History ComicBook / ArkhamAsylumASeriousHouseOnSeriousEarth

* SelfHarm: [[DiscussedTrope Arkham asks "Mad Dog" Hawkins]] why he cuts his arms with a razor]], and Hawkins says that it's to feel something.

* BoomHeadshot: At first, Batman refuses to play along with the plan. Joker convinces him by shooting of the guards who stayed behind in the head and then putting the gun to Dr. Adams' head.

** "Mad Dog" Hawkins tells Arkham that he was sexually abused by his father, which contributed to his descent into insanity, leading him to rape and kill as many women he can, [[spoiler:including Amadeus's wife and daughter]].

* CreepyDollhouse: Amadeus Arkham returns home to find [[spoiler:an escaped mental patient has killed his wife and daughter]]. During the scene, Arkham focuses on his daughter's dollhouse, where he sees [[spoiler:his daughter's head through one of the windows]].
* CriticalPsychoanalysisFailure: Amadeus founded the Asylum to treat the mentally ill after his mother went insane and died. When one of his patients escapes and [[spoiler:rapes and murders his wife and daughter]], he goes off the rails himself and needs to become a patient in his own institution.

** Amadeus Arkham really does use the electroshock machine for torture and murder, subjecting Mad Dog Hawkins to "treatment" that slowly fries him alive [[spoiler:as revenge for what Hawkins did to his wife and daughter]]. This being the 1920s and Arkham Asylum, it's dismissed as an unfortunate accident.

* PaedoHunt: Mad Hatter is reinvented as a pedophile here. Also, Amadeus and his wife are hinted to have sexually abused their young daughter and [[spoiler:Mad Dog left her "indescribably violated"]].

* TheReveal: [[spoiler:The killer of Amadeus Arkham's mother Elizabeth was Amadeus Arkham himself. He had surpressed the memory of it. But once he remembers it, this drives him into insanity. Also, the creature that had been haunting his mother every night was a gigantic bat.]]

* TranquilFury: Amadeus Arkham enters this when he is charged with dealing with [[spoiler:his family's killer]], ultimately leading him to electrocute him to death a year after the event.

** While Amadeus and Constance ''possibly'' sexually abused their young daughter Harriet, [[spoiler:"Mad Dog" Hawkins brutally raped her then cut off her head]].

[-[[caption-width-right:350:"You must admit it's hard to imagine this place being conducive to ''anyone's'' mental health."]]-]

** It's implied Amadeus Arkham and his wife Constance sexually abused their daughter Harriet via an eerie depiction of Arkham, Constance, Harriet, and the cuckoo clock Arkham got as a present for Harriet that also appears to be external female genitalia.

** Amadeus Arkham's parents sexually abused him. In his adulthood, Amadeus and Constance, his wife, also sexually abused Harriet, their daughter. It's also stated that "Mad Dog" Hawkins was sexually abused by his father as well, which contributed to his descent into insanity, leading him to become a serial killer who targets women.

** Clayface is always naked, horribly emaciated, and compelled to spread his "[[PoisonousPerson disease]]", being essentially the Preston Payne incarnation of Clayface minus his usual protective exoskeleton. The sight of him advancing down the corridor and [[WalkingWasteland stripping the paint from the wall by touch alone]] is so horrific that even ''Batman'' is noticeably scared.

** It is hinted that Amadeus Arkham's parents sexually abused him, specifically in the "TunnelOfLove" imagery from his childhood dreams, and the way his face is situated in said image.
** Not only Amadeus's parents, it's implied Amadeus Arkham and his wife Constance sexually abused their daughter Harriet. This is backed up by the drawing she did of her parents, which if you look closely also appears to be external female genitalia.
** [[FromBadToWorse The matter doesn't end there]]. It's also stated that "Mad Dog" Hawkins was sexually abused by his father as well, which contributed to his descent into insanity, leading him to rape and kill as many women he can, [[spoiler:including Amadeus's wife and daughter.]]
* AllPsychologyIsFreudian: Averted, mostly. Morrison wanted to write a Batman story based on Jungian psychology for a change, which emphasizes the idea that there are many parts of the psyche of which we are unaware. There's still some Freudian vibes, though - Batman and Arkham are both fucked up because of their parents, and there's a lot of vaginas as symbols.

