🥤

First and foremost: Matt is not a bad person. I don’t know how much of fandom actually means it when they call him an ass, a bad friend, etc., vs just saying it in the tongue-and-cheek “human disaster” sort of way. But I don’t think Matt’s a bad person at all, nor do I think he’s a bad friend (although this second one is admittedly more complicated).

What makes a person bad? I think I’ve talked about this a little before in other posts, but you can evaluate badness on at least two spectrums: intent and outcome. I don’t think anyone can deny that Matt’s intentions are incredibly good. He deeply desires to help other people. He makes dumb choices, sure, but even those dumb choices are usually inspired by a desire to help.

Of course, sometimes his intentions are less about helping others, and more about something else. That “something else” is most often, I think, self-protectiveness. Like, does he keep his survival of Midland Circle a secret because he thinks Foggy and Karen are better off without him (a dumb but also selfless, others-centered intention)? I think so. Does he also keep his survival a secret because he’s afraid of their rejection (a self-protective intention)? I think so.

But self-protectiveness is clearly rooted in specific traumas, like the rejection he’s experienced from Stick and Elektra and even Foggy and Karen. Personally, I see that as a mitigating factor. I challenge any of us to go through rejections like that and not end up self-protective. Does that make us bad? No. It makes us hurt.

(And this leads to a third factor: capability, or, at least, a person's capability at the moment. I don't think I touched on this the last time when I talked about intent and outcome, but capability is very important to me when determining if I think a person is good or bad. Someone who's been raised with privilege and who's been taught how to treat others well, and yet fails to do so...I'm more likely to believe that this is a person who's either intentionally or negligently treating others poorly. But someone who's never been shown how to treat others well is acting within their capabilities if they treat others poorly. This matters for someone like Matt. I don't see any evidence that Matt was ever taught how to handle even the normal types of complications that come up in human relationships, let alone how to handle something as bizarre as heightened senses and vigilantism. Instead, what was modeled to Matt was that when relationships get complicated, you walk away. Maggie did it first, then Stick, then Elektra. AND YET MATT DOESN’T WALK AWAY. He...uh, pushes people away. But he doesn’t leave them himself, which is what you’d expect, given what he was shown over and over growing up. Also, Matt's capability is clearly capable of expanding as he matures, especially as seen in Season 3. But I think his capability for trust and honesty in Seasons 1 and 2 is lower - and that's not his fault.)

And then we have the outcomes. Matt certainly causes bad outcomes. But do those bad outcomes outweigh the good? Really? Does the heartbreak he causes Foggy and Karen outweigh the lives he’s saved and the people he’s protected from the unthinkable? I don’t believe so, not at all.

Personally, I think both his intentions and the sum total of the outcomes of his life are all good, so to the extent that we measure the goodness of a person that way at all, I’d say he’s solidly “good.”

What about being a bad friend? This is more difficult. Matt is certainly a high-maintenance friend. He’s a difficult friend. But is he a bad friend? This is a much more subjective question, but I personally don’t think he is. I don’t think every high-maintenance and difficult person is a bad friend.

Do you have a friend in your life who struggles with mental illness and trauma which causes them to make choices that hurt you? Does that make them a bad friend?

Do you have a friend in your life who has a job that’s stressful or dangerous, and it worries you? Does that make them a bad friend?

Well, maybe they are a bad friend insofar as they’re not a good fit for you. But for someone else, those issues may not be obstructions. That doesn't make them a bad friend, that merely makes them a bad friend for you.

Honestly, I’m a high-maintenance friend. I’m a person who cares deeply about the problems of others, and it’s hardly unusual for me to call my friends in tears because someone I care about is hurting or because I’ve run into a problem in the world that I can’t fix. This puts a burden on my friends that I'm sure they don't always enjoy.

I’m also a difficult friend because I’m opinionated and argumentative. Sometimes I don’t control that very well. I’ve hurt people in arguments and not realized it, and sometimes I’ve hurt people and realized it and just...kept going. Although I will note that I try not to do this and try to apologize when I do. Still, there are some people who would never want me to be their friend because they don’t want to be friends with an opinionated and argumentative person. I would definitely be a bad friend for them.

Additionally, as a prosecutor, my job is incredibly stressful, and if I end up prosecuting the types of people I desire to prosecute (sex traffickers), then my job will also be dangerous. It means long hours when I’m simply not free to go out for drinks with friends, and it means heavy conversations, and it might very well mean, in the future, that my friends will worry about me if I don’t answer their calls.

