daredevilkink | Discussion/Off-Topic Post #1

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Discussion/Off-Topic Post #1

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OP - It's always good to chat with another anon who is familiar with the comics history. :) It's also good to chat with nuDD fans because they're not coming into the series with our mental baggage and scar tissue from however many years of reading DD. I'll cruise through here and reply in order:

1. I'm glad you parse this out; though totally unnecessary for me, it's good for new fans if they're curious re: Karen's comics history. The reason I chucked this question up was because this MCU Karen isn't sticking to the script. They've obviously pulled some deep cuts from the comics, but in the show Karen sounds like she's already done her porn and drugs act so the mass confusion of readers blaming Matt for Karen's choices is out of the question in the MCU, for which I'm glad. This Karen comes to us with warts and all and that's fine, that's great, but since she hasn't gotten to the 'sell Matt's identity' place yet, I'm wondering if that's what's going to happen in S2. Karen's story is being shown to us en media res so I'm waiting and wondering if they're really going to go there in some way. The show has been very good at taking the loooooong history of DD and giving us this beautiful amalgam of him in nu!Matt Murdock, so I'm expecting the same of Foggy and Karen, though Karen likely won't outstay her welcome so I'm wondering at what point she exits the show and what does she leave in her wake.

2. I was listening to Wesley's speech before Karen shoots him and he's very clear about how all her choices have brought her to that specific moment in time, and what will happen to her and those she loves once Wilson finds out. It's a heavy reminder to the audience that there are consequences pending. The fallout from killing a man, Fisk's man, however warranted, is still pending consequences from either Wilson Fisk and/or the law, maybe both. And we saw what Wilson did to Ben. It does bother me that she already knows what Fisk is capable of and will probably do to her friends and/or family, especially after Ben's funeral, but still refuses to tell anybody. Fun fact: Karen holds Wesley's gun like a pro, she steadies the shooting hand in the palm of her other. And there's no tremble. No, that's not the first time she's shot someone. This show is damn good at small details.

3. I know there's no shame in being office admin, but most of the season Karen's felt like she's trying to exorcise old demons (sort of like Matt -- this show is chock full of parallels between characters), probably from her porn/drugs/shooting people background, but she's jumping on any 'cause' like it's her next fix. And in people with addiction issues, they do tend to substitute one fixation/obsession with another.

4. See, having Elektra and Bullseye show up in the same season makes me think we're going to get that brutal comic canon killing, and if the show is going to kill Elektra, then I doubt they're going to kill Karen, too. But I noticed Karen's reaction to Matt talking to Vanessa and she seemed a little jealous but that made me think Matt should be completely aware of how Karen feels about him by now, yes, but he hasn't encouraged her at all (and I hope he doesn't), which leads me to the next comment.

5. Yes, in DD Yellow iirc when Matt found out Foggy wanted to propose he removed himself from the 3-way, and in the end it didn't matter because Karen wanted Matt anyway. The beautiful kicker to this show is that there have been very subtle nods to same sex pairings as well as het pairings, they didn't exclude anyone, the flow chart is a riot. :) So nods to all the obvious het couples, but also nods to Wilson/Wesley, and even Matt/Foggy. I'm sorry, this is the best thing ever to me. Yes, fandom has taken Matt and shoved him into every pairing possible, and has laughed about all the gratuitous flirting happening between Matt and Foggy, but you know what, it IS gratuitous. The show didn't have to give us those and they did, and they made it BEAUTIFUL. They gave us an entire episode devoted to those two having an argument like a married couple dealing with an infidelity rather than explain away the argument in 10 minutes of We good, bro? Sorry, bro. Yeah, we good, bro, we good. No the tremors are still echoing until the very last episode, this is a BFD. But I'm considering the way that Matt must know Karen is attracted to him, shouldn't he? And he doesn't engage her over it, he doesn't take advantage, he just keeps keeping on. Couldn't he have done the same thing with Foggy? And could have done it for years, which would explain a little more about Foggy being so freaked out about Matt knowing when Foggy was lying and Matt going along with it? Matt couldn't act on it because Foggy means more to him than sex, and Matt's got that whole serial monogamist thing working for him to scratch those itches anyway, but their breakup is taken so hard on each side, there's some deep, deep fissures for that hurt to dig so deep. God, but I really love this show and all the way they managed to respect DD's comics history while giving us an entirely new canvas to work with and new possibilities.

(words words feels words sorry)

if anything, i really hope that they open up on what happened to karen in the past, because i agree with you, she was an expert shot with a gun (she was also incredibly brave to go back to her apartment for the flash drive, and incredibly smart to claw that one officer's eye out when he tried to strangle her. if anything, karen's extremely scrappy.

if they are planning to put her drug addiction/sex worker thing in her past, i wouldn't be against it, tbh. it's always better to see someone get back up than get knocked down. i can't say that she'll have had any involvment in porn, though, since we live in the age of the internet and presumably her employers probably would have been able to find the porn she was in with a simple google search. past drug addiction is possible, provided she passes a drug test. i think people just wouldn't be able to believe it since karen looks so put-together and obviously well-adjusted (but that could be what she's going for, ohoho)

i'd love the show to explore the possibility of foggy's (or even matt's) bisexual tendencies. i really would. i'm just not holding my breath for it because i got dragged around by bbc sherlock at a relatively young age (i'm 18 now, more or less an infant compared to some other anons on this meme), but the constant queerbaiting was just too much for someone just figuring out their own sexuality and i'm incredibly cautious about trusting this show with canonizing non-hetero characters. would i like it to happen? yes, absolutely, and this is a show on a streaming service which also featured kevin spacey full on making out with a man during a threeway which gives me infinitely more hope than the bbc or the cw, but i'm still cautious.

