Batman General Discussion

Never forget that one panel of Cass with Bruce making one guy think he's grooming her.

@Slimcoder: I remember reading a story from a long time ago (I think it was from the early 80's, as it was after Bruce went back to the Manor but before Dick became Nightwing) where we got to see Wayne Manor's day staff (cleaners, groundskeepers, etc). They only came in during the day, they answered to Alfred and Bruce had little to do with them outside of signing their paychecks. Bruce, Dick, and Alfred were shown to live and work in only a small part of the mansion, and the rest of it was mantained like a museum. It was a back-up story that dealt with Alfred keeping the staff away from sensitive areas.

Edited by Robbery on Mar 25th 2024 at 9:07:58 AM

Superman gave Bruce a Superman robot to keep the manor tidy.

"Sir, maybe you also could use it to fight crimina—"

"That's not the way it is done, Alfred."

Juni Ba, writer of The Boy Wonder, talks about the book in an interview with GateCrashers. Special mention of how the Al Ghuls will be depicted.

Edited by windleopard on Mar 28th 2024 at 12:48:06 PM

Literally what the fuck are they talking about? What racist origins?

Something about Ra's being orientalist I think?

It feels like a massive reach. At best.

I feel like everything that was popular more than 30 years ago was racist to somebody.

I really want to visit tge Eastern hemisphere and get some perspective, cause there's no way they don't have material that wouldn't be racist/racially offensive towards Westerners. I honestly wonder if anybody from the East calls out things like the al Ghuls.

Like Japanese anime and video games has some less than ideal depictions of black people but I never really get the sense that they care as much. Lack of transalated interviews maybe.

Ra's is from a made up ethnicity (he wiped his own race out).

For what it's worth, I have a cousin from Saudi, and he really does like the Ra's al Ghul side of the Batman franchise.

Like, I showed him Batman Begins and Gotham, and he really enjoyed the latter because Ra's there was played by an Arabic actor.

And he always pronounces Ra's, as Razz like Begins and doesn't like the other pronunciation.

The pronunciation of Ra's' name has long been a subject of heated debate. Dennis O'Neil intended it to be pronounced Raesh, which is how most adaptations pronounce it, but a lot of people think that Razz is more accurate to how it would actually be pronounced in Arabic, which is probably why Nolan used that one in his version.

Edited by immortaleditor on Mar 28th 2024 at 8:42:44 AM

Ra's is an Arab terrorist who is obsessed with having an heir and his organization has included a mish mash of various Asian cultural concepts and aesthetics.

This stuff has been talked about and criticized for years. DC's always had an Orientalism issue.

Edited by windleopard on Mar 28th 2024 at 5:35:15 PM

I mean, when you phrase it in the most uncharitable way imaginable and leave out any and all context that would counter such a view, yeah, it sounds bad.

I get all parts of that but the getting a heir one. What is so unique about it that it needs to be linked to Asians by default? Cultures all across the planet have traditionally placed great relevance on securing heirs.

I disagree on Ra's because he would get a lot of very cool stories over the years and they went a lot of interesting places with the character.

I do think there's something to be made from the portrayal of Talia, who went twenty years without getting too many meaty stories, and you'd have a much better time making an argument that she was treated as an exotic eye candy character.

This would be the first time I've heard of DC being criticized for Ra's al Ghul and it sounds like a modern issue.

Characters like Egg Fu yeah, definitely.

Is there an Asian/Arabic troper or community that can weigh in on this. Now I'm interested.

Edited by FOFD on Mar 28th 2024 at 1:29:42 PM

I never saw Ra's as racist. He's a villain who happens to be Middle-Eastern, not an Middle-Eastern villain. It's not like his ethnicity factors into his villainous actions and behavior, far as I'm concerned

Edited by RJ-19-CLOVIS-93 on Mar 29th 2024 at 2:44:09 AM

Almost seems racist(reverse discrimination) to claim that it is racist to have a villain that happens to not be of European descent. As if everyone in a people group is the same and thus can only be sll good or all evil. Isn't Cass from Asia? As long as both heroes and villians are culturally diverse(don't have all the heroes be of one ethnicity and all the villains of a different ethnicity), I don't see a problem. Ethnicity has nothing to do with a person's character.

The worst thing I can back up about Ra's Al Ghul is that his stories are wishy washy mashups of "Eastern" stuff, not unlike Mortal Kombat...okay, not quite as bad as Mortal Kombat, but it's the same energy.

The villain is basically Arabic for "I'm an evil demon from the stars who is going to crush you to death", his father is Japanese for "Teacher" and his daughter is Hebrew for "Morning dew". Just what the hell is going on here?

Now I know enough about Batman to know these are characters, not caricatures. Quite the opposite, their ethnicity is such a non factor as to be non existent. Make Ra's Al Ghul a Turk, a Mongol, a Swede, a Berber, a Siberian, an Indian, a Persian and at most all you have to do is come up with another terrifying name for the new language. Nothing else about the character has to change.

Edited by IndirectActiveTransport on Mar 29th 2024 at 8:22:54 AM

and are precisely my feelings on the matter.

It'd be one thing if Ra's' Arabic descent was played in a hyper-stereotypical way, but he never even slightly connects to any stereotypes about Arab people.

Even in that case, I'm fairly certain it's intentional to show that Ra's has been to pretty much every corner of the world and plans to take aspects from all cultures for his "New Eden". And yeah, Ra's can be pretty much any ethnicity and his character remains the same. Something highlighted by how he's been played by actors of numerous different descents and basically nobody has even commented on it. Even in the original comics, he's meant to have a murky and mixed ancestry. I mentioned before how it's rather telling that Ken Watanabe and Liam Neeson both more or less played him in Batman Begins and both of them look a lot like how Ra's has been drawn in the comics at different times even though the two men look nothing like one another.

Edited by immortaleditor on Mar 28th 2024 at 7:59:13 AM

Yeah, Ra's criminal motivations aren't tied to his race, but rather his backstory of using those lazarus pits and getting misanthropic regarding humanity.

He isn't going all "death to America"

Heck, at one point, he finds that the life of a Washington power broker suits him quite well.

Ra's being of non-European origin in and of itself doesn't make him a racist caricature. No one calls Black Manta a racist caricature, just for example.

I'm not even saying the character is totally without merit but there is a lot about the writing for him and his daughter that is pretty iffy.

Edited by windleopard on Mar 28th 2024 at 5:06:03 PM

Re: Ra's "racist" origins.

All I can think of is that Ra's al Ghul was inspired by Fu Manchu. Fu Manchu, if you don't know, was the villain of a bunch of Yellow Peril novels from the early 20th century. He was a Chinese super-villain with a huge network working to establish Asian dominance over the world; these novels were rife with all the stereotypes you can imagine. Ra's is essentially Fu Manchu with the racial angle removed.

Ra's is, as far as I know, never identified to be of any specific ethnicity. It's interesting to note that, though, that in her first couple of appearances (and she first appeared before Ra's did, too), Talia was definitely drawn to look Asian.

Ra's comes off as generically Arabic, at least to my cousin. He never came off as Chinese to me personally.

I always assumed Talia looked Asian because of her mother, not Ra's.

Ra's origin is that he was born to Chinese nomads who settled in eastern North Africa. This was established in Batman: Birth of the Demon, a graphic novel written by his creator Dennis O'Neil.

So Ra's is Asian per the writing of the guy who created him. There is nothing ambiguous about it.