Is Frank Castle a hero or just anther psycho who's kill pattern happens to be vaguely agreeable?

Is Frank Castle a hero or just anther psycho who's kill pattern happens to be vaguely agreeable?

probably the latter.

He is a horribly written character, just like all capeshit characters are horribly written

It's a good bit of both. His standard method of operation is his psychopathic side, where he hunts down criminals and ruthlessly guns them down. But he's proven himself to be genuinely heroic if put in other situations. If you add innocents into the mix, you get to see his genuine heroic side, where he'll risk everything just to make sure they're safe.

is he capeshit? beyond vigilantism, what capeshit tropes does he follow?

what? no, he just uses his brutal side and it always happens o work out in such a way that no civilians die

but he doesn't wear a cape though.

Because he specifically goes out of his way to make sure they're not hurt.

no, he just goes against guys who happen not to be willing to kill civillians

we have this thread a lot.
frank castle kills bad guys in order to save innocents, he is on a fucking crusade against organized crime, and he would never purposefully bring harm to an innocent and in fact accidentally doing so might break him, he would fall.

frank castle is like a DnD paladin, who for reference are lawful good and considered paragons of justice.

he's a shit edgy character written by manchildren who are too pussy to go out and kill everyone they don't like who has different opinions from them.

There actually was a priest Punisher called The Adjudicator in the Runaways book. They go back in time to like the early 1900's and he's just kinda there.

oh, and I'm sure you TOTALLY kill EVERYONE who disagrees with you

Someone sure likes to talk about the Punisher

I'm pretty sure that third pic is from Wolverine's book, where the writer engaged in something of a pissing match with Garth Ennis. I believe that Wolverine's subsequent appearance in Punisher's book had him getting his face ripped off, his balls shot off, and driven over and left under a fucking steamroller. By the Punisher of course

Second pic is probably of Frank's Ultimate incarnation. The less said about that, the better.

Except that's complete and total horseshit, twat.
Frank has gone up against plenty of faggots that are willing to kill random civilians.

when has he ever been put in a situation where he can't just shoot someone because they would kill a civilian? give me one example

Not the same guy, but there was definitely a storyline where Fury put Castle on a blackops mission for the military to rescue a girl. The failsafe for the mission was supposed to be killing the girl to make sure she didn't get in the badguys hands. Fury made sure Castle was on the mission specifically because he would never actually kill the girl, even if it meant he got out alive.

Im imagining they all pop out of a portal in the middle of an open field and he is standing there, not suprised by them but also not doing anything.

and then they just leave him as he stares out into space.

Remember the time Barracuda strapped explosives to his daughter?

You're a funny guy, user.

We have this thread like once a month

The difference is that Paladins tend to purge literal monsters and shit that's chaotic evil by nature. Humans are different, and have the capacity to change.

A lot of the crooks Castle possibly guns down could only be responsible for minor infractions, there are times where he definitely kills motherfuckers that absolutely deserve it, but you can see where the issue comes from when it becomes disproportionate punishment.


No, he really isn't.

Anyway, I always feel the Punisher works best when he isn't the focus. As an ancillary character, playing the opposite to another more traditional hero, is when he's at his best. That's when he can provide a counterpoint to the traditional methods, and in turn, give his own more merit.

Every Punisher story starring The Punisher is the same fucking thing. Bad guy does cartoonishly evil thing so you can root for The Punisher's extreme response. Castle kills a bunch of goons and monologues to himself to sound badass. Punisher will then kill bad guy. Sometimes the fanboy writing the comic will have him beat up Captain America or someone way above his power level because he's Marvel's edgiest Gary Stu.

He's a very dull protagonist, but a pretty compelling antagonist/side character.

This is pretty on the nose, user.

Even within a DnD fantasy setting, there's paladins that don't always deal in absolutes and can be reasonable when given the right circumstances and motivations.

There's a reason that in actual RL DnD sessions someone playing a zero compromise no matter what stereotypical paladin is dubbed "lawful stupid" and people that blindly worship the classic figure of a palading purging anything he doesn't like are usually armchair fantasy nerds that never actually played with other human beings their entire life.

