the body in the new configuration, THEN drop the mess.
The problem with that round is if you then can’t remove the force field. It leathal…. just slowly.
I remember when the Invisible Woman in her darker moments would do this by making a small forcefield around people’s heads.
One of two character you never want to piss off the other being Shadow Cat, one can kill you with out touching you the other can kill you by pushing you into the nearest object. She dropped Thor into the earth and left him there he had to fight his way out only reason he survived is he is a god. Phasing Teleporting and force fields three power sets that if you get creative you can play merry hell with any character.
I remember one cross over where Iron-Man realized Shadow Cat is his kryptonite, for all his tech and being prepared for anything she can short out anything he builds as her phasing power not only passes through them but disrupts electrical equipment.
That’s the proper public punishment for a mime.
His arm was rendered immediately useless. If you look at the page again, he drops his gun when he is shot and his arm goes limp afterwards. So, the delay didn’t make the unwinder round ineffective at it’s goal of immediately stopping him from shooting Sydney. It just had the added effect of finishing him off automatically soon after the initial impact.
The Unwinder wasn’t any better at stopping him than a normal bullet would have been, therefore no justification to use it.
Finishing him off after, and not implicated by stopping him is murder.
The bottom line is, yeah, it was a needlessly violent type of round to use. And that is why it is notably discouraged. Cora was OTT compared to law enforcement, as is the point of the text.
It is still also worth noting it could just have been a type of round she had handy, that fit the category of “I want this guy to die”, and wasn’t intended as a “this is the ideal round to deal with him”. Such a round could have lots of specific purposes, dealing with regeneration or having a particular effect on certain armours or something. And a 22 to his arm probably would have stopped him to, without killing him afterwards…but equally, I wouldn’t say it was guaranteed, also would have let him shoot or do damage.
The unwinder, it instantly disabled his arm, rendering him not a threat. But even if he’d managed to block with the other arm instead, it would have eliminated him soon after still anyway. Is it ideal? No. Do you find it justified? Of course not. Does it still make sense? I’d say yes.
Yeah, that’s kind of the issue. She wasn’t supposed to act on that desire, she was supposed to do what she could reasonably consider necessary to stop him, no more, no less.
The impact of the Unwinder looked perfectly regular – a normal bullet would have done the same damage at impact, hence disabled his arm just as well.
It IS a disabling round. For Wolverine.
It is the type of round that makes even a grazing wound lethal. So, I could see some armies/individuals using them, they would just not be used by the white hats, more the grey and black, like black ops units.
It makes any hit lethal, if the round lodges in the target. (Let’s be generous, and say lodged in the target’s clothing/armour still counts.) If it penetrates the target and comes out the other side, then it won’t be in place by the time it starts unwinding – but appropriate design may be able to prevent through-penetration. If it’s a grazing wound, which only hits tangentially and doesn’t properly penetrate in the first place, then again the unwinder is long gone by the time it activates. Greatly increased lethality over regular ball rounds, true, just not quite to the point of every hit an overkill.
Also it should be weak against armor, since it has low penetration by design. This should be a big disadvantage for a military.
How do we know it’s not an armour-piercing round?
From observing that it didn’t overpenetrate(and its operation even relies on not overpenetrating), and left a minor wound. So it didn’t have a lot of kinetic power or penetration.
To be fair, I wouldn’t call that necessarily conclusive for something that’s as clearly beyond Earth-tech as the unwinder.
We don’t have the ability to make a shell reliably stop that dramatically, although deforming points and tail-heavy tumbling are apparently surprisingly effective. (For how compatible those features are with armour-piercing, I’ll need to defer to a more specialist armourer.) But the level of tech required to produce the unwinder effect in the first place is almost certainly higher than that required to include effective ‘bullet brakes’. Cora’s armourer can evidently pack the primary effect into a shell, so I’m willing to allow them the required secondary effect.
Well see, the kill afterwards isn’t a separate event. The bullet hits the target, then begins the process of dismantling the person from the inside out automatically. It’s all the same action. So, it wouldn’t legally count as the same as if you shot someone to disable them then shot them a second time to finish them off.
Either way, a shoulder shot is actually extremely lethal. Hollywood has given us the trope of a shoulder shot being relatively safe, but major arteries go through the shoulder and you can bleed out very rapidly from a bullet going through there. The unwinder is unnecessarily messy, but as it has no collateral damage it’s only really a step up from a normal gun in terms of emotional reaction to it.
