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OUT OF CHARACTER

Player Name: Isabelle
Are you 16 or older: yep
Contact: shipoftheseus
Current Characters: nope
Tag: Frank Castle (616)

IN CHARACTER
Name: Frank Castle
Canon: Marvel 616
Canon Point: Right after Rucka’s The Punisher (2011) series concludes, when he has prevented Rachel Cole-Alves from committing suicide by cop and allowed her to be taken into custody, but before Rucka’s Punisher: War Zone (2012-2013) picks up and the Avengers manhunt begins.
Age: Guys, Comics time is a hell of a drug. According to THAT, he ought to be, like, 23? Obviously no. Personally I'm keeping Vietnam as his war, because I think it's really a different quality of experience than any other American war and it informed the development of his character a lot, so that the influence remains even when it stopped being explicit. Depending on how much other Marvel players want to use or not use the sliding scale crunch, he's somewhere between his forties and his sixties??? He's canonically died and been resurrected at least twice, so that's a handy reset button for explaining why he doesn't look that old. He's probably in his forties physically, regardless. *waves hands vaguely* I'm flexible here.


History: haha comics are kind of crazy

Personality: Under any thoughtful writer, one of the questions that comes up in Punisher titles again and again is: why? Is his murder spree really fueled by grief and vengeance, or is he just a serial killer using his family to rationalize his behavior? And the only honest, compelling answer is both and neither. Many, many people lose their loved ones, including to violence, and some are even witness to it. But nobody else becomes the Punisher; even among those who do seek revenge, even in the hyperbolic world of superheroes and villains, no one else does what Frank does with his level of relentless and ongoing intensity. If his tragedy is not unique, then his uniqueness has to predate his tragedy, and the few serious backstory titles we get bear that out.

Punisher: The Tyger and Punisher: Born are both technically published under the MAX imprint, but they’re by the same writer (Garth Ennis) who established the backbone of Frank’s modern character after the OTT weirdness at the end of the nineties. He references some of the details of Born in 616 canon, and they both make a great deal of sense with the man and the icon Frank becomes, so I generally assume them as the basis of my backstory. In The Tyger we see Frank as a child: introverted, already independent and self-reliant, quiet and highly observant, direct and basically fearless. He’s not an angry child, more often on the edges, sometimes lost in thought. He’s an avid reader, perhaps prefacing that someday he will be an avid writer, chronicling his self-imposed mission in endless “War Journals”. Most of all, he learns that the adults around him cannot be relied upon, at which point he proves ready and willing to take justice into his own hands. He goes so far as to steal the gun from his father’s safe with a half-baked plan to kill a local rapist protected by his influential family, and is only preempted by the victim’s older brother killing the man before Frank can.

In Punisher: Born we see him in Vietnam, driven by an absolute will to survive and a dedication to doing what he sees as his duty. But defining that duty falls entirely to him, because the hideous state of despair and mismanagement by the command structure in Vietnam has only compounded and calcified his childhood lack of faith in authority. He frags both a superior and a subordinate over the course of the story - already, no one is immune to his personal judgement. Even though the particulars of his code haven’t yet fully formed. He decides something ought to be done and does it himself, with as little dithering as possible. He's also obviously hypervigilant, the constant danger and the nature of his marine training leaving him with a warped and all-consuming focus on the enemy, to the point of not really even being able to think about the war's imminent end in a sustained or logical way. The war is his world, and political considerations aren't part of it - just as his personal war will one day be his world in a similarly distorted view.

But that distortion is not yet all-consuming. Frank says that he thinks his family is his “last chance” but he doesn’t say his last chance at what - presumably, being a person who does more than killing. There’s nothing compelling about him at all if his love for them isn’t genuine, and if the massacre in the park is merely an excuse, rather than a catalyst. Frank was always going to be a driven, disciplined, pragmatic, relentless, hardline and even dangerous person - but nothing about that necessarily says ‘one-man war on organized crime.’ In any life, Frank needs a fight, but the nature of it could have been very different, even heroic. But without his family or anything he sees as worth fighting for, all he has left is an enemy to fight against.

One of his men describes him as “in love with war” and that’s a little bit true - almost all his writers agree that to some degree Frank does what he does because he enjoys it. But it’s also not the whole story. Frank is not rabid, or a sociopath. While certain things set off his temper - especially desecration of his family - most of the time his anger is cold, and conducts his strikes with patience and precision. He feels guilty when he upsets children, and empathizes with others who have suffered loss - he just doesn’t generalize his remorse or his empathy to his victims. Far from being amoral, Frank is a man of very intense moral convictions, and although he is absolutely zealous, I would hesitate to call him a zealot. He’s willing to listen and be persuaded when people speak to him on his own terms, instead of lecturing a soldier on the unimpeachable sanctity of life in black-and-white ways. Although he would say that punishing the guilty is more important to him that protecting the innocent, he won’t let people die due to his own carelessness or callousness. Occasionally he’s capable of great strokes of kindness, like when he urges his neighbor Joan to leave a life that’s making her miserable and gives her the money to do so.