(don't worry about your word dump anon i'm equally as guilty of it at this point)

DA

i'd love the show to explore the possibility of foggy's (or even matt's) bisexual tendencies. i really would. i'm just not holding my breath

Yeah, I heard that Steven DeKnight wanted to have gay characters in Daredevil, but Marvel told him he couldn't. :( I didn't see a source for this, but I would not be surprised if this turned out to be true.

if i'm not recalling wrong, a recent marvel memo was leaked that insisted the recast peter parker had to be straight, so. of course i could just be misreading onion headlines as actual news, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Yes, but I think that was an old memo? But maybe you're right, maybe it's for the new Spider-Man writer's room. The new Spider-Man is supposed to be involved in Civil War, just like the comics, but I think he's only going to be 13, or something like that?

OP: The Comics Code Authority had a deathgrip over sequential art for far too long and that included filtering out any scent of teh gay, but at least Marvel was one of the first who finally stopped using it and allowing it such rampant censorship. In the 15 years since, Marvel is actually embracing the gay characters, and maybe they fuck it up sometimes but they're TRYING. They'll continue to screw up, but they're continue to learn, too. But in television media with the partnership with Disney/ABC I can't help but feel that's what will tie their hands progressively, and it's going to take longer to actually tell the same kind of out characterisations on the screen that are already available in print.

That said, I think Steven DeKnight did an AMAZING job if he was told no and still managed to say ENOUGH to convey so much between the lines. AN AMAZING JOB. :)

While I do think Karen's choices in the show have been brave, they've also been stupid just like Matt's. He calls himself out for walking into the Russian's trap as 'careless, stupid' and he's right, he says they almost caught him. He gets emotional and he loses focus. Karen, otoh, isn't losing focus because she gets emotional, she doesn't have that type of focus to begin with; she's not been trained for this, she's not considering physical 'enemies' or how to judge when she's going to be attacked or how those kind of consequences come into play. She's got Big Ideas (and a lot of neediness to see them fulfilled) but she doesn't plan for anything, and she admits she's 'a big fan of the not thinking' thing. I like Karen, but she's way out of her element and she has a skewed idea of what she can accomplish in this reality. I love her scrappiness, but I love Matt's scrapiness too, and his abilities barely see him out of the situations he puts himself into. I don't see how Karen will survive that world for much longer if she keeps playing her angles the same way.

As for the porn thing, I thought that was what her and Ben were discussing twice? He made it sound like he did some digging on her and found it right away, and it's the reason she won't post the Fisk story to the internet herself, because she said 'who will believe me once they find... what you found' to Ben. IOW Ben's credible, she's not, and she didn't want all that surfacing anyway.

Oh my dear, you are young and so SO fortunate to live in a time where you are blessed with this kind of media and support. You make me feel like reciting the tears in rain monologue from Blade Runner. I'm an older fan and I've seen fandoms come and go, fandoms with homophobic showrunners and shows with homophobic actors and I've seen slash fandoms exist before social media was a thing. What I've learned in my time? To listen to the quiet empty spaces between words, and allow my fannishness to exist there. I think of characterisations and relationships in these shows like the night sky. The bright shining specks of light equate to what's seen/said on the screen, and the dark matter of space is everything else that isn't implicitly stated. WRT sexuality, Marvel has given us the very subtle gift of options on the screen for almost every character, and coming from a place where we used to have showrunners and writing rooms straight up saying NO HOMOS, I'll take it, this is an improvement, and unless/until they ever have a character say outright, 'I'm not gay/bi/straight/X' then there's wiggle room in the sandbox for me to fictionalise whatever I want. Hallelujah. :)

Seconded regarding Marvel giving fans room to play with slash without having to come out and state anything. In the older comics, I notice so much unsubtle homoeroticism that was clearly unintended. These days, it really reads like they know what they're doing and the fans they're baiting.

The relationship between Cap and Bucky is a great example. An even better one is the science bros tag at the end of Iron Man 3.

I mean, even the AV Club review of Nelson v. Murdock makes a point of saying that a line like "Was anything between us even real?" is there for a reason.

Oh, and re: the moratorium on Spider-Man being straight? The article I read indicated that that was on Sony's no-no list as part of the agreement to lend out the rights, not Marvel's.

Marvel has plenty of great LGBT characters (even though I admit that it'll probably be a while until any of them reach the MCU in an outright stated way) including basically the entire Young Avengers team. (Which has Loki who is also extremely gender fluid as a shapeshifter. And so far the MCU has not gone out of its way to contradict this characterization at all).

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