Web Original / Legends Of The Caped Crusader

An activist^*(and bodyguard).
A healer.
A gunman.
A slaying.
An orphan.
A vow.
A crusader.

Legends of the Caped Crusader is a Batman fan-project by DoctorEnn on Reddit, specifically the subreddit for Hero Forge, an online tabletop miniature creator. The project, inspired by the similar Children of Gotham, uses Hero Forge to create reimagined versions of the Dark Knight's rogues gallery and supporting cast, which are then posted to the subreddit, along with comments from the good Doctor themself detailing the character's backstory.

The project has inspired a number of Recursive Fanfictions, all of which form a loosely-connected Shared Universe known as the Legendsverse.

Legends of the Caped Crusader contains examples of the following tropes:

• Adaptation Name Change:
  • Like other modern interpretations, Arkham Asylum gets a name change, this time to the Arkham Rehabilitation Center for the Criminally Disturbed.
  • Professor Hugo Strange becomes Dr. Hugo Strang, with Strange being an unflattering nickname he's called behind his back.
  • Gillian G. Loeb gets a Mysterious Middle Initial as a nod to one of his inspirations, G. Gordon Liddy.
  • Condiment King here takes his name from the two separate incarnations of the character: Buddy Standler from BTAS and Rebirth, and Mitchell Mayo from the New 52.
  • Selina Kyle's costumed identity is known simply as "the Cat", rather than Catwoman (though this isn't without precedent; see Mythology Gag below).
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: In most continuities, Bruce and Selina meet as adults once they've already started their costumed careers. Here, they were Childhood Friends during the few months Bruce stayed in an orphanage after Thomas and Martha were killed. When Bruce left, the loss of him as an anchor sent Selina down the path to delinquency.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: On Earth-0, Jonathan Crane is a gangling stringbean of a man often dressed in shabby clothing — it's how he got his Appropriated Appelation. Here, however, he's a Sharp-Dressed Man with cheekbones and a goatee that are just as sharp.
• Adaptational Badass: Oswald Cobblepot goes from a mid-level mobster Batman can't seem to get rid of to The Chessmaster feared and respected by everyone with power in Gotham City.
• Adaptational Curves: Sofia Falcone isn't the wall of muscle she's usually depicted as, being more slim and conventionally-sized.
• Adaptational Diversity: Garfield Lynns becomes Lynn Garfield, former firefighter turned vengeful arsonist after the murder of her wife.
• Adaptational Dye-Job: Nora Fries, typically depicted as a blonde, is rendered as dark-haired, as are the women Victor kidnaps thinking they're her.
• Adaptational Early Appearance: Poison Ivy, who didn't appear in the comics until 27 years after Batman's debut, is here depicted as modern Gotham's first supervillain.
• Adaptational Heroism: Roxy Rocket is no longer a bank robber who gets off on putting herself In Harm's Way, but an adrenaline junkie stuntwoman who has a tendency to endanger civilians while putting on death-defying public stunts.
• Adaptational Intelligence:
  • Instead of a brutish sewer-dweller, Killer Croc here is depicted as a mob boss, with enough business acumen to run Club Tropicana (a renamed Iceberg Lounge) and remain a major player in the Gotham underworld.
  • Condiment King goes from a comedian turned mind-controlled Silver Age throwback to a remarkably savvy crook adapting to the changing times by affecting the appearance of a supervillain.
• Adaptational Job Change: Hamilton Hill goes from a crooked mayor working for the mob to an Amoral Attorney also working for the mob.
• Adaptational Nationality: Roxy Rocket goes from American to Australian, with (we are told) a foul mouth to match.
• Adaptational Sexuality: In her debut in The New Batman Adventures, Roxy Rocket was a textbook case of Villainesses Want Heroes, having a very intense crush on Batman. That's still the case here to a lesser extent, but she also mentions that there are plenty of denizens of Hollywood — men, women, and otherwise — who she's had dalliances with.
• Adaptational Wimp:
  • Poison Ivy is no longer the superhuman Plant Person she is in canon, instead "merely" being a CEO turned crazed cult leader with a brilliant grasp of chemistry.
