Alicornutopia

I think there was some unspoken consensus going on about how Spider would almost certainly have to end up debent if they were going to so much as let a cop close enough to arrest him. (I mean, when you're that good of a bloodbender, anyone present who's not the Avatar amounts to another potential puppet.) And he emphatically did not want to be debent.

Also, they never explicitly brought it up so they never explicitly found this out, but Spider would've been way more tempted to turn it into a fight and way less cooperative about the various available options if they'd sent him to the Legitimate Authorities. (There was an unspoken acknowledgement between Jun and Spider that Jun was allowed to kill him if that's how things turned out; this does not extend to arbitrary people. They managed to develop a brotherly relationship of surprising depth and complexity in their short acquaintance.)

Also also, this didn't come up either, but I'm not sure there is such a thing as a skilled profession of "figurer-out if this particular person is Really Rehabilitatable or not". And if there is, I wouldn't expect its outcomes to be noticeably better than "amateur" analysis from a person who has special insight into the particular situation at hand. (And even if the Avatarverse has unusually effective psychological profiling, it presumably requires some sort of cooperation from the subject for data-gathering purposes; getting Spider to air his shit to Jun and Beila was hard enough, getting him to talk to A Professional would be nigh-impossible.) Of course, it's pretty reasonable for Beila to have more faith in accredited professionals in a domain she probably doesn't know much about than in an unaccredited person trying to do the same thing.

I’m not saying they should have gone with an option involving the Legitimate Authorities; I could have predicted that Spider would not have gone for that. I’m just surprised they didn’t even consider it.

I also feel that Beila was right to not trust that Jun and Dao had as accurate a read as they thought. She came to the wrong conclusion, but she doesn’t know enough about Jokers or Stevens to trust that they really do have that special insight.

I'm not even sure Beila came to the wrong conclusion. If you value punishment for any reason beyond just rehabilitation (e.g. for deterrence or retribution), letting a murderer walk free even knowing with 100% confidence he won't commit a crime is bad. You have to really trust that Spider's subsequent actions will make up for it on net (hence Beila thinking about "if he went away and quietly healed people in a suburb on an island and never hurt anyone again").

Heh.

I'm inclined to agree with most of my characters that retribution is valueless in a societal context; deterrence doesn't seem to work very well, and in any case, if you're considering letting a criminal go in secret with perfect confidence they won't commit any more crimes, there is nothing left to deter them from and no one else to be deterred from things and any further harm you inflict on them is pure loss.

I mean, the fact that the killer was not caught and punished would be non-secret. Exactly why would not be, but that's not the important part.

I guess I see "publicly admit you let them go" as substantially different from "publicly pretend you couldn't catch them", deterrence-wise.

Deterrence is almost entirely about how likely people feel that they would be to get caught (as opposed to severity of would-be punishment or anything like that).

(In another world, a dragon tries throwing various things through the face of a mirror-headed snake. None of them go, not the giant lizards or the uprooted shrubs or the small furry creatures.)

Why?! :(

Why won't they go? They don't have souls. Portalface snakes are a Dreamward-setting demon and therefore eat souls (or rather, try, and find that they are very inconveniently designed for their own purposes; but they don't even try to eat lizards/shrubs/mousealikes.)

Ah, that makes sense. So the dragon could go through, and if you and Kappa felt generous she could even go through to the same world as her bondmate.

IIRC, no Sunshine vampire or dæmon-having person has interacted with a portalface demon; do you know what would happen if they tried?