Someone that only deals in absolutes is unable to work with others, and thus either ends up alone, or exclusively hangs out with an echo chamber of people that think exactly like him to a T else he's unable to function (i'm sure this all sounds very familiar to certain people reading this, right now).

he is paladin like in that there are things he CANNOT tolerate or he will FALL.
all those things a paladin does compromise on are not those things (or else he falls)
for example when the badguy is being cartoonishly evil in front of him a paladin MUST begin to take action, even if the action is sitting around thinking of a plan to stop the evils of the world from happening instead of beating people up.
punisher DOES butt heads with people who would let evil roam, for he sees allowing evil as an evil itself, although a lesser one.
you know who else had the absolutism of a paladin but DOES get along with people? captain america, as seen in general but especially in the "plant yourself like a tree by the river of truth" speech, its not impossible for a lawful good character to get along with the party like cap does with the avengers.
lawful stupid is said in that order because unlike punisher and cap lawful stupid characters are usually lawful neutral played stupidly, constantly enforcing the law of the land within the party (which is dumb, because if a paladin operated entirely within the laws of the land he would not be armed and armored.)

The problem isn't with the punisher. The problem is with westerners in general and their endless thirst for novelty and newness.

We got tired of the hero, so we created the flawed hero, then the anti-hero, then the villain who has heroic traits, then the lol so random joke characters. Westerners are never satisfied with an archetype for long and constantly want to experience "new" types of characters.

But the flip side is that there are only so many things you can do with a characters personality. So my advice to all of you is to just make peace with it and learn to enjoy things as they are without constantly needing everything to be some kind of bleeding edge avant-garde French theater characterization.

Fuck off weeb. Nobody's got a problem with character archetypes, we're discussing the flaws and good aspects of one particular character and characters like him. We're doing what the board was made for, we're discussing, if you don't like it you can fuck off back to /a/.

I don't know if he's a "true" hero, but he's definitely heroic. Maybe if you lay out different criteria for metas and flatscans. The Silver Surfer is nearly invincible, so to kill people he could detain would be un-heroic. On the other hand, Frank is just a human, so he has much fewer options when it comes to dealing with bad guys.

Disgusting.

Maybe you're the cuckold here.

Either outcome does not stop him being a cuck.

No, but I can't see any other way to mitigate the damage. Besides maybe killing the wife, too, but he's a paladin, so that would probably be frowned upon by his order.

Frank Castle is the only real hero.

sauce?

How many times am I going to be posting this in a week?

Okay, which cultures don't ever get tired of a single archetype of character?

How come Batman never pulled a Punisher 2099 and keep his villains locked up in the Batcave? He has the resources to keep them secure. And how come he never cripples Joker, preventing further bloodshed? He has the skills to do so with his bare hands.

Yeah, or at least use Bruce Wayne's fortune to build a REAL lunatic asylum, one without a revolving door, like Arkham.

Bruce is ultimately a faggot whose moral code leads to constant suffering for the citizens of Gotham.

There should be a version where he employs a more sadistic/pyschotic side, like the crippling Joker thing I spoke of or perhaps a "three strikes and you're dead" approach to killers.

Batman authors realized this, and responded by just making the series that much more retarded

the 1994 crossover punisher batman - deadly knights

You know, if they just out and out said "because you wouldn't buy comics otherwise" I would have to give them a modicum of respect for being honest.

It worked for explaining why Fawcett City was stuck in the 50s.

This just makes me think that Bruce Wayne is secretly behind all the crime in Gotham, too.

The nips never seem to tire of their moeblobs

Wrong. Frank is a crazed murderer who literally always breaks the law. He follows his own rules to kill people who are just as bad or worse than him.

I thought the "lawful" axis of D&D characters just meant they followed a set of rules, which might be the law of the land, but it might also be a personal code that diverges from common principles.

You're more or less right about the Lawful aspect, but his actions aren't really good even if the reasoning is. I would say he'd be Lawful Neutral, but most editions reserve that for people that don't rock the boat one way or the other. Basically D&D alignments are awful and you should try not to use them.

brings harm to and ONLY to those who deserve it, in order to protect the people because its the right thing to do.
thats lawful good mate, im sorry, theres no way around it.


this is right, also nice numbers


I think the law/chaos part of the scale works fine with good and evil needing tweaking depending on edition, its not that bad.
also those are totally good actions, when there is a threat to the people like a dragon near town, and you know harm would come to innocents because of it and try to stop it because no one else has the courage or might this is textbook paladin behavior and definitely good, even if you do not count punishing evil as a good act (I dont but some do) saving innocent lives is.

