Good, Evil, and Daredevil

Kristin Devine

Kristin has humbly retired as Ordinary Times' friendly neighborhood political whipping girl to focus on culture and gender issues. She lives in a wildlife refuge in rural Washington state with too many children and way too many animals. There's also a blog which most people would very much disapprove of https://atomicfeminist.com/

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18 Responses

  1. Jaybird says:

    I would someday like to see this type of story told from the perspective of someone who won’t bend. Who is incorruptible. I want to see the hero’s journey of the person who never compromises, who never makes exceptions, who always follows a strict and unyielding ethical code in every situation regardless of context.

    There’s Rorschach in Watchmen?

    Because I suspect the kind of person who is incapable of corruption is probably a pretty amoral, even sociopathic person.

    Oh, I see you’ve seen it.Report

    • atomickristin in reply to Jaybird says:

      That is a really good example and I just watched the Directors’s Cut of Watchmen this weekend. It had the Black Freighter story from the original comic and it very much reminded me of where my head was at when I wrote this. If you guys haven’t checked it out, I really do recommend it (warning, it’s like 4 hours long) although not as much as I recommend DD season 3.Report

    • Van in reply to Jaybird says:

      Yes, was just coming to suggest the same thing. I read Watchmen when I was a teenager and Rorschach was the character who burned down my narrow, childish ideals on how (good) superheroes (are supposed to) work. I’ve never forgotten that lesson.

      Maybe it’s one of the reasons I’ve engaged with Daredevil so much since.Report

      • atomickristin in reply to Van says:

        Wolverine is another character who is not always so cut and dry in the morality dept. If I remember right he was the first superhero to ever kill someone. But with him it’s usually a lack of self control and not the kind of dispassionate commitment to inflexible morality as Rorschach. I liked how DD was wresting with the decision to kill or not in S3 (which superheroes often do, but not so convincingly – you know s/he’s not gonna do it in the end).

        Thanks for reading!Report

  2. Mike Dwyer says:

    “The scenarios screenwriters love to spin where against all odds, our hero pulls off a miraculous, impossible victory where s/he compromises nothing, good is rewarded and evil is punished, all the loose threads are tied into a beautiful bow and no one we are cheering for ends up worse for the wear, aren’t real. The reality is that the choices we are offered in this life are usually chock full of suck and no matter which option we choose, come with a heartbreakingly high cost. Sometimes even our very souls have to be sold.”

    I just finished Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger series which was very YA, and pretty cheesy in places, but I enjoyed it. They very much played with some of these ideas and the hero’s journey. I liked what they were trying to do, even if it was a bit clumsy.Report

  3. atomickristin says:

    I like it, although I’m not too sure it’s “stuck on an airplane” level of entertaining. More of a “kind of watch while crocheting” level of entertaining.Report

  4. Jaybird says:

    In the Spider-Man video game, one of the things that Kingpin tells Spider-Man as the paddywagon takes him off to jail is, paraphrased, “YOU’RE GOING TO MISS ME! EVERY TWO-BIT CRIMINAL WILL COME OUT OF THE WOODWORK TO TRY TO FILL THE VACUUM THAT I LEAVE BEHIND ME!”

    And, wouldn’t you know it? Kingpin goes to jail and every two-bit criminal comes out of the woodwork to try to fill the vacuum.

    The hypocrisy of the Kingpin was somewhat important to the Order of society. Kingpin was a criminal, a jerk, so on and so forth… but he kept things stable. It felt good to see him get his butt kicked. See him go off to jail.

    But the hypocrisy of having him be in power might have been a smaller price to pay than what followed.

    I’m almost thinking of comparing the American and French Revolutions here. The American Revolution? Hypocritical as hell. The French Revolution? Much less hypocritical. Same for the second one. I don’t know whether the third one (the Napoleon one) was hypocritical or not but it probably was less hypocritical than the American one.

    Hypocrisy performs a lot of important functions.

    Though, when telling stories, its most important function is to help paint the bad guy as being really, really bad instead of merely really bad.Report

  5. Jonathan Rowe says:

    I guess I gotta check this out even though I don’t have Netflix.

    Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed this (so did Frank Miller, I’m pretty sure).

    https://www.amazon.com/Kurt-Busieks-Astro-City-Confession/dp/1563895501

    It’s influenced by among other things Batman, Daredevil (especially the Catholic themes) and Vampires, packaged in an original and transformative way.Report

  6. Rebecca says:

    I can’t but help point out the similarity between Wilson Fisk and our new Acting Attorney General, Mathew Whitaker.Report