Fridge / Batman: Arkham Knight

Fridge examples in Batman: Arkham Knight.

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Fridge Brilliance

• Rocksteady has declared this game to be the final entry in the Arkham series, at least as far as they're taking the series. This makes sense because the super-villains, unlike the previous games, have gone and performed a full blown terrorist attack, if not full-blown treason, by forcing the evacuation of a major city. Even if they don't die, they've dug themselves so deeply that there's too much evidence against them to just lock them up this time.
• Scarecrow's symbol being an upside-down Batman symbol with crooked eyes drawn above it seems almost lazy in terms of a logo, it's literally just a vandalised version of the original, that's the sort of thing you'd expect from someone like Joker or Riddler. Except consider what the logo is actually saying: Batman will fall, and Scarecrow shall soar above him.
• Batman's wearing a black suit of armor in this game. Almost like a dark knight, you might say. The new suit itself has hard armor plates made with carbon fiber, mainly in the head, shoulders, and torso. Considering what happened to him in the last game following hits in those areas, it's not surprising he'd put focus in those areas. Plus, it looks more... alive, like it's actually part of his skin, which makes him look more like an actually scary bat-creature, and allows for the use of Fear Take downs as a result.
• Harley Quinn's physical aptitude and combat skill has significantly increased compared to before, especially since it has only been a year. However, it should be notable to consider who has been her best friend in the Comics; Poison Ivy. Given the apparent Les Yay undertone in their relationship, it is likely that Harley has latched onto her to fill the void now that Joker is gone and acquired the same boost in power from her as well.
• When Batman takes Poison Ivy out of the back of the Batmobile after arriving at G.C.P.D. she makes a snarky comment about Bats' driving. Considering the moves the Batmobile can make in combat and the high likelihood of the player getting attacked while escorting her back to the police department, she probably is getting thrown around quite a lot without explanation.
• As the Joker's body is cremated, the song "Under My Skin" is playing. Not only is this a Call Back to the previous games that featured Joker singing during the end credits, but also one of the plot-lines is Batman reconciling with the fact that there may have been a deeper connection between the two of them.
• A small clue to the Arkham Knight's true identity comes, oddly, from the Scarecrow's design. It was said somewhere that the concept behind the Scarecrow's new look in Arkham Knight stemmed from the idea of a living corpse, someone who had died and come back to life, but in the time between had rotted and decayed. Looking at the Scarecrow proves this, with his deformed face, his staggering walk, his barely-visible body, he genuinely looks like a person who died, rotted in the ground for a few months, and then suddenly started moving again. When all of this is considered, that he appears to have died and come back, doesn't that remind you of a certain someone...?
• Even though/if the Batman died, he won. By the time of the Golden Ending, every single one of the major villains in the entire franchise are either locked up or dead, minimizing the chances of any future break-outs or team-ups (the latter didn't matter much anyway - the Villain Team-Up that received so much attention in the advertising was largely abandoned). Not to mention they are stated to have pooled all their money into this one final attempt at beating Batman. Without their resources, their ability to be any sort of threat, in jail or not, is effectively eliminated. The only remaining villains are people like Victor Zsasz and the Calendar Man - small-scale psychopaths without the desire or resources to plague the city in the way the supervillains or even the mobs did. This is more than temporary; the Lazarus Pit under Gotham City has apparently been destroyed, and with it goes the ultimate source for almost all the extra-normal aspects of this universe. The defeat of Scarecrow and the Arkham Knight, and the Joker not just being gone but forgotten, means that the insanity plaguing Batman's city will never come back. Not to mention that, between Protocol 10 and the Cloudburst firing, a lot of Gotham's criminal population is flat out dead. Additionally, in the Golden Ending, Gordon's the mayor of Gotham, so naturally he'll pass new, tougher laws to keep criminals in check. The epilogue, although it seems to be a Bittersweet Ending, is about one of the happiest endings for Batman in any medium. Alternatively, there is the Fridge Horror interpretation of this. Gotham has a reputation of having a bunch of easily escapable prisons, Joker isn't really confirmed to be forgotten by much of anyone by the epilogue (though inevitably as Batman shows him in his mind, he will be... but everyone that dies is eventually forgotten) and although the supernatural aspects might be tempered by the Lazarus Pit being gone, most Bat-villains don't have powers and those that do, usually don't need the Lazarus Pits for them. Combine with Ra's still being out there and well, it's a good thing there's a new vigilante it seems in the epilogue. Unless the player picks to destroy the machinery keeping Ra's alive in the "Shadow War" portion of the "Season of Infamy" DLC, at which point Nyssa will take over and vows to have the League stop killing innocent people and leave Gotham.
• How fitting is it that the Arkham Knight (Jason) is voiced by the same guy who portrayed a younger Joker (Troy Baker)? After all, Jason is essentially just as much of Joker's making as he is of Batman's.
• So Scarecrow has his new, better than ever Fear Toxin, so powerful it takes Batman the entire game's story to overcome its effects. At first this seems like lazy sequel writing, 'there's an even BIGGER threat than last time', etc... because we don't know how / where Crane got this new one from... right? Well, think back to the ending stinger from Arkham Asylum, the last time we saw Scarecrow. What was the very last image of him we saw (if he appeared in The Stinger)? His hand, in the water, grasping a crate of 'TITAN'. A chemical compound he could easily reverse-engineer and adapt into his Fear Toxin, making it bigger and better than ever before, like TITAN did to human beings.
• The Joker hallucination claims to have lied to Batman about killing Jason Todd once Jason is revealed as the Arkham Knight. Of course he didn't say anything, as he's merely an aspect of Batman's psyche, and thus had no knowledge of Jason's survival until Batman did.
• Why does the Joker fear being forgotten? Maybe it's already happened; Ever since his death, crime has fallen sharply. The people have moved on to worrying about the power struggle between the villains and gangs that they are expecting to occur. When Scarecrow finally makes his play, they're afraid of him and what he will do. The few people who do talk about Joker do so in a very casual manner. The only person really afraid of him still is Batman, partly for his guilt over his death and partly because of his infection by Joker's corrupting blood. Harley still pines for him, but there are hints in her DLC that a part of her wants to finally break free from him. In a few years time, he will barely be mentioned, people just wanting to get with their lives and never paying the maniac a thought again. In addition, three of the four patients tainted by Joker's blood reflect this as well: a boxer who wants to make a comeback, a famous singer, and woman who had a miscarriage and developed an obsession with Batman. A common theme tying all three is an obsession with being noticed and idolized. By contrast, Batman, who is also infected with Joker's blood, was able to go unaffected for so long because he doesn't want that attention.
• In Arkham City, Joker says that the best place to hide something from the world's greatest detective is right under his nose. Of course he kept Jason in Arkham Asylum. Not to mention, he spends this game hiding out in Batman's head.
