Justifying Judge Mental

Inspired by a point raised in a letter discussing the prompt “A Minor Villain Gets Real Scary”, this is an analysis of a character who deserves to be bigger than he is, IMO.

According to Podcast Episode I-15, JM is originally Gilbert Van Groute (“I am Groute”, he presumably has never said). We know he’s a lawyer, which implies that the reason he takes the identity of a judge in his criminal career is the result of him having always identified the judges he tries to persuade in court as being the ultimate authority figures. He knows the law and knows that judges have very little actual power, since their judgments must be constrained by the written text of the laws…and yet, as the final arbiters of how a particular situation is to be handled within the bonds of the law, they are still powerful, and so JM looks at the law he himself practices as a sort of shackle upon what would otherwise be figures of ultimate power. Doubtless he would reject the label of “criminal” for himself; he doesn’t think he’s breaking the law so much as rising above it, becoming something higher and greater than a mere mortal judge, his superpower of persuasion enabling him to bend the truth in the same way that lawyers bend the law…if his powers were as strong as he wished they were, if there were no limitations to their effectiveness, then they would enable him to truly become the final arbiter, not just of law, but of reality.

One of the reasons I’ve had trouble fitting into online communities, this one included, is my resistance to following any sort of rules, and my reason for this aversion is that I’ve always seen a creepy secret behind the eyes of people who uphold and enforce laws and rules of all varieties. If I were to write a story for the character of Judge Mental, I would fully explicate my feelings in this matter, by making him the ultimate example of what I believe many real-life people tend to do at least a little of. As stated in Christopher’s response to the letter, JM isn’t a “greater good” kind of a character, he isn’t someone who uses his powers to impose some sort of objective cosmic law upon the universe, the way the Celestial Tribunal does. Instead, I see JM as being a character who practices the law because he wants to punish people.

We know canonically that he’s a very competitive person, who resorts to underhanded tactics to win against his rival Hugh Lowsley; I see this as leading logically into the rest of my perspective upon him. A fundamentally abusive individual, he doesn’t just want to win, he specifically wants to defeat anyone who he can successfully bring the force of the law down upon, and gaining his powers just gives him a new tool in the wielding of a similar force, which he uses for much the same purpose. This does lean away from the behavior we saw him exercising in his one story against the Southwest Sentinels, but that team is 90’s era, and Gilbert has been harassing Captain Cosmic on his return visits to Earth since the seventies…he’s had time enough to evolve a bit as a character, he’s had a few tastes of victory over the years, and so now he feels like he has the magnaminity to be able to indulge in “playing nice” for a while, as long as everyone goes along with his delusions. Even the most violent abusers have periods of calm, where their preferred victim hasn’t done anything to set them off for a while, and they’re content to pretend at loving that person for a while, up until they find some tiny excuse to turn upon that person once again, and go back to hurting them in the way that they really want to have an excuse to hurt something.

I see JM as a very cruel person who constantly itches with the desire to…well, I don’t want to parallel him to myself, but to justify…bringing all his viciousness to bear upon someone and smashing them into the dirt, grinding his boot heel down on their neck in order to make himself feel more dominant…and IMO, this is what a LOT of people who gravitate toward lawmaking, law-arguing, and law-enforcing positions are secretly like deep down. Not all, certainly, there are plenty of people who fundamentally believe that preserving law and order is a noble and worthy cause; to again quote Christopher, these are indeed “greater good sorts of people”. But anyone who’s been on the Internet has encountered a moderator or something who seemed to enjoy their job just a little too much, and of course we have all sorts of stereotypes of bad cops and bad politicians (and certain types of bad lawyers, although generally this midpoint between the lawmaker and the enforcer doesn’t lean in this direction as much as either of them), stereotypes which exist for a reason even if they only represent a tiny minority of the group.

There is another interpretation of JM that I can see, though, one where he actually does believe the things he says and is genuinely delusional, seeing himself as being on some sort of higher mission to bring order to a chaotic world. But that vibe really fits better for a Fanatic enemy or the like…I really think Judge Mental works better as I’ve described him here.

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