Judge Dredd: The hero or villain issue

[Aaron A Aardvark]

Roosevelt was dead by the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was Truman.

D'oh! I knew that.

[TordelBack]

Blimey, Garageman gives good post.

This question might benefit from a consideration of whether Fargo is a hero or a villain, after all he set up the system, and he provided the genetic material it shaped. 

There's also two Justice Departments here, Fargo's temporary solution and (for want of a better term) Goodman's permanent one.  Dredd is essentially a product of the former, but grew up and operates in the latter.  The very fact that he works against the injustices of the present system, when he could easily rule over it, moves him towards the hero camp.  Alas the utter bleakness of the system within which he's slightly adjusted his moral compass means that almost everything he does is overshadowed by the weight of villainy that he's complicit in, and actively protects.

But then...

Who else would have abandoned Owen Krysler, and then defeated the Mutant, blind and alone?  Who would have taken the fight back to the Sisters, and to Kazan?  Who could have faced down Judge Fear and Judge Cal? 

Who else would have saved that baby in the ruins of Vince St Clair?

[The Corinthian]

You may be looking too favourably on Fargo and too harshly at Goodman there. Fargo's surely too smart to have realised that this kind of "temporary solution" can't just be put back in the bottle while Goodman has to deal with the worst thing ever to happen in the history of the world.