• Joker's "incarnation" in this game, so to speak, is an unseemly perfect one-to-one recreation. He's practically the ghost of his real self, all things considered. When one considers the nature of how he's showing up, this should be impossible. Then you realize the trick to it, this is Batman's Joker. Of course he's a perfect recreation of the real thing. Literally nobody on Earth had more exposure to Joker than Batman, not even Harley, and you know he's spent years trying to figure out the Clown Prince of Crime. Even if Batman is loathe to admit it, Joker's fixation wasn't entirely one-sided.
  • It's subtle, but there is one noticeable difference between the real Joker and the hallucinatory Joker: the original Joker certainly enjoys taunting Batman about his failures, but this one is absolutely obsessed with it, to the exclusion of basically anything else - The scenes he's in where he doesn't bring up Barbara, Jason, or Talia can be counted on one hand. Why? Because he's not really the Joker, just a manifestation of Batman's own inner critic wearing the Joker as a mask. Every "The Reason You Suck" Speech the Joker gives in this game is actually Batman talking to himself.
• The title of the game also refers to Batman. Specifically, any time the Joker is in charge, he is an Arkham Knight. To add to that, the Tagline Be The Batman could also refer to not just the Player, but double as a Foreshadow of The Joker attempting to be the Batman by pulling a Grand Theft Me on Batman.
  • Furthermore, maybe Batman being referred to as the Arkham Knight can be seen as less as a title and more of an accomplishment; the majority of his foes have spent time in Arkham Asylum and Arkham City and he has single-handedly defeated them all in those locations, essentially gaining (or regaining) control of the prisons from them.
  • Alternatively, the title can be a sneaky play on "Arkham Night", since the grand scope of the villain's schemes aren't restrained in an Asylum or a cut-off portion of Gotham City, but on Halloween Night.
• The reason the Knight went after Babs first isn't just because of her dad and Batman. It's because she's the least physically capable and most isolated, while at the same time posing the biggest threat to his drones. As soon as she gets free, she manages to find an exploit in the network a few minutes, while multitasking.
• Speaking of Joker, Batman completely ignores him every time his hallucination shows up. Near the end of the game, the player can discover a fact about him; his greatest fear is to be forgotten and ignored.
• The game's ending, and even the Knightfall Protocol, are foreshadowed in a sense by the Hush side-mission, through the simple fact that it can't end the way it does. Thomas Elliot knows Bruce Wayne is Batman. Batman lays a smack-down on him and tells Lucius to lock him in a Wayne Enterprises vault for the time being... what the hell were they going to do then? Leave him there forever, all to protect Bruce's identity? Of course not. The only thing to do would be to remove the threat itself, either by killing Thomas Elliot, or making it so that his blackmail information is utterly useless.
  • They could just deny it. Elliot is clearly insane and obsessed with Bruce Wayne, if he's willing to perform surgery on himself to make himself into an exact double of Wayne, and he doesn't have any proof of his claims. Probably not the most ethical solution to gaslight an already mentally ill person like that, but if the rest of the night had gone differently, it was an option.
  • Given that Batman got unmasked as Bruce Wayne to everyone at the end, locking him up in the vault instead of the GCPD Precinct is still a sound decision, considering that most of the prisoners there are pissed at Batman and by extension at Bruce Wayne for putting them there in the first place.
• Why are Two-Face and Penguin doing such normal crimes like bank robbery and gun running? They've practically bankrupted themselves financing the Militia. They're trying to build up their wealth again. Now that they've been defeated, and will likely have some pretty hefty charges following the game's events, they've got almost nothing to start over with.
• Other than because it's absolutely terrifying, why is Scarecrow's face so horrifically reconstructed? Simple, Crane had to do it on himself, and while he has obviously been to medical school, a psychiatrist is not a surgeon. Even if he knew how to perform surgery, he'd botch the procedure on purpose if there was a slight chance of scaring somebody with the end result.
• The reason you have to get 100% of everything done for the true ending? There's no chance that Bruce would give up being Batman if the streets weren't safe.
• Interesting observation about the final Joker sequence. Physically, it happens at Arkham Asylum. Which means with their last game, Rocksteady let everybody play as Joker in Arkham Asylum.
• Back in, Arkham Asylum, the final confrontation has Joker saying to Batman: "Come on! Change! Get crazy! It's the only way to beat me!". Fast-forward to the end of Arkham Knight where Batman ends up letting his Joker side out to be dealt with by Crane's fear toxin, allowing him to beat both Scarecrow and Joker (the latter for good this time). And it also arguably continues the series' running motif of the "fake Joker gag".
• It is debatable whether the Joker hallucination is "just" a part of Batman's mind, or indeed a comeback plot by Mr. J. Given how other infected people who, unlike Batman, had little to no relations to the Joker, still were becoming "jokerized" in their identity crisis, it might as well be the latter. If so, that's a great Shout-Out to Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, where Joker used a very similar back-from-the-dead plan.
• This game marks Two-Face's second appearance in the Arkham series. More specifically, he has appeared in Arkham City and Arkham Knight, the second and fourth games in the series. Not only does he get two appearances, but he appears in entries whose installment times are numbers divisible by two. That's some convenient application of numerological motifs. How many upgrade points do you get for completing a mission like 'Own The Roads', 'The Perfect Crime', 'Campaign For Disarmament', etc...? One per encounter, with three at the end. How many do you get for completing a Two-Face encounter? TWO points per encounter, and the usual three at the end.
• Here's a thought how the Fear Toxin cured Batman's Joker infection and killed Ivy. It's explained that the toxin gives off a radiation signature when it's created. While this radiation isn't powerful enough to hurt humans, Scarecrow wants people scared because of his toxin so something that directly kills them won't work for him, it's still enough to "cook" Batman's infection and poison Ivy.
• At first, the reveal that Batman and several people were mutating thanks to Joker's infected blood makes no sense since City established that his blood was poisonous, and that Batman took both the cure and pure Lazarus chemical. Unless, Joker had given so much blood that he bled out all of the Titan that made him sick, but was still dying because he had suffered so long that his body just finally gave out, exhibiting the same illness regardless. That means that whatever hit the Batman was a prepared batch, Joker did have refrigeration equipment, and what hit the other four were "clean" samples.
• The climax takes place before dawn on November 1st, the end of Halloween Night - when masks come off. Additionally, the Knightfall Protocol, dedicated to the memory of Bruce's parents, is activated on All Souls' Day/the Day of the Dead.
• Pay attention to how the Joker looks between his first appearance at ACE Chemicals and the final hallucinations in the game. In the first hallucination, over half of Joker's face had Titan scarring, his suit was ratty and washed out, and even his lapel flower was wilted, roughly as bad as he looked at the time of his death. As the game progressed, and Batman was exposed to more toxin, Joker's appearance improved, his suit gaining more color and his scarring becoming less severe. By the truck sequence, he looked slightly better than he did in his first Arkham City appearance, and once Scarecrow hit Batman with the last dose of toxin while strapped to the gurney, Joker's makeup was perfect and his suit looked newly made. This reflected how much stronger the Joker persona was growing as Batman's willpower was broken down... but it also reflected Batman letting go of the guilt he felt for Joker's death. In a backwards way, the Joker persona and his constant commentary was partially Batman reminding himself of what the Joker really was, and realigning his memory of the Joker from the man he couldn't save to a pure, impartial view of a murderer and monster that flat-out didn't want to be redeemed. As Batman slowly started focusing on the Joker he spent years fighting instead of the Joker he spent one night trying to save, he was able to capitalize on the clown's fear of being forgotten to reduce him to nothing but that memory, an untarnished image of the Joker, who was finally locked away forever.
