Superheroes Responsible For A Crazy Amount Of Deaths

Avengers: Infinity War ends with perhaps the largest mass murder in film history. After obtaining all six Infinity Stones, Thanos snaps his fingers and instantly kills half the universe at random. There are multiple superheroes who each deserve at least a small share of blame for letting him succeed: Doctor Strange gives up the Time Stone to save Tony Stark. Gamora gives up the Soul Stone to save Nebula. But the hero who deserves the bulk of blame for not stopping "The Snap" has to be Peter Quill, a.k.a. Star-Lord.

There are two reasons for this. First, when Peter made his fatal mistake, attacking Thanos while Mantis had him hypnotized, his timing was especially bad. There wasn't just a single stone on the line: His team had almost secured the entire Infinity Gauntlet, thus recovering the four Infinity Stones Thanos had gathered to that point and the device he needed to wield them. Second, Star-Lord wasn't choosing to save someone or something else in exchange for letting Thanos succeed. He was just lashing out after learning that Thanos killed Gamora — understandable, but also undeniably pointless. So not only did Star-Lord's mistake cost the heroes everything, it was especially unforgivable because it gained them nothing.

If you want to be totally accurate, then yeah, there is blame aplenty to go 'round. But if you need just one face to pin to your wall and throw darts at, Star-Lord is your boy.

In the landscape of superhero TV, one surprising thing about the first season of the CW show Arrow was Oliver Queen's willingness to kill evildoers with little provocation. In one sense, this is somewhat inevitable. It's difficult to avoid killing your foes when your primary attack is shooting them with a bow and arrow, unless you decide to tip your arrows in boxing gloves, as some of the goofier comic book and cartoon incarnations of Green Arrow have done. A graphic from Comic Book Resources shows that in the first season alone, Oliver kills 55 people.

Queen eventually vowed to stop killing people, and although he has mostly stuck to this, ongoing flashbacks continue to reveal more and more people that he killed in his dark past as a vigilante and member of the Bravta, so his kill count keeps ticking up. One viewer who did the math came up with a figure of 165 people killed by Queen over the show's first five seasons.

How many more people Oliver kills before the end of the series remains to be seen, although from here on, most will probably occur in flashbacks. Even though he has a veritable Halloween store full of skeletons in his closet, present-day Oliver is mostly doing his cartoon self proud, such as in the third season episode "Guilty," when he did indeed put a boxing glove on the end of an arrow to take someone down non-lethally.

Despite usually having a reputation for a being a relatively cautious hero in most incarnations, the version of Superman that appeared in the film Man of Steel did not seem to place a high priority on avoiding collateral damage. This was especially true during his final battle with General Zod, which bounced around downtown Metropolis, toppling skyscrapers as it went. Although the film never gives specific figures about just how many people are killed during this conflict, it's safe to assume that the number is fairly high.

Fortunately, a company known as Watson Technical Consulting, which specializes in modeling the effects of both natural and artificial disasters, is here to help. They ran a surprisingly scientific study on how much damage a battle like this would inflict on a dense urban center like Metropolis, using Chicago and Manhattan as stand-ins.

Their results were blood-chilling. According to their projections, Supes' final battle with Zod would have resulted in about 129,000 people confirmed dead, about 250,000 missing in the rubble (most of whom would also be dead), and an additional million people injured. Also, the amount it would take to repair the damage to structures and infrastructure would come in at a cool $2 trillion.

Now it makes sense why Clark gets a day job at the Daily Planet at the end of that movie. After causing that much carnage, we'd all want to put on a pair of glasses and pretend we were someone else.

In terms of cosmic level screwups, one that rivals Jean Grey's biggest mistake certainly falls at the feet of Green Lantern John Stewart. Although he eventually grew into a wise and measured veteran, during his early days, Stewart was aggressively individualistic and arrogant.

This came to a head during an event known as Cosmic Odyssey, when John traveled to the planet Xanshi along with fellow Justice Leaguer Martian Manhunter in order to defend it from an evil force known as the Anti-Life Equation. The trouble began shortly after, when John decided that their foe was going to be too much for his companion to handle. He used his powers to imprison Martian Manhunter in a force bubble and send him away, saying "I'll move a lot faster not having to worry about you." Ignoring the Manhunter's pleas, John charged in to face whatever danger awaited him alone.

And then he saw it. Famously, at this point in time, Green Lantern rings were unable to affect anything yellow. Towering above John was an enormous world-destroying bomb, set to explode in just a few seconds... and it was completely yellow. A moment later, Xanshi and all of its inhabitants were gone.

John's forcefield managed to protect him from the blast, but his psyche never recovered from the guilt of failing to protect the planet. From then on, he was a changed man. And unlike Jean Grey, later writers never cut him a break. His biggest mistake stayed canon forever.

It's an old debate. Some argue that the comics version of Batman, who refuses to kill people, is responsible for zero deaths. Others claim that his refusal to put down dangerous criminals who are beyond rehabilitation means that he is responsible for more deaths than could ever be counted.

It all depends on your perspective. If you are a consequentialist, you believe that actions are not wrong in and of themselves. Instead it is only the ramifications of one's actions that matters. On the other hand, if you follow a deontological theory of ethics, you believe that certain actions can be always right or always wrong, regardless of the consequences.

Most believe Batman subscribes to a deontological philosophy. He believes that killing anyone, under any circumstances, is wrong — even the Joker, who has killed 543 people that we know of throughout his criminal career. But from another perspective, Batman might be a consequentialist. He stated in 2005's Under the Red Hood that the real reason he doesn't kill is because he worries that if he started, he might not be able to stop. Bruce has also stated from time to time that his refusal to kill is his way of setting an example for the people of Gotham. Perhaps the consequences of his actions are actually more important to him then whether or not killing is inherently wrong.

For further reading, Looper's own Chris Sims dove deep into this classic geek dilemma in a truly wonderful article.

Finally, if we're allowing non-canon stories into the mix, there is a single clear winner in the debate over which superhero has killed the most people. In the wonderfully twisted comic called Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe, Deadpool kills everyone in the world, and then he keeps going.

One of Deadpool's unique powers is that he knows that he's in a comic book and jokes about this regularly. This particular story begins when Wade finally snaps and becomes convinced that existing within the confines of fiction is a hellish prison. He realizes that everyone in the world needs to be set free, and he decides to accomplish this by killing them.

What follows is a series of obscenely gory battles, wherein Deadpool murders the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and many others, until he finally breaks out of the comic itself, and murders the people who were writing it.

But believe it or not, this is not the end of the story. In a sequel called Deadpool Killustrated, Wade continued to traverse the multiverse, now killing characters of classic literature like Captain Ahab and Tom Sawyer. Then there was a third series called Deadpool Kills Deadpool, in which the less evil Deadpool from normal Marvel continuity has to fight the more evil Deadpool from the Deadpool Kills... series, who by now has become known as Dreadpool.

Y'know, maybe Star-Lord deserves an apology. For some reason, letting just half the universe die on accident doesn't seem so bad anymore.