Which One Is The Mask? Daredevil/Matt Murdock

Which one is the mask? Daredevil/Matt Murdock

I think that, to some extent, they are both the mask.

When people write about this, they (tend to) talk as if Matt Murdock and Daredevil are two personalities placed into one mind, two definitively separate halves of a whole. I don’t necessarily agree with that. Matt Murdock is Daredevil and Daredevil is Matt Murdock, and there is no sharp line between them only a blur. They are just different aspects of one personality, unbalanced when viewed without the context of the other.

I do get the ‘two halves of a whole’ thing, and I think there is an amount of truth to that. But there is no clear separation between the two, no point where Matt Murdock ends and Daredevil begins.

Those who only know Daredevil would think of him as brutal and violent, which he is. Yet those who only know Matt Murdock would think of him as soft spoken and charming, and he’s all that too. Daredevil and Matt Murdock are not mutually exclusive. They coexist.

I also think that this is why Foggy doesn’t seem to accept that Matt can’t just give up being Daredevil. He knows Matt, has never known Daredevil so he finds it hard to accept that this soft spoken and charming guy is a brutal and violent vigilante. Matt acts as the mask there. (@ceterisparibus116 very much inspired this take)

(Plus, the (literal) mask isn’t what makes Matt Daredevil. The anonymity it provides allows him to be a vigilante, but removing the mask doesn’t erase what created/fuels Daredevil, it simply removes what enables Matt to physically be Daredevil.)

In short: Daredevil and Matt Murdock are not separate entities. They are simply different characteristics zoomed in on in a way that ignores the other parts entirely. Both are incomplete without the other, so both are the mask.