There's a difference between slaying an evil dragon threatening a village or killing bandits that attacked you on the road and tracking down gang members and torturing them for information before killing them. There's also the issue of the varying depictions of the character and the extremes he goes to.

Yes.

Alright, point. But this does also highlight the advantages of "thirst for novelty".

I don't see that difference. Both the dragon and the bandits represent threats to the people of the realm. Both threats must be ended.

That would've been a better explanation.
>And he needs his villains like a junkie needs drug.


maybe a Hugo Strange spinoff?

You're assuming that the morality of actions in D&D comes from what you do rather than why or how you do. Keep in mind that the alignment system is designed to fit groups of adventurers with differing alignments all taking up these quests despite potentially having diametrically opposed alignments. The moral issue here shouldn't come up in if the Punisher would slay a dragon or some bandits if dropped into a fantasy setting but why he'd do so and how he'd do it. Raiding a bandit camp because "my world view defines them as enemy combatants" and only taking prisoners to torture them for information wouldn't make Castle good any more than some Chaotic Evil wizard who decided he wanted a cape made out of human skin and saw the bandits had a bounty on them.

To quote the 5th ed players handbook for D&D (page 122): (Lawful Good) creatures can be counted on to do the right thing as expected by society.". Compared to "(Lawful Neutral) individuals act in accordance with law, tradition, or personal codes." The bits in italics are the important bits here.

So basically unless Castle starts incorporating due process and human rights into his methods he won't count as "Good" for the same reason that a paladin would fall for killing the inhabitants of a goblin nursery. Just because some creatures (objectively in D&Ds case) count as evil doesn't mean that any action taken against them is moral.

To be Lawful Good you have to temper the Lawful side with mercy, compassion and all that other stuff that Castle very explicitly doesn't do. Meanwhile Lawful Neutral requires strict adherence to some sort of code (Kill bad guys, don't harm innocents) without exhibiting to heavily explicitly traits of Good or Evil alignments (such as bending/breaking rules to give the repentant a second chance or stretching rules to benefit yourself).

A lot of people shit on injustice….but I really like how they handle the "what if" finally portraying that faggot ayyy of sups as the dirt bag he is….

shiggy diggy.

Which society? The local Drow society? Modern IRL western society? Feudal mediaeval fantasy society?

A paladin going through the proper motions of


Unless society expects their paladins to kill all goblinoids, right?

For baby-eating Drow…

Holy shit, I knew the D&D alignment system was stupid, but this is just downright Swedish.

its not so much the system is stupid as the guy you are replying to is, although I do end up tweaking the good/evil side from the book definitions depending on edition the chaos/law side is pretty simple and works.

While that user is getting lawful stupid, the system itself is flawed because good and evil objectively exist in the D&D settings and that alone causes a lot of issues when arguing actions vs intent. I'm fairly sure torture is an evil act in most if not all editions.

Holy shit that sounds awful.

how exactly? there is only one class that deals with good and evil as objective measurable things regularly, and thats the paladin.
the only time I see an argument is when the players believe the DM has mis-labeled something, but the only one who can see the labels is the paladin (and he cant even do that in every edition) and since you control the NPC the only time a mislabeling can occur is if the paladin uses detect alignment on a player character, but they dont need to do that because they already have a sense of who their traveling companion is.

forgot to mention, even if you are afraid of an argument by mislabeling you could simply ask the player to state alignment.

I always thought a Punisher cartoon could work by having him methodically take out badguys. It can start out like a villain of the week show before it gets to the main Punisher villains like Jigsaw. That and his origin can be told in the opening credits and the show begins with him as an experienced Punisher who's done this shit for a while. That and he can try to kill some supervillains he comes across and gets stopped by Daredevil or Spiderman because they don't like killing.

Fuck that. Frank works better on his own.

That would be an interesting twist t the comics. Bruce Wayne/Batman secretly creates disasters in and around Gotham City knowing that at least one villain or supervillain will be created, along with untold numbers of potential goons, thugs, and gang members, all just to make himself feel relevant and needed in the world.

Well, I don't plan to make the crossovers a frequent thing. Just like once in a while. Like in Samurai Jack when Jack meets the Scotsman.

If it's Punisher's show why can't he just kill Daredevil and Spiderman

Because he only kills criminals like the mob, gangbangers, drug dealers, human traffickers and etc. He doesn't kill heroes though they do get in his way sometimes to his annoyance.