@mavnn You could be more familiar with Punisher than I am but I thought that Punisher, like Grimdark Batman, was presented in moral terms even if those terms are just that the ends justify the means. Golgo 13 et al are explicitly not portrayed as being motivated by anything redeeming or useful. They're psychos and the pleasure lies purely in the writers constructing these horrific houses of sand that the characters turn up and kick over. @SJohnRoss
So it's either 'character is a bastard but the whole system is rotten' like Wolf of Wall Street. Or 'character is rotten but charming' like Arsene Lupin. Or the grimdark moral fantasy that fuelled 00s epic fantasy like Prince of Thorns (everyone in this book is a bastard so you, thd reader, can feel better about being a self-serving piece of shit).
But very rare to find stories that are litterally about the joys of watching horrible elites get chewed up by a black-eyed assassin.
Raffles the Gentleman Thief is possibly the sole exception but those stories are masks off in so many ways. The only way in which they could be more on point is if Bunny and Raffles went to India to escape the consequences of their actions and wound up making a fortune by perpetrating massacres until they came into possession of a diamond mine and then just sat back and got rich working the locals to death.
@Taskerland There are oddities like the very long Parker series of novels, by Donald Westlake writing under a pseudonym ("Richard Stark"), where the protagonist is morally awful, his world has moral complexity (it's not the case that the whole system is rotten), and the books are kind of built around a viewpoint where ethics is everything. Just a kind of utter amorality (there isn't even an explicit rejection of morality; it's just ignored) rather than immorality or grimdark faux-morality, etc.
@SJohnRoss You are correct about Parker. Parker is definitely a hyper-bastard deployed against bastards with institutional backing. Similar jouissanxe based in amoral competence porn.
@[email protected] @[email protected] Isn't this also basically the Punisher, Deadpool, etc? Obviously not nice people, sometimes in fairly upbeat settings (if not always upbeat stories) but who only interact with enemies who are so obivously worse than them that they appear... not quite as morally bankrupt. See also things like John Wick, although that has the whole glanced at initially redemption overtones that are almost part of the character if you squint hard enough.
@mavnn @SJohnRoss Deadpool is a loveable scamp. Wick is a blank sheet. The Punisher? I don't know... He's often framed in similar terms to Miller's Grimdark Batman in that he's an obsessive and a joyless fanatic.
@[email protected] @[email protected] I must admit that I loath Deadpool who doesn't really come across as loveable to me at all, so I may not be the best judge there. And you don't get much blanker than Wick.
But I suppose I'm not really seeing the line between people like Punisher and Lone Wolf, so I may have missed part of the essence of what you're saying.
