finnix

This comic panel captures it perfectly, and it reminds me of the scene in S3 that makes me collapse into a puddle. Foggy gives Karen a big hug and tells her everything is going to be all right, and gives her cash for her to run. I relate deeply to Karen on an extraordinary level, and Foggy reminds me so much of my brother, it’s eerie. We’ve had word-for-word conversations like the one where Foggy tells Karen, “That’s not the kind of friend I want to be.” I am lucky enough to have my own real life Foggy in my world, who is the perfect complement to my stern, self-protective, grudge-holding flaws - especially regarding my impatience with my parents, who have abandonment trauma. My mother is Matt Murdock, who hurts me by being a pitiful, lovable orphan - that’s a unique dynamic that deserves praise for realism, too. I know to the core of my soul what it feels like to have a Foggy - someone who really is that good, that loving, and that amazing of a friend, and (shhh, I’m whispering in case my brother hears) always right! If I didn’t get to have that person in my life, I would believe Foggy is too good to be true.

Because this relationship is so personal to me - realistic and almost unsettling how true to life it is - Karen and Foggy mean the world to me. I care about their friendship more than Matt and Foggy’s, when it comes down to it, because of the way I emotionally relate to it and understand what it feels like to be the Karen to a Foggy. Take it from me; Foggy is a gift from the universe and the best thing to ever happen to Karen.

I can’t rewatch Karen’s episode because it’s too close to life. My greatest fear has always been the loss of my brother. I am from Colorado (Vermont West), my dad drove a Jeep Cherokee, my brother is younger and as a teenager I was mean like Karen when he was always an angel to me (tell him that and you’re dead to me - do you want to be responsible for giving that humble soul a big head?! 😉), my mom had cancer when I was a teen, we had family businesses, my dad checked out and left for Montana when I took care of my mom and brother when she had cancer, my outlet is dancing, I blew my college career and dropped out because of tragedy, and I was in a severe, life-changing car accident as a teen. I wasn’t driving and no one died, but I still have PTSD and neck problems. It’s all just close enough that I weep every time I watch this episode.

I am SLOWLY coming around to maybe a more nuanced perspective of episode 9, with @alizelavasseur help. To be sure, I still am mightily pissed at episode 9, and I think it was one of the weakest in the show, and I wish it didnt exist and that episode 8 was the finale, BUT, some of the things that made me so angry about it before I've started to view from a different perspective. The fact that the writers made Karen and Matt "break up" over their mutual grief over Foggy, I think, is significant. If the show wanted to bring them together and say that together, they could overcome Foggy's absence, there are myriad other ways they could have written Karen out of the show. They could have had Matt send her away in order to protect her. They could have had her leave in order to protect HIM. The fact that they specify that their mutual grief over their best friend and brother was the cause, gives me me a sliver of hope. Because thats a gaping hole in the story that can really only be resolved in a couple of ways, and the biggest and most obvious way, is to bring Foggy back, and have all three of them united once more.

Thank you so much for sharing!

he lies, he's reckless, he wrongs and disrespects the people he cares about, he's a hypocrite of the highest order, he decides that sometimes he knows best and that he is right to bulldoze over the motivations of other people.

after outing ayala as the white tiger in court — which i do think is in-character, he's a great lawyer but he's known to take risks and allow his daredevil-ness to bleed into how he presents his clients — he tries to moralize to hector with borrowed lines from maggie. matt, with his current rejectionist viewpoint on vigilantism, thinks he has done hector a favor by making it impossible or hard for him to be white tiger. he makes false equivalencies and says things that he knows are bullshit because he's deluding himself.

despite all his altruism (which he is currently going on a year of suppressing), matt is a spectacularly self-centered person. it's an argument he and foggy had multiple times. but as the audience, we can see the extent of it in a way that foggy can't: matt filters the world around him through the ways he thinks about himself. vigilantism lost matt his best friend, therefore it is not only okay but right for him to take the white tiger from hector (it would protect his loved ones).

Something I adore about Daredevil is that the characters, all of them, make mistakes and do things that hurt other people, and the show doesn't give us a neon sign saying "FYI THIS WAS A BAD IDEA." The show just lets it happen and trusts us, as audience members, to be smart enough to figure out what we think.

And with Matt, we constantly see him making choices for reasons that he thinks are good but those reasons are hypocritical but he sincerely believes them but then the choices have a bad outcome but it's not entirely bad, but it's still bad, and even if the outcome isn't all that bad, it still seems disrespectful because he's sort of denying the agency of someone else in his efforts to "save" them but it's because he cares and he's trying to do the right thing but but but but -

Matt’s collisions with other vigilantes have always been fraught. He and Frank beat the shit out of each other. He was deeply skeptical of everyone in the Defends. His trust was the hardest to earn and I’d argue only Jessica ever did. That was possibly because Jessica herself is loudly ambivalent on the subject of vigilantes and because Matt’s profession made him familiar with and more readily appreciative of her investigatory methods. Matt was always going to believe he knew better than White Tiger. This would have been true even if they had met at a time when Matt still believed that vigilantes played an important role in keeping people safe. It requires a certain amount of steely certainty in your own judgement to be a vigilante. And that doesn’t go away just because the clothes are packed up in a box.

There is dissonance in Matt’s view of the world that can never be fully resolved because he wants there to be a clear, fair system of justice. But its also slow, imperfect, and has been abused by people with power. And Matt doesn’t know how to not act. And that is why we love him as imperfect as he is.

And Matt's certainty in his own judgment is something I think fandom consistently just...misses. Fandom consistently acts as if all Matt needs is reassurance from Foggy or Karen or someone else that he's doing the right thing, and then he'll be okay, or at least more okay.

But while I suppose that wouldn't hurt, Matt's deepest struggle is not about what other people think of him; it's about what he thinks of himself.

And that's part of why he had to say those things to Hector. He has to convince himself that he made the right choice putting away the suit. He's still struggling with that choice, as evidenced by him carrying that horn with him wherever he goes. But think of what it means for Matt to acknowledge his own uncertainty over whether he's doing the right thing. It leaves him absolutely floundering.

If he doesn't know whether he's doing the right thing, that leaves him:

In a continual state of existential crisis about whether he's "good enough" or even "good" at all; and

Completely paralyzed because he can't afford to act if such an action might actually be bad instead of good.

So rather than giving himself space to sit with this uncertainty, rather than being gentle with himself in moments of existential crisis and inaction, Matt simply chooses a position and clings to it with desperate ferocity.

They’re basically a literary prank– the sentence starts out in such a way that you think you know where it’s going, but the way it ends completely changes the meaning while still being a complete and logical sentence. Usually it deals with double meanings, or with words that can be multiple parts of speech, like nouns and verbs or nouns and adjectives.

So we get gems like

The old man the boat. (The old people are manning the boat)

The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families. (The apartment complex is home to both married and single soldiers, plus their families)

The prime number few. (People who are excellent are few in number.)

The cotton clothing is usually made of grows in Mississipi. (The cotton that clothing is made of)

The man who hunts ducks out on weekends. (As in he ducks out of his responsibilities)

spiderman dances to the beat