James Nicoll <jdnicoll@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Alexey Romanov <alexey_r@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >On 1 May 2008 12:33:24 -0400, James Nicoll wrote:
> >
> >> Title Author Publication
> >> Date
> >
> >> KITTY TAKES A HOLIDAY Vaughn, Carrie
> >>
> >> One of Kitty's friends has to deal with an unwanted life-style
> >> change while another is forced to deal with the startling revelation
> >> that killing helpless people is illegal in several jurisdictions in
USA
> >> [1].
> >>
> >> I love the Kitty novels but her friend****p with a couple of the
> >> sup****ting characters is as odd as Barak Obama having a Grand
> >> Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan as a close personal friend. I'm all for
> >> having a wide variety of friends but I draw the line at people whose
> >> lifestyle seems to depend on shooting people like me.
> >>
> >> 1: Unless you're a cop and the person being shot is black, in which
case
> >> it's still OK.
> >
> >They aren't shooting "people like Kitty" (i.e. werewolves, vampires,
etc.)
> >in general, only the rogue ones. And WVEs kill rogues as well.
>
> Yeah, and I'm sure if we asked the KKK would have said they
> only went after rogue Negroes, Jews and Catholics. There's no reason
> to think that properly-briefed cops couldn't deal with the various
> spookies that break the law and less reason for a werewolf to hang
> out with people who seem to have made hunting werewolves a central
> part of their lives.
Well, *Kitty* has killed both werewolves and vampires by this point, so
that point is somewhat weakened. Or is that OK, since it's only "those
people" killing each other? (To drag in another st*****ype.)
I think that cop (what's her name? ...looks it up... Detective Hardin)
hit the nail right on the head: vamps and weres are essentially
organized crime syndicates. They're conspiracies organized to commit
illegal acts, and the authorities didn't know about them until very
recently -- so people like Cormac (the friendly psychopath) can be seen
as either another gang or as keepers of a kind of rough frontier justice
(depending on how sympathetic one wants to be towards them).
Arguing that "properly trained cops" -- in a world where vamps and weres
are *known* (incorrectly) to be mythical -- could handle the situation
is technically true, but besides the point. The prerequisite for
*getting* cops trained in dealing with vamps and weres is the widespread
public knowledge that they exist, which hadn't yet been met. So there
couldn't possibly be such a thing, and there's no moral requirement to
leave a situation to be handled by something nonexistent.
We don't really know how the Fearless Vampire Hunters operated --
whether they just picked off any they could find, or if they were hired
by one faction to attack another, or if they were self-appointed
comic-book-style do-gooders who only took action when regular people
were threatened or killed. I doubt they were particularly KKK-ish;
that's not the way Vaughan seems to be going.
They were, certainly, people who went around commiting murders for their
own reasons -- but vast numbers of weres and vamps did the same, and all
the members of both of those societies are complicit in the murders
committed by their groups. So nobody has much of a claim for moral
superiority.
The Kitty book have a lot more of the rule of law than most urban
fantasy books, but I'm with you in wanting to see even more of it.
--
Andrew Wheeler
(just finished reading _Holiday_, and thinking about it)
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