He is - on very rare occasion - capable of mercy, letting both the Marvel villain Rhino and his friend and ally Rachel Cole-Alves live in spite of each of them accidentally killing an innocent, even though he usually disregards intent as a mitigating factor. In the Punisher: Nightmare Annual he tries (though ultimately fails) to spare and rehabilitate a traumatized fellow veteran who, due to military experiments, is morphing into a hulk-like monster, with all Frank’s bloodlust and none of his self-control. Another time, Rhino talks him out of killing a handful of small-time crooks who’ve gotten their hands on supervillain tech: “You punish the guilty, not the stupid.” And he listens and pulls back. There’s definitely a creepy fascist undertone to Frank’s arrogant assumption that the world can be divided into the pure and the “scum” who need to be expunged, but there’s very little ego to this mission. He holds himself to a standard - in many ways, the same standard. After he kills the reporter Tatiana Arocha while essentially under neonazi mind control, he doesn’t try to defend himself from Tatiana’s boyfriend, his former accomplice Stuart Clarke. He says, “You’re right. I did it. I’m sorry. Do what you have to do,” and even, “Punish me.” If not for SHIELD Agent Bridge ratting out Clarke as a washed-up supervillain and cop-killer himself, Frank would have let Clarke kill him for his sins without hesitation.

This highlights one of the greatest paradoxes of Frank’s character: he’s an utterly pragmatic, relentless survivor, but also deeply suicidal. A great deal of the time, Frank unequivocally wants to be dead - but not only will he not kill himself, but he won’t let himself get sloppy, either. He won’t stop trying to regroup and continue his mission no matter how badly hurt he is, or how much easier that would be. Every time death seems certain, he reacts with an almost chipper calmness - soon, soon he’ll be done. But he doesn’t stop fighting, can’t stop until he is made to stop, never seems to think of stopping. Part of it is self-loathing, that he doesn’t believe he deserves to die yet, part of it is probably the old habits of marine training, part of it may even be a lingering ex-Catholic unwillingness to kill himself, and some of it is just natural tenacity, but it always keeps him moving.

Frank is a very practical person, despite his various moral hard lines. He claims he never compromises, saying “No deals. Ever,” when killing emissaries of supervillains offering to work with Team Cap and the Secret Avengers during Civil War. He will never compromise in terms of working with someone he sees as guilty, no matter what he stands to gain. He frequently threatens marks for information, but if he’s already decided they merit punishment, no amount of cooperation will actually save them. But it’s also more complicated than that: he will make deals with other heroes that compromise on his goals and methods, using non-lethal weaponry and abiding by restrictions while working with them if he needs their help with a larger goal. He did this when joining Cap in the first place, and with Daredevil and Spiderman in the Omega Drive arc, among many other such incidents.

Although he’s billed as a ‘badass normal’, he’ll use any weapon he can get ahold of if it’s effective for his immediate goals, including super-type things, whether that’s a magic bloodstone, stolen Antman tech or armorized Venom goo. Then, rather than wrapping his identity in it like any another supervillain, he’ll discard it and move on when it’s no longer the best tool for the job. He does his research, he fights dirty, and he has zero sense of ‘warrior honor’. He uses stealth, distance sniping, and psychological warfare, especially the skull symbol and his reputation, and he actually bluffs a lot. He sometimes threatens people he would never kill, people who are innocent in his estimation, and gets a lot of mileage out of their terrified cooperation. If anyone ever called him on it, he’d probably be screwed.

There’s also a contradiction between his terse, lone killer persona and his actual behavior. Although he frequently says he works alone, in 616 he spends far more time with allies than without them, including tech experts like Microchip, Stuart Clarke, and Henry Russo, cops or ex-cops like Lynn Michaels, Martin Soap and Samantha Stone, fellow military like Rachel Cole-Alves and Tuggs, and sometimes he even joins superteams like the Marvel Knights and the Thunderbolts. He turns himself in so that he can watch over Daredevil in prison, and forms a fractious but real bond with SHIELD Agent Bridge over the course of Bridge’s pursuit of him, eventually allowing both himself and Jigsaw to be arrested. His training is as a marine, not a lone ninja or mercenary: he wants a team at his back that he can rely on, even if that team is only one other person, even if most of the people he associates with betray him and/or die tragically.

He genuinely cares about them, even if he’s terrible at showing it most of the time. He’s not an accommodating person, but he gives Henry the affirmation he needs after Henry loses his temper with Frank’s brusqueness, and he gives Rachel his symbol and his mission to give her purpose to get her through her grief and guilt. After Bridge dies fighting Red Hood, Frank makes sure his family is cared for. Frank is especially weak to children, even though he tries to avoid them, given the hazards of his life. When a lonely boy discovers his hideout, Frank eats with him and listens to his problems. Frank sometimes pushes people away "for their own good," but far less often than his stereotype would suggest. In the clearest example, he tells Henry that if he ever sees him again, Frank will kill him - but this is another bluff. If Frank thought Henry should die for temporarily falling back under his abusive father Jigsaw’s sway, he would kill him right then. Frank says it not because it’s true, and not because he wants to be alone, but because Henry can - and does - have a better life doing other things. It’s high-handed and perhaps unfair, but it also comes from a place of caring and honesty about what he is and what being part of his life means.