• There's one possible explanation for Jason having his abrupt change of heart at the end. He may have been exposed to Scarecrow's toxin when Batman pulled him from the Cloudburst. Perhaps he was forced to confront his demons just enough that all it took was Bruce apologizing. There's some evidence in the game to support this theory. One Militia soldier says he hears voices in his head after being briefly exposed to the Cloudburst toxin. And in the battle with Jason, he says that he can hear the Joker laughing in his head. While this may simply be a result of his mental instability and torture, it could also point to fear toxin exposure, as he would have had no defense against it after his tank was disabled, the toxin being able to go through gas masks and filters. The character bio for the Red Hood says that Jason returned to himself after "vanquishing the Arkham Knight persona." Seems like the Toxin helped Jason free his mind of Joker's influence too.
• Here's another theory how Batman overcame the Joker infection. In the illusion on the truck Batman finally crossed his one restraint and used lethal force on the Joker hallucination. Back in Asylum Batman's worst fear is that he'd become like Joker if he crossed that line. But when he finally did it he realized that he's not like the Joker after all- he's sane. With his greatest fear laid to rest, the toxin could only affect the infection.
• How was Batman able to seal away the Joker in his mind once and for all and beat Scarecrow? He used the strategy he was known for- one that even lent his own name to the trope- the good old-fashioned Batman Gambit.
  • Scarecrow: Perhaps the player wasn't the only one that saw The Red Hood symbol graffitied next to the door to Scarecrow's truck, or the giant one spray-painted on top of Panessa Studios. Batman saw them too. Then right before the Crime Alley hallucination, Alfred tells him someone's tracking him, to which Batman replies that he knew "he" would. since he saw the Red Hood symbols, "he" could only be Jason Todd, now back on Batman's side. So all Batman had to do was keep Scarecrow preoccupied with his fear posturing and "unmasking" long enough until Jason showed up to save him in some way, such as shooting the gun out of Scarecrow's hands and freeing Bruce from his restraints. He knew Scarecrow couldn't resist rubbing the "unmasking" in Bruce's face and would also be annoyed that Batman was once more resisting the fear toxin, thus pushing Scarecrow into wasting time shooting him up (or rather, shooting The Joker up) with more fear toxin, just long enough for Jason to show up.
  • Joker: Once Batman heard from Alfred about Jason tracking him, he put the plan in motion, to deal with both Scarecrow and Joker. So he let Joker take over his mind. Just for that one instance. He let Joker have his fun with the shotgun, the Jokermobile, killing Two-Face, Penguin and Riddler, setting Gotham ablaze and ultimately conquering Bruce's mind. He knew that, once the Joker persona took over his mind and body, Joker would be all too happy to mock Scarecrow's fear toxin or take pleasure in it, annoying Scarecrow enough to give him a second dose... except since Joker was in control and because Batman's body was not nearly as poison resistant as Joker's original body was, said second dose instead infected Joker and not Batman. The result was Joker seeing his worst fear (being forgotten after death) along with Batman taunting him about it, weakening him enough for Batman to strike, toss him in a mental cell and thus seal him away forever.
• Halloween Night: It is said the monsters are at their strongest during this night. It may have been why Scarecrow chose to attack Gotham on this night, having gathered the necessary resources, knowledge and allies in order to increase the potency of his own growing legacy of fear thorough the night's own reputation, hoping it would be enough to overpower Batman and his own legend, especially considering his alter ego is inspired by an iconic figure of Halloween.
• When you consider it, Joker had the perfect way to ensure his legacy of death and destruction would continue (albeit by proxy and no one knowing of his involvement) after his demise... The Arkham Knight.
• What is the greatest fear of hallucination Joker? Being forgotten. What does he do when he gains some control of the city? Puts his image on every billboard and statue! Why does hallucination Joker fear being forgotten: not only has his influence waned drastically, but he was defined by his association with other people. Penguin, Riddler, Black Mask, and more were established in some way before the events of Batman: Arkham Origins due to their hard work, with Penguin starting to make waves in the Gotham underworld by beginning to outmuscle the Falcone family, purely by merit of his own efforts. Who was Joker? Some completely unknown guy with no past who made his Gotham debut by stealthily taking over Black Mask's gang, using Black Mask's money to set other established hitmen and villains on Batman. As the years went on, Batman was the unstoppable hero with no equal. Joker was the guy Batman beat senseless no matter what he did. He doesn't even have an actual overarching goal in mind that isn't based on Batman; he sticks around Gotham because he's trying to make Batman insane, not to get rich or pursuing a cause (sane or not) like the rest of the rogue's gallery. Joker's motivated by whatever hurts Batman, be it going after his associates or killing Gotham citizens. He may boast about taking over Gotham, but that's purely because it's Batman's city and it gets the Dark Knight riled up enough to play Joker's games. Joker was always afraid of being shown up and forgotten because he never built himself up, just stole from others.
• Batman was able to create an improved version of the Freeze Blasts, but still had to retrieve the REC from the GCPD because there wasn't a new version. This seems like a huge oversight until you remember Batman is worried about his Joker infection; a crazed Batman could easily make a lethal REC, so he couldn't risk it until is was necessary. He needs the rest of his gear, despite the potential risks, but the REC is his own Godzilla Threshold. It also explains why he doesn't retrieve the Shock Gloves, which he knows can stop Bane, despite them being next to the REC. That and the gloves are at least a decade old at this point, and might not even work.
• At the end of A Matter of Family, Batgirl makes a point of facing away from the Commissioner after he's rescued in the final cutscene. Commissioner Gordon thinks that this is because she's upset about Joker escaping, but there's a simpler explanation: Mask or no mask, do you really think Commissioner Gordon wouldn't be able to recognize his own daughter from a distance of three feet if he saw her face? Notice how she doesn't speak to the hostages she rescues once she's alone? They're cops, and surely they'd recognize the voice of their boss's daughter.
• When you observe the game's main story and a few of the side missions, you'll see that the game focuses quite a bit on legacy and being remembered. Azrael goes through Batman's tests to possibly succeed him when he's gone, Scarecrow seeks to deconstruct Batman's legendary status, and Joker's greatest fear is being forgotten, and thus not having a legacy. Indeed, legacy has been a theme in the whole series. Quincy Sharp talked of how his work at Arkham Asylum and Arkham City would be his legacy, Strange flat out said Arkham City would be his legacy, and Ra's wanted a successor so he could finally retire/die. Only Batman's legacy is preserved, as he always fought for justice and worked with others, whereas the others manipulated the law and other people. Batman's legacy is indeed preserved, as Robin's DLC shows that Tim is to become Bruce's successor, continuing to fight the good fight as Robin. Although it's preserved at the cost of the Wayne legacy. Even if Bruce and Alfred slipped away in secret before the Manor went up, Bruce won't be able to use his family name again, and the Wayne business empire will be in Fox's hands from here on in.