There’s still no justification to load the Unwinder in the first place, other than making sure he dies regardless of what’s needed to stop him. Hence that choice is murder. It’s like a cop shooting someone with a taser after having poisoned the projectiles.
It’s less lethal than the Unwinder – in this case it could be seen that it wasn’t bleeding very strongly.
The Unwinder is a different quality is a different animal because its lethality is decoupled from it’s stopping power. With regular guns, the deader(in terms of chances of survival) you shoot them the quicker they go down, which is why it’s justified to shoot someone very dead if you need to stop them. But the Unwinder shoots someone very dead but waits for them to go down.
Also, I don’t think the triggering of the Unwinder was a process. He was fine except for the shoulder wound, then suddenly ripped apart all at once. I think it was either a delayed or a remote controlled fuze.
The unwinder was an appropriate round for the biggest threat Cora knew of anticipated: Concretia.
A solid slug would have done very little. The unwinder would probably have reduced a golem to gravel, buying Cora time to rescue Sydney and fly away.
As it happened, is was more payload than was necessary to do the job. Cora didn’t really have time to stop and reload
and Sydney would have been hit by flying stone instead of human fleshy bits.
I disagree this was intended for Concretia, especially as its implied Cora was seeing what Sydney was through the glasses up the point they were smacked off, her target was clearly that guy.
It doesn’t matter, she doesn’t need an excuse she is an action hero trope, stuff the grenade in his pocket, kick him off the roof, say a one liner as he explodes on the way down.
No more no less.
All the Unwinder could do is break Concretia’s rock body – which barely slows her down, and Peggy proved a high-powered slug can have same effect, but without a tactically awkward delay of several seconds between impact and effect.
Well, Cora was on-scene and made the call,for better or worse. I’d guess that converting a golem to gravel is more effective than just shooting off the head, since forming a golem takes a couple of beats, but as Rhuen points out what does it matter? Action hero does action hero stuff. The rest of us sit in our comfy chairs, lacking super powers or alien tech.
That’s not clear – I believe her choice was motivated by wanting to murder him, not tactical considerations, and I support this by arguing that there’s no tactical justification to the choice.
Concretia tends to rebuild her golems when they’re damaged anyway, and whatever delay she gains she loses waiting for the Unwinder to trigger.
Grrl Power is very explicit about defying action hero tropes and analyzing consequences, like when Maxima taught Sydney how to avoid collateral damage in a superpowered fight.
Unwinder rounds are probably practical ammunition for someone who shoots at a wide range of xenos.
It was NECESSARILY messy. The necessity was a deterrence to the henches to continue the combat. It worked.
Any other munitions you try to impose instead of that one, you have to explain exactly how you create a 100% chance that the boss gets off no orders to kill the hostage, and that the henches do not continue the violence.
That choice was tactically brilliant and worked perfectly. The assumption that “she could have pulled any other magic munition I imagine out of her butt and it also would have worked perfectly and no bad guy would have done anything else” is wishful thinking.
You claim that it was necessary can be discarded just as easily, and for much the same reasons, as other people’s claims that some other strategy would have been preferable.
By killing him immediately. A headshot, for example. Certainly not by leaving him alive for several seconds, like Cora did.
You can’t, unless you kill them too. This includes the Unwinder, which confers no benefit here.
It was at least as as effective as a regular lethal bullet, therefore there is no justification REQUIRED for using it.
However, it was FAR MORE effective strategically imho, since it totally cowed the henches and a regular bullet would not have done.
There was NO Adverse tactical results due to her choice. Therefore, it was a valid and proper choice and all counterfactual strategies assume without evidence that the counterfactual would have operated as well.
If you can’t explain how your strategy would 100% guarantee that the boss gets off no orders and that the henches surrender or flee, then you are merely fantasizing to satisfy your preferences.
A Demoralizer weapon. Which fits what Cora was saying with Ray as her view of a deterrent which again matches her cowboy life style and mercenary experience. She isn’t about law enforcement or long term criminal deterrents. She about the short gain, psychological warfare take out the lead guy, quickly and brutally and his Henchmen are more likely to surrender or retreat rather than fight. Be the bigger bear so to speak.
Not when using it like Cora did, with a less lethal shot to the extremities. If she goes for center of mass, she can use the lethal force justification.
No, you don’t get to justify a strategy with “it worked out in hindsight”, unless the character has precognition. You have to compare from Cora’s POV at the time of decision – where her choice has no benefits, but some drawbacks over the natural alternatives. I won’t repeat myself here, I’ve explained that elsewhere often enough.