Am I a bad friend?

I mean, maybe, lol. But my point is: those things by themselves don’t make me a bad friend; they merely make me a high-maintenance and sometimes difficult friend—and that's not the same thing.

I’ve said it before: if Foggy or Karen can’t handle the stress involved with being Matt’s friend, both due to his choices as Daredevil and due to the impact of his mental health issues, then they need to evaluate whether the friendship is a good fit for them—but that doesn’t mean Matt is a bad friend. The truth is, Matt is a person who is high-maintenance and stressful, but who loves his friends intensely and struggles to treat them well but (and this is key) actively tries to do better, as seen in Season 3.

That’s not a bad friend. A bad friend is someone who hurts their friends and doesn’t care. A bad friend is someone who willfully or negligently takes advantage of their friends. A bad friend is someone who doesn’t bother trying to do better.

Matt doesn’t do any of these things.

Next up, another thing I’ve noticed is that…I don’t agree with how Daredevil fandom seems to think about what it means for Matt to be happy. That’s what a lot of us want, right? We want Matt to be happy. We want him to find healing.

But a lot of fics, posts, etc. seem to focus on happiness as Matt finding more stability in his relationships, be they romantic or platonic. Like, Foggy or Karen or Frank or whomever supporting him. And although I certainly think that would contribute to his happiness, I think there’s a lot more at play.

Matt is a character who is deeply self-judgmental. Which is not to say that he constantly loathes himself; to the contrary, he clearly takes pride in several parts of himself. He is, overall, pleased with his abilities as a lawyer, with his competence as a fighter, and he’s even sometimes pleased with his ability to flirt. ;) What I mean when I say that Matt is self-judgmental is that Matt is constantly evaluating himself. He’s constantly trying to figure out if he’s doing the right thing, if he’s meeting the standards to which he holds himself.

From my perspective, a lot of fandom acts like if other people reassure him, then that will soothe his self-judgmentalness (shut up, tumblr, I know that’s not a word). But the thing is, it WON’T. Matt is not a person whose view of himself depends on how others view him. Even when everyone around him says he’s doing something wrong, he can be convinced that he’s doing something right. Even when everyone around him says he’s doing something right, he can be convinced that he’s doing something wrong.

So bringing Matt to a point where he’s happy needs to address this. Either: a) his standards need to lower so that he can meet them where he is; b) he needs to see that he is meeting his standards where he is, even if he thought he wasn’t; c) he needs to grow in the specific ways required for him to meet those standards; or d) he needs to somehow, despite his self-judgmentalness, become okay with not meeting his own standards.

None of those things automatically follow from his friends being supportive. The closest would be (b) and possibly (d), but I rarely see fics and posts actually address those specific elements of supportiveness.

Similarly, some fics and posts seem to suggest that Matt will be happy if he stops / lessens his Daredeviling. This is a complicated subject because there’s a wide range of how Matt would go about doing this. Is it simply spending less time in the mask? Is it fighting less dangerous bad guys? Is it taking backup? Is it getting better medical care? Is it letting other people know where he is so they know if he doesn’t come home? What, exactly, does that mean?

The problem is that some of these answers, namely “spending less time in the mask” and “fighting less dangerous bad guys,” risk leaving him feeling like he’s not meeting his standards, and he's not okay with that. As he tells Foggy, people get hurt when he takes a night off. So it’s not enough to get him to Daredevil less in those two regards; he has to also believe that he’s still doing the right thing. And I sometimes see that addressed, usually in a utilitarian “you’ll be able to help more people if you’re not on the verge of collapse” sort of way. But although there’s a certain logic to that perspective, it doesn’t really get at the heart of what it means for Matt to believe he’s a good person, you know?

And I mean, I get that a lot of fics and posts aren’t trying to do a deep-dive into Matt’s understanding of what a good person is, especially as applied to himself. This is just a thing that I happen to think about a lot, so I notice when it seems like it’s getting skimmed over.

The final thing that’s probably more controversial is Matt’s relationship to his faith. You can’t scroll though his tag on tumblr or AO3 without seeing “religious trauma” and “Catholic guilt” somewhere.

And here I want to pause to acknowledge my own bias. I’m religious, and I love it. My faith has made my life infinitely better. It has some sort-of downsides (in ways that I believe are similar to what Matt experiences, in that the downsides don't actually come from the faith itself but rather from my misunderstanding/misapplication of my faith), but it’s overall my favorite thing about myself.

