Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25266931-20141008232543/@comment-75.36.167.103-20141016181713

Considering Junior wasn't dead or enragedly trying to kill Yang for what she did to he and his crew in the Yellow Trailer when he saw her again, I think it's safe to say that there Is an Awful Lot of nonethal combat. Including ballistics, explosives, and obvious bladed weapons. Ditto the fact that Torchwick has escaped a lot and is still very much alive given what he's done and all the likely chances they've had to put him in the ground.

That being said, we do have pretty clear evidence that there is also lethality. The glorified mob hit on Tuskson  and confirmation that he's Dead-Dead-Dead (or if I wanted to play devil's advocate, at least someone Cinder ordered Dead and thinks is) says that. And the fact that plenty of the poor, Bloody Grimm get dismembered or obviously killed in normal combat (by teenage girls and boys more often than not) tells me that there Is indeed lethality in this. And I don't think the cars  that Torchwick's mech jumped on are going to be faring well.

That, and the fact that space for human and faunus is rather tight. The major civilizations have to cower behind natural barriers, and the last time they tried to stretch out and get leg room it would up with Mountain Glenn. So plopping down prisons like we normally do would probably be something of an extravagent use of very limited space.

Couple that with empowered, more or less free-roaming warriors and nomadic wasteland with no law, and I think we'd have a golden recipe for a vigilante culture. Though on the opposite side, the limited amount of people and space means that human/faunus life is valuable, which would incentivize prisons. So take that as you will.

But my personal guess is that if push comes to shove, they Will Kill. I think the circumstances they're confronting the person in would matter more than the crime itself, and I think they have strong issues with it both from their age and relatively wide-eyed mindset, and from the cultural issues about killing humans/faunus when there are so few.

But I'd have very little doubt that if they tried, they could and would kill. And once the body has hit the floor I think the same culture would be unlikely to press them too hard about Why. The frontier and the hunt are dangerous things and all....