That’s why every heavyweight character from the fictional and mythic canon is getting ‘rebooted’ at the moment. Many things changing fast in culture, many people having studied the humanities.
Wait until artists start using these characters - then it will really start getting interesting.
The basic premise of the Gotham universe is that everything is fucked. It’s grimdark, it’s DC’s 40K. Actually it would make near perfect sense if those two were one universe.
OTOH the Harley Quinn series (the one with Harlivy) does take jabs at Bruce’s sheltered status, “People pay rent?”. Lots of stuff going on in that series that don’t fit standard canon, though, the series is as much a contemporary commentary on the universe as it’s an in-universe show. Do watch that series btw even if you’re not into comics, or the universe, or whatever, it’s hilarious.
That’s always the issue with super heroes. All these people with these crazy abilities and powers and the only thing we can think to do with them is beating up petty criminals.
Like that’s really what the world needs: tougher cops with no oversight.
What’s the difference between the super villains in their universe and the ones in ours? Mass shooters, serial killers, billionaires who own sweat shops, leaders of drug cartels, Jeffery Epstein, corrupt cops, corrupt judges, Putin, all the soldiers commiting war crimes and those who lead them who are either ok with it, or instructing then to do so… we’ve got super villains
Doesn’t change the fact that much of what they do is beat up petty criminals. Hell, that’s usually their goal early on, before super villains get introduced.
She’s also an environment strawman. Think of how often mainstream media portrays environments as radicals vs how often they’re portrayed as reasonable heroes. Thanos? Kingman’s villain? Think that’s by accident? Well, maybe some of it is. Being able to find success within a power structure means you may find it reasonable and fair, so you end up writing stories that reinforce that power structure.
Thanos’ MCU depiction isn’t a distillation of a decades old comic character, it’s a result of them not adapting the subplot where he wants to bang Death. Seriously, his motivation in the comics is that he has a boner for Death and thinks she’ll want to sleep with him if he kills an incredibly large number of people. They hadn’t gotten that far into the cosmology by the time they used Thanos in the movies, so they had to come up with some other reason that he might want to kill half the population of the universe.
Time to take a meme on the internet too seriously! :D
There are two things that bug me about the weirdly frequent discourse on Batman.
Firstly, there’s no one version of Batman. You can find bastard fascist Batman, and you can find actual justice Batman. Hell, you can find both by Frank Miller, depending on the point in his career. My favorite version is from The Animated Series, and you’ll find tons of examples of Batman using kindness and compassion to affect meaningful change, instead of reveling in violence as though it solves anything. Heck, he’s nicer to working-class folks, even sympathetic criminals, than to his fellow rich people.
Secondly, I think it’s a talking point with bad optics. Batman rules. Why let the fascists have him? If there are loads of ways to look at and interpret the character, I’d rather focus on the one that makes him the good kind of class traitor, anti-fascist, anti-cop, and fighting for economic and social justice.
Yeah, one of my favorite depictions of him are the Year One movies/comics, where Batman is fighting corrupt cops just as much as he’s fighting the mafia and other villains of the week.
Couldn’t he use his batman persona to intimidate the rich to affect social change? Like Bruce Wayne can do so much if he had a dude in the night breaking into other billionaires houses in Gotham and telling them to raise wages or stop influencing politicians to not raise taxes and let healthcare for all go through
You’re pretty much describing a scene from Batman: Year One. He crashes a party full of rich people to intimidate them. It’s actually the good Frank Miller comic I was talking about.
I like TAS Batman A LOT especailly since he gave his villains every shot at redemeption, many of them were simply too damaged to live a normal life… Heck, for Harley Quinn all it took for her to start being evil again was a single PTSD attack, and it was induced by a mall cop, implying her trauma was started by police brutality
Yeah, that’s one of the episodes that immediately came to mind.
Harley: There’s one thing I’ve gotta know: why’d you stay with me all day, risking your butt for someone who’s never given you anything but trouble?
Batman: I know what it’s like to try and rebuild a life. I had a bad day, too, once.
It was absolutely a rehabilitative vision of justice. The same thing happens with The Ventriloquist, where Batman is extremely supportive, and goes to great lengths to talk him down after he was manipulated into returning to crime. Heck, there’s even a villain, Lock-Up, who personifies a cruel, punitive form of justice. He even reveals the guard’s abuse, through a clever ploy, as Bruce Wayne, in a hearing about Arkham.
And Harley did eventually get better in TAS’s continuity. In Batman Beyond, she has a brief cameo where she’s upset with her grandkids for getting involved with the Jokerz gang.
Several versions also have him channeling huge amounts of money to charities as Bruce. Also trying to influence local politics with his company or hiring petty criminals he runs into as Batman to work at Wayne Enterprises so they have legitimate income. Batman is working on things that are happening right this second, but Bruce is trying to fix systemic issues so that Batman eventually won’t be needed.