There are a whole bunch of good reasons. First and foremost is “Because I can” closely followed by “Does anyone else want to negotiate?” Also, it was a disabling round… for Wolverine or anything else with fast regeneration. And then there are the fourth wall criteria of general awesomeness and the required hot-chicks-with-big-guns, a requirement that Cora meets in every possible way.
I still don’t understand why everyone is talking about this as if Cora is some sort of law enforcement agent. Based on how Dave has her listed here, I thought she was simply an alien on earth visiting her friends when things started to go bad. She was clearly not listed as law enforcement before when she killed those guys with Sydney on the space station, so why would everyone in the forums try to hold her to a standard on a planet she is not from and was clearly not told anything with regards to rules? At most, Sydney would have mentioned it was overkill on the space station, but she would not have walked through the rules with Cora due to the shock. Am I missing something?
The problem with you saying that she didn’t know the rules, is that when she showed up to save Sydney she says “Maxima suggested I use non-lethal ordnance but oops.” Meaning she had at least a quick briefing about using non-lethal force
They are wanting to impose unrealistic and irrelevant restrictions on Cora.
Yes, Cora decided to kill a kidnapper,, slaver and would-be murderer in an explosively gruesome manner, as a warning to his subordinates not to mess with her.
It worked.
They don’t like that.
I’m sure Cora is terribly broken up by their disapproval. See panels 4 and 5 for a visual representation of how broken up she is.
If you push her, she may get as high on the guilt scale as page 913 final panel.
Wow, the “keep Vehemence high on dope prison regime” may actually become a real policy!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-56215137
Any one else getting a strong Scully vibe from panel the last?
No… but we can definitely see where you’re getting it!
I think it’s the hair.
Not the hair, the face, specially the mouth
that’s because most of europe has about the same land mass as Texas. The Us is huge and has a gigantic population. and no duh police kills are lower in Europe half the countries don’t allow regular police forces to carry firearms.
I mean, if you’re gonna compare to Europe as a continent…
Europe landmass: 10,180,000 km²
Texas landmass: 695,662 km²
US landmass: 9.834 million km²
Europe population: 741 million
USA population: 328.2 million
You’re right that no duh, police not all being armed leads to less police murders though.
american culture is a shit show of consumerism and elitism. thats the basis of the gun death rates in america.
Texas is slightly larger than France, with about 1/3 the population of France.
I foresee a fierce, high volume scolding from Maxima that is casually interrupted by a metallic bronze hand and a softly worded “You DO remember that I don’t work for you, right? I’m not even a civilian under the government you represent. “
Maxima is a cop and a soldier, and this happened on american soil. She absolutely has the authority to enforce the law of the land on Cora.
Cora has earned quite some goodwill, which is why she gets a talking to and not incarcerated, in traction, or interred.
I think Max is very angry about the excessive use of force and killing of a suspect.
I think Max is going to be apoplectic about Sydney being exposed to that level of gore and trauma.
The only saving grace i can see is that the glasses Cora gave Sydney are probably the only reason Sydney is still alive.
Oh I’m not suggesting Cora has full immunity from crimes; just that Max’s natural reflex to chew her out like a subordinate (she gets lots of practice with Dabbler) probably is going to fall on deaf ears when that person isn’t under her command.
…Although on further thought, some pages back when Cora and the space-letch were stuck guarding prisoners, she dropped a hint that they were not local law enforcers… yet.
Perhaps there’s been talk of recruiting Cora in some capacity… although what you offer a girl with her own spaceship full of studs to convince her to sign on with an underdeveloped planet’s localized police force, I have no idea.
…you give her easy access to Dabbler for reasons :P
That….that feels more like an incentive for Dabbler?
Given the ‘no playing where you work’ policy Dabbler is obliged to follow, that may be more of a reason to keep her off the team.
Seeing all the discussion, I will say what I have said before.
Cora does not need to be excused, nor does she need to be condemned.
But maybe alot of you are like half my age and less because to me Cora is just a sci-fi action hero trope.
I have seen so many movies with characters just like this. Pretty sure if we applied the real world laws and high morals and ethics, pretty sure every 1980s action hero would be on trial for war crimes, excessive force, torture, ect…
I would use Brock Samson as a more modern example but that even may be some years old now for an example. These are action heroes who shoot a rocket into a guy sending him flying through the air to explode on impact with a helicopter full of other bad guys. Shove a grenade in their pocket and kick them off a building while saying a one liner like, “look out bomb low” or whatever.
Well sure, but I’m fairly sure Brock is a deconstruction of the character archetype he represents so I wouldn’t offer him up as an unironic/neutral example.