** The viscica piscis (The place where to super-imposed circles intersect). Arkham was build on top of one, Amadeus' spell to contain the Bat entity had the shape of one and then there's the clown fish mentioned in AnimalMotifs.

** Clayface, who looks like he's flaking apart. "Batman... my skin is sick..."
** Much like in ''ComicBook/TheSandman1989'', Dr. Destiny had his original rational for his SkullForAHead (the JLA ridding him off the ability to dream shriveling up his face) extended to affecting his whole body, becoming an emaciated figure in a wheelchair. In their notes in collected editions, Morrison even notes they never bought that Dee would've only had a skull-looking face because of what happened.

** Two-Face ignores a flip of his coin, making a decision for himself for the first time. [[spoiler:The coin comes up "bad heads", which meant that he should have killed Batman. But instead, Two-Face said that the Bat goes free, and so he did.]]

* CreepyCrossdresser: Amadeus dresses up in his mother's wedding dress after discovering the corpses of his wife and daughter. Also, Cavendish wears a bridal gown during the climax. Finally, the Joker (in a more downplayed case) as he is seen wearing high heels.
* CreepyDollhouse: Amadeus Arkham returns home to find [[spoiler:an escaped mental patient has killed his wife and daughter.]] During the scene, Arkham focuses on his daughter's dollhouse, where he sees [[spoiler:his daughter's head through one of the windows.]]
* CriticalPsychoanalysisFailure: Amadeus founded the Asylum to treat the mentally ill after his mother went insane and died. When one of his patients escapes and rapes and murders his wife and daughter, he goes off the rails himself and needs to become a patient in his own institution.
* CurbStompBattle: While he's forced to RunTheGauntlet, Batman's "fights" against Clayface and Dr. Destiny are over very quickly. The former is taken out with a single kick to the leg, while the latter is in a wheelchair, prompting Batman to simply kick him down a set of stairs.

* {{Deconstruction}}: The comic dives into the psychological issues surrounding the mentalities of the Caped Crusader and his rogues' gallery. Batman's rigid and stoic demeanor is just his way of covering his severe emotional issues and sexual repression, Mad Hatter's love of blonde little girls is taken to [[PaedoHunt outright pedophilia]], and Maxie Zeus is a weak skeletal man with [[AGodAmI a huge messiah complex]] and who has developed an addiction to electroshock therapy.

** In the part where Amadeus Arkham describes his carnival nightmares, the "TunnelOfLove" is meant to remind you of a woman's genitals.
* DerangedAnimation: Minus the "animation" part since it's a comic, but the art style definitely revels in this and milks it for all the creepiness it's worth. Batman's cape is treated like wisps of smoke, the Joker's smile is depicted with stark red teeth and his eyes are bulging, and there's massive slabs of darkness puncutated with horrific images on every panel.
* EldritchLocation: After being previously hinted, this version of Arkham is a focusing point for madness that expands in all directions of time, created by Gotham and [[AnimalisticAbomination the Bat.]] [[spoiler:It even seems to create a StableTimeLoop involving the Arkham family and Elizabeth Arkham's death.]]

** Amadeus Arkham really does use the electroshock machine for torture and murder, subjecting Mad Dog Hawkins to "treatment" that slowly fries him alive as revenge for what Hawkins did to his wife and daughter. This being the 1920s and Arkham Asylum, it's dismissed as an unfortunate accident.

* EyeScream:
** Joker creatively uses a nurse, a sharpened pencil, and one of her eyes to lure Batman to the asylum. [[spoiler:And then when Batman gets there, it turns out he was kidding]].
** Then there's the Joker himself, since this version doesn't have eyelids.

