So, reading one of the recent story arcs on pvponline got me thinking. The basic overview of the story is that there’s a character, Shecky, who’s basically a boozing, gambling con-artist, who fleeces his close friends for protection, to avoid a huge debt he’s racked up. One of the people who’s hiding him gets beat up by the person coming to collect what’s due.

At some point, the “good guys” beat up the enforcer, who’s trying to collect from Shecky. Later, Skull pays off Shecky’s debt to get him off the hook. Shecky then decides to leave, now that he’s no longer a fugitive, and says that he’s glad that he’s now got somewhere to call home. Of Skull, he says, “Kid, you’re the only person who’s never judged me. Not even once. I can’t tell you how much that means to me.”

It’s presented in such a way that my perception of it is that that’s upposed to be a good thing. Skull’s pretty consistently the “innocent” one, and generally, his simplicity is supposed to be a good thing – something to aspire to.

But this really rubs me the wrong way. Shecky used them, he got one of Skull’s friends seriously injured, he lied to them repeatedly, and has never done anything positive for anyone else. Why is “not judging,” in this case, a good thing? It’s not like Shecky was being pursued by some evil villain for no reason – he’d racked up that debt, and was running from it.

It bothers me that basically, you’ve got a character who excplicitly does bad things, and the “hero” is the one who basically ignores all the shit they pull. It’d be like having a heartwarming story about how Hitler was really a good guy underneath all the genocide, and the hero of the piece is the one who can see past the evil actions, to the inconsequential non-evil that hides behind it.

Whee!