The Appeal of Daredevil

I see Daredevil as representing rage -- particularly the rage constituent to grief.

Matt Murdock's childhood blinding would carry with it a tremendous amount of grief for his loss of sight. In mourning the life he once had, of which he had been robbed by someone careless, anger would reasonably follow, consciously or unconsciously.

Further grief accumulated with the loss of his father, Jack Murdock. Some anger would stem from the grief itself, and some from the fact that Jack declined to throw his boxing match for the sake of pride and got himself killed for it.

To me, the reason why it feels so natural for Daredevil to be a symbol of anger is because his powers are all about being heightened and vigilant -- always ready to fight, just as a person who is perpetually enraged. Anger causes the fight-or-flight response of sympathetic nervous system activation, which entails slightly heightened awareness/senses for normal humans. It is almost as if Daredevil's heightened senses are an exaggerated manifestation of his lifelong rage, mainly due to his strong grief.

I believe this is why Frank Miller's darker revamp of the character didn't feel out of place, why Daredevil's angry, blood-red costume feels fitting (besides it simply looking better), and why the Netflix Daredevil series focused so much on the character's anger. The Netflix show placed a strong emphasis on his rage, with the recurring line: "Let the devil out". The focus on Matt's anger was never a source of contention among the responses to the show, and I believe that this is because it did not register as a sort of arbitrary change to the character -- I think, for most of his history, he had already been an unconscious symbol of rage.