* FoeRomanceSubtext: Part of Morrison's interpretation of Batman. Joker, sensing Batman's fragile state of mind and repressed sexuality, deliberately messes with him. The Joker [[TheComicallySerious slaps Batman's ass]] and calls him [[TermsOfEndangerment things like "sweetie" and "darling" while making it clear that he's still very dangerous]].

* IGaveMyWord: Zigzagged with the Joker. When Batman arrives at Arkham Asylum early in the story, Batman tells Joker to release a hostage, as Joker promised he would. True to his word, the Joker does just that, letting his hostage go without a scratch. However, when the Joker gives Batman an hour to run the gauntlet through Arkham Asylum, he's talked into going after the Dark Knight after only ten minutes.
* ImAHumanitarian: [[spoiler:Arkham eats his dead wife and daughter following their deaths]]. If you look carefully in the scenes directly after [[spoiler:Arkham discovers his dead family]], you can see he has some [[spoiler:blood around his mouth and beard]]. An early version of the script had more explicit.
* ImpaledPalm: Batman does it to himself with a shard of glass. [[spoiler:He does this to snap himself out of a memory of his parents being killed by focusing on the pain.]]
* ImpaledWithExtremePrejudice: [[spoiler:Killer Croc ends up impaled at the end of the ClimaxBoss fightagainst him with Batman. Tellingly, Batman almost ends up the same way, but saves himself from a fall before he gets impaled on the fence of the asylum. All the while, narration from Amadeus Arkham narrates a dream he had where he fought a dragon, all of it matching what's happening in Batman's fight with Croc, including slaying the dragon.]]

--> '''Batman:''' Take your filthy hands off me!
--> '''Joker:''' What's the matter? Have I touched a nerve? How is the Boy Wonder (Jason Todd)?[[note]]This took place before ''A Death in the Family'' but the latter was published after this[[/note]] Started shaving yet?
--> '''Batman:''' Filthy degenerate!
--> '''Joker:''' Flattery will get you nowhere.
* LiteraryAllusionTitle: That is line 65 from Phillip Larkin's poem [[http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar5.htm "Church Going"]], that describes the fascination Larkin, an agnostic, feels for churches, recognizing that even when humanity will lose all faith in gods, it will always need churches as a place to reflect about life, death, marriage, etc... then you realize that the comic is about a BedlamHouse, and it implies humanity will always need a place like that, too.

* MentalTimeTravel: According to Morrison's script, the madness of the asylum's inmates echoed back through time which drove Mrs. Arkham (and, later, her son Amadeus) insane. But Batman's anger and confusion is what drove the two Arkhams over the edge, which leads Amadeus to write about the Bat, so [[spoiler:Cavendish]] would set the events of the comic in motion, which caused the Arkhams to go insane. All because Dr. Destiny's dream-based reality-warping powers had allowed the Asylum to turn into a nightmare landscape where the veil of time was thin to begin with. And that only happened because the inmates had taken over, and ''that'' only happened because Batman had in his anger and confusion put them in there to begin with. Finally, Cavendish finishes Arkham's spell, which is intended to exorcise the mad demon that infests the asylum, but because it's April Fools' Day, everything works backward and he instead is the one to send it back in time and infest the asylum in the first place. So it's not just this, but it's also a StableTimeLoop.
* MercyKill: [[spoiler:Amadeus Arkham kills his mother with a knife to the throat while she was in a fit of madness. The way it was framed, it was treated as if he knew she'd never break free of her insanity, as she mentions a monster coming after her every night.]]

