History Headscratchers / BatmanTheAnimatedSeries

*** Should be notice that Batman is not criminal's babysitter. He made a commitment to save innocent people from criminals, no to save criminals from criminals.

** You know? A lot of animal rights activist do eat meat. The idea that people in favor of animal rights are strict Vegans is a Hollywood stereotype, most people are against animal cruelty and are not Vegetarian, and there are also many people inside the animal rights movement in general that do consider ethically acceptable to kill animals if is for things like food and essential medical experiments, as far as even in those cases is done in a humane way. There are many different positions regarding animal rights, some more moderate than others. So, in a parallelism, disregarding the fact that she is crazy, she can be a plant rights activist and still acknowledge that eating plants is necessary for the health, while is not the same as extinguish an entire plant species for a building (something that even normal people can find questionable).

*** The troper above was presumably just misremembering the episode in question. As for why he chooses an overly elaborate and potentially unreliable method of killing rather than going the "just shoot him" method... the dude ''is'' a cartoon supervillain. The viewer does have to make ''some'' allowances for unnecessary ostentation in his methods. If you want a story about a murderer who kills his victims bluntly and with no unnecessary affectations or delays whatsoever and you've chosen ''Batman: The Animated Series'' as the best place to look, frankly you've made a bad choice there.

*** But the Judge DID got around to the Riddler, but chose to drop a book on him and make corny puns. Batman and the police weren't there at the time to stop him. The question wasn't "why he didn't go after the other villains?". The OP asked "why didn't the judge kill Riddler right there on the spot?"

** And also, ''because'' General Vreeland is at that moment ''charging towards them in a tank''. Most people, if finding themselves in such a position, would also be likely to try and put as much distance between themselves and the tank as possible. The "flight" part of "fight or flight" kicked in, basically; I imagine Harley would rather allow Veronica to go on her merry way at a point when there's ''not'' a crazed Patton-esque maniac in an armored vehicle bearing down on her.

** Leaving aside suggestions of sublimated pedophilia, the most likely explanation is that Tetch views Alice as, well, Alice simply because he views ''everything'' around him through the lens of ''Alice in Wonderland''. As one example, notice how after mind-controlling her he casts his boss -- depicted throughout the episode as a loud, overbearing and bullying female authority figure -- as the Red Queen, a loud, overbearing and bullying female authority figure in the book. He's a lonely, anti-social man fixated on his favourite book and increasingly detached and dissociated from the people and world around him. So naturally, the sweet ingenue he's got a crush on is cast as Alice, the most important person in the book; because she's also the most important person in Tetch's life. She's not an exact match for the actual character because of course she isn't, but that doesn't matter to Tetch because, as the events of the episode clearly demonstrate, he's becoming increasingly delusional, and the more delusional he gets the more he tries to force everything in his life to fit the book.

** Because he doesn't want to. He wants what he wants in reality, not just a computer simulation of what he wants generated by his mind. He dumps Batman in there just to get him out of the way, because Batman tends to prevent Mad Hatter from taking what he wants in reality.

[[/folder]

[[Folder: Bat hang glider]]

** I don't think we're supposed to view Clock King as sympathetic at all, or at least not ''very'' sympathetic; he is, after all, an uptight ControlFreak taking out his frustrations and failures on a man who did nothing more than give him what was clearly supposed to just be well-meaning and well-intentioned advice. The point is not that Mayor Hill was wrong to give him that advice, but that even good intentions can sometimes balloon out to have consequences that were unforeseen and not necessarily good.

** Describing Ivy's plant creatures as "sentient and autonomous" seems to be at least a bit of a stretch. At very least, what sentience or autonomy they ''do'' have for the most part appears to be incredibly uncomplicated, being more or less limited to the kind that would enable them to complete basic tasks like STOMP HERE or PICK UP THING or EAT POINTY-EARED THING on Ivy's orders. There are maybe one or two examples in the entire series which demonstrate any kind of complexity beyond this, and these usually turn out to be mere puppets programmed and controlled by Ivy with no independent thought or will of their own, and which tend to devolve incredibly quickly into STOMP HERE AND EAT POINTY-EARED THING mode as soon as they've served Ivy's purposes; they're really more "extensions of Ivy's intelligence and will" rather than sentient beings in their own right. In short, they don't seem to have any kind of meaningful intelligence, autonomy or "soul" that would bring them anywhere close to being on the level of most animal life, let alone human sentience.
** And considering that if left unchecked they'd mostly obey Ivy's orders by stomping around killing as many non-plants as possible if Batman didn't stop them with terminal force, frankly he doesn't really have much choice for the most part. "Bigoted hypocrite" it might make him if we want to get all DracoInLeatherPants about it, but Batman letting every human and animal life form in Gotham City die horribly at the hands of mindless plant-monsters acting unthinkingly under the orders of a murderous sociopathic lunatic because he was too busy wringing his hands over the political correctness of killing glorified weeds that can move about and kill people would arguably be the far more morally reprehensible course of action.

** I don't think we're supposed to view Clock King as sympathetic at all, or at least not ''very'' sympathetic; he is, after all, an uptight ControlFreak taking out his frustrations and failures on a man who did nothing more than give him what was clearly nothing more than well-meaning and well-intentioned advice. The point is not that Mayor Hill was wrong to give him that advice, but that even good intentions can sometimes balloon out to have consequences that were unforeseen and not necessarily good.

