Thoughts about how Ben Reilly's return was handled?

[Vworp Vworp]

I wonder how many people would change their tune if they were killed and brought back to life multiple times because of a lunatic. How many of you would retain your attitude and self awareness and how many would probably become crazy too.

Yeah, that's probably something you're just going to have to just keep wondering.

Nobody is saying Ben should be fine, Ben should be a little damaged and maybe carrying around some baggage from that. However there is a huge difference between taking revenge against a psychotic scientist and going along with genocide and murder. Insanity is a cop-out in this story because there is some form of logic that goes along with the decision making. It's logic is heavily flawed and Ben just does it without warning or build up. He just ignites an apocalypse for no reason other than to make clones. How could 27 deaths make Ben;
Use an Egyptian theme
Resort to emotional blackmail
Murder
Attempted murder
Grave robbing
Forcing people to work for him against there will for pills to keep them alive
Reviving someone who got the death penalty
Reviving Massacre
Bringing back known terrorists from the dead
Releasing inmates from prison
Willingness to let someone murder his brother over a disagreement
Resorting to genocide for NO REASON
Identity theft

If we had seen the build up to this I may be more accepting but we only know Ben 27 in the context of Clone Conspiracy. Last we saw Ben he was a hero and all around nice guy, now we know he would do everything I listed and we lack context for this beyond him being a little unhinged after getting resurrected so many times. Insanity can't be an all around cop-out in story telling. That's how we get things like 90's Jackal.

Exactly. It's possible that there was a way to write Clone Conspiracy and Ben's character in a way that was familiar, whilst still bearing the scars of what happened to him. But that's not the story Dan wrote. And it certainly wasn't the Ben that he wrote. CC's Ben didn't even have a mild echo of Ben's personality, not a single line of dialogue, not a single action, not a single solitary moment that felt in any way at all like this was a damaged Ben Reilly.

Indeed, take out some of the personal stuff and you could have given any generic villain exactly the same dialogue that Ben had in this story and I doubt anyone would have suggested "Hang on, that sounds like something Ben Reilly would do/say".