If Strawman arguments was a comic book.
this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2026
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That ship with all those people
this would make a good story unironically. guy can only βchargeβ his powers via murder. so he chooses to be a dexter like guy who only kills baddies.
A lot more interesting if only (relative) innocents count.
Or make it so the sides can't be too imbalanced (easy decision), so the bigger the heroic feat, the more "innocent" sacrifices needed.
or heβs given a name and has to hunt them down. and has lived through all sorts of eras so it gets both easier to find the person and harder.
Santa Clarita Diet?
Am I the only one who thinks this would actually be a really interesting hero to see in action? (Comic book action, anyway)
Yeah, actually.
Everything is a huge moral dilemma. A plot to find suicidal people and "people that don't matter" to be able to kill at a moment's notice. People willing to be the sacrifice for money - but who pays? Constant second guessing about if the sacrifice was worth it if things go wrong.
I almost can't believe someone hasn't done this yet.
The folk he saves are obliged to be his future sacrifices...
That's a big reveal you save for waaaay down the line.
That, or sacrifices from saved people count for 10 times or something.
Gotham like city, called 'Paradoxolis', builds an alliance with Trolleyman by creating an institution called 'The Altar', filled with 'undesirables, criminals and suicidal people' ready to die at a moment's notice.
Paradoxolis raises the 'Trolleyman' signal in the air accompanied by an extremely loud railway horn ... Trolleyman arrives ... they sacrifice one of the people from 'The Altar' and Trolleyman instantly gains his powers
Crisis takes hold of the city as The Altar starts to run of out people to sacrifice so they start grading people across Paradoxolis according to a 'worthiness scale' and start sacrificing people according to an arbitrary 'worthiness meter'.
"... It was a broken system that still managed to work in spite of itself. For months, families complained, but no one really cared. Lives were being saved. That was still the only metric. That was the only metric that ever hit the news.
Then the mayor's daughter went missing. Her face showed up after a week, automatically added to the Alter's 'Wall of Honor' one day. In fact, the day after a group of 4 burglars were saved by Trolleyman from being killed by a millionaire's overzealous security team.
That day the mayor quit. He walked out of the Paradoxolis City Hall, and devoted the rest of his life to killing Trolleyman."
Bro, the story writes itself.
Not directly related, but psycho pass is an excellent show about a dystopia with a sort of kind of precog system for identifying criminals. Bad guy does bad guy stuff to show the system is broken, good gal cop has to try to stay idealistic.
Could also be amazing if the hero couldn't control his power. Instead, something else decided for him when he has to activate it.
The hero walks past a train that is about to crash. The hero has no idea, and suddenly time stops. The hero is completely surprised. Only he is still moving and thinking. Everyone else is frozen in time. Now he has to choose who of the people around him to sacrifice. A sacrifice has to be made, otherwise it will be himself. It's not just decision of the train should be rescued, he in only the one who has to decide who has to die for it.
I think both could work. I would love the social commentary of other people trying to game the system.
Trying to get the hero to take out a targeted person by putting a bus in danger. He always on the news, so an ad agency tries to get targets wearing company logos to be the ones killed. And every time the final moment of decision closes around the hero and it's just him.
I kind of like the idea of them saving someone and then causing unintentional death after but needing to figure out the pattern. That could be used both for a tortured hero and as the fall of a hero to villany because no matter what they do people die.
I don't support the death sentence, but this would be by far the most ethical way to implement it I guess.
Plot twist: They kill someone on death row who is innocent as a trade for saving the actual killer and find out afterwards.
Id wish for text book, because it gives more space to explore the ethical and emotional challenges this hero would face.
Oh yeah agreed, I just meant I don't want to experience it in real life :D
It should be a power where the more morally reprehensible thing they do according to their own compass, the more powerful they become
It'll be awesome to see a hulked out trolley man, distraught, eyes clouded with tears, his friends asking them "what did you do ?". Then they're sent flying by trolley man simply turning their head toward their friends. Trolley man can't even say they're sorry, it'll probably rupture their eardrums on the spot.
Trolley man is on the brink of losing it all, it would only take one last kill for them to become an uncontrollable natural disaster, feeding their curse.
Obviously the villain shows up.
Will their fifth murder feel as morally reprehensible to them as their first? Or will they get used to it, making each murder less empowering?
It depends on who exactly they kill, or what they empathize with. They might start out as a very sensitive character who can't bear to pick up a flower, so it doesn't even have to be a murder. The more they do it the more fucked up they become but if the fifth murder is a loved one, it's more morally reprehensible, or depending on their moral compass, a child, an old person, a woman, a teacher, a cop, all this can skew the balance either way. So, in general, yes, but not always
Get Garth Ennis on it!
Higher scale/scope powers need more people to be killed, so sometimes it's not worth it.
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Final Fantasy authors designing their science-based "hard magic" system like:
Okay but that logo with the tracks in the letter y is pretty cool!
Maybe he just needs a whole magazine of shopping trolleys to activate his powers?
Yeah, he should be Trolley Problem Man.
Because he never has a pound coin when he needs a trolley?
No, that's Trolley Coin Man.
Is that a tumor on his r thigh or just where superheros keep their cellphone in their spandex?
So: Superman + Deathnote.
Later seasons get real interesting for what crime qualifies as deserving death.
ezpz. Just kill the chairman of the board of the shipping company. :D
There's a trolley rolling down a track that splits into two - on one, which the trolley is going towards, there is a single person who's tied up on the track, and on the other there's 3 tied up people.
There's a lever next to the track that has a 50% chance to stop the train
Would you pull it?
A glowing review by Stan Lee
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