** Describing Ivy's plant creatures as "sentient and autonomous" seems to be at least a bit of a stretch. At very least, what sentience or autonomy they ''do'' have for the most part appears to be incredibly uncomplicated, being more or less limited to the kind that would enable them to complete basic tasks like STOMP HERE or PICK UP THING or CRUNCH POINTY-EARED THING on Ivy's orders. There are maybe one or two examples in the entire series which demonstrate any kind of complexity beyond this, and these usually turn out to be mere puppets programmed and controlled by Ivy with no independent thought or will of their own, and which tend to devolve incredibly quickly into STOMP HERE AND CRUNCH POINTY-EARED THING mode as soon as they've served Ivy's purposes; they're really more "extensions of Ivy's intelligence and will" rather than sentient beings in their own right. In short, they don't seem to have any kind of meaningful intelligence, autonomy or "soul" that would bring them anywhere close to being on the level of most animal life, let alone human sentience. And considering that if left unchecked they'd mostly stomp around killing as many non-plants as possible if Batman didn't stop them with terminal force, frankly he doesn't really have much choice for the most part. "Bigoted hypocrite" it might make him if we want to get all DracoInLeatherPants about it, but Batman letting every human and animal life form in Gotham City die horribly at the hands of mindless plant-monsters acting unthinkingly under the orders of a murderous sociopathic lunatic because he was too busy wringing his hands over the political correctness of killing glorified weeds that can move about and kill people would arguably be the far more morally reprehensible course of action.

** Describing Ivy's plant creatures as "sentient and autonomous" seems to be at least a bit of a stretch. At very least, what sentience or autonomy they ''do'' have for the most part appears to be incredibly uncomplicated, being more or less limited to the kind that would enable them to complete basic tasks like STOMP HERE or PICK UP THING or CRUNCH POINTY-EARED THING on Ivy's orders. There are maybe one or two examples in the entire series which demonstrate any kind of complexity beyond this, and these usually turn out to be mere puppets programmed and controlled by Ivy with no independent thought or will of their own, and which tend to devolve incredibly quickly into STOMP HERE AND CRUNCH POINTY-EARED THING mode as soon as they've served Ivy's purposes; they're really more "extensions of Ivy's intelligence and will" rather than sentient beings in their own right. In short, they don't seem to have any kind of meaningful intelligence, autonomy or "soul" that would bring them anywhere close to being on the level of most animal life, let alone human sentience. And considering that if left unchecked they'd mostly stomp around killing as many non-plants as possible if Batman didn't stop them with terminal force, frankly he doesn't really have much choice for the most part. "Bigoted hypocrite" it might make him if we want to get all DracoInLeatherPants about it, but Batman letting every human and animal life form in Gotham City die horribly at the hands of mindless plant-monsters acting unthinkingly under the orders of a murderous sociopathic lunatic because he was too busy wringing his hands over the political correctness of killing things which are basically weeds that can move about and kill people would be the far more morally reprehensible course of action.

* Why is it that nearly all of Batman's foes are sent to Arkham? It's an insane asylum, not a prison! Why would they put non-insane villains like Freeze there? I've seen people use the argument that only Arkham has the equipment to keep Freeze alive, or keep the superhuman Killer Crock locked up, to which I say: What. The. Fuck. Why would a psychiatric institution, of all places, be the one place with such equipment!?
** It's worth noting that everybody doesn't get sent to Arkham. Penguin usually ends up in Blackgate, Bane is implied to be dead (along with Candy) until the soft reboot to connect with Superman and as for why Arkham has better equipment the obvious answer is that after genuine super villains start showing up in Gotham they simply decided one place to house them and spent their budget on that place. After all what are you going to do with Freeze, Croc, or Clayface if you ever catch them. The better question by the end of the series is why they never open a new facility for the quote unquote regular crazies.

* In the ''DCAU'', if an Arkham patient pretends to be normal for weeks, would the doctor let him/her out? Why doesn't Joker pretend to be sane? Clearly he's aware he is crazy.

If Selina Kyle's blonde hair is a dye job, then why is her fur blonde when she gets turned into a cat-mutant hybrid by Dr. Dorian?

** Well, "it stinks to look like a deformed monster" for one. For two, presumably Matt Hagen does not find being a slimy lump of living clay a particularly pleasant way to go throughout life. For three, spending ''eternity'' being a slimy lump of living clay presumably multiplies the unpleasantness of point two by infinity. For three, WhoWantsToLiveForever? For four, it's basically completely upended the life of wealth and fame and constant adulation that Hagen craved and was pretty used to. For five, it chafes his ego; yes, he can pretend to be anyone and live his life that way, but that means that the real Matt Hagen is being ignored and unseen -- the friends and lovers aren't really Matt Hagen's, they're those of the person Matt Hagen is pretending to be. For six, since Matt Hagen is basically a sentient lump of clay now, he is presumably unable to do a lot of the fun stuff -- sex, drinking, drugs, etc -- that people generally like to do with girlfriends and friends and such. For seven, maintaining a single form appears to take a lot of effort and concentration that is hard for Matt to maintain for indefinite periods of time. For eight, if Matt Hagen loses concentration and suddenly turns into a massive lump of clay in front of people, they will likely find it rather gross and may not want to spend time for him. For nine... guy's gone completely loco.