• Adaptational Villainy: In the comics, Gilda Dent was Two-Face's heartbroken ex-wife who was almost as spotless as her Apollo, implication that she might be the Holiday Killer notwithstanding. Here, she's an aspiring criminal mastermind who attempted to have Harvey killed twice, slept with DA Hamilton Hill to get herself more connections, and is The Unapologetic for all of it. Oh, and she's blonde instead of dark-haired.
  • In Batman: The Cult, Deacon Blackfire captured, tortured, and almost completely broke Batman, and was only defeated when both Bats and Robin stormed his lair with tranquilizer machine guns. Here, a lone Batman pointedly refuses to break in his encounter with the cult, and Blackfire himself is Dragged Off to Hell by his "benefactor" after his defeat.
• Age Lift: Dick Grayson goes from young enough to be Bruce's first ward to old enough to have been a mentor to him before he even started out as a vigilante.
• The Alcoholic:
  • KGBeast's faulty memory is mentioned to be the result of more than just his fondness for vodka.
  • One of Edward Nashton's pictures has him with a bottle in his hand, which is implied to be one of the reasons his girlfriend left him.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • The official story is that Joe Chill was just a Loony Fan, but there are enough weird inconsistencies (inexplicable gaps in security that Chill exploited, alleged ties between him and Gotham's underworld) that some people — including Bruce Wayne — aren't convinced.
  • Killer Croc's exact origins are left a mystery. Is he a human with a rare genetic condition? An actual crocodile mutated by toxic waste? A refugee from an Alternate Universe where the dinosaurs never died out? Not even Croc himself knows, but he's here and he runs one of Gotham's biggest clubs, so we might as well roll with it.
  • KGBeast may or may not be the answer to the question "Who Shot JFK?"
  • Which of the Red Hood Collective was the one who became "the Survivor" after the Batman's raid on Axis Chemicals? Good luck figuring that one out.
• Animal Motifs: The Scarecrow from the perspective of a fear-gassed Batman has a number of insectoid features. Plenty of insects are poisonous, and there's also the old myth about earwigs crawling inside people's ears while they sleep, much like how Crane gets inside the heads of his victims.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Hugo Strang believes that the Batman is one of these, describing him as a "babau" (the east Mediterranean term for a boogeyman) born from the insanity afflicting Gotham City, acting as a carrier for it.
• Arc Words: The lore for Blackfire and his cult details the various evils they've committed over the years, but adds each time that it all went uninvestigated because "it's Gotham". It's subverted, though, when Batman comes along and wrecks the cult, "because it's Gotham. His Gotham."
• As the Good Book Says...: Or in this case, the Bad Book. The lore for Blackfire and his cult opens with a set of passages from the Bible of Crime espousing their Social Darwinist philosophy and condemning Batman for defying it by being a Hope Bringer for the citizens of Gotham.
• Beneath Notice: Condiment King thinks (or hopes) that he's this for the Batman, who spends most of his time taking down big-time supervillains and mob bosses, and less of it dealing with a bank robber with a gimmick. Time will tell if he's right...
• Berserk Button: If you value your life, do not call Oswald Cobblepot "Penguin". The last guy who made that mistake got fished out of the Sprang River a month later and labeled a Suicide by Sea. It might have been, too.
• Bland-Name Product: Poison Ivy's introduction has her giving a PLANTalk (rather than a TEDTalk) in Metropolis.
• Blasphemous Boast: The Start of Darkness that led to Pamela Isley becoming a supervillain began with a declaration that her company would find a way to cure death. Unfortunately, her search for that cure led to an encounter with the Green and the birth of Poison Ivy.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Scarecrow's personal philosophy is that fear is what keeps people safe from rape, murder, or worse, and thus superheroes are a danger to the natural order, since they give people hope; he reserves special ire for the Batman, since not only does he operate in Gotham City, the most fear-ridden place on Earth, but he does so while appearing to be only human.
• Body Horror:
  • One image in "File #005" shows a former member of Hedera wandering the streets of Gotham, emaciated, strung out, and with a massive tangle of plant matter clinging to her left arm that the caption describes as an "infection" which eventually had to be amputated.