• For all the complaints of how the villains never really contribute to the Evil Plan outside of funding, there are good reasons: after Arkham City, Gotham's criminal population doesn't want to get involved with another PMC. Either that or the Arkham Knight has given his men orders to kill the villains and their henchmen if they try to kill Batman.
• Batman's story in the series mirrors that of Amadeus Arkham and Quincy Sharp. All were from influential families, Batman and Amadeus suffered the loss of loved ones because of madmen, and the deaths of those loved ones, and the eventual deaths of the killers, had severe affects on the mental stability of the two, before they eventually went insane in Arkham Asylum. By extension, Joker plays the role of Martin "Mad Dog" Hawkins, the man that killed Arkham's family. The Arkham Chronicles show that Amadeus wanted to understand Mad Dog, just as Batman strove to understand Joker. Mad Dog was ultimately killed by his own insanity, one last murder led to guards beating him to death, just as Joker caused Batman to drop the cure in Arkham City. But unlike Amadeus, Batman discovered what he needed to retain his sanity by realizing Joker's motivation. Likewise, while Quincy acted partly for his own glory, he genuinely wanted to save Gotham from its out of control criminal element, only to fall into insanity as well. In City, Strange implied that Batman were similar, wanting to help, but also motivated by ego, but unlike Qunicy, Batman stayed sane. The difference between them is that Quincy was willing to bend rules and sacrifice people he deemed unworthy for his own needs, unlike Batman who saw the best in people and was willing to sacrifice himself for others. This makes the series a tale of three people who tried to save the city, with Batman the one who got it right.
• So in this game, after getting a big dose of fear toxin, the player controls Joker who tries to kill Batman, before the latter re-asserts control. Which happened before in Asylum. In fact, if you visit Joker in the detention center during that game, he says that he and Crane think Batman should've snapped long ago. In City Joker comments how Batman is bottling up his emotions, Strange's audio tape suggesting a "true self", before Batman hallucinates Joker's head on Mr. Freeze's body. Batman's been bottling up emotions so long that they formed into a split personalty in the Joker's likeness, a personality which almost got out thanks to the fear toxin in Asylum, and briefly did get out in City. That's what the Joker in this game is: it's not a ghost, not a reaction from the tainted blood mixing with toxin, but Batman's own pent up emotions, finally too strong for Batman to hold back. This is yet another explanation for how Batman defeated the Joker in his final hallucination: after spending a whole night facing his worst fears, he finally had to confront his feelings and resolve them.
• Commissioner Gordon debuted in Detective Comics #27, Batman's first appearance. He really was there at the beginning.
• While the Boss fights are often criticized for being short or non-existent, it does make sense; Batman is said to be on his physical peak, and of course the weaker villains (Such as Penguin and 3/4 of the Joker infected) wouldn't take too long to beat. Then there are those who aren't looking for a fight (Man-Bat, Azrael, Blackfire) and of course Scarecrow; who uses a leg brace, is practically crippled and not in a proper physical state to fight. While these don't apply to some of the villains (Deathstroke, Arkham Knight), their losses could be pointed to overconfidence.
• Why does Scarecrow have so little actual screen-time? The last time he confronted Batman in person, he got horribly mauled. In addition, he is afraid of bats; there's no reason for him to leave his hideout.
• Harley gets slightly more mellow towards Batman after her chapter. The reason: by that point, she knows that Batman has contracted the Joker infection. Even if he's still Batman, she can't be too harsh on the Joker inside of him.
• The names of the bridges connecting the three islands on which the game takes place directly reflect Jason's/Arkham Knight's character arc: Perdition, Mercy, Penitence, Salvation.
• His entry on the characters page says that the Arkham Knight made a major mistake by not evacuating with the Cloud Burst, even though Batman had Alfred raise the bridges before the fight. But, knowing that it's Jason Todd under the helmet, there are two explanations: he knew that escape was impossible and ran with it. Alternatively, defying Scarecrow was Jason's own personal revenge, though whether it's for moral reasons or for jeopardizing the plan by constantly letting Batman live is up for debate.
• Interesting observation about the League of Assassins: The only battle power the warring factions have are ninjas, even though Arkham City suggests that they can afford better equipment. Well that's just it: they can't. The tape unlocked after beating the "Shadow War" mission revealed that Ra's' mind was going even before the events of the prior game. Digging out the pit in Arkham City almost sank half the prison site, jeopardizing the whole project and needlessly wasting money and lives because Ra's forgot that Gotham had two more Lazarus Pits in easier locations. Ra's vastly underestimated how much was actually spent on setting up Arkham City. The failure of the Arkham City plan and Talia's death revealed his incompetence, leading to Nyssa's rebellion, and the fighting drained even more of the League's now limited wealth.
• Interesting observation of the new batsuit and what it really means to the series: The Arkham Knight identifies the make of Batman's suit, and while this should've clued Batman into his identity right away because only a Bat-family member like Jason Todd would know that tech, there is an explanation. Batgirl's costume shares some similarities to the new suit, which means that her suit was identified first, and the Knight just used that existing intel. This also means that Batgirl's suit is the prototype for Bruce's suit, which explains why Barbara likes his new costume. With just a shared aesthetic, the new suit adds more weight to Barbara's role in the game, and the series.
• The more Riddles you solve on your own, the fewer Riddler henchmen you find. From a player perspective, this is because the henchmen only reveal the location of Riddles that haven't been solved, and if they're already found, there's no need for a henchman to reveal their location. But this also makes sense in-game: the faster Batman solves the Riddles, the less impressed the rank and file mooks will be with Riddler, so the fewer henchmen he has to spill the beans, with only the ones that pity him sticking around. He's already done this song and dance two times already, getting respect from Gotham's criminals only because he does more each time. In this game, the entire city starts out covered in Riddler traps and trophies, and there's multiple mook conversations that comment on this. Soon as they begin noticeably disappearing, the criminals and mercenaries basically give up on Nigma since it means that Batman's beating him again.
• Why does Scarecrow go from a creepy higher-pitch in the first game to an intimidating baritone here? It was probably an intentional choice when he underwent heavy surgery post-Croc attack. Since he didn't scare Batman in the asylum, he opted to try something different! This also reflects in his clothing and build; since emaciated and uncovered didn't work, bulky and almost completely unrevealed would have seemed like a plausible option.
