The weird detail I noticed about Batman's no-kill rule

I was looking through old comics at my local shop last weekend and found a 1980s issue where Batman lets a guy fall to his death and calls it an accident. It got me thinking about how often writers bend that rule for convenient exits. Has anyone else caught moments like that where the no-kill rule feels more like a loophole?

3 comments

3 Comments

ellis.robert1d agoRising Star

Been noticing the exact same thing everywhere lately. Companies do it all the time with their own rules. My credit card company has a whole page on how they protect you from fraud, but then you call them about a weird charge and suddenly it's "well it depends on the situation." The whole loophole thing is just how people operate. We set up rules for convenience not because we actually believe in them. Batman's no-kill rule works great until a writer needs an easy way out of a story corner, same way a boss says they never work weekends but then emails you at 10pm on a Sunday. People love having rules they can point to until following them becomes inconvenient.

williams903d ago

Yeah, you see that a lot in the older stuff... it's like they wrote themselves into a corner and just took the easy way out. Best advice is to just not overthink it, the rule bends whenever the plot needs it to.

hugo_jones2d ago

Hang on, let me push back a bit. That "rule bends whenever the plot needs it" thing is EXACTLY what ruins stories for me. Look at Back to the Future - they set up this rule that changing the past messes up the future, but then Marty just shows his parents a picture and everything's fine. That's lazy writing dressed up as "flexible rules." A good time travel story, like Primer, builds the plot AROUND the rules, not the other way around. Dark on Netflix did it right too - they stuck to their own logic so hard it became the whole point of the show.