Discussion ComicBook / ThePunisher

Did it myself, when will I ever learn?

He does not want to wantonly kill everyone ( Never Hurt an Innocent) or Take Over the World so he is not a Villain Protagonist.

You've got a ridiculously narrow view of villainy, if it is required to have ambitions to be a worldwide tyrant to be one.

Anyway, applied to the real world he is an ex-semi war criminal, who gained a new target after his family suffers the same fate as the Vietnamese he himself was a part of targetting

And yes, he very much would hurt an innocent, and still continue as usual. Not target them deliberately no, but he knows "that wars have civilian casualties".

Even his most Lighter and Softer incarnation did kill a civilian female hostage after a cell of Eagle Land style survivalist Nazis wanted him to prove his loyalties during an infiltration.'

Of course, real world politics actually mostly work in terms of Evil Versus Evil, there is little to do about that, and anybody who is not uneasy with the fact tends to be a Complete Monster.

However, he is still a serial-killer One-Man Army, somebody who applies the libertarian Uber Mensch ideal of "An individual having full authority beyond the hypocritical rule of law to apply his own brand of "justice", the same they themselves do in a greater scale. If terrorists work "independently" (supported by assorted factions from diverse governments); why should there not be counter-organisations (that somehow manage to finance themselves) that also combat them beyond any rule of law? Chaos is a much better way to combat Chaos than bureaucratic, inefficient, slow-moving order. Now, let's to talk about raving one-fit-for-everything _ideology_ without either reality, compassion for the social-Darwinian foodstuff that Does Not Deserve To Exist (TM), or accountability to any authority beyond my own blindsided gargantuan ego!"

Of course, for the real world this tends to simply reduce practical efficiency/capability against high civilian casualties, and would be much better applied by assisting existing entities with new data, expertise, flexibility, or areas of attack... Taking the law into one's own hands on such a serious matter as torture and mass-murder makes somebody into another Jack The Ripper: "Filthy immoral prostitutes that make me want them! Kill them all!" -> "Filthy immoral drug-addict leeches upon society that are slaves to their addictions, and the research that dares to challenge my ideology by stating that their free will is virtually non-existent! They haven't suffered nearly enough! Kill them all in as gruesome hideous and torturous fashions as possible! I will write multitudes of excruciatingly hateful propaganda for it and then assign them all to be tortured forever to show what a comparatively good and decent person that I am! They aren't any better than the people who enslave them, because they gladly allow themselves to be enslaved, and love being like this! There are no victims! Don't ever give them treatment! DIIIIIIIIIEEEEEE! WRIIIITHEEEE! ROAST ON A SPIT! I WANT ANNNGUISSH!... but coated in sugar to make it sound reasonable... And no, I'm not remotely a drug addict, but it's not necessary to get disturbed when what in the real world would be pure absolute evil, especially froma position of non-traumatised absolute entitlement, without say any riduculously extreme war trauma and brainwashing Jerk Justifications, is lauded as an ideal (The Punisher at least has the excuse of simply being a limited human with few other options on his own, which actually gives him a much bigger excuse than Wolverine, and is not presented as something bright and shiny while committing gruesome horrors... Zatanna and her ilk on the other hand...), and you know, that's literally the kind of extension this type of reasoning leads to (and yes, a large part of American media creators actually do sound like that, and tend to assume that they are among the nicest percentiles of humanity, even though they read like some of the genuinely nastiest people you have ever encountered, In Name Only comparatively tame local neo-Nazis included... Gawd, I get tired of blindsided hateful ideologues).