Also this IS a comic that deals with superheroics in a realistic way so Maxima being unhappy at Cora’s flippancy is to be expected. I mean Maxima is willing to kill, and subscribes to the Batman school of superheroics, but she doesn’t like seeing her protegés be traumatised in the line of duty.
I find it odd that so many readers have latched so tightly onto the idea that this is a serious, realistic superhero comic, and ignored all the cartoonish elements, aside from the periodic surprise when they pop up. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, but some people sure seem convinced that it does.
A lot of the appeal of this comic is that DaveB attempts building a realistic world and isn’t scared of defying tropes.
“It’s just a comic book, don’t think too hard about it” is intellectually very unsatisfying, and it doesn’t to Grrl Power justice.
He’s conscious of the tropes, but he’s not scared of using them when it suits him, either.
Only if they can be conciliated with realism.
Also next page: Sydney starts giggling because she can’t believe Maxi fell for her “Thousand yard stare” routine :P
Heh. To be honest, I’d like that, I prefer giggling Sydney over traumatizes Sydney.
I just realized after looking at panel 7 that Dabbler only has 4 fingers on each hand.
I wasn’t sure if that was intentional or a mistake so I checked the archive and… yep, 4 fingers. In every scene where she’s not in a glamour, she has 4 fingers. How did I miss that until now?
DaveB has some hella impressive attention to detail.
“If a man ever needed dying, HE did / No one has the right to say what he said about you…”
I get it.
Some believe lethal force should never be authorized. That any and all means less than lethal force should be used to deal with the situation and that once dealt with, someone suspected of having violated the law or the even the conventions of society should have their day in court to be accused, exercise their right to a vigorous defense and then be judged by a either someone authorized by society to render judgement or by a group of so-called peers.
I applaud the purity of the view and defend those describing this idealistic world where lethal force is never the first response. This is all wonderful in that it literally represent the arguments, speeches and passion that would be present and televised on mainstream media for the next couple of news cycles if this were real life. But science fiction ammunition aside, this sadistic jerk would be just as dead if it had been NYPD that walked in and not Cora. Three rounds center of mass for an armed perpetrator who had just stated they were going to kill a federal office. At the very least. And no one is going to get more than administrative leave if they choose to empty the clip into the guy because, hey, they thought he might have super powers. And that is assuming they knew nothing about the situation with Concretia, dosing a federal agent with drugs to forcibly interrogate her, brutalizing her, etc..
Cora is a cowboy, or cowgirl if you prefer. She shouldn’t be conducting law enforcement operations because she isn’t law enforcement, isn’t trained as terrestrial law enforcement or honestly may not be the person anyone should trust with enforcing laws they don’t know anything about. She was a powerful and willful alien on a ride along that spiral completely out of control. And she is someone who was summoned to rescue a friend from a self-admitted @ssh*le threatening that friend. She chose to stop him in a manner designed to ensure he was humiliated before being rendered into the stone garden where he will never threaten her friend again.
Is Cora a ‘good’ person? Definitely likeable, but I’m not going to waste time or energy arguing whether she is a good person. I personally believe there would be an investigation, probably internal to ARC, which would find a host of issues with Cora being in a position to kill the guy but rule there was sufficient evidence he “deserved a killing”.
I don’t agree with defending those pacifist nutjobs anymore. If you can’t objectively look at the world and say “this is what I want, but it’s not what we have YET” then: you. are. a. liability.
You will destroy and decry when it suits your needs and not when it suits the world that enables your very existence. You will argue for peace when the only route to survival is war. You will aim for goals that are impossible and must fail because they are founded upon a distorted worldview. You are crazy, and you will cause others to descend into madness alongside you.
Are our modern politics not already evidence of this?
That aside, I wholeheartedly agree with everything else. I wish more people could understand that utilitarian doesn’t mean evil. Ethics themselves are utilitarian and so is the science that gave us this wonderful thing called the Internet. Imagine talking to people we don’t know, possibly thousands of miles away, within mere seconds – in 1902. This is a power once available only to gods, and as power does, it has begun to drive us mad.
Am I the first to notice that Sydney’s description that the “human sized bag of lasagna” did not include the fact that there was sauce included? Lots of meat sauce.
lasagna by its actual recipe includes meat and cheese with even its most universal recipe. does not include sauce specifically – but the meat and cheese could certainly do so
Good thing Sydney’s already a vegetarian.
Look at the human! You gave it anxiety!
coming back to it, this page really is my favorite out of all this comic.