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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
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It definitely does not matter. The problem with the Punisher is that his mindset seems to be that homicide is acceptable if the target is a criminal and that the less homicidal methods of justice are inadequate, which parallels the mindset of real murderer cops. How the fictional police are portrayed in the story is irrelevant; the problem starts the moment Frank is framed as sympathetic.
I think the Punisher's issue is that he's a real life guy who's supposed to be "realistic". That's why Batman gets more criticism than most other superheroes.
The Punisher does not have the highest body count in marvel. But he's a guy in a shirt who shoots guns and fights normal people so what he does gets more flak than Wolverine or Deadpool or others.
It is possible the Punisher might work perfectly well if, intead of the typical criminals he targets, Frank in a movie instead goes after people like white supremacist gangs and corrupt cops.
But that's a big "if", and more to the point, I doubt Disney would be particularly interested in doing much with the Punisher either way when it had plenty of other R-Rated heroes to make movies and series out of now, like Deadpool, Moon Knight, Blade and (fingers crossed) X-23.
Some fiction is better at escaping our world than others. I pointed to John Wick as an example where his world is clearly made much more heightened than our own. "It's okay to kill secret orders of assassins" versus "it's okay to kill civilians who are actually robbers, abusers, other forms of crime we see on the news" are two very different things, and one is much easier to carry over into the real world than the other.
Maybe he should be the white collar Punisher and go after Wall Street
Forever liveblogging the AvengersFor The Punisher to work, it must exist in a world with corrupt or ineffectual authorities and the worst possible kind of criminal scum. This is a very different tone from the rest of the MCU and I cannot see how they could be reconciled.
Deadpool works because Wade's problems are generally too small in scale to attract the attention of folks like the Avengers (or the X-Men), although they cross paths frequently enough and it's sufficiently irreverent to poke fun at the incongruities it creates.
Spider-Man works because it maintains an optimistic tone and is more about Peter's problems then it is about the heinousness of the villains. Also, MCU Spidey is intimately connected to the other characters.
Frank Castle doesn't fit the tone of the MCU at all, not unless they radically change the status quo.
Edited by Fighteer on Feb 8th 2021 at 4:24:00 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The Punisher mamaged to appear in a Spider-Man cartoon where he wasn't allowed to shoot people, and the super kiddy Super Hero Squad Show, the MCU isn't that weird.
And like was said above, Frank is really small scale. His appearances in books with other superheroes or villains usually end with him getting beaten up because he's out of his league. It's not like they'd adapt the story where he became an angel or anything, that'd actually be something big.
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Yeah and honestly, it was even more cringey than Wolverine not being allowed to cut anything with his claws in several cartoons.
The Punisher is not meant to be a kid-friendly character.
Edited by Forenperser on Feb 8th 2021 at 10:35:09 AM
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% ScandinavianThe best Punisher moment is when he gets run over by the Shocker and goes flying through the air with the same stoically disgruntled expression
Forever liveblogging the AvengersThe scale of Frank isn't really a problem, for me, it's more the locale. Castle is almost always shown operating in New York, the very same place with more heroes per mile radius than anywhere on earth, and pretty much all of those heroes would logically try to stop a mass-murderer with more guns than some small countries shooting up neighborhoods every other wednesday. Frank would work better if he was more in a setting that would allow him to stretch his legs and not in fact get his shit kicked in after a week of operations when Spider-Man, Luke Cage, Daredevil, Iron Fist and probably even Doctor Strange crawl out of the woodwork to absolutely wreck his ass without writer fiat to stop them.
While MCU NY isn't quite as crowded yet, Spidey being such a element raises the same question. Move up Castle to L.A, San Francisco, Chicago, somewhere else far away from New York or just give up and make Frank a antagonist as I've said a handful of times.
As me and Tucker also previously pointed out, John Wick is a good point of contrast with Punisher as both franchises deal with the same central appeal: gun-based cathartic violent revenge. John Wick's heightened world helps it be more fantastical and separate from reality, but it also helps that the franchise is less "judgemental", if you will. While Castle is inevitably framed as a man on a righteous crusade against filthy criminals, John Wick's setting has John very much on the same moral tier as the other characters and villains (i.e they're all violent criminals) and thus the story allows itself to be much more easy-going. Wick's evidently the hero because he's never the instigator of the conflict and he's a incredibly nice man if you don't mess with him, but even Wick himself doesn't seem to hold a grudge against these professional assassins unless they go out of their way to fuck with him (and sometimes even when they do, he can still maintain a sense of civility and professional courtesy). I love the way one review of Chapter 2 put it: "The movie says that even in hell, there’s such a thing as decorum.
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If we took a Wickian approach to Castle we'd presumably have him deal with colorful, outlandish assassin networks underneath society in a Urban Fantasy-esque way and have Castle himself be more interwined with the criminal world rather than conducting a mass-murdering warpath against all manner of crime.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."

Fingers crossed for Ms Marvel being good.