• In the "Season of Infamy" DLC there's no additional dialogue from Joker about the new prisoners, whereas the main villains got something. While the real world explanation could be that Mark Hamill was too busy to record new lines, the in-game explanation could be that he just doesn't care about the DLC villains enough to warrant a Joker speech. Most of the main villains all started as decent people until they were broken by some circumstance, so Batman feels some level of empathy towards them. The others though? Nothing. Mr. Freeze pretty much ditched his life of crime, Batman has long since written Croc off as an animal, Hatter was too far gone mentally all the way back in Origins, and Ra's is dying so what's the point? That and he's only just met the Iron Heights people and, if Ra's escaped, the ninja under Nyssa's command.
• Red Hood shares a few animations with Nightwing. Considering they both were trained by Batman to the same role, it makes perfect sense.
• DLC characters aren't referred by name during AR challenges. While it's clearly because of the quick patch-in, there is no reason why the Batcomputer (The challenges are simulations after all) would have voice files for Azrael, Harley, Batgirl and Red Hood, since HQ is a villain, Batman was uncertain of Azrael's motives, RH didn't exist until Batman's final night, and Barbara was crippled years earlier. The fact that the AR challenges are Batcomputer simulations also explains the Gameplay and Story Segregation in regards to Red Hood's (and likely Harley's) clearly lethal takedowns leaving thugs registered as unconscious and able to be revived by medics: the simulations are designed to train the bat family. Because of how much Batman, Nightwing and Robin are dedicated to the idea of Thou Shalt Not Kill that their training simulator isn't programmed to recognize the idea of the user employing lethal force.
• Deathstroke:
  • After the final story battle, the Militia Sergeant says "there's nothing left" despite there still being at least four tank battles left. While the exact number varies based on how the player plays, Deathstroke took the remaining tanks for himself and put them on a different network. Neither the Sergeant nor Oracle are aware of this network, hence why the Sergeant is still around post-game, and why Oracle isn't hacking drones anymore either.
  • Deathstroke's embarrassingly easy defeat makes sense when you realize that his weapons and tactics haven't changed since Origins, whereas Batman has constantly upgraded his own. Deathstroke physically jumps out his tank in the same clunky suit from a decade ago, whereas Batman ejects from his tank in a multipurpose bleeding edge suit. Also consider that Deathstroke is switching to hand to hand combat after his tank is crippled by the Batmobile's weapons; he's almost as battered as his tank by that point, his old armor not able to handle sudden shocks very well.
  • One of Slade's radio boasts directed at Batman - specifically, the one about how he does this sort of thing for a living - may have had more unwitting Self-Deprecation in it than he realized. Yes, it makes sense that he'd assume his professional status would make him more skilled than your average run-of-the-mill vigilante... but the very fact that Slade takes people down "for a living" means that he only does so on occasions when somebody happens to hire him. Which, even for the world's greatest assassin, probably isn't going to send him hunting more often than a few nights in a month, tops; he charges too much to be any busier than that. Batman, in contrast, operates on his own timetable and is out on the streets virtually every freaking night. So, Slade, still certain you've logged more hours of combat experience than Batman...?
• Joker's image as a Monster Clown had always seemed like an arbitrary thing: something foisted off on him because of how the chemicals he fell into affected his skin, lips, and hair. But it makes a ton more sense when it's revealed that his greatest fear is being ignored and forgotten about. He was never an actual circus clown, he's the class clown: the kid who's perpetually desperate for attention, even if it's the kind you get for pissing people off with taunting and pranks.
• Penguin shuts up quickly after Batman threatens to kill him, despite knowing he doesn't kill; Cobblepot has seen Batman kill before, as he was present when Bats crushed Solomon Grundy's heart. Now that Ozzie knows that Batman isn't completely above killing in some cases and is going through a Sanity Slippage, he really doesn't want to make him mad. Not to mention, if Batman managed to crush the heart of an undead man 3 times his size, what horrors could he do to Oz? There's also how no one seems REALLY sure what happened between Batman and the Joker in Arkham City - the general public just knows that they both entered, but only Batman walked out carrying Joker's body. Penguin might know that Batman has that rule, but if there's even a chance that he broke it for the Joker... maybe he'll break it again for Oswald Cobblepot.
• In the post-game of City there are less thugs on the streets following the gang war and Protocol 10. This time, even in the full game, the number of thugs never changes, despite the detonations of both the Cloudburst and Freeze's cryo-generator. Since the Arkham Knight's soldiers are mercenaries, and Batman only knocks them out, some of them went AWOL and joined the riots as the number of actual thugs shrank.
• Naturally Nygma doesn't want to admit that Scarecrow succeeded in outing Batman's secret identity. It's not just that he can't bear to think he hadn't figured it out himself; it's that he can't accept that Scarecrow's one plan to bring down the Bat had been so much more successful than his constant harebrained, disastrous schemes, that he'd vainly invested so much time, effort, and resources in pulling off time and time again... just for some 'inferior" mind to do it in one go.
• Note that what hallucinatory Joker is harried by when he takes over Batman's mind aren't just images of this character's actual enemy, they're statues of said enemy. This isn't just a gimmick for a creepy "Weeping Angels" effect or Jump Scare; it's a direct result of that character's own deepest fear. Namely, that people will continue to memorialize Batman on and on, over and over again, long after Joker's own grave is overgrown and its marker reduced to anonymous rubble.
• Thanks to his DLC, we know that this version of Jason Todd also adopts the Red Hood persona. In the comics, he does this to rub Batman's having caused the Joker's creation into Bruce's face. But in this version, Jason gets over his misdirected rage at Bruce before he takes on the Red Hood identity, and thinks Bruce is dead by then. So why choose Red Hood for his new persona? Probably because it expresses his wish that Joker - and by extension, his own Arkham Knight persona, that he now realizes was a horrible mistake and is trying to make amends for - had never been created in the first place.
• Saving Barbara turns into a series of these: It starts with Batman rescuing Gordon from the Arkham Knight, or as we soon learn... Jason Todd. Naturally, a fight starts, but Batman constantly, desperately tries to talk sense into him, flat-out calling him 'ROBIN' to try and remind him of who he is inside. The fight itself ought to count, considering it's a series of constantly-upped stakes, with new dangers and obstacles at every turn, with swarms of goons flooding in for every 'round', all wearing gadgets and gizmos like optic-camo, medical packs, stun-sticks, etc. After saving Gordon from Jason, we're treated to a short but powerful moment in an elevator as Gordon and Batman talk to each other, revealing in a very brief but clever way that Gordon has known for some time that Bruce is Batman. How did he find out? Eh, debatable, but the point stands that he knows, and refuses to treat him any differently. He's still Batman to him. Gordon also says that the two of them would do anything for their families. He was tipping Batman off to Scarecrow's ploy. They arrive on the roof and confront Scarecrow, only to discover that Barbara is still alive, and this was all a ploy by Scarecrow to bring the Batman to him, using Gordon as both bait and a pawn at the same time. This alone counts as a Crowning Moment Of Awesome for Scarecrow himself. Combo-awesome where Scarecrow tells Gordon to shoot Batman to save Barbara, which Gordon reluctantly obliges, firing his gun into Batman's chest and knocking him off the roof, seemingly killing him... only for Batman to reveal later that Gordon knew all along that Batman's chest-plate was basically indestructible, and one little bullet wouldn't do a mite of damage to him, meaning he always knew he'd survive the shot. Scarecrow betrays Gordon and hurls Barbara off the roof, only for Batman to soar out of the shadows and catch her, landing safely on the ground with her. In itself, badass. The Arkham Knight's drone tanks swarm the area, and Batman notes the Batmobile was destroyed... but who cares? He has a spare already on the way, and it's fully-loaded with all the upgrades, even the ones you hadn't picked. Not only that, but Batman takes out all of the tanks using the REMOTE rather than driving the Batmobile himself, all while protecting Barbara from the tanks.
