So I was watching this video from Boogie, a prominent YouTuber who recently got into a bunch of legal trouble for firing a warning shot at a bully. He went through two years of legal hell in order to clear his name and at many times was really close to losing everything.
This got me thinking. Our characters don't experience enough legal trouble. If Boogie can get in big trouble for firing a warning shot at a clear bully who was threatening his life, then how about a random bystander who gets hurt in one of the small side scuffles that our characters go through on a regular basis?
I remember in Spider Man: No Way Home, Peter's legal troubles with Mysterio are mostly handwaved away with a cameo from Daredevil. But even if he was totally in the clear, it would have taken years and thousands of dollars to go through the court proceedings. And let me remind you, court proceedings are slow. Every small scuffle, every time a bad guy shoots up a bar or something, every time the main character is forced to harm someone or even threaten someone, that's enough to get them in major legal trouble.
See, most of our characters are living in Hollywood land, or GTA land, where you can do crazy stuff and get away with it mostly scot free. Because it's no fun if your protagonist accidentally injures a random no-name side character who you haven't even invented a name for and gets dragged through years of legal litigation that totally trashes his reputation and prevents him from doing his heroic stuff. That stuff just doesn't happen in any book that doesn't focus on that kind of thing in particular.
And I'm more guilty of this than most. My characters can run about a city blowing stuff up, battling ninjas, and get involved in crazy shenanigans that leave tons of people dead and get away with it without even talking to a lawyer. And that's strange.
But I argue here that it's necessary. In order to keep the stakes high in any action movie, you can't afford to waste chapters dealing with legal issues that most writers don't even have an expertise on. You want your character to go bang bang smack smack. You ignore the fact that our society has very little tolerance for deviance, and even if someone is completely innocent in a situation, they still have to drag themselves through court to prove their point. Because this isn't fun. It's not what we've been conditioned to expect in any movie or story involving action in the modern world.
And I feel kind of bad for being one of the perpetrators of this trope. But I'll still write the same way, because I just don't think anyone besides John Grisham can write good law stuff and keep it interesting. So my characters will continue to be public menaces without recourse and I'll embrace that trope. That's my decision on the matter. Now that I've made it, I'll be able to handle certain parts of that trope better.
So keep your characters blasting through the streets, but remember that you can't really get away with that in real life.
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