Sbr Is Only Mildly Morally Ambiguous And That’s Okay

Sbr is only mildly morally ambiguous and that’s okay

okay so the title is misleading 🫣 this is just a short examination of Johnny v Valentine (and Johnny & Valentine) with a little analysis of the confrontation.

for me valentine’s defining character trait isn’t his patriotism but that’s he’s a massive fucking liar. excellent writing for a politician. the only promise he ever kept was the one he made to lucy not to harm steven. and even then valentine is also super vindictive, so even though he didn’t kill him he made sure to torture him a little. Valentine is not at all the magnanimous man he presents himself to be and the constant discrepancy between his words and his actions proves that. when he’s trying to trick johnny into ending the rotation he hits all correct appeals but johnny knows in his gut that this man is a liar.

sometimes ppl act like sbr proposes a huge moral quandary about valentine’s intentions and whether he was the one “walking the righteous path” all along. but there’s really not. that’s Johnny’s internal battle. Since nick’s death johnny believed himself to be a curse / burden / bad person, but through the race he undergoes several trials that end in self-improvement and learning to have grace with himself. by the end of the narrative Johnny has evolved into someone who does have the strength of character and integrity necessary to judge the actions of someone else, whether he believes it or not, and regardless of whether he feels the right to. So yes, johnny was right to kill valentine. there’s no ifs or buts about it. the true brutality and cruelty of Valentine’s ideal world was very clearly portrayed in the way D4C Love Train functions. the corpse appeared to ‘choose’ Valentine by granting him Love Train, but at the same time it was also healing Johnny. if we look at the corpse through the lens of it primarily being a tool used to achieve the collector’s desires, we see that it empowered both Valentine and Johnny and indirectly or not set them on a collision course with each other. Perhaps there was a question of who was ‘righteous’ for the corpse itself, but the narrative itself tells us over and over again that it’s Johnny.

look at it this way. Johnny, who for most of his life believed he was spiritually and later physically damaged beyond hope, was empowered through the corpse and ended the narrative with a new chance at life. Valentine, who desired a world where not just America would prosper, but where he would be the head of said prospering state, and embody the power behind it, was granted the ability to achieve that world. Yet during their confrontation, the callous cruelty and negative consequences of Valentine’s vision is made apparent over and over again. First with Lucy, then with the innocents killed ‘somewhere else’, and lastly with Gyro and Johnny. Valentine’s actions always betray the truth of his intentions; once he proposed the deal, should Johnny have accepted, he intended to backstab Johnny and kill him the moment he got what he wanted. If he had truly been the ‘righteous one’, he would have kept his word and left Johnny alone once the rotation was reversed. But leaving Johnny alive would have meant he was no longer the most powerful man in the room, and that idea is something Valentine can’t stand.

Valentine is not a good person with good intentions. He claims to care about America, yet throughout the story discards his men and citizens like bugs (consider the train engineer). His actions continually demonstrate the reality: Valentine is power-hungry, petty, vindictive, ruthless, and above all else, a manipulative liar.

Valentine’s patriotism is the motivation behind his actions, but his brutality and deceptiveness defines those actions and is evident in everything he does. The implicit reason Alt!Diego failed was because he believed Valentine. By the end of the story there shouldn’t be a question on whether Valentine or Johnny was in the right. Valentine was the villain and he needed to be defeated. His ‘righteous’ world was, unequivocally, wrong.