#counselling officer | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup · 2 years ago

Note

Hey Syn, I have a very serious question: do you think Matt and Frank can co-parent or would these two be constantly at each others throats?

I mean, they have a lot in common but the way they deal with it is so completely different.

Not to mention that Frank sees Daredevil as a pain in the ass and above the "dirty work" aka killing while Matt condems Franks killing spree. Or their background concerning family (Matt = his dad and Stick; Frank = old parents who didn't know how to control him + Maria and their kids)

I mean, it really depends very heavily on the context.

Like, if you pull them out of canon as they are, hand them a random baby, and assign them to raise it like it’s a flour sack for Health class, then that’s gonna be a hard no. They hate each other, Matt definitely does not want to be a parent, frank wants to be a parent but of like, his kids, specifically, and neither of them are going to want to cooperate on an indefinite basis. They would find the nearest fire station and leave the baby on the steps. But, in the spirit of the question, I think it’s important to note that parenting is something you do not something you are.

Like, it’s a million little choices stretched out for as long as both you and the kid is alive. Decisions you make in the interests of the kid. So, lots of room to fuck those choices up. It’s extremely difficult being a parent, I don’t want to diminish that, but you don’t get whacked with the parent stick once you become in charge of a child. It’s something you have to pick, again and again and again, multiple times a day, seven days a week, including holidays, and a lot of parents don’t pick to like, be parents.

It’s about putting your kid first, and doing what you think is best for them. Sacrificing for them if that’s what it takes. Teaching them not to be a serial killer and taking an interest in them and trying to keep them emotionally, physically, and mentally healthy. A million different things. So, for me, the question isn’t more if they can co-parent, but what, if anything, is a situation where they’d both be willing to take on the responsibility of parenthood together, and then we hit whether those choices you make as a parent are gonna be the same for them.

A few notes:

1. They fucking hate each other.

2. They agree on nothing.

Which is really bad for co-parenting because 1) kids can tell when their parents fucking hate each other, and 2) you need to agree on like, parenting at the very least, or you’ll constantly be fighting.

Really, it’d be a matter of finding the hyper specific situation where they have to make it work for the kid and neither of them are willing to walk away.

Because like, hating each other, not agreeing on anything—those are mindsets, not choices. They still have to make choices. Hypothetically, they could choose to suck it up, be civil, and learn to cooperate for the sake of the kid. I just see very few instances where that would ever happen.

It sounds mercenary, but it’s cost and worth, right? It costs mental time and energy as well as physical money and resources to raise a child. Stack on the costs of having to do it with a guy you fucking hate, and the cost of raising a child is enormous.

The thing is, with Matt and Frank, it’s not like the traditional routes of accidentally finding themselves coparenting is open. Like. Okay. One of them cannot accidentally knock up the other, if we’re starting from canonical sexes assigned at birth and assuming like, no mpreg. They have no way of finding themselves with a biological offshoot of the two of them combined. Before we get to the logistics of “would they be able to work out co-parenting logistically,” any mutual kid of theirs is going to first have to jump the hurdle of getting them to choose to co-parent in the first place. This is going to be the step they almost inevitably fail at.

Choosing to parent a child when you're one of the two most unstable men alive is a big decision. It's an even bigger decision when the other parent is going to be the other most unstable man alive. And that big big decision gets even bigger when you simply fucking hate the other guy. So if Matt and Frank are facing the threshold question of "Are we willing to raise this child?" they're going to almost inevitably say, "No, we need to leave this kid on some nice fire station steps."

And I don't want to make it sound like the kid isn't good enough for them. It's more that if Matt and Frank are being faced with the very important decision of deciding whether they are what's best for this child, they're almost invariably going to say "Absolutely fucking not, get literally anyone else."

Because honestly? Matt and Frank are almost never the best case scenario for a child. Matt's business model is "trust in Jesus to provide for the light bill, yes we will accept half a banana and this 1997 copy of the phantom of the opera as payment for our expert legal services, god bless and amen." Frank does not have a single legitimate income stream. Both of them are profoundly mentally ill and would not get therapy at gunpoint. They've both faked their death on multiple occasions, depending on what canon you're talking about. Falling completely off the grid and having all of their loved ones sobbing at their funeral is a repeated life event for them. Both of them could actually die on any given day. There's warrants out for their arrest. There's probably a shoot on sight policy for them. they both have a proclivity for collapsing, bleeding and dying, to the floor. I'm not convinced they know how to file their taxes.

