* How come that everybody sees [[spoiler:the Spirit of Arkham, or Quincy Sharp,]] as a CompleteMonster? Sure he wants to [[spoiler:lobotomize Harley and burn Ivy alive, and other stuff]] but considering who they are, it's probably the most pragmatic decision that exists so far, and after taking their shits for so long, I think the people of Gotham would agree to let him do it without complaning.
** ...You think wanting to ''burn someone alive for existing'' is "the most pragmatic decision"? Sweet Jesus, what is ''wrong'' with you?
** Wel,l she has killed hundreds of people according to the interviews, and sending in the SWAT-team to take her down would be difficult with those powers of her. The burning part would probably be the best way to take her down before more lives are taken.
** You do understand what "burning someone alive" ''means'', right? It's not exactly a quick and painless way to kill someone. In fact, it's cruel, painful, and ''long''. Calling it "pragmatic" in any way, especially when they have her ''locked up already'' is just plain ''wrong''. If you really needed to end her life to save others, you could just shoot her. Not kill her in one of the most painful and cruel ways imaginable.
** Still it doesn't justifice [[spoiler:Sharp]]'s CompleteMonster status. Perhaps "burning her alive" is maybe a bit too far but he hasn't (yet, anyway) killed hundreds of innocent people just ForTheEvulz like the average complete monster does. Right now he's just in on the inmates, and lets face it: if he actually just shot them all, Gotham would be a much happier place.
** And like I said before, just shooting her would be difficult thanks to her "creating giant monster plants" powers. Bullets doesn't work one single bit on plants, but flamethrowers do.
** Yes, but a quick-acting poison would kill her as well, and it's not as painfully as burning alive. Also, this Troper got the impression that the messages we saw were only a small part of it, and that [[spoiler: Sharp]] planned similar "Treatments" for every patient in Arkham, not just the one's specifically referred to in the messages.
** Sharp wasn't speaking in the context of "She's broken out and is currently threatening the city and hundreds of thousands of lives." He was speaking in the context of, "We've got her tied up, she's not currently a threat to anyone, BURN THE WITCH! CLEANSE THE EVIL FILTH!" He's not talking about stopping a rampaging monster while she's on the rampage, he's talking about murdering someone in the most painful way he can come up with, just because she exists.
** Yea, yea, I get it: you think burning a mass murderer to death is wrong but, as I said before, it still doesn't justifice his CompleteMonster status. The burning part maybe at worst a MoralEventHorizon, but a CompleteMonster is someone that cross them so many times that you begin to lose the count. But right now he hasn't crossed any form of it, at least physically. His [[MoralEventHorizon MEHs]] are just thoughts in his head right now, which clearly had been pushed over the edge by the actual monsters. He's a supervillain hating KnightTemplar at his worst, but not a CompleteMonster. It takes more than just thinking of killing supervillains "for just existing" to be one.
*** ''Yea yea I get it: you think burning a mass murderer to death is wrong but as I said before: it still doesn't justifice his Complete Monster status.'' Yes. Yes it does. Your logic is so twisted it might as well be a pretzel. The fact that he takes a hard line against criminals and maniacs does not justify the ''means'' by which he intends to deal with them. Imagine, for a moment, if Adolf Hitler had only sent dangerous psychotics and criminals to the Nazi death camps. Would that have made him less of a monster?
**** Um, yes, it would. Killing innocents is rather a different kettle of fish to being extremely harsh towards the guilty.
***** No, it wouldn't. Criminals are still human beings. And unless they are fairly tried, convicted, and sentenced to be executed by a jury of their peers, they don't deserve to be killed. Furthermore, Arkham is first and foremost a ''hospital''. It's meant to be a place of ''healing'' and ''therapy'', not a private torture den for a sadistic maniac.
***** No, it ''would''. The crime of Hitler's death camps was they were for the ''innocents''; those put in them were guilty of nothing more than existing, and were not, fundamentally, dangerous to others. Had they been criminals and psychotics, they would be ''guilty''; perhaps you could argue the magnitude of the punishment was not justified, but it's a far lesser crime to punish the guilty excessively than to massacre those who are ''not'' guilty. In fact, the very comparison is ludicrous; we're talking about unrepentant mass murderers, people who very much ''are'' guilty, who think nothing of torturing people for shits and giggles (Harley, Zsasz, Scarecrow), or murdering entire cities (Joker) or ''the entire human race and most other forms of life'' (Ivy). None of these people are innocent; they are dangerous as long as they continue to exist. The patient records make it plain that the professionals believe the Joker cannot be cured and that the Scarecrow might not even be insane. A better comparison, therefore, would be to say if you put Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and others like them into a death camp, would anyone give a ''flying shit'' what you did to them? And the answer is a big "no." You find the situation creepy because an ugly man wants to kill two attractive women and you find that triggers your chivalry reflex. That's all there is to it.
