Why Daredevil Won't Kill Bullseye

[lordultimus]

Comments

[speedingtortoise]

That right there is just perfect.

[grumman]

This is a perfectly reasonable stance to take - if Daredevil hands Bullseye to the authorities on a silver platter, he has more than done his part. If society wants Bullseye dead, they don't need to demand Daredevil is the executioner.

The problem is when characters like Daredevil go one step further and say "I won't kill him, and neither will you." Bullseye is a mass murderer who has escaped from prison at least once, and has been deliberately freed on at least one other occasion. Containment has failed, and if Bullseye cannot be contained he must be destroyed.

[sadoeuphemist]

Not at all. Daredevil is not stating his personal preference here. He is saying that he refuses to execute Bullseye because he believes only the state (and God) should have such power. It only follows that he would also want to prevent another non-state actor from executing Bullseye.

[thehood]

Of course killing him doesn't stick either, The hand brought him back to life.

Also, he doesn't always escape himself. Sometimes the whomever wants to employ him pulls strings to get him out.

[starwolf_oakley]

Oddly, Frank Miller had Daredevil destroy a helicopter and the pilot in BORN AGAIN.

[silverhammerman]

Well in that instance Daredevil had no alternative to just blowing up the helicopter, so Miller might make a distinction between killing because you want to and killing because you have to.

I mean, TDKR has that weird scene where Batman outright shoots and seemingly kills a kidnapper who's threatening a hostage, an act which is literally never mentioned again in the series, so the extent to which killing is okay seems to always be contextual.

[cainofdreaming]

And then he killed Bullseye (well the Beast of the Hand did, while wearing him as bodysuit). Not that it stopped Bullseye. Which is one of the reasons why I find the eternal argument of "why doesn't character x kill character y" so freaking old. Death doesn't really stop anyone in the comics. At best its a breather, at worst it's an added powerset for the killed party perhaps coupled with a summer event.

[rainspirit]

Even Bullseye being paralysed for life and locked in a casket didn't stop him for very long.

[cyberghostface]

Actually he wasn't possessed when he killed Bullseye, that's one of the things he noted in the epilogue; that it was all him and he had to take responsibility.

[freezer]

And how many people did Bullseye kill between this and your next encounter, Matt?

[cyberghostface]

Is that his responsibility?

[freezer]

After the second or third time (because Comics): Yes.

[cainofdreaming]

Would it have been his responsibility if he had killed Bullseye and a couple of months later Bullseye was back again, killing more people?

[freezer]

No, that's just bad writing. See also: Wolverine spending an entire arc killing Sabretooth Deader Than Dead, and Creed doesn't even stay dead for six months (and comes back as an ersatz Kingpin)

[cainofdreaming]

It's all the same to the dead people, isn't it? If neither imprisonment or death is an effective means of stopping these people then why is one considered more blameworthy than the other?

Edit - Also, why is the one bad writing and not the other?

[grumman]

If neither imprisonment or death is an effective means of stopping these people then why is one considered more blameworthy than the other?

Edit - Also, why is the one bad writing and not the other?

Because you are resorting to the MAD doctrine of literature discussion: that because this is fiction, none of it matters. If your argument is that killing a mass murderer is not good because it's barely an inconvenience to them, it also follows that killing a mass murderer is not bad. By your reasoning why not just double tap Bullseye? If death does not matter, why are you complaining when somebody kills him?

[sanctaphrax]

Since the big comic worlds are insane and stop making sense if you think about them too hard, it's generally best to treat the characters as representations of real-world people and ideas.

In the real world, vigilantes killing people is pretty much always a bad thing. So by analogy, Daredevil killing Bullseye is treated as bad.

The nature of the comic world negates the reasons that vigilante murders are bad in real life. But it also negates the reasons to kill someone like Bullseye. Sometimes the narrative twists to turn superheroes who kill into monsters, sometimes it twists to make killing morally mandatory.

It's all rather hard to take seriously. So the real-world-analogy approach tends to predominate.

[freezer]

To me, there's a turning point where the fact that said rogues keep coming back and keep willingly slaughtering innocents becomes less a part of the story and more an artifact of lazy writing ("Out of ideas: Let's unleash Sabretooth! Creed had his soul murdered? Fuck it! The Hand brought him back!")

An example like Batman does it both ways: Before the Nu52 reboot, The Joker was ludicrously overused and unstoppable to an equally ludicrous degree (bad writing).

But it's established that Batman Will Not Kill, even an incurable monster like The Joker. That his Rogues will keep coming back, and many of them will rack up a sizable body count before he catches them, are things Batman considers part of the price of Doing Things The Right Way. Batman addresses the consequences of his ways (or occasionally has them thrown in his face).

This is part of Batman's character, good or bad. It's not merely an excuse to keep trotting out the same murderous bastard characters

Also, in the above case of Daredevil's rationalizing, taken at face value, there's no such thing as self-defense or defense of others. If police take down a hostage taker, that's as wrong as him beating Bullseye to death. That's probably not what Matt (or the writer) meant, but that's what he said. And it makes him come across as unseemly self-righteous.

[sadoeuphemist]

It's incredibly obvious in context what Daredevil means, and you would have to be willfully misinterpreting him to think it refers to self-defense. Taking another man's life in your hands means giving yourself the authority to determine whether someone deserves to die. It's not the same thing as merely taking a life.

[lego_joker]

I think it's less an artifact of lazy writing than it is an artifact of comics (especially superhero comics) once being *disposable* entertainment. Back during their heyday, readers weren't expected to remember or care about the Joker's last zillion appearances, and the stories themselves seldom mentioned such things. Heck, even gathering up every issue in order would probably have gotten you labeled a weirdo even amongst comics fans.

But then along comes the direct market, with companies doing their damndest to convince us that every single issue and tie-in "matters". Add the one-two punch of DKR and The Killing Joke, and suddenly everyone thinks it's ~edgy~ to use what was once an invisible trope to emphasize how grim 'n' gritty the setting is.

[locuatico]

I don't know. how many times has SHIELD recognized they are pretty shitty at keeping people like Bullseye behind bars?

[astrakhan42]

I'd love it if this gets quoted directly in Daredevil Season 2. A lot of this works in the context of talking to/about the Punisher.