Matt and Frank electing to take a child in involves a much higher level of choice than having an accidental biological child. If we're like, living in the mpreg or gender bend world or whatever and accidental pregnancy was on the table, while termination would be an option and a choice they could make, they have time to plan and get their shit in order if Frank decides he wants to go for parenting round #2 and Matt like, presumably has an undiagnosed head injury or something if he's decided to voluntarily continue his genetic line.

If they are taking in a child, then that is an immediate choice they have to make with immediate consequences. They don't have nine months to get into more stable positions--the child is standing right in front of them in need of a home, has a set personality, has unique and tangible needs and problems, and their life is probably in fucking shambles if matt and frank are even in the running for consideration. At this stage of the game, Matt and Frank are almost always going to say "Hey, I've developed a great deal of fondness for you, in this, our time saving you from that faceless drug lord or whatever brought your life to such a state of crisis. But i'm sort of a fucking mess and there has got to be a better option for you out of the 7 billion people on earth. i will personally find them and make sure you have a home, but it's not going to be with me."

Frank loved Amy in Season 2 of the punisher, but he still sent her off to live in a different, more stable home. "Being raised by the Punisher and daredevil" is just not a very good environment for a kid. It's going to be really really hard to ever get them to consider coparenting simply because them parenting a child at all is not going to be good for the child, and they will find them a different home.

Honestly, the only thing that could really tip them into deciding to take in a kid would be 1) if the kid's life is just that fucked to begin with and 2) overwhelming emotional complications making it so they can't give the kid up.

TO BE CLEAR i am not making any promises about the "these stupid hells we keep" verse but lisa actually happens to be a perfect case study, so we'll bring her in for illustrative purposes.

Lisa actually just is in a unique position where her life is that fucked. Matt only decided to take her in in the first place because the chaste put him in a bind. On a psychological level, Lisa needs some major help right now. She needs support to do it. But she can't get it, because she can't tell anyone about what happened to her without putting them in immediate risk of the chaste and/or hand killing them. She also doesn't want help to begin with, and wouldn't reach out for help and let people in with the way she is right now. Even if she did, Stick's brainwashing was so fucked that it makes it hard for most average adoptive parents to be able to help with that level of abuse.

Matt doesn't even know if he can find the chaste, let alone take them down. Even if he did take down the chaste, he'd effectively be taking out the only force keeping the hand in check, so now the world may fall to fucking ninjas, who also may go after Lisa. On the other hand, Matt would conceivably be able to provide her the support she needed. He already knows about the dangerous facts, so they don't have to worry about him being killed for knowing. He has none of the problems that almost every other adult on the planet would have for lisa's willingness to open up--he's on the inside of Stick's special group. She sees him as someone like her. He can start chipping away at Stick's brainwashing--if he got his shit together and stopped being such a fucking mess. prayers for him on that. it's the fact that Lisa's interests are so boxed in by the threats on her make the chances of Matt and Frank's co-parenting coming into play much higher.

That being said, if matt knew "murder dad" was an option in therianthropy, he probably would have said "good luck and god bless you seem like you have this under control" and fucked right off to be mentally ill and unstable in peace. Frank is sufficiently dangerous enough on his own to keep lisa safe and, as her father, may be a better candidate to give her support. Like, Matt wouldn't leave her life entirely, but he'd be like the sitcom neighbor who shows up on the occasional special episode and helps her through her brainwashing. Matt legitimately only gets to the threshold of "willing to be this child's permanent adult figure" if there are literally zero other options. And I specify adult figure because matt in hells verse very much is thinking of himself as less of lisa's father and more of her adult roommate who can claim her on his tax forms now. he's the spencer to her carly at best.

Lisa is Frank's daughter. There is not a world where he is willing to walk away from her. So he would have to ignore whatever logistical issues there were and find a way to make it fucking work. Matt is one of those logistical issues, and the question is whether Frank decides to resolve it with like, fuckin' couple's counseling or with kicking matt in the ribs.

The other question is whether Matt stays if there is another option.

Because say like, the day after therianthropy ends, Frank Castle shows up on their doorstep ready to take Lisa back in. He hasn't gone on his murder spree yet, amen and god bless, and won't be doing it at all. It's weird that you asked that question, actually, who would even think of such a thing. He has a daughter to raise and will be devoting his time and effort to that.