-->"I don't know how many times I have to say this. I am sane. I am perfectly and completely sane. I shouldn't be in here at all. There's been a ''terrible mistake''."
* PaedoHunt: Mad Hatter is reinvented as a pedophile here. Also, Amadeus and his wife are hinted to have sexually abused their young daughter and Mad Dog definitely raped her.
* PaintingTheMedium: Every character gets a different style of speech bubble. For example, Batman's is black with white lettering; Maxie gets blue with a Greek font... Joker's lines don't ''have'' speech bubbles containing them (but did have a deranged red color) and Clayface's were... just plain weird.
** While probably unintentional, Maxie Zeus talking about how he's a god in blue speech bubbles brought [[Comicbook/{{Watchmen}} someone else]] to mind.
** This can lead to difficulty in reading some dialogue, especially with the Joker's jagged-red font.

---> '''Grant Morrison''': "Alert readers will perceive him as AIDS on two legs and realise that he represents the fear of what lies beyond the curtain in the Tunnel of Love. If we take all the encounters with villains as corresponding to various psychological states, then this one is Batman's fear of sexuality as something intrinsically unclean."

---> '''Grant Morrison''': "This Batman is a frightened, threatened boy who has made himself terrible at the cost of his own humanity. He is completely incapable of any kind of sexual relationship. He has made himself hard and domineering in order that he might never be hurt or abandoned again."

* TranquilFury: Amadeus Arkham enters this when he is charged with dealing with his family's killer, ultimately leading him to electrocute him to death a year after the event.
* ThereAreNoTherapists: Well there are therapists, just not ''good ones''. The therapists in the Asylum are all hopelessly corrupt, just as insane as the inmates, scared out of their minds, or all three.

* TheUnfought: Lots and lots. Batman only fights Killer Croc, and assaults both Clayface and Dr. Destiny. But the rest of the rogue gallery goes completely unfought - Joker, Two Face, Black Mask, Mad Hatter, Maxie Zeus, and the Scarecrow are all seen by never attacked by Batman.

** While Amadeus and Constance ''possibly'' sexually abused their young daughter Harriet, Mad Dog definitely did before brutally murdering her.
** The Mad Hatter calls young blonde girls "bitches" during a rant to Batman, implying that he's a pedophile.

-->'''Joker''': He seems so frail in that wheelchair but all he has to do is ''look'' at you and you stop being ''real''. He does ''so'' want to look at ''you'', darling.*

-->'''Joker''': He seems so frail in that wheelchair but all he has to do is ''look'' at you and you stop being ''real''. He does ''so'' want to look at ''you'', darling.

* SmallReferencePools: We have UsefulNotes/CarlJung, ''Literature/AliceInWonderland'', ''Film/{{Psycho}}'', Literature/TheBible, Creator/AleisterCrowley, TarotMotifs, quantum mechanics, and much, much more.

-->'''Arkham:''' [''narration''] Many years later, when I became aware of the significance of the beetle as a symbol of rebirth, I realized that she was simply trying to protect herself from something, [[BeetleManiac in the only way that made sense to her]].

[-[[caption-width-right:350:[[NothingExcitingEverHappensHere The most serious house on the most serious street in America, where nothing remotely silly will ever happen.]]]]-]

->''Sometimes... sometimes I think the Asylum is a head. We're inside a huge head that dreams us all into being. Perhaps it's '''your''' head, Batman. Arkham is a looking glass... and '''we''' are '''you'''.''

* AllPsychologyIsFreudian: Averted, mostly. Morrison actually wanted to write a Batman story based on Jungian psychology for a change, which emphasizes the idea that there are many parts of the psyche of which we are unaware. There's still some Freudian vibes, though - Batman and Arkham are both fucked up because of their parents, and there's a lot of vaginas as symbols.

* AnimalMotifs: Clown fish are featured in Amadeus' flashbacks. Morrison explains in the annotations that they signify both the viscica piscis, the relationship between the folk symbolism that fish share with the moon, the Joker (You know, clowns and all that) and crossdressing.