• That Batman can refuse to save Ra's life is a call back to his vow to stop Ra's back in Arkham City. And since Ghul's Wonder City project is what made Gotham so messed up in the first place, Batman would be avenging everybody in Gotham that's suffered because of Ra's.
• For all the complaints about Black Mask being such a coward in the Red Hood DLC, there is an explanation: we never saw what Strange did to him after his cameo in City.
• If the ghost in the Golden Ending really is Bruce, then the full game foreshadows how he can maintain his crusade. He knows how to track traces of Lazarus chemical, and knows of at least three sources in Gotham. His interest in Hatter's sound based mind control tech would let him get an edge on enemies before fights would start. And Ranken's experiments on Croc could result in a Healing Factor. There's also still some Titan left in Gotham- supplementary material for Batman: Arkham City shows that taking small doses over time would result in a safe, permanent strength increase. Batman's enemies have given him enough options to keep his crusade going, even better then before.
• Why are the drone tanks so ineffective against the Batmobile? If you listen to Enemy Chatter during these encounters, you will find out that there's a SINGLE operator controlling dozens of drones at the same time. Controlling so many drones at once like that is probably too hard for one man. As a result, the overall performance of the drones suffer.
• In Batman: Arkham Asylum establishes that Batman has three fears: losing a loved one, that night in Crime Alley along with the helplessness he felt, and that he's on the verge of, if not already, going insane and how taking one life will push him over the edge. In Batman: Arkham City, both Hugo Strange and Joker comment on the emotions that Batman's suppressing, and how his one rule is holding him back. But it's not his morality, it's his fears, and this final night lets him finally confront said fears and lay them to rest. Batman repeatedly has loved ones captured, and even has to fight Jason, who he failed to save. As Barbara tells him, they're fighting with him. They made their choices, so Batman's not to blame if something happens. Even Jason, as the Riddler stories reveal, chose to hunt and kill Joker, only to be captured. In the final encounter with Scarecrow, if you look closely, he's incidentally recreated the Wayne shooting. Bruce is once again helpless, being shackled, while two loved ones are unable to protect him, Gordon protecting a recently shot Robin. Once Red Hood shows up to help him, Bruce not only defeats Scarecrow, but he finally has closure for his parents' deaths - he truly knows that if he was able to save his parents, he would have. Just before the final encounter, Batman tries to stop the Joker hallucination by breaking his neck. While this fails, and is proof that Batman's losing the fight to against the infection, it also shows that he's not on the edge like he thought.
• Why does Freeze immediately stand down and trust Batman to save Nora in the Season of Infamy DLC? In Arkham City Freeze, refusing to believe Batman would save her without 'motivation', fought him, unwittingly allowing Harley to steal the only remaining sample of the cure to the disease that was presently killing him, and Batman still saved Nora for him. By the time they meet again Freeze sees Batman for who he is, a good man who will save Nora on his own without needing motivation, so he is willing to put his trust in Batman.
• In one of the patient interviews unlocked in Batman: Arkham Asylum Dr. Young suggests that Joker's motivation stems from some kind of fear, thinking that's the key to rehabilitating him. Jump forward to the final Joker sequence, and Batman discovers that fear to finally stop Joker.
• At one point in Panessa studios, the player can put Batman in a cell for containment. Turns out it's a hallucination, and he never went in. Try it again, and that turns out to be a hallucination. Over and over again. Until the game automatically tosses Robin in when you press the "Enter Cell" button. Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity? It's doing the same thing over and over, expecting things to change. Except this time, they do.
• Hallucination!Joker's habit of disappearing when either Batman's not looking at him or the camera goes off him may not just be a part of said hallucination, it may also be Joker parodying Batman's most infamous habit and pulling it on him.
• There is an instance of Five-Second Foreshadowing just before the confirmation that, as indicated by the Riddler story Nora Freeze was awake within her cryopod, her stating "Batman" upon recognizing who was in front of her: in the "Cold, Cold Heart" DLC of "Batman: Arkham Origins" we know that at the time of Nora's Freezing Batman was an urban legend that had yet to be caught on camera, with most people who knew about him at all calling him "Bat-Man", meaning the only way she'd know him is if she was aware of the times he'd interacted with her frozen body, such as in aforementioned DLC or "Batman: Arkham City".
• As pointed out in the Heartwarming page, when the player controls the Joker in the finale, he never points his gun at Harley, showing that he doesn’t think killing her would be funny. Well, of course he doesn’t. Joker's worst fear is being forgotten, and in this Fear Toxin-induced nightmare, Harley is the only one who remembers him.
• It's rather appropriate that the Joker hallucination should pop up when the overload of Fear Toxin in Ace Chemicals is destroying it. After all, no matter what Joker's backstory is, there are always two consistent details. One is Batman and the other is a dip in a vat of chemicals at the Ace Chemicals plant. So it makes sense that when the Joker's birthplace gets destroyed, his figurative ghost (or literal ghost?) should show up to haunt Batman for the rest of the game.
• In the Panessa flashback, Batman tells Gordon that the inmates are suffering from an extremely mutated form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease after being exposed to Joker's mutated blood, with them and even Batman slowly mutating into variations of Joker. There has been pushback from people questioning this premise, as CJD normally kills within a year and can't be controlled, let alone cured like Batman eventually does. But, when you listen to the audio log under Joker's profile, Batman says that the blood acts like a prion infection, meaning they never had CJD in the first place. Batman misled Gordon, banking on Jim's lack of medical knowledge to drive him off after he hears a weird name, because while he obviously had to warn Gordon, he didn't want the cops getting too close for fear of their safety. The scene is foreshadowing Batman's trust issues.
• Appropriately, the four villains of the Season of Infamy DLC each correspond to one of the seasons of the year.
  • Mad Hatter, being obsessed with things like rabbits, picnics, and tea parties, represents Spring.
  • Killer Croc, who takes his alias from a crocodile, an animal that lives in warm, humid climates, represents Summer.
  • Ra's Al Ghul, being practically a revenant at this point who's constantly between life and death, represents Fall.
  • Mister Freeze, for obvious reasons, represents Winter.

