YMMV / The Gotham War

• Fanon Discontinuity: Secret Six fans refuse to acknowledge every single thing that happened in this comic pertaining to Marquise being Scandal Savage, due to her being written totally out of character in her quest to aid her father despite it being well known how much she genuinely loathes him for the way he raised her and treated her mother alongside his refusal to accept her sexual orientation.
• I Knew It!: At least one fan called that Marquise was really Scandal Savage as far back as Catwoman #54, months before Gotham War even began.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A major complaint about this story, even before Battle Lines dropped, is that The Gotham War is another story in which Gotham City becomes a war zone under Batman's nose, which fans have noticed has been happening with regularity between City of Bane, The Joker War and Fear State. Further complaints about this story is the suggestion that the Bat-Family is going to be splintered again thanks to Batman's actions. For many fans, it's the same song and dance for ages and they're just tired of it.
  • It even gets lampshaded by Batwoman in the first issue of the new Outsiders as her leaving Gotham because she's tired of war breaking out for one reason or another and she wants to spend effort on a fight that matters.
• Moral Event Horizon: Bruce has never really been the image of sanity, but he clearly crossed a very big line when he kidnaps and injects a solution into Jason that paralyzes him with fear whenever his adrenaline kicks up. While this is definitely Zur-En-Arrh telling him to do these things, the fact that Bruce went ahead and decided "Yeah, this is a really good idea" shows how far he's fallen.
• Narm: When Selina explains that her Thieves' Guild will only target the rich, Bruce could easily complain about the many issues with normalizing crime, even non-violent crime. Not to mention the problems of teaching criminals, including murderers and psychos like Fright, to be better criminals. But what does he retort with? "My parents were rich!" It's supposed to make Batman look self-absorbed and out of touch, but the childishness of it when there are so many other angles for the World's Greatest Detective to argue from makes it unintentionally comedic.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: On the one hand, we have Catwoman, who is building up criminals as thieves ostensibly to control crime while still having it happen on a nightly basis under her watch. On the other hand, we have Batman, who is overly brutal and dismantles any and all crime, but through brute force and mentally crippling his allies in the attempt to "help" them, all without actually doing anything to make the situation better than Catwoman had. Coupled with others trying to figure out which kind of criminal is better and the Savages making to enforce a plan that would potentially destroy the entire city to give immortality, many readers were left just waiting for the storyline to be over, instead of bothering to care about one side or another.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: A sizable part of the fanbase sees Bruce as far more sympathetic than the unhinged lunatic the story tries to present him as. His opposition to Selina's organized Thieves' Guild is because of the understandable notion that normalizing crime, violent or not, is never a good thing. Damian also points out that Selina is training criminals (including hardened psychos and murderers like Fright) to be better criminals against a finite number of targets. So what happens when Selina's thieves run out of people to rob? Scandal Savage answers this question by repurposing the organization into her father Vandal Savage's personal League of Shadows.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The event tries to paint Selina's Thieves' Guild as the compassionate solution to Gotham's crime problem opposite to Batman's more violent methods, to the point where members of the Bat-family are willing to turn on Bruce to stop him from ruining 'Selina's peace'. Due to the story's almost overzealous effort to demonstrate all the glaring flaws in her plan, culminating in Vandal usurping control of the guild from her and reshaping them in to his personal army, many fans felt that she instead comes off as a stubborn idiot whose idea was doomed to fall apart even if Bruce hadn't intervened.