daredevilkink | Discussion/Off-Topic Post #1

I'm not an avid DD comics reader but I've seen enough fandom flailing to know that Matt chained up with a gun duct taped to his hand in the trailer is from the comics where the Punisher makes forces Matt to kill him/make the decision to to save someone else (correct me if I'm wrong on the specifics).

I'm just wondering, is this really any different from Matt making the decision to kill Fisk in S1? They've both taken a lot of lives to taking theirs would save people (regardless of the Punisher thinking he's only killing bad guys, it's still murder) and in S1 Matt wasn't in a split-second decision situation, he had far more time to decide to kill Fisk.

The line in the trailer 'you're one bad day away from being me' makes me think about this too- Matt's already had that day and he came back from it.

Uh, I mean, I feel like the one bad day that Frank's talking about is everyone you love dying, not...them being threatened. Like, part of the tension of that statement is in a way, Matt doesn't know if it's true or not. Foggy/Karen/Claire/etc are still alive.

One bad day away from losing everyone he cares about...
that, is an awesome interpretation.

Or, as I prefer to call it, it's not a 'bad day' as much as 'the wrong person getting hurt/killed'.

Frank has a fairly unique idea of a 'bad day'

The thing about Matt deciding to kill Fisk because of Mrs Cardenas' death is that it was definitely a "bad day", and it wasn't one that he really came back from through his own will. The only thing that stopped him carrying out the murder was a) finding Nobu instead of Fisk and b) being too beat-up to do anything when Fisk did appear. By the time the final showdown happened, it's arguable that Matt had the chance to kill Fisk and decided not to, but he wasn't quite driven by his emotions/desire for revenge as much as wanting justice for Fisk's crimes - not to mention, there wouldn't have been much point killing Fisk, with cops on the way and court proceedings on the horizon.

So that's why Frank's line hit hard for me. We know Matt is an emotional guy with a temper, and not many qualms about hurting bad people. Maybe by that point in the series, Matt will have made a far more solid decision to never kill, but it'll always be true that a "bad day" once did nearly bring him to cross that line. And who knows what the next "bad day" will do, if it's bad enough? Matt's driven by a sense of justice and faith in the law; what happens if he is ever in a dark enough place that he can't believe in those things any more?

As viewers we know/hope nothing will ever bring Matt to that point like it did with Frank, but the characters themselves don't 'know' that. That's one reason why it's so interesting to watch.

The line, although appropriate, is actually used in The Killing Joke between Batman and the Joker and it is about Joker killing Batman's 'family'. There's always the moral question of what does it take to make a hero into a killer.

I think the reason they use that line on the show is because it IS attached to another daredevil comic canon scene between Frank and Matt where Matt has lost everything, has been outed as DD, is in prison with Fisk awaiting trial, thinks Foggy is dead (in one of THE shittiest choices Foggy ever makes is to let Matt think he's dead and go into witness protection), and Fisk is toying with him daily. There is NO reason to not turn into a killer besides Matt's morals and he's on the verge of giving up. Frank finds out what's happening, essentially gets himself thrown intro prison to help Matt and break him out, and as they're going their separate ways he tells Matt he did it because 'You don't want to be me. You needed to remember that.' I hope we get a similar chat between Frank and Matt this season.

(in one of THE shittiest choices Foggy ever makes is to let Matt think he's dead and go into witness protection)

Did Foggy have a choice in that? I thought I read somewhere that it was orchestrated by Vanessa?

^^ Yeah, if anything that's really a case of Foggy being put in a shitty situation because of Matt's choices, not the other way around.

Vanessa didn't set it up so much as legit have Foggy actually shanked in Matt's prison after Foggy visits him to make Matt suffer and hear him die.

Foggy was, in my memory, basically told in the ambulance that he was being put into witness protection for his own good. In fact, the next time you see Foggy after his supposed death, he's actually trying to contact Matt and escape witness protection because he's worried about Matt. (Despite the fact that Matt's outing just tanked their practice and led Foggy to be the one to decide perjuring themselves was worth it to protect his secret).

So yeah... I am actually impressed by that anon's ability to stubbornly blame Foggy for that one. That's kind of a fucked up interpretation of events.

SA - Just to add to the point... Foggy doesn't "let Matt think he's dead". Matt thinks Foggy is dead because he straight up dies in the ambulance following multiple shanking stab wounds incurred while looking out for Matt. To clarify.

