NetherRealm's Injustice 2 is ostensibly a game about a group of superheroes getting together to fight an arch-villain named Brainiac. Brainiac threatens to abduct several cities before destroying Earth, but that dangling sword of Damocles is overshadowed by a more personal moral conflict—one carried over from the first _Injustice—_the clash between Batman's strict non-lethal values and Superman's capital punishment-friendly form of authoritarian rule.

Which might be a surprising thing to hear if f you're only familiar with the most popular version of Superman. But unlike the do-no-harm, boy scout farmboy of Smallville, Justice League Unlimited, and All-Star Superman, the Superman of the Injustice universe errs toward tyranny: He seeks to rule by force and threat of death. Batman adheres, instead, to his famous "No killing" rule, while still retaining control through an unaccountable, high-tech surveillance state.

Because of this dichotomy, it's possible to read both Injustice games as as a referendum on the death penalty in the U.S. On one side, there is Superman and his cohorts who believe society would be improved by permanently removing violent criminals and killers from it. Injustice 2 begins, for example, with a flashback where Robin proves his mettle to Superman by slitting the throat of the serial killer Victor Zsasz, after writing him off as "incorrigible." On the other side of this ideological divide is Batman, who prefers sending such criminals into prison, with little thought given to the justice process beyond his own sphere of vigilantism. And maybe you see already why this referendum has its own problems.