****** Actually, the answer is 'yes' for plenty of people. You don't lose your human rights because you're a disgusting evil human being. Because they're, you know, human rights.
******* Bullshit. There's a huge difference between those guilty of terrible crimes who have expressed no remorse whatsoever and those guilty of simply being Jews. The fact that you don't know what that difference is suggests you have a very tenuous grip on reality. You ''do'' lose some of your human rights as a criminal; you lose your right to privacy, your right to freedom of movement, and so on. Nevermind that Ivy is not in the strictest sense a human and certainly doesn't self-identify as one.
***** Third party here: the key word here is "dangerous". A drug lord that has murdered hundreds of people but is now unarmed and in custody is a criminal but not dangerous. The Joker can conceivably turn the contents of a janitor's closet into deadly nerve gas. There's just no comparison.
***** Another third party: Sharp's status as a CompleteMonster really depends on WHO we are talking about here. In the case of Harley: yes, it would be horrendous for Sharp to give her a lobotomy, but there's a reason for that: Time. In the comics, we've seen that Harley actually does get better if the Joker isn't around to influence her. In some cases, she's even gone and done some super-heroing of her own. This proves that there is hope that Harley can make a recovery. Yet if we are talking about people like Killer Croc, Poison Ivy and the Joker, Sharp's reaction to them is very natural. They are monsters who, by their actions, have proved themselves to be a constant threat. And given that they can escape Arkham so easily, locking them up just amounts to delaying the danger long enough for new fodder to come along.
****** Well, that does rather depend on whether you consider that Harley to be the same one; certainly, a lot of the sympathy for game-Harley comes from her portrayals in other media (especially the adorable Animated version of her) but I'm not sure there's any reason to regard the one in the game as an extension of those characters rather than a character in her own right. Let's face it, usually Harley isn't the type to gun down, electrocute and torture people for the hell of it, either.
******* I can't help but notice that no one mentioned the fact that Sharp apparently ''beat an inmate to death'', with his bare hands, for no reason other than that he was angry. He's a horrible person.
******** Yeah, it's worth remembering that surely Arkham doesn't JUST take people like the Joker, who are dangerous in ''or'' out. I mean, we're talking about an institution for the mentally ill, criminal or not, being used for some sort of sick revenge power trip. Where he apparently deliberately wants to use the most horrific forms of execution possible for no reason except personal desire, like burning people to death. That's... pretty damn fucked up, no matter what their crimes were.
********* I think you'll find it's an instituition for the ''criminally insane'', actually.
********* Review the chronicles: He views every single inmate as little more than a gibbering animal that deserves nothing but torture and death. Look at the Asylum itself: Everything, from the procedures (the whole human experimentation thing) to the guards (a chronicle mentions guards that beat an inmate to a stain) to the equipment (electric floors, some very creepy stuff at the medical facility) is designed to go beyond "cautionary measures due to superpowered inmates" to "let's make their lives hell until we get an excuse to kill them". And much of the equipment is ''modern'', which means Sharpe deliberately bought them to be such.
********** Also: When he thought about torturing & lobotomizing Harley, she was still in the "good psychiatrist being seduced by the Joker" phase. No proof of heinous action, nor of unrecoverable madness.
*** Another third party: yes, most of the inmates of Arkham Asylum are themselves [[CompleteMonster Complete Monsters]] and few would shed tears if they were disposed of in some fashion. But there's, say, shooting someone in the head and then there's ''burning someone alive''. Both are forms of murder, but one is relatively quick and painless and the other is agonizing, long and sadistic. Sharp's a CompleteMonster (at least on a theoretical level) because he wants to lower himself to the level of Complete Monsters like the Joker, Poison Ivy, etc -- i.e. people who murder people gruesomely and sadistically for their own pleasure and amusement; it's fairly clear that, for all his high-falutin' talk about being Gotham's savior, Sharp gets off on the idea of burning Poison Ivy alive and lobotomising Harley Quinn. You don't stop being a CompleteMonster just because your intended victims are ''also'' {{Complete Monster}}s.
*** I'm a fourth party! Alright, let us assume that Sharp's concern about letting supervillains live is justified. Let us also assume that none of the supervillains can ever be rehabilitated, ever. Well then, all Sharp has to do is tell Batman, "No, I don't want lunatics like Croc/Joker/Harley/Scarecrow/Ivy/Everyone Else You've Ever Brought Here in my hospital. Take these monsters to Blackgate and let them get the death penalty." Instead, he takes personal custody of creatures he thinks are monsters, developing his intention to kill them as soon as they walk in the door. Furthermore, he decides to kill them by torturous means; electrocution, or burning, when there is no evidence that any of these "animals," as he calls them, are immune to conventional weapons. ''That'' is why he is a monster; not because the ends he believes in are necessarily wrong, but because he pursues those ends in the most arbitrarily cruel way available to him. If you assume that the Chronicles are censored for his benefit, he looks even worse.
