God…just came across this scene on somebody’s feed and had a new bit of headcanon click after years.
Everybody knows this scene: they’re arguing about whether criminals deserve second chances. Matt says yes, Frank says no. Matt asks him how he’s so sure that the men he kills don’t have a chance for redemption, and Frank just says he knows. He’s sure.
And maybe it’s just that Frank is that good at reading people, maybe it’s because his family’s senseless murder has made him that jaded about the nature of humanity (and this is even before he understands the real truth of what went down, which I’m sure helped so much), but in this moment I was suddenly positive that Frank is convinced that nobody in his sights is capable of redemption because life proved to him that he isn’t, either.
In Punisher he talks about how he was a little shithead when he was younger, hurting people just because he could. Then the Marines came along and whitewashed that particular aptitude, making what he did seem noble, a necessary evil to protect those who just didn’t have it in them, to preserve Freedom and The American Way(tm) (this bit I thought was sort of implied between the lines — he’s so proud of his service, and he talks about what he came home to in the graveyard scene as though it’s stuff that is widely accepted as good and what they were fighting for, even if it’s just things like shitty fast food).
But there’s just something about how Frank is about his family that makes you think he felt like he never deserved them, like it was some kind of miracle that he ever wound up with a loving wife and two amazing kids. And it suddenly clicked that on some level he must be convinced that he lost them because he never deserved them in the first place — that he invoked some kind of cosmic punishment for daring to be part of their lives when he well knew he was the Type of Man That He Is, the type that violence follows around like flies on shit, and this loss proved that there had not actually been any redemption for him, that part was all a lie he told himself just because he wanted to believe it. In Frank’s view, there are people who were always good, like Matt, and there are people who will always be bad, like himself, men who are steeped in blood, gore, and gun powder, doomed to be able to see the light of the nicer world above them but never able to crawl out of the pit they’re in.
He knows the men he puts down aren’t capable of redemption because he is them, knows it in his bones, and the best he can do (because despite knowing better and despite the smiting he received for his hubris, he cannot bear the thought that he is the same as the worst of the worst) is to only put down the other bad men, the ones who don’t draw the line at leaving the decent people alone.
