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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
The diner speech can be ambiguous, like most things about the Punisher during his time on the show. He seems to mean well, and he has a point— you love someone in spite of their flaws, not because they don't have any— but like anything else, it's a matter of degree, and you do have to consider the source. The idea that the argument can be used to excuse abuse doesn't mean Frank was abusive, just that not everyone is as good a man as Frank was— and even (once) good men like Frank was can go pretty far astray.
edited 23rd Mar '17 12:37:08 PM by Unsung
Speaking of which, I also really liked Frank's final scene. Karen pleading with him not to become the Punisher and Frank's deadpan rejection of her olive branch is perfect Punisher. And I do not have enough compliments for the way Frank deals with the Blacksmith.
"One shot, one kill." Perfect. I hate when Frank's depicted as torturing people for lulz. I feel it misses his point as a character. Putting a bullet through the guy's skull mid-sentence is everything I want out of Frank. Even when it actually is personal, that level of detachment is what I love out of the character.
No gloating, no sadism, no joy. Just another enemy neutralized, another battle won, and the war goes on.
edited 23rd Mar '17 12:47:47 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I may have been mistaken about it being his final scene.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Punisher's execution of the Blacksmith is his anti-penultimate scene. We then have him shooting some Ninjas from a rooftop at Matt's final battle and then he burns down his own house to signify the death of his old life once and for all.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."I thought his final scene was shooting some ninjas?
Ah.
Anyway, I didn't really like the Blacksmith subplot as a thing. Doesn't it kind of miss the point of the Punisher if there was one person that you can blame for his family's death? If it was a conspiracy instead of the uncaring callousness of crime?
edited 23rd Mar '17 12:53:06 PM by Bocaj
Forever liveblogging the AvengersIt totally does and that's why I didn't like the subplot as a whole either. But I liked some of the scenes it gave us.
A lot of Punisher adaptations have this problem. They want to give Frank an archnemesis. Someone who is the cause of his problems. Someone who flipped the switch that ignited the Punisher. But as noted, it misses the point. The reason Frank is anything more than a cowboy vigilante who went out that one time, got his revenge, and then f*cked off is because he doesn't actually have a target for his vengeance.
Castle became the Punisher because he's at war with an idea. Nobody killed his family. His family was killed by a freak act of random, violent crime. They were caught in the crossfire between two mobs. There's no person for Castle to pin his pain on. Instead, his archnemesis is the concept of random, violent crime. Every night, he goes out and wages war against an abstract.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I'm not a big fan of the Blacksmith plot either. For me, I'd have preferred if the plot twist was that there is no "Blacksmith" and it's just some sort of criminal boogeyman people created to dodge their guilt, blaming it on "the Blacksmith".
Which reminds me of another fun translation trivia: When I read DD and Punisher comics in Portuguese in my youth, the name Hell's Kitchen was translated to Cozinha do Inferno (lit: Kitchen of Hell), but for some godforsaken reason they didn't translate any of the references to the Kitchen Irish, calling them just Kitchen Irish (rather than "Irlandeses da Cozinha" if you were to translate it). So people just keep alluding to how the Kitchen Irish are plotting to do things and me, in my massive childhood stupidity, ended up thinking Kitchen Irish was a person, rather than an organization, and I spent my entire childhood waiting and being hype for the inevitable showdown between this massive criminal mastermind called Kitchen Irish, so powerful no one can even find him, and Daredevil/Punisher/someone.
I was very disappointed when I discovered the truth.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Count me in as not liking the back-end of the Punisher story.
Overall, Daredevil season 2 is my least favourite outing...at the end of the day the only aspects which work are the scenes in the beginning which are lifted directly from the comics and Kingpin finally becoming a proper schemer. I also like Foggy being a proper lawyer. Everything else falls flat or is downright bad.
I was a bit hesitant about the Blacksmith at first, since a whole point of Punisher's character is that there isn't just "the one guy", that one Joe Chill, who killed his family. It's the concept of crime itself that killed them, which is why he goes to war with it.
But the fact that he just casually executes him and keeps on Punishing regardless of "avenging" his family cleared my skepticism. He hasn't gotten revenge for his family, he's just killed yet another criminal; one that he happens to have a personal reason to hate, but another nameless criminal nonetheless, and he's nowhere near done.