Depending on the timeline, that’s not true, but that’s the problem with resetting a timeline a dozen or whatever times. We see an endless amount of him fighting the crime and never the results.
Joker: I’ve tried everything! Mobs of gun-toting clowns. Mind altering gas. Inciting riots. Political engineering. An elaborate plan to make everyone look like me. Sharks.
Bane: Sharks?
Joker: Yes, sharks. Did I stutter? Honey, do I have something distracting stuck in my teeth?
Harley: No, sweetie. Just that winning smile of yours. ::mwah:: ^_^
Bane: (That’s it. I’m just gonna level the whole city and be done with this place)
Bane was wasted potential. Once people figured out if you pull the tubes out he is incapable of even walking. The first time he takes over his physical abilities are just a supplement to his natural charisma. After he loses he somehow loses the ability to lead men and the only thing left is he is a big guy.
The writers could have easily made him a long term effective foe like Penguin.
They didn’t explore it as much as I thought they should. Batman created Bane, indirectly, and in some ways attracted Bane to Gotham which set off the events that lead to all of Arkham criminals being released. Which in turn led Arzial to Gotham. Which brought about the events of Contagion and Cataclysm which lead to No Man’s Land.
So in a way the entire city of Gotham was brought down by him being there.
Sure. But you can take a step back from there and assert the crime cartels of the earlier era - the Falconnes and Mannheims and Marchettis - and their corrupt police confederates created Batman (since they’re indirectly the cause of his parents’ death and the main antagonists that head up the crime wave that young Bruce pits himself against).
And since there’s a (even in-universe) hard association between organized crime and the various state and federal intelligence agencies, I guess you could put the entire Batman Villain universe at the feet of Harry Truman, J. Edgar Hoover, and Allen Dulles.
True but it is not on the same level. It is sorta like Indiana Jones.
That general and his scientist were going to use Venom and like 5 soliders to attempt a coup. Which would have failed. You can’t take over the US with 5 guys. Ffs it doesn’t even make sense. The government has nukes. You are not going to win that war. Because Batman interfered they fleed to that knock-off Cuba. So Batman followed which meant that the thugs ruling that country knew the serum was worth it. Making them use it on Bane. But it doesn’t end there. Bane wants to rule the world so he needs to go to the most powerful country. Which city does he pick within it? He picks Gotham because he sees that Batman is the single point of failure.
Had Batman done nothing the coup would have failed and the serum would have been forgotten. At most a few people die. Had he interfered but later on retired after Jason Todd other vigilantes would have stepped in making Gotham have more than one failure point. Stopping Bane.
Well… if one of them has super psychic powers and another can pick up a tank and hit you with it… Its also worth taking a step back and recognizing John Locke’s theory of Consent of the Governed does not hold up particularly well in the DC Universe. Powerful Metas are taking over small nations left and right.
The government has nukes.
Okay, sure. But every time you use a nuke, you get five new radioactive themed supers. So you gotta use those judiciously.
Had Batman done nothing the coup would have failed and the serum would have been forgotten.
That’s a huge leap. Had he done nothing, the coup would have forced Star Labs or the Suicide Squad or some equivalent to intervene. And then you’d just get a different group of Meta-humans dabbling with super-drugs. And besides, its not like Magic Steroids are a hard sell in a setting where half the new wave crime bosses are trying to get into fist fights with Superman.
he sees that Batman is the single point of failure
To that end, I’d argue Batman’s Babel Protocols as a bigger issue than Bane fixating on Gotham. Less that Batman is a single point of failure than that he’s written as this Ubermensch who needs to outclass all the other Metas in the Justice League.
He’s a singular point of overwhelming strength that only really exists as a counterpoint to the high fantasy impossible people surrounding him. And then, as a consequence of him being on such a high level, all his enemies also have to be able to feasibly beat up Superman our outpace The Flash.
This gets you to Joke functioning as a literal demi-god.
And that’s not really a “Batman” problem but a “Writers getting into a dick-swinging competition” problem.
The Illuminati Court of Owls enabling more crime alongside the general pervasive corruption by the ruling class,
The buried evil bat god Barbatos who was summoned and remains under the city
The corruption of insane wizard Dr. Gotham who has also been buried under the city for over 40,000 years (Who gave him a doctorate 40,000 years ago is what I want to know.),
Amadeus Arkham (and seemingly every warden of Arkham since) grossly mistreating the patients there.
The city being surrounded by swampland lending it to be perpetually gloomy.
One can see why the city might not have the best base to positively grow from.
Joker might be supernatural in origin, too. The ‘vat of chemicals’ story is explicitly a maybe, Batman can’t find any evidence he existed before he showed up as Joker, and he keeps surviving things it should be impossible to survive. That last one could be connected to the lazarus pit, though.
This is maybe the stupidest take on Batman in the history of the Internet. Prior to the Internet, anyone weird enough to think this way would’ve felt far too alone in the opinion to speak it out loud. Those were better days.
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