#if Agamemnon has a million haters and all that

[sarafangirlart]

“Agamemnon didn’t want to kill Polyxena!” He still enslaved and separated her family, sacked her city and raped her sister.

[autisticcassandracain]

I feel like being a hater real quick so bear with me. A defense I sometimes see for Tom King's Mister Miracle is that most people who read it probably don't know much about Mister Miracle or the Fourth World as a whole, so they don't see the major flaws in it. Like if you don't know Orion you don't know King massacres his character. If you haven't read the original New Gods series you can't be mad about the way King deforms its anti-war messaging or misconstrues Highfather's character. You can't be mad about the way the Forever People are uncerimoniously killed off screen if you don't know who they are. You can't see just how far King deviates thematically from every other Mister Miracle series if you've never read them. So the argument is that Tom King's Mister Miracle is good, provided you don't know anything about the characters or world, which is where all the praise for the series comes from.

But. And I'm sorry in advance for sounding like a complete tool. It's not?? Like even without any prior knowledge of the source material, King's Mister Miracle is mediocre at best.

King's Mister Miracle hinges on the shock factor its brutal scenes and heavy subject matter has. Yes, it's good at portraying horrific scenes in visceral detail - it opens with a graphic suicide attempt that is undoubtedly shocking, its portrayal of mental health issues and trauma is visceral, its scenes of warfare and torture horrific. But being shocking, visceral, and horrific does not make you interesting. It does not make you good.

Because beneath the graphic gore, the thematic core of the series is childish. King's understanding of the philosophies and ethics he discusses is rudimentary at best. The series has nothing interesting to say about the ethics of war - or at least, nothing that other works of literarure haven't said in far more interesting ways.

Its treatment of utilitarianism specifically really sticks in my mind. The question of idealism vs utilitarianism is discussed, but never on a level deeper than you can find on Wikipedia. It is treated as a flat conflict of ideologies; Highfather, on the side of utilitarianism, sacrificing Scott to Darkseid, vs Scott, on the side of idealism, refusing to do so and escaping the trap.

But that is a fundamental simplification of the actual events portrayed in Kirby's New Gods, where Highfather, far from a utilitarian, was actually fueled by a deeply held ideal. His decision to give up Scott wasn't a 'the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few' situation - 'the greater good' never comes up. It was Highfather sacrificing all he had left - the son of his wife, for whose sake he'd started this war to begin with - for what he believed in: peace. He only became Highfather once he achieved this ideal, the belief in peace, the belief that war must not last forever. He did not sacrifice Scott in a game of numbers; he did not calculate that the happiness of one was outweighed by the happiness of thousands, millions even. It wasn't about the numbers. It was about the ideal.

And when you actually came down to it, it wasn't even, truly, a sacrifice: it was a trade. A trade of two sons. For Highfather, this was a sacrifice that it wasn't for Darkseid, but this wasn't Agamemnon leading Iphigenia to the slaughter by will of the gods; as he traded Scott into hell, Highfather saved another, gave Orion the chance at a good life that he never could've gotten on Apokolips. He gave Orion the choice to be good, and Orion took it.

Does that mean Scott's trade was justified? Does that mean that the ideal of peace - achieved for a time and instilled in a young soul who never would've encountered it otherwise - was worth it? Was Scott's trade a moral one? Maybe! All Kirby's book tells you is that war cannot go on forever. How to approach that is up to you.

None of that is anything you'd think of if King's Mister Miracle was your first foray into the Fourth World. But these layers of complexity are completely absent from King's Mister Miracle. There is a right choice in King's world, unambiguously, and it wasn't trading Jacob. The topic of utilitarianism is discussed with a random cashier who spouts a textbook definition, and the book doesn't dig futher, delve into the difference between utilitarianism and consequentialism, for example. Jacob wouldn't have been traded for another life, another young soul, but for a weapon. King's Mister Miracle does not engage with the true complexities of ethics here; it simply has Scott escape the trade, winning unamiguously, but the war continues, as it always will. Even the world's greatest escape artist can't escape from the neverending war.

Jacob's trade was not justified. The war will never end. These are unambiguous truths in King's Mister Miracle.

I know jack shit about ethics. I am almost positive my definition of idealism here is wrong or, at the very least, oversimplified. The extent of my knowledge lies in my fucking high school ethics class.

I am still not exaggerating when I say said high school course on war ethics still provided more depth than King's Mister Miracle. My high school essay provided more depth. King's Mister Miracle waxes poetically about the complexities of war while showing extremely black and white views on ethics, its moral quandries having obvious correct answers the narrative goes out of its way to facilitate.

In King's Mister Miracle, you can never win the war, but you can, somehow, fight it ethically. Negotiations are doomed to fail. Peace will never last. War is hell, a string of violent injuries, torture, and depravity. But the ethical questions have a right and a wrong answer. You can't win at war, but you can win at ethics.

In King's Mister Miracle, nothing in war is good, but, simultaneously, its ethics are black and white. It's an edgy teenager's view of war. Or, perhaps more accurately: a CIA agent's.