Also I think it was implied that there wasn't some big conspiracy to kill Frank's family? They really did just have the misfortune of getting caught in the crossfire of random criminals, it's just the cover-up itself that's a conspiracy.
edited 23rd Mar '17 1:10:51 PM by Anomalocaris20
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!Having been spoiled on a lot of this stuff beforehand (I'm a spoiler hound, can't help myself), I'm a bit inclined to agree with these observations.
To my knowledge the closest the Punisher has ever had to a genuine arch-villain is Jigsaw, and only because Jigsaw is just super damn hard to kill. Frank doesn't even see Jigsaw as his arch-enemy, it's only Jigsaw that does.
By the way, who is playing Jigsaw in the Punisher series?
EDIT: NVM, googled it. They got Prince Caspian to play Jigsaw?
edited 23rd Mar '17 1:25:58 PM by AdricDePsycho
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?Ben Barnes
(of Westworld fame) is apparently playing "Billy Russo" (Jigsaw's real name), Frank's best friend from his time as Special Forces and now head of a private security company.
It's probably going the way of basically every single Netflix show and giving him shades of tragedy and going over his "origin story" over the first season. If I had to guess he'll be horribly disfigured by the end and ascend to become Jigsaw, hating the Punisher.
But yeah he doesn't really have any solid arch-enemies because he keeps killing them all. He's had memorable villains but they rarely survive more than one arc. Barracuda is often alluded as his best villain.
I've always had a soft spot for the Saracen myself. Motherfucker has the gall to attack the Punisher with a scimitar and somehow survive. I want Saracen to be in the Netflix series and just attack Frank Castle with a scimitar, disarm him and proceed to have a swordfight with him while this plays.
edited 23rd Mar '17 1:30:23 PM by Gaon
"All you Fascists bound to lose."He's Logan. Your dad should remember him as the Guest who's a rich sex maniac jackass who treats every single Host like a literal object and makes as point to be as depraved and cruel as possible.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."They're sorely overestimating Venom's mainstream appeal as a standalone character. Like, of the people who even will recognize him, a significant portion will be scratching their heads and going, "Isn't he that lame goop monster that the guy from That 70's Show played in the worst Spider-Man movie?"
This is what filmgoers know about Venom:
edited 23rd Mar '17 3:04:13 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.In Luke Cage they did offhandedly refer to what could happen if the Punisher got his hands on some of the more advanced and dangerous technology and weapons in the age of superheroes. It might be interesting to see him using other weapons than 'just' his standard issue military hardware - there's precedence in the comics as well (mainstream that is, not MAX Punisher.)
"These 'no-nonsense' solutions of yours just don't hold water in a complex world of jet-powered apes and time travel."I still find it a shame that netflix overlooked the opportunity to have Frank Castle be blindsided by all the weird shit going on in the MCU. I wanted to see him trying to shoot one of the Hand ninjas and then said ninja just dodges/heals from the bullet and Frank's so flabbergasted the ninja destroys him, teaching him a valuable lesson about the world he's in.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."The Hand can bring people back from the dead, but they're not Wolverine. People on the power level of the Avengers are rare, and even then, one bullet in the right place would still have taken down most of the opponents in their individual movies outside of a select few like Abomination, Ronan, and the various gods and and elves and such. Punisher's whole thing isn't just that he's a guy who's good with guns— he's also someone who cases the shit out of his targets.
The Punisher is a smart man, but the whole point of the DD season 2 was to show his "origin story" and as far as we know, he just killed normal people beforehand. In the comics we've never really had a chance to have his first experience with the bizarre because his first story is him fighting Spider-Man and already being alright with it, but in the Netflix verse, I'd have enjoyed having seen Frank Castle trying to kill something supernatural with bullets and failing miserably at it. It'd suit the netflix narrative of this being his "early days".
Then, after learning this valuable lesson, adapting and killing said supernatural target in their second encounter.
It's not that far-fetched either because Netflix Punisher isn't as implacable as his comics self (at least not yet). He has difficulty overpowering three mooks and a dozen mooks manage to capture him, whilst comics Castle regularly mows down hundreds.
edited 23rd Mar '17 6:27:11 PM by Gaon
"All you Fascists bound to lose."

Elektra is actually fairly good written until they dive into her backstory and change it from "bored rich heiress" to "tool for various male characters". I hated that. The undermined all the good work they did with this one.