Um, but going back into what orchestrated it, yes there were a lot of hands behind the scenes pulling strings to make things happen, so if that's true then I don't understand why people stubbornly selectively say Foggy's not to blame because it was orchestrated, buuuut... in the same breath they also say everything was Matt's fault and nevermind the orchestration? Foggy was seriously complicit in what went down, what got them to that point. When Matt was first accused, he was the one who wanted to come out and admit it, and it was Foggy who shot him down and told him to shut the hell up and they were going to fight it, they were going to straight up lie to all the papers and media and counter sue. Which is weird because in Waid's run they mentioned how that was all Matt's fault and Matt's decision and uh nope, (retcon is a thing and Matt makes a lot of bad life choices but I wish they'd let Foggy have at least that one important moment in Matt's history but then again Waid believed Foggy was a coward who needed very specific Matt-related motivation to be action-courageous and I kind of don't buy that) that was Foggy's decision and Matt agreed with it. But again, retcon; we can't even blame an unreliable narrator because Matt and Foggy had that whole argument over Matt coming out.

I do think Foggy had plans to stay gone and out of Matt's life when he was shanked in prison, he was scared to death and he was hoping Matt would forgive him, he didn't plan to go back until he was healing up and started worrying about Matt. Like, honestly, did he ever actually think he wasn't going to worry about Matt in witness protection? In what world does Foggy Nelson ever not worry about Matt Murdock? It was supposed to be his thing, his whole thing, in his own words it defined him as a person, at least until the most recent run I guess.

Yooo I don't know about the comic book whatever but I have noticed what you're saying that people here are real quick to forgive Foggy anything while blaming Matt for the same stuff and I don't get it? Matt and Foggy seemed pretty even in the loveable asshole olympics in season one, they both did heroic things, they're both stalkers who break the law for the greater good. They help people in different ways so why the low level rage in only Matt's direction? What did I miss?

Anon who originally made the point about it NOT being Foggy's fault -

Here's the thing. I don't think Foggy's a saint. I'm not absolving him of his involvement in being the one to tell Matt not to simply come out as Daredevil from the beginning. But I just think it's a bit much to blame him for the prison shanking and subsequent decision to temporarily stay in witness protection? Like, that's a crazy expectation for how someone would act to assume that he would do anything different or even had the power to do anything differently in that specific scenario, orchestrated or not.

I'm not saying it's 100% Matt's fault he's in jail, or that it's 100% Matt's fault he got shanked, but let's face facts - at the end of the day, the decision to BE DAREDEVIL, period, was Matt's to make despite the wide-reaching impact it had on Foggy's life. And Foggy has always stuck by him through almost all of that, so I don't think it's shitty of him to nearly die and then allow witness protection to look out for him for a bit. I also think that it was never a case of him wanting to be in witness protection, because the minute he's healed he's trying to contact Matt and figure out what's going on. He knew he was Matt's lawyer and what the stakes were for Matt.

And I'll agree with you that painting Foggy as a saint is unfair. I actually hate when people do that too. But there is also a tendency among Daredevil fans (especially those for the show) to similarly try and paint Matt as a cinnamon roll whose decision to be Daredevil is saintly and heroic and all about his wanting to do the right thing vs. Foggy being kind of a nag who just wants to be pissy with him about it. And both characterizations are ridiculous.

I called out the blaming Foggy in the particular scenario stated only because I thought that in that case specifically it was really reaching to blame Foggy and let Matt off the hook, not because I don't think Foggy's guilty of anything or Matt's always in the wrong. It seemed to me to be an attempt to absolve Matt of responsibility for all of the stuff that went down related to his outing and paint him as a victim rather than a person whose choices (made with agency and knowing full well what might happen at the time) caught up with him.

I agree with the above anons that really it's all about balancing both of them as characters who collectively together often make fucked up choices, including things like faking Foggy's death later on in Waid's run or the things that happened with relation to Milla. I'm not completing in the camp of either of them.

Discussion/Off-Topic Post #1

Matt deciding to kill Fisk vs deciding to kill the Punisher

Re: Matt deciding to kill Fisk vs deciding to kill the Punisher

Re: Matt deciding to kill Fisk vs deciding to kill the Punisher

Re: Matt deciding to kill Fisk vs deciding to kill the Punisher

Re: Matt deciding to kill Fisk vs deciding to kill the Punisher

Re: Matt deciding to kill Fisk vs deciding to kill the Punisher

Re: Matt deciding to kill Fisk vs deciding to kill the Punisher

Re: Matt deciding to kill Fisk vs deciding to kill the Punisher

Re: Matt deciding to kill Fisk vs deciding to kill the Punisher

Re: Matt deciding to kill Fisk vs deciding to kill the Punisher

Re: Matt deciding to kill Fisk vs deciding to kill the Punisher

Re: Matt deciding to kill Fisk vs deciding to kill the Punisher

Re: Matt deciding to kill Fisk vs deciding to kill the Punisher