*** Fifth party! I'm going with the original poster. Quincy Sharp is NOT a complete monster. He's like the Punisher. He'll do horrible things to Killer Croc, the Joker, and Poison Ivy, but he's not going to slaughter children or burn pregnant women on a whim. He may be a bad guy, but he's still a good guy compared to the bad guys.
**** ..."Good guy compared to the bad guys." You realize that, in the case of Joker at least, that is a VERY easy criteria to meet? I think the real argument we need to be having here is whether or not a WellIntentionedExtremist can also be a CompleteMonster.
**** Well, do you consider the Punisher to be a CompleteMonster?
***** Um, yes ? What, was that supposed to be a difficult question ? He's a murdering sociopath. If the Punisher was a real person he would be on the death row, and rightly so.
***** Then YMMV, because while I do not see him as a hero, I don't see him as a monster.
**** Sixth party; reread the spirit of Arkham bio once you have all the chronicles. He doesn't want to kill Joker or Ivy or Croc because they've killed people, he wants to kill them ''because they are insane.'' It says right there in his 'facts' section that he wants to kill all insane people as a result of self-loathing for his own problems. So he is nothing like the Punisher who, at heart, is a good person and only goes after the worst criminals while leaving the lesser ones alone. Sharp wants to horribly and painfully slaughter everyone with a hint of mental illness, which combined with his position as the head of an Asylum which is meant to help the insane makes him a CompleteMonster. So yes, he would murder children and pregnant women if they are insane, because he views any form of insanity as a cancer on the city that needs to be purged.
**** Wouldn't that make Ra's al-Ghul and Quincy a lot alike? Both are, basically, [[WellIntentionedExtremist Well Intentional Extremists]]. Also, if their intentions are good, can they still be considered Complete Monsters? It says on the Complete Monsters page that a Well Intentional Extremist cannot be considered a true, complete monster.
**** Seventh party. Someone delete this long, painful, and superfluous debate, please?
**** Sixth party again, no. This is the purpose of the headscratchers section. To the guy above you, no, Ghul and Quincy are nothing alike. Ra's al-Ghul wants to make a better world of the sake of making a better world no matter the methods, Quincy wants to kill insane people because he himself is insane and he can't accept that someone as 'good' as him has such a defect, so he has to take it out on anyone with mental illnesses, from the Joker all the way down to little babies. Read the Spirit of Arkham's facts section after you have all the clues; it spells his motivations out quite clearly that he's omnicidal against any form of mental illness.
**** Eight party. Okay, burning Ivy alive is wrong. But does she really have human rights anymore? I remember reading somewhere she considers herself a plant and not a human.
**** [[TheNthDoctor Nth]] [[OverlyLongGag Party]] -- Ivy is also completely insane and delusional; she doesn't lose her human rights just because of that. Otherwise a lot of people who suffered the unfortunate delusion that they were extraterrestrials would also be in trouble. Granted, with her connection to plants there are certain physiological issues and affinities that could affect this and complicate the issue, but it's perhaps sufficient to say that she's human enough to qualify.
**** This here is a tenth party just coming to say that I agree with the second party. The one that said Quincy is a monster. The first party guy was quick to point out if Hitler only killed criminals, he'd be good (which I myself find a dubious claim), but Quincy isn't killing only criminals, he kills insane people. Even the ones who are harmlessy insane. You know that old man who lives under the bridge and who shouts at his cats? Burned alive. Know who else burned those? [[GodwinsLaw Hitler]]. Not the fake would-be hero Hitler either.
** Going with this discussion - in Arkham City it apparently turns out that [[spoiler: Sharp becomes the mayor of Gotham.]] How could this have happened? Batman would have definitely figured out who he was if the player can, so why didn't Batman go out of his way to stop [[spoiler: Sharp]] especially given the kind of person he is and the fact that someone like that shouldn't be [[spoiler: mayor of the whole city?]]
*** Even with the Chronicles on the island, Batman can't prove that [[spoiler:Sharp was the one who wrote them.]] Riddler placed a huge amount of trophies and puzzles all over the island, so people who weren't on the island could just as easily say it was his work.
**** More to the point, though, would ''you'' walk into a lunatic asylum dressed as a bat and tell them to arrest the warden because a bunch of talking, paving slabs told you he was evil?
**** To be fair, if said man dressed as a bat had saved the city more times than could be remembered and was responsible for apprehending most of the psychotic lunatics housed within said asylum in the first place, bat-suit or not I'd probably give him the time of day at least.

16th Jan '13 1:47:12 PM KNDrules

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16th Jan '13 1:35:16 PM KNDrules

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9th Jan '13 11:57:15 AM TVRulezAgain

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