  • From the neck up, Mr. Freeze is a withered, inhumanly pallid corpse. From the neck down, he has a gnarled-looking body permanently crusted with ice.
  • Kirk's Man-Bat transformation is depicted as clearly painful, the doctor's face contorting in pain to show off his sharpening teeth as his hands grow fur and claws and wings burst from his back.
• Brick Joke: Attached to Selina's message to Bruce is a note from Alfred reassuring him that he checked the Manor for anything missing after she left. At the end of the message itself, Selina adds a PPS:
  Selina: Tell Alfred to stop checking the silverware closet. Please, darling, I have some standards.
• Bystander Syndrome: What kept Deacon Blackfire and his cult from being discovered for so long. Who really cares if the odd hobo or streetwalker never comes out of that old church, or that you can hear creepy chanting from nowhere if you're out late, or that corpses will sometimes wash up around the area that look like they've been drained of their blood? It's Gotham. Until one costumed Gothamite comes along and decides to look a little deeper...
• Composite Character: DoctorEnn freely admits that many of the character concepts draw on various other continuities. Tropes Are Tools, though, and the reimagined characters are more than capable of standing on their own.
  • Many of Deacon Blackfire's aesthetic affectations are references to classic Bat-foe the Mad Monk; the Mother Superior of his cult, Dala, is herself a henchman of the Monk in the mainline DC universe.
  • This universe's Deadshot is combined with Deathstroke, since DoctorEnn kept getting the two mixed up. Even their names are combined: Floyd Lawton and Slade Wilson become Floyd Wilson.
  • Stephanie Brown did briefly have a career as the Spoiler as in the comics, but once Batman took down her father, he took her on as this universe's Oracle.
• Cool Aunt: Bruce's aunt Harriet served as his guardian after his parents were killed, and though she wasn't exactly privy to his vigilante ambitions, she did provide some useful help to young Bruce: plenty of time to himself to study up on whatever he might need to know, an impromptu crash course in the kind of acting and showmanship necessary for a secret identity, and a good foundation for a reputation as a billionaire playboy.
• Cosmic Horror Reveal: Maybe. Scarecrow's references to Eldritch Abominations that he believes fear protects against, his calling Batman "the Pawn of the Devourer of Fear", and his fear toxin hallucination of a monstrous Batman being labeled as "Barbatos" all imply that Simon Hurt's "bat-god" may very well exist in this universe.
• The Cracker: After getting fired from Question, the newly-minted Riddler uses a backdoor he installed on the servers during his time there to sneak past the increasingly large and baffled cybersecurity team and steal their stolen data for his Revenge scheme (see Riddle Me This below).
• Cryptic Conversation: One of Joe Chill's only statements made during his trial was a remark of "You'll just have to figure it out, won't you?" in response to a crowd of reporters shouting questions about his motive for killing the Waynes.
• Cult:
  • Hedera, Pamela Isley's company, becomes one after her vision of the Green.
  • Deacon Blackfire, true to form, is the head of one of these.
• Dark Is Evil: Invoked by the Acolytes of the Blackfire, who couldn't be happier about it, and are quite miffed by the fact that the Batman invokes the opposite.
• Deadly Game: The Riddler's plan comes to a climax when he hijacks the airwaves to broadcast The Riddle Factory, a game show featuring old grudges from his past and challenging them to get smart -- or die! It's actually implied that at least some of the riddles were actually Intentionally Unwinnable, since the narration from Riddler's perspective refers to Batman saving his ex as helping her "cheat her way out of death".
• Decomposite Character:
  • Calendar Man's usual identity of Julian Gregory Day is here divided across two brothers: Julian Day, the Calendar Man, and Gregory Day, Gotham City police captain who uses his murderous brother to assassinate key witnesses to the GCPD's corruption.
  • Penguin's role in the comics as "mobster club owner with an animal gimmick" gets given to Killer Croc, while Penguin becomes a Knowledge Broker and "problem solver" that readers have likened to the Kingpin.
  • Jim and Barbara Gordon both get different aspects of Jim's usual role as Batman's Friend on the Force: Jim as the police higher-up who holds the GCPD back from going too hard after Batman, and Barbara as the beat cop who helps with his investigations.