Matt's already pretty emotionally involved. Like, he already loves Lisa, even if he may not be able to admit as much. But he's very much still in the capacity of doing this as a necessary evil. He does not view himself as like, a good option--he took in Lisa because he viewed himself as the only option. If he has another option? He'd probably bow out pretty immediately and call it a near-brush with adult responsibility. If there was more time to establish a relationship with Lisa?

It sounds bad to say, but it's really hard to say whether Matt would decide to stay not as legitimately the only living candidate on the planet, but as a voluntary parent, just because he loves the kid in question. It goes more to his own doubts as to his ability to be a healthy influence than his ability to love a kid. He just has a lot of issues and he knows that it wouldn't be good for a kid to be dealing with his spiral. It'd definitely require a lot of growth and healing on his part. But it would take this kind of extreme circumstances to even get to the threshold question of "is matt even willing to try to be a parent?" and he will dive back over that threshold if another option arises.

For Frank, it would be more of a question of getting him to understand the severity of the situation. Frank is very stubborn and set in his ways. To get him to accept co-parenting with Matt, especially as Lisa's like, actual father who has some primacy in this situation, he has to accept that Matt's someone who should be in Lisa's life. It would be a question of whether he actually grasps the depths of what happened to Lisa and the things that make Matt good for her life.

Honestly, I just think that the circumstances to get Matt and Frank to agree to coparent in the first place would have to be so hyper-specific and extreme that it'd almost necessarily exclude them as coparents. That being said, the fact that the circumstances would have to be that extreme actually goes in favor of matt and frank working out coparenting. Like, the situation is already fucked beyond all hope if they are the two parenting options on the table. If they had a kid that needs them that badly, and that they loved too much to leave, then they're going to be in the position where they have to work it out. If they don't, they'll fuck up the kid.

Will they be perfect parents together? By absolutely no stretch of the imagination. They are going to fuck up so bad and so often. But, at their core, they do care deeply about the people they love. They're going to try fucking hard to fix their fuck ups and do better. It would be messy and painful and absolutely riddled with mistakes, but I think they'd conceivably make it over the finish line at the end of the day out of sheer burning necessity.

It does help that most of their biggest problems are going to likely be sidestepped. Like, take Matt's "no kill" code versus Frank's "yes kill" code.

They're going to dodge it just because neither of them are likely to actually want a kid to turn out like them. Like, if they're raising a kid, it's not for the kid to be the robin to their batman. They're not raising them to fight crime. The core of the issue ("How do you ethically run a vigilante career") is going to not come into play because they're probably not raising this kid to be a vigilante. It's probably going to be a very touchy subject that Dad and Other Dad simply do not discuss ever.

Honestly, thoughts and prayers for the very confused couple's counselor they're going to have to get, because they'd have to learn how to bear each other's personalities sooner rather than later. But if they don't figure it on their own, Karen or Foggy is going to threaten their lives and manhoods if they don't get their shit together and take care of that kid properly. They'd have to either come to a truce or find a different living situation for the kid, because it'd be toxic to raise a kid in a household where they actively fucking hate each other.

Daredevil and the Punisher is an entirely separate can of worm. Are they both keeping up the vigilante career? That's a huge problem independent from their relationship--they are constantly risking death or prison, and it's going to be stressful for the kid to have them come home injured constantly. If we assume neither of them are giving it up, eventually they're going to have to either come to some kind of middle ground as to working together or take a very extreme "leave it at the office" approach where they simply do not ever talk about it at home ever. Like married professors who are academic rivals.

The is a very long way of saying that it's incredibly unlikely that they would ever willingly coparent and it'd be a non-issue, but if they did end up in a coparenting situation, then they'd probably manage it. It'd take a lot of fucking work and would be extremely far from perfect, but they would presumably love the kid and put in the Herculean effort required to actually exist in each other's presences for an extended period of time.

#matt murdock #frank castle #asks #like do i think it's in the least bit probable NO #but somewhere out there in the multiverse captain america married female tony stark #and johnny storm married reed richards #both of which are wild fucking comic book plots that we all have to live with #so sure #somewhere out there in the infinite cosmos frank castle and matt murdock are having a very tense appointment in a couples counseling office #their very confused therapist does not know What They Are #Are they married?? exes?? dating?? Where Did They Get Their Child #they're never going to be World's Best Violence Dads but they would really love the kid and try hard #the kid would live to see their 18th birthday (probably) and be mostly happy and HOPEFULLY not a serial killer #jury's out on that last one

32 notes · View notes