I also need to acknowledge that many people in the Daredevil fandom have been hurt by religion. I in no way want to diminish that, nor do I want to diminish the value of Matt as a comfort character to anyone.

But what I’m trying to do is set aside my personal experiences and set aside other people’s personal experiences, and just evaluate Matt within the confines of the story as told on Netflix. Factually, objectively, what is his relationship with religion?

I don’t think it overall is one of trauma or even guilt.

Here’s my understanding of his relationship with religion:

As a child, he’s told by his grandmother that he has the devil inside. He may not know exactly what she meant by that, but he certainly has his own idea: the devil is a scary sort of rage that hurts people. He sees it in his dad, and he sees it in himself. Even as an adult, he still remembers that phrase and still identifies with it to the point that he continually brings it up with Father Lantom, clearly seeking some sort of explanation of it and guidance for how to deal with it.

He believes in damnation. He believes, specifically, that killing someone will lead to damnation.

He believes in redemption. He believes anyone and everyone, no matter what they’ve done, can be redeemed. (Apparently redemption triumphs over damnation, at least in theory, because when Frank talks about giving killers a chance to kill again, Matt doesn’t hesitate to argue that they should have the chance to try again—because redemption is still possible, even for them.)

He believes God made everyone for a purpose. He believes this includes himself, although he’s not certain how that works out in the context of Daredevil, where God’s purpose seems to clash with (or perhaps take advantage of?) the “devil inside.”

He believes God hears people’s prayers, and believes God has given him his abilities so he can answer those prayers.

He believes God hears him and expects God to answer him—and is confused and hurt when it appears that God is silent. But although we don’t see him pray often, he makes the sign of the cross before making hard/questionable decisions (like…to kill someone), and he prays desperately over Elektra when he thought he was losing her. (I also think he prayed when he hugged Karen after Frank shot at the hospital, but I’m not entirely sure.)

He comes to believe that God is not silent, but instead that God is at work subtly in and through him, as well as in and through the people around him, to bring about good in the world.

His faith brings him comfort when confronting the hard things in life—not always, but sometimes. (Unless he’s not being honest with Karen about that, back in Season 1.)

He finds comfort and guidance in talking to religious characters like Maggie and Father Lantom. He seemed to distance himself from religion for a while before the show started, but eventually the need for that comfort and guidance brought him back.

He’s grown up in a church that clearly cares about “the least of these.” There’s the orphanage for one, and Father Lantom sharing the church with people of other faiths, like the mosque in S3, and Maggie’s statement to Karen that the church is experienced with protecting people who are on the run who have nowhere else to go.

The church gave him a home when he had nowhere else to go. Father Lantom was a father figure when he had no one else to care for him that way.

He notably doesn’t appear to feel any guilt over a lot of Catholic sins: most prominently punching people in general (which…actually, it’s debatable whether that’s a sin in the context of defense of others), sex outside of marriage, getting drunk, swearing, skipping church, etc.

I think that about sums it up? Looking over this list, the only things that seems to be traumatic is his belief of “the devil inside,” and possibly his belief in damnation (though arguably not, or at least less so, to the extent that he considers the possibility of redemption for himself). Those are also the only two areas where I see guilt really arising.

Is that enough to say he’s a character with religious trauma and Catholic guilt? Well, definitely not Catholic guilt as it is technically defined, since technically Catholic guilt is about feeling guilt for something that you don’t actually think is wrong, but you feel guilty anyway because you were taught by Catholicism that the behavior is wrong. This would apply to all the things Matt does without feeling guilt, like sex outside of marriage, etc. This would not apply to the things Matt does feel guilt about, like, y’know, beating people up and considering murder, since these are things that Matt truly thinks are wrong.

So I think fandom is using “Catholic guilt” to suggest that Matt feels extra guilt or too much guilt (or…any guilt, to the extent that you might think no guilt should ever be felt) for doing certain things.

So by that definition, is it fair to say that Matt has religious trauma and Catholic guilt? Well, maybe—except when we consider his personality.

I mean, imagine Matt without ever having heard the words “devil inside.” Imagine Matt without any belief in damnation or hell.

Now imagine that same Matt lashing out in anger and beating people up. Imagine that Matt trying to kill someone.

How would he feel about himself?

