All Comments on 'The Punisher'

Interesting story, unfortunately end was rushed/truncated. would have liked to have seen this broken into chapters and more of the Emma and Kara redemption/ learning to love story included..

Thank you for your comment, @Ct1Catfish. I was feeling an urge to make the story shorter, thus cut the ending down in scope. Yes, I could have made Emma and Kara more detailed. I also toyed with the idea of making the Baba character be a supernatural being in disguise. Perhaps those are ideas for later / another work. The girls were profoundly changed by the order to learn from Baba, and by the inclusion into the larger group with some degree of forgiveness. The transformation happened too quickly in my view as well, I would have drawn it out longer, but the way the story was working, it was moving very fast and drawing out that part might have been trouble. Good ideas, though. I am really thinking about a second Punisher, different person/setting/cohort/handicapps, but same idea overall. It's really interesting to me what kinds of things a set of archetypes would do, shifted a bit, and the same presumption of bound-as-punishment.

1 No - New Zealand was named by Abel Tasman, a Dutch Captain, for Zeeland in Holland. Spelling was looser on those days. My suspicions are that another Dutchman was involved in naming the town of Zealand.

2. If every man goes out and has 16 wives and each wife has 16 children, how are we going to feed and house them all? What about all those 15 unmarried men - are they going to go out and murder each other or live gayly or fight wars or do other stupid testosterone filled stuff? Our will we just kill the babies? However you look at it this paradise has some evil fruit.

1. @Anonymous, thank you kindly, I love how place names are often so happenstantial and their meanings are lost over time. Like, it didn't occur to me for the longest time (just unexamined) that nova scotia was "new scotland" in latin, so yeah, fun stuff.

2. Every man in teh world can't have 16 wives. Yes, this'd be a problem. But, this guy was blessed by one or more Gods so things are off for him anyway, and blessed, so it's not an everybody gets to do this thing. He's ack'd as being of good moral character so he'll treat people fairly, we're set to presume.

It was hard to follow a few times. I'm not sure if that was a failing in the writing, or if you were trying to convey something about how a person on the spectrum processes the world.

I am glad you began toning down the hostility against Kara and Emma. The first several pages were a bit overly harsh, if understandable. It would have been too much if they had born their 'mark of Cain' forever.

I've been binging your stories over the last week or so, and I have to say that this is the first one I didn't finish. This is definitely on me, but I'm writing this comment because I'm curious if anyone else felt similarly. First off: I like the premise. It's strange, but it's interesting to me that they're farther ahead sexually than emotionally because it's the opposite of how your stories go.

You lost me on their first drive to church and Kevin unloads on Emma for saying that the folks who speak in tongues are "making stuff up" -- Kevin getting mad is what lost me. And I think this is where I say that I must be an asshole, because he's just trying to push the idea of being tolerant of other people, and their most deeply held religious beliefs are important. Personally I'm an atheist and the talking-in-tongues crowd are about my least favorite kind of fundie because they're usually homophobes too. But the exact reason I put it down is this: they all had a conversation with a literal god that rewrote the laws of the universe for this story to take place, and this god is NOT claimed to be the christian god. After that setup, the best you can do in theology is "it's real to them"?

I swear I'm not here to argue religion with you - your stories seem to be heavily based in things you're familiar with, and I'm absolutely not saying "don't put god talk in my smut." But what I am saying is that that scene destroyed my suspension of disbelief (it's been about 30 hours since they had a conversation with a god, and that doesn't come up while they're driving to church??????) and once it was gone I wasn't very interested in what was being said. Of ANY hard-hitting, universal lesson he could have taught them, you're starting with "you're not allowed to make fun of the speaking in tongues people"? Again - maybe I'm just an asshole, but that doesn't pass the sniff test for me.

I like redemption arcs, and I like your work a lot, but for some reason it didn't come together here for me.

I don't even know that there's anything actionable you can draw from this. You can't please everyone all of the time? Avoid theological conversations in a story where you introduce a literal god and that fact doesn't impact the characters' view on the divine?

Hope to read more of your stuff soon