Eleven Reasons Why I Love Deadpool, and Why You Should Too

This article is pretty self-explanatory. Deadpool is freakin’ awesome, and there’s not a lot that will convince me otherwise. He’s been my favourite Marvel character for a while now, so sit your arse down and listen to why. Captain RiffRaff drunkenly presents; 11 Reasons Why I Love Deadpool, And Why You Should Too. Deadpool and all other characters mentioned belong to Marvel.

 

1. He’s Utterly Hilarious

There’s no arguing with this point, no matter how prudish or non-existent or just plain simple your sense of humour is, Deadpool is one funny fucker. He constantly makes jokes about himself, the situations he finds himself in, and more often than not, about the people he’s with.

He’s inventive with his insults and he doesn’t hold back with his pranks. If ever he finds himself up against an enemy who insults him in turn, his comebacks are legendary. Most importantly, he never seems to take himself too seriously when he’s in a funny mood, and his sense of humour is infectious.

No matter how down I’m feeling, a bit of Deadpool will have me laughing in minutes, guaranteed.

 

2. He’s Morally Ambiguous

Deadpool started out as a villain, making his first appearance in New Mutants issue 98. However, since getting his own series, Deadpool has been shown to be more good(ish); someone who swings between heroics and just plain arseholery. If you pay him enough, he’ll dropkick your gran over a multistory car park (but knowing him, he might just do it anyway), or he might go rescue a bunch of orphans from a housefire, roasting himself nicely in the process. He’s tried numerous times to be a “hero”, more often than not deciding that it’s not for him and he happily goes back to slaughtering for money.

Being so ambiguous opens up a mass of doors for the writers; being neither entirely good nor entirely evil means that Deadpool could do anything. He could kill the President or shag his wife, or he could save the earth and entire human race from aliens (oh yeah, he’s done that one). He has many more interesting story-arcs than most heroes. The best bit is that he’s not one of those self-important do-gooders. he’s not a teacher’s pet (hell, he probably was the one who put firecrackers up her skirt) so you don’t end up hating him for being a smarmy suck-up who’s always right. He’s human, he makes mistakes, and we can relate to that.

 

3. He’s Not Completely Evil

As I’ve said, he’s morally ambiguous, and even though he’s done some pretty foul things in his life, like taking prisoner a blind and elderly woman (who happens to be fuckin’ awesome, by the way) and frequently locking her in a room full of sharp objects and traps because he’s absolutely insane, he’s not all bad. Sure, he shoots dolphins and what-have-you for shits and giggles, but even Deadpool has a line. He has a real soft spot for kids, and while I don’t like the buggers myself, I can appreciate that having a line that you won’t cross is damn admirable.

A frequent joke in the DP universe is that he gets mistaken for Spiderman regularly. When a little girl makes that mistake on the subway, Deadpool just goes with it, instead of spoiling her joy at meeting “Spiderman”. He’s bailed on contracts because children were involved, and even taken in kids who were trying to kill him because they had nowhere to go and he felt he owed them a debt.

 

4. He Just Doesn’t Give a Shit

No matter the situation Deadpool finds himself in, his first port of call will likely be to make a joke or hit on whatever “hot babe” is in the vicinity, before the slaughter commences. No doubt his carefree attitude to problems (especially if they involve lots of stabby-stabby-blood-blood) comes from his healing factor, rendering him pretty much immortal. A large side-helping of insanity also helps.

No matter the job, if it pays well enough, he’ll waltz in with a wisecrack and a gleeful grin as he slices and dices his way through. He’s not easily intimidated, so making fun of the situation comes naturally and god damn it’s funny.

 

5. Mindless Violence! YAY!

As well as having the aformentioned healing factor, Deadpool is extremely skilled in combat, be it martial arts or general weaponry. Add some clinical insanity into the mix and you’ve got an unpredictable fighter who is more likely than not about to kick your arse. Although Deadpool loses as many fights as he wins, he’s been set against some pretty impressive odds and still come out on top.

One of the more notable fights that Deadpool won was against Taskmaster, who is renowned for being able to assimilate an opponent’s fighting style, and use this to beat the crap out of them. Deadpool just started dancing and kicked Taskmaster’s bony behind. Even if you ignored all that, Deadpool just loves violence, and will happily kill his way through anything. It’s refreshing when the main character turns into Sir Kill-a-Lot, especially seeing as most heroes only turn over the baddies to the police.

