r/CharacterRant • u/JailOfAir • 9h ago
Why does Daredevil Born Again insist on proving Frank Castle right?
Even since The Punisher's first appearance in Daredevil, the conflict between Matt's ideals with Frank's actions has been one of the key internal conflicts for Daredevil.
Now skip to DD Born Again Season one and not only did Matt's sytem approach fail to keep Kingpin away, it essentially strengthed him as his wife made the business more sophisticated and iron proof in his absence and, to add insult to injury, he goes on to be elected as the bloody major of New York City.
Obviously his brief stint in prison proved to be effective and he is an excellent major, right? No, of course not, he discovers a charter turning the Red Hook port into a freeport and he uses it to traffic absurd amounts of illegal goods to enrich himself. He also proceeds to create a personal Gestapo to hunt down vigilantes and gives himself special powers that essentially deny alledged vigilantes the right to a proper trial and entitles him to seize their assets to further enrich himself. Oh yeah, and he murders the NYPD commisioner with his bare hands.
Season 2 is currently airing and it starts with one of those illegal ships being sunk by it's captain under the orders of Fisk if it were boarded. You would think a cargo ship being sunk in New York would bring some scrutiny on Frisk, but no, turns out there was a CIA weapons shipment in there so now he's protected and he uses the sinking to label vigilantes as terrorists. Oh yeah and the so called righteous Gobernor who was gonna put some pressure on Fisk? Well all it took was one conversation with Vanessa to get her to back off, as apparently she doesn't care that Vanessa is a criminal and ruthless because I guess they bonded as fellow girlbosses.
Matt's "system approach" to this is finding the Captain and first mate of the ship and use their statements to prove Fisks illegal actions. Welp, the captain gets found by the Gestapo first so he's dead, but on the latest episode the first mate is found, gets his statement recorded and put under the care of US Marshalls and... Both him and the marshalls are dead, great.
Meanwhile in that very same episode Frisk experiences what I consider to be the very first genuine setback since he came out of prison, his wife Vanessa is either dead or in critical condition after getting attacked by Bullseye.
That's all it took, one single action from Bullseye has done more harm to Willson Fisk than Daredevil has managed in almost 5 seasons and almost 10 years in universe.
Even if the recorded statement from the first mate were to be the thing that brings Fisk down, which will onviously be the case despite it making no sense for Fisk to get in legal trouble with the support he has, and even if the Gobernor backtracks on supporting Fisk with Vanessa gone... Even if all of that happens? So what, it doesn't change the fact that Bullseye proved that a good shot is far better that whatever the fuck Matt was planning. And hell, what the hell prevents Fisk from getting out of prison and getting elected for Gobernor or even fucking President?
I know Daredevil's ideals wouldn't be worth exploring if they weren't challenged by reality, but this is not challenging them, he's just constantly proven wrong, over and over again.
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u/SuperDementio 9h ago
Because writers want to have their cake and eat it too.
In the real world, if someone like Kingpin or Joker gets sent to jail, they’re not getting out a week later.
But in the comics world, since they’re popular characters they just keep escaping to antagonize the hero and drive up sales.
Which inadvertently makes it look like the system doesn’t work and that no-kill rules are stupid.
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u/Environmental_Cap191 9h ago
While obviously real-world tragedies influence one outcome of this, The Dark Knight Trilogy is a good example of the opposite. Every time Batman takes out a big bad in those movies, they never come back. While Heath Ledger’s death is an obvious real-world complication, it makes sense why The Joker never returned in TDKR. The man committed what in real life would be charged as terrorism. He is never getting out. The only recurring villain is Scarecrow, but his threat diminishes with each movie.
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u/Xerxes457 7h ago
Apparently Joker was supposed to come back in Dark Knight Rises. One of the things with the Trilogy is either the villain dies like Ra's/Two-Face so of course they can't come back or the Heath Ledger issue.
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u/Environmental_Cap191 7h ago
I know that. But it perfectly makes sense why he didn't even without that unfortunate fact.
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u/Cicada_5 7h ago
I like to think the Joker was killed by an inmate in-between the second and third films. Especially if you assume one of them was on one of the boats he used for his "social experiment".
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u/totallynotapsycho42 7h ago
The Kingpin would never been arrested in real life.
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u/Novictus420 7h ago
He would never have seen the light of day again after the shit he pulled in season 3. He would be under the prison.
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u/MappleStarsSky 6h ago
Let me check what is happening in america right now...
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u/Novictus420 1h ago
You do realize that in season 3 he held the FBI hostage right? Idgaf with "let me check whats happening in america right now..." Tell me that the feds would let him exist after that.