* ElectroconvulsiveTherapyIsTorture: Dr Amadeus Arkham really does use the electroshock machine for torture and murder, subjecting Mad Dog Hawkins to "treatment" that slowly fries him alive as revenge for what Hawkins did to his wife and daughter. This being a) the 1920s and b) Arkham Asylum, it's dismissed as an unfortunate accident. Meanwhile, Maxie Zeus is subject to electroconvulsive, but [[AvertedTrope doesn't find it torturous]], in fact, it feeds into his delusions of being the god of lightning.

* FakeKillScare: This is how Joker provokes Batman into coming for him: [[spoiler:over the phone, he acts as though he's blinding a nurse with a pencil through her eyes. When Batman gets there, the nurse is completely unharmed]].

* LiteraryAllusionTitle: That is line 65 from Phillip Larkin's poem [[http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar5.htm "Church Going"]], that describes the fascination Larkin, an agnostic, feels for churches, recognizing that even when humanity will lose all faith in gods, it will always need churches as a place to reflect about life, death, marriage, etc... then you realize that the comic is about a BedlamHouse, and it implies humanity will always need a place like that...

* SecretIdentityApathy:

** The last words of the comic:
---> '''Two Face''': [[Literature/AlicesAdventuresInWonderland "Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards."]]

* TheUnfought: Lots and lots. Batman only fights Killer Croc, and assaults both Clayface and Dr. Destiny. But the rest of the rogue gallery goes completely unfought - Joker, Two Face, Black Mask, Mad Hatter, Maxie Zeus, Scarecrow...
* ViewersAreGeniuses: You'll get much more out of it if you have some knowledge of psychological symbolism. If not...
** Multiple re-reads are practically mandatory as well.
** It also has the problem that, while the art is wonderful, it often does a poor job of actually portraying the events of the scene and at many points has omitted important symbolic details for the sake of maintaining its distinctive style. Reading the script, even without annotations, reveals a lot.
* WeirdMoon: Two-Face has decided it's a coin, scarred face up, which is why God had to [[CrapsackWorld create the world]].

* WouldHurtAChild: While Amadeus and Constance ''possibly'' sexually abused their young daughter Harriet, Mad Dog definitely did before brutally murdering her.

* AprilFoolsPlot: The story takes place on April Fools' Day.

* BedlamHouse: Arkham at its finest, folks. And by finest, we mean "most pants-crappingly scary".

* CharacterDevelopment: The whole point of the plot is Batman overcoming his own personal demons and issues to become a true hero. Grant Morrison notes in the annotated script that the ending is meant to symbolize Batman's transformation from a hurt little boy obsessing over the death of his parents to the brilliant detective hero of [[Comicbook/BatmanGrantMorrison Morrison's Batman epic]]. Essentially it's the death of one interpretation and the birth of another.
** Another example of this led to it being CanonDiscontinuity: [[OOCIsSeriousBusiness Two-Face ignores a flip of his coin.]]

* CreepyCrossdresser: Amadeus dresses up in his mother's wedding dress after discovering the corpses of his wife and daughter. Dr. Cavendish wears a bridal gown during the climax. Finally, the Joker (in a more downplayed case) as he is seen wearing high heels. Although, in the original script, Joker was supposed to dress similar to Madonna in her "Open up your heart" music video.

** Not only Amadeus's parents, it's implied Amadeus Arkham and Constance, his wife, sexually abused Harriet, their daughter. This is backed up by the drawing she did of her parents, which if you look closely also appears to be external female genitalia.

* AllPsychologyIsFreudian: Averted, mostly. Morrison actually wanted to write a Batman story based on Jungian psychology for a change. There's still some Freudian vibes, though - Batman and Arkham are both fucked up because of their parents, and there's a lot of vaginas.

* ClimaxBoss: Killer Croc.

* TheComicallySerious: The Batman here is intentionally depicted at his most humorless, as a commentary on his borderline psychotic 1980s incarnations.