Anyway, this is just stream-of-consciousness, not an essay, and I've written much more thorough and comprehensible analyses on the topic elsewhere, but returning to "Is he a Villain Protagonist?" Answer: Yes, in terms of what he symbolises/how his type of serial-killing actions would function in the real world, and that it is turning common to seriously consider performing them, as well as the sheer extremes he commits, and we cannot call him anything but a villain without condoning Jack The Ripper or any other Blood Knight Knight Templar mass-murdering callous fanatic with an agenda, and no compassion either for victims or less-than-severe non-evil criminals... However, yes, obviously there is some inherent incompatibility/"inconsistency", as there wouldn't be a clear-cut answer if Frank simply had remained a soldier/sniper accountable to a "reasonably benevolent democratic government", instead, as the real world isn't nice at all and extremely regretably sometimes does need (somewhat, sort of, kind of, maybe... well, at least the other guy is even worse) "altruistic" enforcement to function. The problem is that his type of "hero" is making humanity consider the full dirty mass-murdering extent as something noble and admireable, the first option to be accepted as the "bloodcrazed frenzied apes ripping each other to pieces in a pit" inescapable status quo, rather than putting up genuine kindness, tolerance, and altrusim, without intense sadism, torture-fetischism, murder, stylish quotable bigotry, and calculated extremist ideology agendas, as the ideal to strive for... with all hopes, higher ideals, and so on thoroughly destroyed (And yes, it is a tough spot to start from as any religion stemming from the Old Testament taken literally always sounds almost indistinguishable from Nazism, so any hopes, dreams, or refuges were perverted into the complete opposite long before anybody now alive entered the picture, but thoughtlessly incorporating and applying them always automatically makes the creator in question sound word-by-word like a rot-spreading Nazi, seriously, and this is tragic as most probably have good intentions, and the opposing atheism isn't the answer either, but it is still there propagating entitled torture and condemnation for comparative petty trivialities as something laudable). In any case, essentially Frank's type of Villain Protagonist is put in the wrong setting, and given the sheer predominance over more traditionally clear-cut laudable characters the standards are slipping further and further to the point where youths in general seriously think that Deadpool is a fully acceptable nice guy. :(

In any case, certain heroes, such as Iron Man or Batman have started to become reenvisioned as something far more comfortable and genuinely positive. Now if the creators could simply adapt the idea of proportionate retribution salvation and reincarnation, or somesuch, rather than the torture orgies on anybody they disapprove of (almost everyone), and deluding themselves that this won't simply help to make the world a worse place to live in, and make them look far more evil than the vast majority of those they get kick out of cheerfully uniformly condemning.

...Still, returnign to the more interesting tangential topic, at least heavily implied by Neil Gaiman and elsewhere, there are serious ongoing dialogues in the media establishment about finally taking responsibility for that they have caused an enormous amount of nasal-blindsided-Hollywood-douchebag-voice level vanity ("Agitating people through bigot-propaganda isn't a crime! Goebbels wasn't responsible! Screw Freakonomics and brain research!") harm over the years, and the damage has already been done (check Panty And Stocking for a frighteningly accurate Japanese counter-attack parody of what western media in total sounds like and what kind of people you end up with), but I at least genuinely wish them good luck in any attempts to salvage what remains of western society. Personally I think that most of them have the entirely wrong outlook to do it, with far too great tendencies for blindsided reverse-morality and professional lying, to manage it, and tend to be one of the strongest parts of the overall problem (after listening in-depth to hardcore libertarian ideologues, medical high-level psychopaths, rabid religious zealots, and Mussolini-fanboy fascists, they all sort of flow together, with the genuine distinctions of true character apparently non-existent, and no genuine decency whatsoever underneath, even though they frequently claim to be in opposition), especially as the already caused damage has spread like ever-increasing ripples with all of humanity infected and incapable of doing anything but helping it along. And they don't even realise that the approach they are taking only causes what they condemn in the first place, especially as they recurrently sound even more extreme themselves, and that most people actually are much easier to stomach than they are.

In contrast, a million strong internet content controllers, unified China, perfectly poised to take advantage of the splintered culture, especially considering badly prioritised Wiki Leaks created diplomatic advantages and the like, but at least trying should produce a much better effect than not at all.

Me? I've mostly instinctively/impulsively/reactively done my usual unfiltered raw honest processing patterning to figure out and bring some attention to the problems and in-depth satirised/helped to define the opposing alternative. It's not much, but there has been quite a lot of response, direct or roundabout, so I hope that it is helping.