Here’s the point I’m trying to make: Matt is an intensely self-judgmental person with or without his faith, and it is this self-judgmentalness that compounds his trauma and feeds his guilt. His faith gives him a certain specific framework by which to evaluate himself and his actions, but I don’t see any evidence that, if he ditched his faith, he would no longer care about doing the right thing. Nor do I see any evidence that, if he ditched his faith, he would think that lashing out in anger and trying to kill people is fine.

In other words, Matt would be a guilt-ridden person even if he weren't Catholic.

Additionally, the moments in his life that I believe were most traumatic have nothing to do with religion. Growing up without a mom. Losing his dad. Losing his sight. Growing up in an orphanage (and presumably watching other kids get adopted / fostered, while he was left behind). Stick’s rejection. Elektra’s rejection. These were all formative in his life, and most clearly lead to his specific trauma responses, and they would’ve happened with or without his faith.

Why, then, does Matt sometimes appear to have religious trauma or Catholic guilt, when in fact he’d have trauma and guilt regardless? I think the answer is this: his religion colors his trauma and guilt, and people see the coloring and mistake the coloring for causality.

This is where I have to tread carefully, because I’m straying from fact and entering into speculation, and I recognize that my own life experiences might be coloring (ha) my perspective. But then again…maybe my own life experiences, as a religious person, are simply giving me a unique insight into a religious character.

I mean, Matt hasn’t been to therapy, okay? He doesn’t appear to know the first thing about mental health. He doesn’t have the vocabulary to talk about it.

But what vocabulary does he have? A religious vocabulary. So how does he talk about trauma and guilt? With religion and in the context of religion.

Take his angst over his anger and how he acts on it, for example. If he had the vocabulary, he could talk about it in terms of nuanced emotions or in terms of cognitive distortions. But he doesn’t have that vocabulary. Instead of saying, “I’m constantly angry at the injustices of the world,” he says, “I have the devil inside.” Instead of saying, “I don’t always know how to act on my anger appropriately,” he says, “Sometimes I let the devil out.” Instead of saying, “I engage in self-blame and believe that every bad thing is somehow my fault,” he says, “I feel guilty.” These religious phrases (”the devil” and “guilty”) are not the cause of how he feels; they’re merely the vocabulary he has to explain how he feels.

So again, this is a matter of vocabulary, not causation. And it’s personally what I’ve experienced. My parents are psychologists, so I actually have an advantage over Matt in that I do have a vocabulary for talking about mental health. But even so, my faith adds a layer to things. It has to, if it means anything to me, if it’s not just window dressing.

Like, if I’m depressed and feel that I’m of no value, then I necessarily wonder if God values me. If I’m anxious and I feel that everything is out of control, then that could easily lead to me thinking God has abandoned me. That doesn’t mean my faith caused the depression or the anxiety, but it certainly is how I explain it. My faith colors it.

All that being said, I have to be fair: the idea that Matt’s faith colors his trauma and guilt rather than causing it does not negate the possibility that, by coloring it, Matt’s faith also exacerbates it.

So does it? Personally, I think…yeah, sometimes. Sometimes, but only to the extent that Matt applies his faith in an incomplete, patchwork way to himself. The clearest example is the damnation vs redemption issue, where Matt jumps to say that killing someone will damn him, but never seems to consider the possibility that he could be redeemed from that—or that he could be redeemed from any of his bad choices whatsoever.

I also think Father Lantom was woefully unhelpful in telling Matt that guilt is a sign that his work is not finished, which 1) misstates the Gospel (smh); and 2) places the responsibility of bad things on Matt’s shoulders; and 3) doesn’t bother to help Matt distinguish between the feeling of guilt and the reality of guilt—the reality that he’s done something wrong. (Which is incredibly ironic in S2, given that the “guilt” Matt was referring to in this conversation was about Grotto’s death, which wasn’t his fault at all, and yet we never see Matt process his mistakes with Foggy, Karen, and Frank’s trial in terms of guilt, even though those mistakes decidedly were his fault.)

And personally, I think the positives from Matt’s faith outweigh those. Positives like comfort and guidance, stability, a sense of purpose, a home, the belief that someone out there is listening, the belief that someone powerful is working things for good, the model of a lifestyle of service to others, the belief in redemption...that’s a lot of beautiful things, don’t you think?

I also think the positives from Matt’s faith would outweigh the negatives even more if he had a more accurate understanding of his faith, which would get at issues like whether his anger really is “the devil,” whether his feelings of guilt are accurate, whether his wrongs determine his value, whether redemption is applicable to him, etc. But that’s an essay for another time. ;)