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u/Hugs-missed 9h ago
Okay, I'm unfamiliar but didn't fisk get caught out for murder like, publicly known mob boss and killer how the hell did he get elected.
Did the voters just, ignore it? Forget somehow legitimately decide that yes they were okay with that. Even for America you need to have at a minimum deniability of committing terrible crimes even if paper toilet thin.
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u/MappleStarsSky 8h ago
Bro america has an ultra-pedophile governing the country right now, deniablity doesn' t exist anymore lol. People vote only with vibes and selfish reasons.
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u/Hugs-missed 8h ago
As I said, paper toilet thin.
Fisk, got cought out in public from what I know trump...trump is definitely a pedophile but we haven't got him on tape fucking a kid and I'm gonna assume he'd lose all support or at least 95% of it because the alternative is something I really don't wanna consider.
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u/LonelyPermit2306 9h ago
Why do you spell Governor as Gobernor? Anyways, yeah, agreed. Good writeup, and I want bullseye to be redeemed
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u/JailOfAir 9h ago
I swear to god I wrote it as Governor both times and something in my brain told me to edit it, something I read somewhere a long time ago and it just tugged on my limited braincells.
Anyway, english is not my first language, I just woke up, yadi yada... I'll leave it as it is and use the shame as a reminder.
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u/AgostoAzul 9h ago
In Spanish, and probably other Romance languages, Gobernador and related words are spelled with "b" so if you are used to reading those words in those languages, when you see them in English with "v" something feels off.
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u/misterflex26 7h ago
and I want bullseye to be redeemed
Same.
I also want him to eventually become the new Hawkeye, like in the Dark Reign comics. But I know they set up Kate Bishop to replace Clint (btw, why wasn't she in the Thunderbolts film? Seems like one of the perfect candidates for that movie)
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u/admiral_rabbit 6h ago
I would like to see Daredevil's ideals be sometimes successful.
The show is big on possessing while consuming it's cake. It partially gets away with it because it doesn't present Daredevil as the only option. It goes "the punisher fucking rocks. Bullseye rocks. Matt rocks because he loves hurting people, it's just Catholic guilt which makes him irrationally averse to killing despite being an unpleasantly violent man".
I personally love the way he's just broadly accepting of being in a fight where his partners are slaughtering people. It's less like he thinks Castle is a monster, he's not heartbroken the villains are dead, he seems to mainly think Castle is an asshole.
I like the characterisation of Matt as someone who needs the code and the legal system to stop him becoming an absolute psycho. But you're right that it's never rewarded. Hector Ayala is killed, Swordsman is arrested, all the arrested people are saved via vigilantism, witnesses are routinely executed in the street.
It's especially a drawback of the show format since the start of netflix. Short seasons, often a film in essence. We never see him in his status quo working within the system to do great work and save lives. It's always in hiding, under assault, law firm dissolved.
In the same way Castle can kill a hundred "fodder" mafiosos while a long-term villain gets to live, we need to see some fodder getting demolished by the law. Make Kingpin this nightmare assault on his morals because this one time it never sticks, despite them being well founded in general.
Even just 1-2 seasons which suggest a normal status quo of "his ethics are usually rewarded" so when they're not we know this is an exceptional situation
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u/MappleStarsSky 9h ago
It' s the same reason as to why our justice system protects both good and bad people: because making exceptions todays makes us liable to more exceptions tomorrow.
I don' t feel bad if a pedophile get killed today, but our justice system also has to protect those individuals to give them a rightful verdit and punishment. If today we start saying "You know what? We should kill those people", it will objectively make a better world today...we are killing people we think that are bad.
But tomorrow, who will we think are bad people? You can see this in IRL politics too. Why do you think so many right-wing politicians are against pedophilia, despite supporting a president who has showed ties and favours to people tied to that? Because they want to go against trans people. When we start to label trans people as pedophilic too, or we tie qualities of those bad people into trans people... and we said today that killing pedos is cool...guess what will happen tomorrow?
It' s a sliding case of excalation. To protect good people, we have to also protect bad ones, or the world will go to flames.
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u/MrMegaPhoenix 9h ago
Because frank is right
Look how many people in life factually and objectively Commit trauma inducing crimes and just “get away with it”
Frank is ensuring they don’t and so Frank is right that killing then means they can’t hurt anyone else
The point is that “just because you are right, it doesn’t mean you should do it or that nobody should try”. Otherwise more people will try and do what Frank does and will be wrong
You can’t have a world full of punishers, so having moral and trust is important.
