once more, for dramatic effect

The state is the institution that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in a given territory. State violence is so normalized it often ceases to be seen as violence, e.g if a civilian takes someone off the street by force, throws them in a car and holds them hostage in a secondary location that's kidnapping, if a cop does it it's arresting.

Cops are not simply "people who do violence" they are people who hold a monopoly on the legitimate use of it and commit statist violence to uphold the power of companies and the government. In contrast, vigilantism is non-state violence that challenges this monopoly, at least in theory, but in practice it depends on who vigilantes target and what methods they use.

If vigilantes work with cops, target only people who the state targets and send them to jail then they are functionally state operatives and are acting as a paramilitary wing for the police.

This is why so many heroes seem unaware of their status as criminals. They lecture their enemies of the evil of crime while committing the crime of vigilantism because while they might be law breakers on paper, they aren't in practice. They are implicitly authorised by the cops they work with.

If they instead target people not on the basis of whether or not the state likes them but based on their own independent morality and do not collaborate with the state at all then they are non-state, and if they actively defend people against state violence then they are anti-state.

Of course, most vigilantes don't fit 100% into one of these categories, like most things in life, this is a spectrum and where they're placed can change over time. This is more of a framework that you can use to figure out how much of a cop a vigilante is being at any given time.

Yes, a belief in redemption is often a motivating factor for prisoner's rights advocates, but it isn't always related and does not make someones support of the prison industrial complex more progressive because it does not materially change what they think should happen to criminals.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.