It didn't pull me out of the story when I played it the first time, FWIW. It's just that Peter was overly nice with the police. Like the cops, and not just Watanabe, send him around to fix up and use cell towers to increase surveillance. In the end of The Dark Knight, Batman creates a cell-phone sonar relay system which he hands control over to Lucius Fox and they both point out its an ethical breach to use surveillance that powerful...in Spider-Man PS4, a similar system is erected without any moral qualms whatsoever.
I think the PS4 game is pro-police because the Batman Arkham games are pro-police, with Aaron Cash, Jim Gordon, and so on. In the Arkham games, the issue is between cops as civil servants versus privatized military police represented by Tyger. So it was an interesting angle. And I think fundamentally it's because having cops as intermediary characters helps world-building and infomration setup happen in a very economical manner in action-adventure games.
But maybe Insomniac Games will alter and fix that in the sequels. Having Spider-Man respected and liked by the police only to lose that in the sequels because of circumstances is a cool way to up the stakes and a great way to reintroduce classic core Spider-Man elements. Similar to how the stinger at the end of FFH is basically setting up a "Back to Basics" in the MCU Spider-Man movies.
Perhaps. The videogame is the only version I could think of which made an issue of Spider-Man's relationship with the police in a contemporary context. That's why I brought it up.
True.
True. Not what I was suggesting as an alternative but true nonetheless.There are much smarter takes on how to handle police corruption in fiction that don't boil down to "cops not chaotic evil orcs = game bad".
Topics about police brutality can't be properly addressed in stories that revolve around a vigilante routinely breaking and entering and beating people up based on who he believes are guilty.
Because we have an inside view into Peter's psyche, we know that, regardless of the situation or outcome, he means well. We don't have that kind of luxury with real-life police or people in general.
I think the dynamic is definitely going to be changed because Watanabe is gone. I figure that's how they'll work Captain Stacy in.
I don't know if they'll do an about-face on Spider-Man's reputation since that's kind of what the endgame of the PS4 game was about.
Overall this is the challenge with the real world intersecting superheroes' world. Whenever police are brought into a story, its going to blatantly expose inconsistencies with comics in general and why they don't depict realism. The inconsistency is glaring when you think about it. Cops are normal people trying to do a job that is very difficult under most circumstances. They get traumatized, they see things no one should see, they get cynical. Cops are specifically trained to deal with situations most people wouldn't deal with for any amount of money.
Vigilantes of any kind are not a cop's friend. They are not welcome, under any circumstances, even if they happen to do the right thing. Police make mistakes but they are able to be held accountable for them, they have a badge number and a name, as opposed to someone like Spider-Man. They can't just swing off and leave someone else to bat clean up.
If comics were more realistic, heroes would be more human and deal with the exact same issues as cops do. You do see attempts to make heroes more realistic in some comics series and they pretty much always end in tragedy or at least feature tragedy as a major theme. More recently, the topic of mental health was tackled in Heroes in Crisis, and we all know how well that was received and how well that one ended.
Comics are the escape, police are the reality. So its just always going to be tricky to depict someone as unnatural and out there as Spider-Man in a cop's world.
Every day is a gift, not a given right.