 

6. He Breaks the Fourth Wall

And he breaks it a lot. Deadpool may be crazy, but he’s crazy to the point where he knows he’s in a comic book and may use it to his humerous advantage; even going so far as to tear through the comic’s pages to warn his past self about something, which of course, he doesn’t listen to.

He’s tried to tell other characters about the “man with the typewriter and the twisted imagination”, and randomly refers to the readers and how they may be experiencing reading the comic book. Even in his game (which is fucking amazing, by the way) breaking the fourth wall is a regular occurrence, making for very entertaining gameplay. Regularly confusing other characters and sharing in-jokes with the reader leads to a very funny and special experience with the character.

 

 

7. He’s a Lot Cleverer Than People Think

Deadpool may be insane, but he’s pretty clever as well. He knows how to survive and have fun doing so at the same time. Consider Daredevil; a character with super-senses and a moral compass wound so tight you’d expect flowers to come shooting out of his arse every time he took a shit. He’s clever, and his super senses make it so he’s a tough cookie to beat. However, Deadpool has managed to escape him more than once, and has even fooled him (if only momentarily) before.

If that wasn’t impressive enough, consider Bullseye. This guy never misses. That’s why he’s called Bullseye. Yet Deadpool, being Deadpool, has managed to accuarely predict where his weapons are going to strike, and move less lethal things into their path to save another, or, even more impressively, has managed to completely avoid his missile altogether.

 

8. He’s Actually a Pretty Tragic Character

Aside from suffering a horrendous disfigurement, caused by the Weapon X program that gave him his healing factor but accelerated his cancer, causing it to spread across his whole body, Deapool is a lot deeper and more emotionally scarred than most; and that makes him relatable, especially with his coping mechanisms, namely humour and not giving a shit a lot of the time. He doesn’t hide from the fact that they are coping mechanisms either. I guess not giving a flying monkey-fuck is pretty helpful because he’s always losing. His friends, his battles, and occasionally his mind. It’s rare that Deadpool actually gets a win, so we celebrate all the harder when he does. Again, this makes him identifiable to readers, and likable because he’s not a constantly-winning-superiour-arsehole with unattainable goals that somehow are reached at the end of the episode. And he hates himself. He calls himself a monster.

Deadpool’s had a lot of shit happen to him during his life, people have used him, abused him, and the sort of torture he endured hoping for a cancer cure thanks to Weapon X’s program is something no one should experience, let alone have to live with it forever. Added to all this, if Deadpool ever loves someone, you can guarantee that they will either shit all over him, or just plain die. But he just gets up again, more crippled inside than before, slaps a grin on his mug and makes a joke, and off he skips to murder some more people for money.

 

9. He Can be Heroic

Deadpool may be morally bankrupt a lot of the time, but he does care, even if he can’t express it very well. A big story arc of his was he wanted to be a hero, and fucked up royally. But, when he was left to his own devices, he ended up doing the right thing, even though that mean he carried the burden of knowing he had doomed the human race to a lifetime of pain and free will, instead of an eternity of blissful ignorance and no free will at all. That’s pretty heroic if you ask me. Chances are, if given the choice, Deadpool will do the right thing in the end.

 

 

10. He Can’t Die

 

This would usually be a character trait that people should avoid; it means that your character is virtually unbeatable and that makes them boring. This isn’t the case with Deadpool. It’s actually kind of sad, because the amount of pain he goes through on a day to day basis would leave most people hanging off the light fittings. But even though he’s in love with Death and would do pretty much anything to be with the physical female manifestation of the cessation of essential bodily function (with a crackin’ pair of boobies) the jealous Thanos cursed him with life, meaning our favourite talkative merc will be around for a long time yet to come.

 

11. He Will Do Anything To Get What He Wants

This includes dragon-punching Kitty Pride into the clouds just to provoke Wolverine into fighting him, or shooting an innocent civilian in the leg just so he can escape Daredevil. Deadpool just don’t give a fuck.

 

There we have it folks. My reasons why I love Deadpool as a character. Do you agree? Do you not? Well you can fuck off then. My blog.