It's not about intolerance in general, it's about a counter-reaction to thoroughly corrupt overwhelming media trends/finding all of the blindsided seas of utterly misaimed hatred, and inane/inaccurate definition of "if you get damaged that means that you are evil, and should get tortured even further; if you don't get damaged that means that you are good, and are entitled to torture people, despite much less reason; never mind what reality looks like" utterly tiresome to listen to in the wrong run, and matter-of-fact processing it like raw unfiltered data into as much coherence as possible. One of the strongest blows towards getting rid of the worst of it would probably be to scrap all unified media mishmashes, that drown out all true coherent stories, and make all creative voices/stories stand on their own, entirely self-contained again, without being bogged down.

But again, I'm mostly a reactive processing type, so that's just the best sense I can make of it for the moment, and I continuously change my mind depending on the input.

What do you think of the contrasting take with Frank Castle-in-MAX then? (Regarding "Frank's type of villain protagonist is put in the wrong setting." I ask this since that Castle essentially admitted at the end of "The Slavers" that it was a social worker — and eventually a cop-turned-social worker's ally — who were actually helping the victims, and all he could do was kill their assailants.)

He does vary by writer, but the first post-Ennis arc of the MAX version has him attempting suicide after believing that he'd killed an innocent. Conveniently, he on a 'whim' checks and finds that it wasn't him, it was a certain someone wanting him to believe it.

Although I still don't like the Max setting, as it focuses on the dark, bloodthirsty, and mirthless; I "dislike it considerably less", as it is a more realistic one for these types of actions, is entirely self-contained, and highlight serious problems that actually exist within reality/that torture, mutilate, murder, and enslave countless innocent people... but you know, there are the more reliable parts of the news media available for that. Regardless, he is not glorified into a shiny bright icon here, just a dirty tool for a dirty situation. Superhero books should be kept to Superman and the like to be inspiring for something better, or at least to non-massmurderers.

I'm perhaps over-compassionate in certain respects. I tend to feel sorry for people who have been put into horrible circumstances, even if they are murderers. You know, "hate the sin and not the sinner". They have to be completely-in-control-of-their-actions-and-evaluated-to-the-core extremist ideologues, rather than reactive desperate survival values types, for me to say "oh, fuck them", and even then I'm not immune to it on some levels.

As such I find the idea of idealising eternal genocide owens as something pure, good, positive solution reprehensible; and it takes ridiculous amounts of corruption for me not to see the criminal being tortured to death by somebody far more entitled as a human being, who shouldn't be treated that way. I can defintiely see it as something practical and inescapable. That sometimes we have to kill in order to save greater numbers, but I dislike when it turns into a glorified frenzied sadism orgy.

Heck, I'm used to having pretty much the entirety of American media loudly proclaim that they want to torture me to death and beyond (I'm autistic, so it's an ongoing "Abomination embodiment of anti-life without a soul, who is not _worthy_ to exist, and should be kicked down into a torture pit with an inane snappy quote! Diiiieee!" kind of thing. As they are uncommon creatures of pure chaos, they don't like the idea that some (in fact most, but some more than others) people need serious order/structure to function; and instinctively brand it as "evil", perverting all true meaning of the word in the process, while giving, per definition, true sociopath-perspective extremely preferential treatment, regardless that it usually doesn't remotely apply to either type in reality. Hence. reverse-morality. The victim is always at fault, and it is far worse to strike back or defend yourself than to casually butcher people for kicks and giggles. I.e. as much as they like to kid themselves about it, they frequently act as an honest-to-Gosh-matter-of-fact-analysis-true-force-for-near-absolute-evil... and no the Family Guy approach of ripping everything apart to nothingness isn't remotely a good idea either. It's just that it sounds like different evil extremes that stand for nothing genuine beyond at best semi-catchy slogans opposing each other, and anybody who notices what's really going on twisted into a common enemy, regardless if that type is almost uniformly comparatively completely harmless/they have to completely twist it away from reality) and still tend to forgive the individuals, but really don't like the memetic cancer it represents. Forget the news media sensationalist corruption. It's utterly banal compared to what the fiction creators spread around, and they have at least as great an effect on the human subconscious.

He's not "evil", he just happnes to like war. It may because of his experiences in Vietnam which changed him.If he was evil, he'll kill anyone, but chooses to use his love for war for a good cause, which benefits society.

Hopefully I did a good job in creating such a page.