Fridge Logic

• The supposedly "non-lethal" Batmobile. Many commentators have noted that its capacity for Video Game Cruelty Potential as seen in this video contradicts the Hand Wave of "slam rounds" and the pulse taser which shocks any NPC within proximity. This is especially apparent when one controls the Jokerized Batmobile in the finale, which fires live rounds and missiles at civilian targets, and the game-play is functionally identical to the non-lethal Batmobile.

Fridge Horror

• In Arkham City, Azrael's prophecy mentions: "From the ashes of Arkham, Gotham will burn". It seems a little odd at first, and doesn't seem to hold a whole lot of meaning behind it. That is until Firefly of all people shows up in the second trailer. Then you realize: Firefly's probably been in Arkham for a very long time, and will be absolutely ecstatic to burn everything to the ground...
• There are voice-mails of Lex Luthor strong-arming Bruce to sell his Applied Science division and the post-game villain chat has Simon Stagg tell Batman/Bruce that when its over, Stagg rubs in how Bruce has destroyed his family legacy and how Stagg might have enough to buy out Wayne's businesses. Unless Batman's contingency plan is truly well covered, Lucius Fox at Wayne Industries and other holdings will be facing tons of lawsuits in property damages, abuse, assault and battery. Likewise the stockholders will also give a side-eye over company funds used to make expensive Bat vehicles and gadgets. So Wayne's businesses have a bright future of SEC investigations, senate inquiries, fall in stock prices, bankruptcy. A lot of people will be laid off and whatever holdings there are will be bought by Corrupt Corporate Executive like Lex, Stagg and others. The thugs and hench-folk would have to explain in court why they were in Gotham after a mandatory evacuation, in essence having to admit their parts in a treasonous conspiracy that threatened a good chunk of the country, even if unwittingly. Lucius and Bruce probably had some sort of legal porcupine prepped for if and when the worst happened. Some of Gotham's (former?) Big Bads, facing treason and terrorism charges might seek to drop the dime on the involvement of those like Luthor, which would pin him down from snatching up Wayne Industries. Odds are they're also not the faves of their non-elite henchmen for being on the ground when the toxin cloud hit. If Bruce is anything like Tony Stark (and he is) than he may not even have shareholders per se. The Knightfall Protocol almost had to have more levels than simply a replay of DKR's ending. Of course, if that does happen, then a large amount of Gotham's criminals would be executed for their part in treason. That means that letting Protocol 10 happen would've done the same thing but sooner, kept the militia from getting funding, and prevented Bruce's apparent suicide.
• The fact that Joker's blood can cause hallucinations, bring about homicidal and manipulative behaviors, increase aggression and sadism, and invoke an admiration for and fixation on Batman, implies that Joker (in this continuity at least) might actually be a sick and unwell person who's plagued by an identifiable physical condition which affects his brain and alters his actions and cognitive functions. What's more, in a way, Joker was right, Batman's allies do have a bad habit of finding themselves in dangerous situations and possibly dead, so in a way, his desire to work by himself as much as possible to keep them out of danger can be somewhat well-founded.
• It can be argued that Scarecrow is at least partially correct to blame Batman for his mauling by Killer Croc; watching the scene from Arkham Asylum, all Croc does to begin with is hoist Crane over his head. Batman then throws a batarang at Croc, setting off his shock collar. Croc then dives underwater with Scarecrow in tow, with the mauling happening off-screen. Now, even though Batman threw that batarang to stop Croc from eating Crane, from Crane's perspective setting off the shock collar made Croc angry enough to maul him. And if Scarecrow considers Croc as nothing more than an animal like many people do, then he arguably is justified in blaming the man who enraged the animal holding him.
• During gameplay thugs can occasionally be heard referencing their families ['looking after the kids'/'getting the child a toy'], but since these thugs are in the city -which is under lock-down due to Scarecrow's threats- and still talking about meeting their sons/daughters later... Are the families of the thug still in the city?
• In Port Adams you can find (and use to solve a Riddle) Bane's mask, with what appears to be Titan still in it, inside a shipping container. This means that there is some of the Titan formula still in Gotham. Thankfully, Scarecrow, Arkham Knight, the Militia, or even random thugs don't seem to notice it, but if one of them had gotten hold of it, an already bad night for Batman could potentially have gotten a lot worse, especially if they were smart enough to try and make more of it.
• A story found by solving the Riddles is told from the perspective of Nora Fries. She's conscious inside that cryotank.
• It's speculated that the Nightmare Batman in the Golden Ending is really Bruce using some form of Fear Toxin to intimidate thugs after faking his death. If it's true, then Bruce, all this time, was perfectly okay with resorting to chemical warfare against street thugs but held back for the sake of his friends. Not only does this suggest that Batman is closer to the kind of insanity his enemies show than previously suggested, but what if, without friends to think about, he eventually abandons his one rule?
• If Bruce really did fake his death, than in order for people to keep believing that, he has to cut off contact with people in general, meaning there's a real possibility that he might let people die to keep up his facade. Unless his new outfit completely obscures his face and voice, or unless he's copied enough of the Mad Hatter and Scarecrow's tricks to fool everybody which is even more disturbing since now no one would be safe from Batman.
• When Batman first sees the Knight's gunship, he just walks up to it and stares it down. Shortly thereafter, he stays in the mixing chamber to try and reduce the blast radius of the Fear Toxin explosion, even though it may kill him or at best leave him catatonic. He's a Death Seeker, since he knows that in one way or another, he's going to die.
• When Batman checked Francine Langstrom's body, there were no signs of life, like a pulse. Upon returning, he finds her gone and the words "Forever, my love" written in blood... And then you remember that Kirk used the DNA of a vampire bat! So she became the Distaff Counterpart to Justice League: Gods and Monsters Kirk Langstrom?
• While tie in comics have had characters use compounds reverse engineered from his clay-flesh, Clayface himself isn't present in the game. This brings up at least two possibilities: either Batman really did kill him and the Dark Knight doesn't consider him human enough to count under the no-kill rule, or Clayface's being held somewhere and likely illegally experimented on where no one can find him. Another possibility is that Clayface was still submerged in the Arkham City Lazarus Pit and was recovered by the League of Assassins- who would be very upset over his role in Talia's death and the Pit's destruction. In that case, chances are he's long dead.
• Joker isn't evil, just sick. The disease in his blood is making him act this way. Considering the breadth of his personality traits that the infected acquired: his obsession, his homicidal tendencies, his manipulation, and in Bruce, his entire mental state. It is all the disease that made him act that way. Joker truly isn't responsible for his own actions. This shows just how inept the Arkham staff really is: all these years of no one identifying Joker's illness, but Batman figures it out in the 9 month gap between City and Knight? No wonder the supervillains never get any better. This also raises the question of when exactly did Joker contract his disease: before or after his chemical bath? Could the chemical bath have actually been a suicide attempt that somehow stabilized the disease? If Joker-mania is transmissible through blood, then it is probably transmissible through other bodily fluids. Who do we know that routinely got transmissions of bodily fluids from Joker and then went crazy? Poor Harley, homicidal madness by STD. Even worse, the infection is progressive, so she will only get worse.
