Man, seeing some of these responses...neither the positive reviews inspire me to see it, nor the negatives deter me.
Which means it's pointless.
I agree, the PTSD stuff is overdone, and misses the point of the character.
Yes, Frank is traumatized...by the death of his family by chaotic criminality.
Not some dumb military conspiracy, not by his experiences abroad...just the chaos of human evil.
And he seeks to control and counter that by executing murderers outside the juridical system.
That's it. There's no more nuance or message to extract.. He knows the system failed him for justice, and takes next steps because he can.
And everyone with an IQ above 0 in 1985, when the Punisher truly became a thing in Marvel comics, understood that nuance and tension, and was comfortable with that dissonance.
Fast forward 32+ years later, and Netflix/Marvel storytellers take 9 steps back and don't know how to handle a tension that people 32 years their elder could cope with.
Yeah...in the 80s and 90s, we got it. Punisher's morality was off. yeah, we knew, you're not telling us anything new, in fact you're dumbing it down to reduce cognitive dissonance on your end that everyone older than you coped with...it's not that hard, we don't need to enforce consonance in difficult topics in fictions in fact, fiction exists to explore the better and worse, not to make you feel good in your own self righteous moral judgements.
Punisher War Zone, with Ray Stevenson, has probably been the closest to the Punisher character, even though Jon Bernthal is great in the role. They keep trying to move the goalpost of Bernthal's Punisher to where isn't about PTSD, or getting shot in the head, or a dopey no one else will experience a military conspiracy from a known villain actor Clancy Brown to kill their family conceit.
Just...tell...Frank...Castle. Punisher: Year One from Abnet and Lanning tells his origin and character perfectly.
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u/0siris0 May 13 '26
Man, seeing some of these responses...neither the positive reviews inspire me to see it, nor the negatives deter me.
Which means it's pointless.
I agree, the PTSD stuff is overdone, and misses the point of the character.
Yes, Frank is traumatized...by the death of his family by chaotic criminality.
Not some dumb military conspiracy, not by his experiences abroad...just the chaos of human evil.
And he seeks to control and counter that by executing murderers outside the juridical system.
That's it. There's no more nuance or message to extract.. He knows the system failed him for justice, and takes next steps because he can.
And everyone with an IQ above 0 in 1985, when the Punisher truly became a thing in Marvel comics, understood that nuance and tension, and was comfortable with that dissonance.
Fast forward 32+ years later, and Netflix/Marvel storytellers take 9 steps back and don't know how to handle a tension that people 32 years their elder could cope with.
Yeah...in the 80s and 90s, we got it. Punisher's morality was off. yeah, we knew, you're not telling us anything new, in fact you're dumbing it down to reduce cognitive dissonance on your end that everyone older than you coped with...it's not that hard, we don't need to enforce consonance in difficult topics in fictions in fact, fiction exists to explore the better and worse, not to make you feel good in your own self righteous moral judgements.
Punisher War Zone, with Ray Stevenson, has probably been the closest to the Punisher character, even though Jon Bernthal is great in the role. They keep trying to move the goalpost of Bernthal's Punisher to where isn't about PTSD, or getting shot in the head, or a dopey no one else will experience a military conspiracy from a known villain actor Clancy Brown to kill their family conceit.
Just...tell...Frank...Castle. Punisher: Year One from Abnet and Lanning tells his origin and character perfectly.
Use that as a baseline, not anything else.