Under most writers, especially Ennis and Rucka, part of what makes Frank genuinely tragic, rather than the parody of machismo and manpain he can sometimes become, is that he is self-aware about his choices. He knows that by embracing vengeance, he is deliberately not healing, prolonging his pain. He knows that he isn’t helping change the system - he’s too bitter to believe it can be changed. Sometimes he tries to justify himself in terms of the families that won’t suffer as he has, but just as often, he admits that prevention is not that point, because there will always be crime: retribution is the point. And he is aware that he is not admirable, not selfless, and not healthy. He regularly works to stop others from going down his path, from Daredevil to cops and ordinary people. “You don’t want to be like me,” he says, over and over. When Rachel says she aspired to be like him, he responds, “No one should be like me.” Although he frequently gets frustrated with heroes, he also isn’t under the delusion that he is one. He just doesn’t know how to be anything else.

Contracts: Frank wouldn’t like it, but Frank does a lot of things he doesn’t especially like. He tries not to get mixed up in the magic and aliens side of Marvel Plot Madness if he can help it, but it still happens and this honestly won’t be the weirdest shit that ever happened to him. He’ll see it as just another obstacle to deal with so he can continue his mission. After taking stock of the situation, he’d land somewhere in between “the only way out is through,” and “needs more intel,” and deciding that cooperating for the time being is the best way to advance both of those objectives.

Abilities/Skills:
- USMC special forces (Recon) training, including brutal hand-to-hand, knife fighting, improvised weapons, wilderness survival, field medicine, bomb construction, and a frankly ludicrous proficiency in firearms
- brilliant, patient, and focused strategist
- insane pain tolerance, will continue fighting while shot/impaled/etc
- heals about as fast and well as humanly possible
- can apparently operate on raw obsession without sleep for way, way too long
- without weapons, surprise, or planning time he’s definitely not the biggest baddest though, any superhero who is a hand-to-hand primary should kick his ass in a fair fight
- he’s really good at not being in fair fights tho
- surveillance, infiltration, rappelling, making crazy map/string boards, budgeting stolen drug money to manage secret bolt holes, stalking, bondage, escaping bondage, ETC ORDINARY CRIME FIGHTING AND PARANOIA TYPE STUFF
- also apparently he’s a decent tailor
- knows a couple different languages, including Vietnamese and Spanish
- A+ brooding, grunting, avoiding personal questions, and coffee drinking
- he adopts a goddamn coyote one time that’s not a skill it’s just super cool okay

Strengths/Weaknesses: Frank is smart, efficient, disciplined, highly organized, a quick learner, physically fit, and not too proud to do grunt work, so he’ll do a good job at just about anything that he thinks is worth doing. He’s got just about any wilderness survival skill you can think of, and he’s a decent hand at emergency medicine, construction and basic mechanical engineering/tech management. He is pretty terrible at anything involving comforting or extensively talking to other human beings.

Items:
- Winter clothing, thermal under layers and insulating outer layers, black
- Leather jacket, black
- Combat boots, black
- Body armor, including kneepads, gloves, and chestplate w/white skull, otherwise black
- 1 burner phone, black
- 1 heavy duty belt with lots of little pouches, black
- 1 magnificent beard, black
- 2 switchblades and 1 USMC Ka-bar knife, probably also black, come on
- A multitool with pliers, wire-stripper/cutter, and screwdriver attachments, given all the mechanical booby-trapping he does during the chase
- 4 disgusting protein bars because he hates joy
- Look the man ALWAYS carries grenades, who the fuck knows where, he isn’t drawn with bulgy cargo pockets but he ALWAYS HAS THEM and he picks them up in the warehouse before he and Rachel split up, let’s say he has 2 regular and 1 flash left
- M1911 pistol w/several extra packs of .45 ammunition
- Honestly he ought to have more guns hidden somewhere probably but that’s the only one confirmed so I’m gonna say he left the rest in his go bag in the van and he’s stuck with just the one SETTLE DOWN, DUDE
- Speaking of which, 1 set of keys to his murdervan (which, in a shocking twist, is grey.)
- 1 set USMC dog tags & chain
- 1 ugly-ass makeshift bandage/eyepatch thing
- 1 stolen spider-man webshooter, limited use b/c no web goo resupply

SAMPLES
Network Sample:

[Frank has found his way to the main gunnery. The video feed skims across several of the control systems before it comes back to him.]

Major weaponry is an investment of resources. Ships can't afford to waste resources. These are maintained, powered, standing by -

[Ready.]

We've a lightshow on our six and someone did a real recruitment push.

[So.]

When do we expect the enemy, and what do we know about him?

[The most important questions, in Frank's estimation - maybe the only important questions. Everything else is derivative of those.]

Prose/Action Sample: Test drive meme, Frank wants to adopt the Survival Child