• At the end of the game, most of Gotham's captured Super Criminals are in police custody. In. The. Same. Cell. Deathstroke is in his full armor. Firefly in his pyrotechnic gear. Scarecrow, etc. Even with the armed guards, what's stopping a mass casualty in GCPD the moment Slade shows he's got a paperclip under his tongue?
• If you let Azrael go free in his side quest, there's a chance he'll return to protect Gotham in Bruce's absence. Unless he rejoins the police, he's going to be a vigilante with an identical fighting style to Bruce's, which would put Bruce's loved ones in danger as criminals mistake Azrael for Bruce in a new costume. To make things worse, Bruce has been investing millions in Gotham, specifically to rebuild the Arkham City site. As he learns about the plight of the fire crew, the layoffs, the fires, the attack on them by Firefly, he must be kicking himself, thinking that he could've prevented this if he gave the fire department money.
• Given in the "Shadow War" portion of "Season of Infamy", we see the waitress and the guy who told officer Owens about the "smoker" in the morgue. If the player has Owen fire his gun when the hallucination starts, it's possible Owens shot one or both of them.
• During the battle in the Militia HQ, Jason says how he can still hear the Joker laughing in his head. Does Jason also suffer from Joker hallucinations? Was it the fear gas he was briefly exposed earlier, or was his torture at the hands of Joker just as efficient as Crane's new strain of the toxin? Scarecrow might even have been slipping the Knight small doses of toxin, despite their working together. Given Crane's clinical interests, the temptation to probe his associate's paranoia and obsession with Batman would've been virtually impossible to resist.
• Given that the Arkham Knight's soldiers are mercenaries, and Batman only knocks them out, it's possible some of them went AWOL and joined the riots as the number of actual thugs shrank with all the chaos of the game's events. This means some, possibly most, of the militia will walk away from all this. Also, this means that Gotham will be safer because so many criminals are dead following the game's events- Protocol 10 would've saved Gotham.
• A small one that most people miss, but a good one nonetheless: after Barbara Gordon supposedly shoots herself in Scarecrow's China Town safehouse, return to the location of the tragedy and you'll see that the wheelchair is still there, but that the Joker is sitting in it, pretending to be dead, and if you wait long enough he'll eventually start talking and making more crass jokes, like all the other Joker hallucinations. But unlike all the other Joker hallucinations, where he eventually disappears... here, he doesn't, he never gets out of the chair. No matter how many times you look away and then back, he's still there. And why? Because as we discover later in the plot, Barbara isn't dead, it was one of Scarecrow's illusions. She's still alive, but the gas has worn off by now, and if the Joker wasn't in the chair, you'd see that it was empty and start to work it out. The Joker hallucination even alludes to the fact that Barbara's body is gone, asking if Gordon came and took it away when you were doing something else... but he still won't get out of the chair to prove if it's gone or not. Another thing people often miss about that part is Joker moves the gun Barbara shoots herself with from the middle of the table to the edge. Since we're already aware Joker's not actually there, the only way he can interact with the gun is if it's part of a hallucination.
• Minor but disturbing detail: In the Professor Pyg investigation, one of the victims' bodies is identified in part by the scars of an old shark bite. Batman's cross-referencing of this fact with the Missing Persons database turns up more than 1500 hits. Just how common are shark attacks in this game's Verse? This crosses over with Fridge Brilliance and Fridge Horror, but actually, the rate of shark bites was probably more common than you'd think. Various supervillains like using man-eating sharks for their deathtraps and whatnot (Tiger Shark, to give an example), and other supervillains are man-eating sharks (King Shark, anyone?), so the rate of shark bites in the Arkhamverse is probably far higher than our world. Too unrealistic for the Arkhamverse? In Arkham City, Penguin literally had a massive Great White Shark as a pet. Keep in mind, said shark had a lot of wounds on it, which had to come from somewhere, say, victims fighting back? The wounds also implied that the shark was old, so it probably was there for a while, giving it lots of time to take chunks out of people. Oh, and Penguin was in the middle of a super-prison at the time, but still managed to keep the shark fed for months on end so some things, or more likely, someones were being used for food.
• In the "A Matter Of Family" DLC, the secret room with the Starro parasite is sealed off from everything else. The only way to get in there is by crawling through a vent, which itself is tucked away. Just what necessitated the parasite to be isolated in an inaccessible room? Especially considering that there's a poster in the park that indicates that it used to be a sideshow attraction. And of the two tanks in the room, one of them is empty.
• How long was Hush actually in Wayne tower? When you get to the parking Garage for Ivy's Sonar Lucius mentioned that he believed Bruce to already be there, suggesting that since their last point of contact Hush had entered the tower. The Hush side mission doesn't occur until after you deal with Harley at the movie studios. Now there is quite some time that passes between getting the sonar and going back to the movie studios, if memory serves you get Batmobile access for Founders island around this point, so Bruce could've spent several hours focusing on Most Wanted cases before the movie studios sequence. So what exactly was Hush doing the whole time?
• At the end of the game, Joker finally takes control of Batman's mind. ... To reiterate, Joker finally took control over Batman's mind which was implied to be permanent this time. He won. Batman's will finally reached its limit and Joker won. Scarecrow ruined it by injecting his body again, allowing the Batman persona to re-assert dominance, but that doesn't take away from the fact that Joker won and Batman lost. Batman may have won in the end, but he lost when it counted. It's mitigated by speculation that everything from Robin's abduction to Scarecrow's defeat was all one big Batman Gambit by the Dark Knight, but it's still a scary thought.
• In the first act of the game, Batman can converse with officers on the roof of the GCPD, each of whom have sniper rifles trained out towards the city. After the Cloudburst is activated, they cannot be found on the roof, nor inside the GCPD lockup. Most likely, they all died, potentially as a result of being exposed to fear toxin. Militia soldiers can also be overheard discussing a contest to see who can shoot the officers on the roof. Maybe they were picked off? Either way, tragic.
• Here's something disturbing to consider: as heavily mocked as he is, Riddler came the closest to killing Batman. In the final fight, his robots increasingly adapt to Batman's attacks, and would've won if Catwoman hadn't returned. Batman even admits to Riddler that he would've lost otherwise. The fact that the robots don't adapt in Catwoman's DLC means Riddler was updating the robots in the field, and hadn't uploaded his data to his main computer yet. If he wasn't so focused on making elaborate puzzles, race courses, or even personally fighting Batman to prove his superiority, Riddler would've tuned his robots until they were unstoppable.
• Jason is shown walking with his back hunched over in every scene he's in. He could be just doing this to look more threatening, but remember what he was in during the joker torture scenes: a wheelchair he was tied to with barbed wire. There's no telling how often Joker would keep him in the chair, so his hunched back might be yet another reminder of what joker put him through along with the brand and other scars. All the king's horses and all the king's men really couldn't put Robin together again.