A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I'm going to do a couple rec posts for fandoms I'm requesting or thinking of requesting for Yuletide, in case any of you might get into them too and request them or write me a treat.

At least half and possibly all the fandoms I'm going to request for Yuletide this year are very controversial and/or widely disliked in the fannish community. I've hesitated to write about them because I find it frustrating and annoying when I write about something I love, and I get an avalanche of responses saying, "I hate this," and "You do know that this is very problematic, right?" and "I watched five minutes of it and hated it," and "I'm not going to watch it because I already know I hate it."

So please don't comment to say any of those things. If you hate it, already know you'd hate it without seeing it, feel that it's problematic, etc, please just skip this post.

On to The Punisher! It's a flawed show but it's one of my favorites of the last couple years. I've watched it at least three or four times and have enjoyed it just as much every time. It's a very emotional show and really gets to me on that level. It also hits a lot of my fannish buttons, repeatedly and with a hammer.

Frank Castle is a Marine who got entangled with a conspiracy of criminals while overseas; when he returned, they murdered his wife and children, and put him in a coma for a year. He woke up, became a vigilante who the papers called "The Punisher," killed a bunch of people, and then tried to retire under an assumed name. This all happened in Daredevil season 2, in which he also met a journalist named Karen Page who helped him out despite qualms over his methods.

In The Punisher, Frank is trying to live a normal life under an assumed name. This all goes south when a mild-mannered NSA analyst, David Lieberman, who is currently assumed dead due to having been entangled in the same conspiracy but is actually in hiding, contacts Frank with an offer to team up. Frank initially doesn't take this well, to say the least, but they do end up teaming up. This brings Frank, who has been living in a kind of emotional stasis walled off from human contact, back into contact with terrifying things like friends, family, and his own feelings.

So, it's basically about a person who went through a ton of trauma, dealt with it by cutting himself off from relationships and emotions (other than violence and anger), and is dragged kicking and screaming back to humanity. This and variations of it are possibly my single favorite story of all time.

On a purely quality level, The Punisher has some extraordinarily good performances, mostly very good writing, fascinating characters and complex character relationships, and a lot to say and show about some topics very close to my heart, such as PTSD, anger, how the same traumas affect different people differently, how men and women are allowed to express emotion, what happens to soldiers after the war, and how people respond to living in a fundamentally unjust society.

On a fannish level, the relationships are fantastic. There's a low-key funny and adorable odd-couple buddy relationship that is just the best, with tons of domesticity. Frank and David live in a bunker together for most of the show; the evolution of their relationship from Frank zip-tying David naked to a chair, to them squabbling over tea and sandwiches, to David literally holding a near-death Frank in his arms and sobbing, just gets better on repeat viewing. (This is also a GREAT fandom for hurt-comfort. Frank gets shot, stabbed, beaten half to death, etc, about every other episode.)

There's also a really fascinating dynamic where Frank gets involved with David's wife Sarah and their children, who think David is dead, and steps in David's role as husband and father to some extent. I have a huge infidelity squick, so this storyline in particular made me very tense for a while; if you do too, I can give details in comments. For now I'll just say that it works out in a way that I really liked, with none of the dishonesty or meanness that would normally ensue, and that David/Frank/Sarah are very shippable. The parent-child type relationships are great too - the kids aren't generic cute kids, they're real-feeling people. (Real-feeling people having real-feeling relationships and conversations is generally a big draw of this show.)

Frank also has a compelling relationship with his Marine buddy Billy Russo that's completely different from any of his other relationships, and another one with Karen Page, ditto. Frank is my little black dress in this fandom and you could plausibly write him with all of them and also some characters I haven't even mentioned yet, like his other Marine buddy, Curtis, a disabled former medic who runs a veteran's group, and Dinah Madani, the FBI agent who's sometimes working at cross purposes to Frank and sometimes on the trail of the same people. (I wouldn't rec the show specifically for female characters, but it does have a number of very interesting, well-rounded ones who do not exist solely in relationship to men.)

I am not a fan of the comics, so can't comment on them other than to say that I was always vaguely perplexed as to why having a lot of guns - and not even high-tech guns, just regular guns - was a superpower. The answer is that isn't. While the Punisher TV show is set in the same world as the other current Marvel TV shows, we really only know this because of character crossover; it doesn't acknowledge superpowers at all.

Flaws and caveats: like every other Netflix Marvel show, it takes a couple episodes to get going. It has a lot of very graphic, disturbing violence. (Not gratuitous, IMO, and no sexualized violence to women. Exactly. There are some sexualized moments of violence involving men, plus one sort of sexualized aftermath of violence involving a woman. I have to say I really liked those and consider them features rather than bugs; I can describe in comments if you like as they're really spoilery.) It has a lot of guns, and the episode that tries to take on the issue of gun control does an incredibly bad job of it; that's unfortunately also probably the best episode for Frank/Karen interaction, so it's not skippable. On re-watch I fast-forwarded all the gun discussion. There's some draggy subplots that I also ended up mostly skipping on rewatch.

It has one of the best season endings I've ever seen. In fact it was such a perfect ending that I may end up not watching season two unless I hear positive things/don't hear certain negative things. So it works very well as a self-contained miniseries.

Again, please no comments about how you know you'd hate this and so won't watch it. I can take them as read.