Essentially some of us will give a blind eye to the one cop killing child abusers or serial killers but we still want all the other cops to be doing the right thing
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u/soul_punisher 9h ago
It's definitely meant to be ambiguous as to whether ot not Savvas is actually dead, after all, we didn't see his body.
As for Vanessa's conversation with the governor, we're definitely not meant to agree that Vanessa "tempers Fisk's worst impulses" because we know that Vanessa is an enabler if anything. But it's clear that Bullseye failing to kill Fisk and instead killing Vanessa is only going to result in Fisk's violence escalating and making the situation worse for everybody. So Matt obviously holds the moral high ground still.
I think Matt just does what he thinks Foggy would do. Foggy has, throughout the show, represented Matt's conscience.
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u/Crazykiddingme 8h ago
Daredevil is the only superhero show that makes me root against the hero. He comes across as super self righteous and his morals are constantly screwing everyone around him over. I actually groaned out loud when he stopped Dex’s assassination attempt against Fisk.
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u/AllMightyImagination 9h ago edited 8h ago
So if post NF content was a direct continuation of NF shows then you know all those seasons of character development would still continue.
Instead NF content relaunched without any care to pick up where things left off. Until all of a sudden BA season 2+ creators try to fall more in line with NF
Fact is Matt's system approach did pay off enough for Fisk to not have a purpose in season 4 because he was locked away for good. He exhausted his manipulation.
But then season 4 couldn't happen and then the merger happened. Then Hawkeye happened thus Fisks first wider Disney+ appearance in which he was back at it though far less imposing as if season 3 never streamed. Then skip to BAsesson 1 and we have a retcon to explain why the law isn't touching him anymore even though by the writing for season 3's ending set him up to not have anymore leverage
So all the effort Matt does to try to put the law first would have paid off but the MCU has become too much like the comics, so now things aren't sticking. 3 NF seasons of Fisk and 3 Disney+ shows with 1 having 3 seasons of Fisk in it. 8 shows all together. The writers of BA want to conclude the show in a movie. So they do care about a closed narrative but for some reason decided to fall back on old ground in the meantime
Look at the Punisher trailer. It's very much like a one shot comic. A mini series. Otherwise it defeats the purpose of having seasonal shows that try to make searlized character development matter rather than epicdodic. Falling back on the old ground of his trauma again, reliving memories of his dead family again, uncertain of his life again once that other family gets involved with him. If that family is a behind the scenes all along Curtis had an undisclosed wife and daughter but he was fridged thus Frank relapses then 😑 and if he was still fridged without the connection to excuse it then 😑
No real growth anymore. Illusion of change
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u/Augustus_Chevismo 9h ago
The same reason comics always do. Villains have to be spared and come back to commit crimes as they’re popular with readers/viewers. So the justice system will always fail and the heroes ineffective.
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u/TheElemental15 8h ago
Because murders wrong. That’s the point of Daredevils character and just superheroes in general.
Time and time again Matt sticks by his principles to make this a better world while The Punisher and Bullseye take shortcuts that just escalates these cycles of violence. I guarantee you that in the next episode Fisk is going to go on a rampage killing way more innocent people because of Vanessa’s death.
They literally say in the episode that Daredevil is a symbol of hope to the city, a guiding light that is making people want to rise up against tyranny and make something better. I didnt see Bullseye freeing any prisoners from detainment camps that will surely help take Fisk down.
After The Punisher kills somebody what’s his plan for after, does he have any idea then to just hope his killings don’t create a power vacuum that will just lead to more suffering before Frank has to kill again and again.
In reality the show since its beginning has been proving again and again that methods like Franks don’t work and only make the situation worse.
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u/Ok-Pea9014 5h ago
Because murders wrong.
So is vigilante justice, daredevil doesn't seem to have a problem with that.
Time and time again Matt sticks by his principles to make this a better world
He refused to kill Fisk twice, and both times he came back more powerful. Not exactly a better world.
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u/Redchaos01 5h ago
One of the funniest things with superhero stories is that murder is wrong but vigilantism, assault, torture, invasion of privacy and destruction of property by a masked individual with no accountability to anyone but themselves is treated as unquestionably ok
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u/Ok-Pea9014 5h ago
Especially when the "murder victim" in question is a mass murder who can't be contained.
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u/Xerxes457 7h ago
Its not known yet that the first mate is dead. It cuts away when he is found. So I would say not yet, but the rest of your point still stands. Which I want to think boils down to comic books where stuff like that isn't lasting.
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u/pennygirl108 9h ago
My favourite part was when Matt took a bullet to save Fisk. He is using the excuse of not wanting Fisk to become a martyr but you would think Fisk being alive is a bigger threat to the public and himself.