* CoversAlwaysLie: The cover above is that of the 15th anniversary UpdatedRerelease, which suggests The Joker is the main villain. While Joker does show up, he isn't the main antagonist. The original 1989 cover instead has a ''very'' detailed drawing of a bat flying by Arkham Asylum.
** And the Joker is the TrueFinalBoss after the BigBad is gone.

* DarkerAndEdgier: In case the rest of this page didn't make it clear, this book takes a deep dive into the underlying psychology of Batman and his rogues, with all of the horror that entails.

* DerangedAnimation: Minus the "animation" part since it's a comic, but the art style definitely revels in this and milks it for all the creepiness it's worth.
* EldritchLocation: After being previously hinted, this version of Arkham is a focusing point for madness that expands in all directions of time, created by Gotham and [[AnimalisticAbomination the Bat.]]

* FakeKillScare: This is how Joker provokes Batman into coming for him: [[spoiler:over the phone, he acts as though he's blinding a nurse with a pencil through her eyes.]]
* FoeRomanceSubtext[=/=]HomoeroticSubtext: Part of Morrison's interpretation of Batman. Joker, sensing Batman's fragile state of mind and repressed sexuality, deliberately fucks with him, the most memorable part being when he [[TheComicallySerious slaps Batman's ass]].

%%* GuiltByAssociationGag: Professor Milo.
* HollywoodPsychology: The idea that ComicBook/TheJoker reinvents himself every day because he finds reality so overwhelming, so that he might be a harmless prankster one moment and a homicidal maniac the next. Amongst other things, this reconciles the wildly different versions of the character that have appeared since the 40's. The problem is the doctors call this "Super Sanity" and imply that perhaps he is perfectly sensible to live this way, maybe more so than the rest, and that this "Super Sanity" is unprecedented. Apart from not knowing what sanity means, the doctors are actually describing a very much precedented condition, namely dissociation or a psychotic break from reality, albeit an extreme case. The doctors are obviously quacks, but the term has become popular in the Joker's fandom.
** It's 20 years later, but in their ''[[ComicBook/BatmanGrantMorrison Batman and Robin]]'' series, Morrison has Joker admit to the new Robin, Damian Wayne, that he isn't really crazy ("just differently sane") and affirms Damian's accusations that he really isn't as crazy as he lets everyone think he is, confirming that these doctors are not meant to be taken seriously and ComicBook/TheJoker is supposed to be nothing more than a sophisticated ManipulativeBastard . Again, this is ''20 years later'', so it's not exactly the best authority on the subject, even if it is from the same author.

* ImpaledPalm: Batman does it to himself with a shard of glass.
* ImpaledWithExtremePrejudice: [[spoiler:Killer Croc.]]

* TheReveal: [[spoiler:The killer of Amadeus Arkham's mother was Amadeus Arkham himself. He had surpressed the memory of it. But once he remembers it, this drives him into insanity. Also, the creature that had been haunting his mother every night was a gigantic bat.]]

* MentalTimeTravel and StableTimeLoop: According to Morrison's script, the madness of the asylum's inmates echoed back through time which drove Mrs. Arkham (and, later, her son Amadeus) insane. But Batman's anger and confusion is what drove the two Arkhams over the edge, which leads Amadeus to write about the Bat, so [[spoiler:Cavendish]] would set the events of the comic in motion, which caused the Arkhams to go insane. All because Dr. Destiny's dream-based reality-warping powers had allowed the Asylum to turn into a nightmare landscape where the veil of time was thin to begin with. And that only happened because the inmates had taken over, and ''that'' only happened because Batman had in his anger and confusion put them in there to begin with. Finally, Cavendish finishes Arkham's spell, which is intended to exorcise the mad demon that infests the asylum, but because it's April Fools' Day, everything works backward and he instead is the one to send it back in time and infest the asylum in the first place.

* MommyIssues: Both Batman and Arkham have metric truckloads of them.

* SanityHasAdvantages: But not as many as you'd hope.

--> '''Two Face''': [[Literature/AlicesAdventuresInWonderland "Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards."]]