• Deducing the Secret Identity: Considering how well they know each other, it wasn't hard for Selina Kyle to figure out who was under the Batman's cowl. Of course, the World's Greatest Detective had already done the same for her.
• Despair Event Horizon: Lynn Garfield crosses it hard after her wife's "tragic death", becoming the supervillain Firefly to take revenge on the FDGC and Daggett Industries.
• Disabled in the Adaptation:
  • Carmine Falcone here is an old man — well, older — confined to a wheelchair.
  • Commissioner Gordon is also wheelchair-bound after getting shot in the spine.
• Dramatic Irony: "File #017" has Harleen Quinzel saying that clearly the Batman is the greatest threat facing Gotham... over a shot of the Joker, her future puddin', hard at work in a chemical lab.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Penguin's mother is the only person in the world he cares about, and the only one who genuinely cares about him. He works to keep her Locked Out of the Loop when it comes to his criminal empire, but it's hinted she might have caught on...
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: When Batman's fear gas hallucinations turn into a flashback to his parents' murder, Scarecrow quips that they've found his "trigger point"... as the camera focuses on the barrel of Joe Chill's gun.
• Face-Revealing Turn: Harvey, now Two-Face, gives his would-be killer one of these before shooting her, along with a Pre-Mortem One-Liner:
  Oh. I'm sorry, Gilda. I truly am. But the thing is... Harvey isn't here right now.
• Facial Horror:
  • What little we can see of the Joker isn't pretty: hair reduced to long, stringy patches, pallid skin, and of course, a Cheshire Cat Grin with a few too many teeth in it.
  • Harvey's once-handsome mug, after a bullet to the face and a reconstructive surgery turned assassination attempt, is none too pretty, with burned flesh all down his right side and the flesh around that side of his mouth ragged and torn, revealing a lipless snarl.
• Fan Disservice: "File #010: Deacon Blackfire" has a shot of a topless Julie Madison... covered in occult scrawlings, sobbing in terror, and with a knife to her throat.
• Femme Fatale:
  • Poison Ivy zigzags this: her main method of "seduction" is using her hallucinogens to brainwash people, but the picture of her in Arkham has her posed as if to properly seduce an unseen interviewer.
• Gangbangers: King Tut's oeuvre, controlling most of the gangs across Gotham's East Side.
• Giftedly Bad: Downplayed with King Tut: there are a few songs on his self-produced albums that aren't half bad, but overall he's firmly middling, though being that he's a ruthless gang leader, no one really wants to tell him that.
• Girlboss Feminist: Pamela Isley was this to a T before her supervillain career got started, with DoctorEnn citing Elizabeth Holmes as an inspiration.
• The Ghost:
  • Batman himself is almost never shown on panel in any of the files; some have him conveniently off-screen, Bruce Wayne out of costume features in a couple, and we get to see Scarecrow's fear toxin-induced vision of "Barbatos", but the cape and cowl itself is only seen in "File #017" and the Christmas Episode, and only the latter shows it in any real detail.
  • Jervis Tetch, the Mad Hatter, has been mentioned a time or two (Scarecrow cites him as one of the inspirations behind his fear toxin, and a message from Oracle in "File #016: The Bat Cloud" mentions an Alice going missing), but hasn't yet appeared in the flesh.
• Good Bad Girl: Fittingly for a character inspired by Stevie Nicks, Harriet Kane was one of these in her younger days (though with significantly less of a cocaine habit).
• Harmful to Minors: Selina Kyle's Dark and Troubled Past got started when she found her dad dead in his chair from a self-inflicted gunshot.
• He Knows Too Much: Lynn Garfield's wife, Dr. Theodora Carson, started noticing some odd irregularities with the design of the FIREFLY suit, ones that could make the suit incredibly dangerous to use. Not long after, she died in a blaze that FDGC officers were strangely slow to put out...
• Heel Realization: Roxy Rocket undergoes one of these when Batman finally shows up in time to put a stop to her latest stunt, with his genuine concern for her life shattering the assumptions she'd made about him.
  Roxy Rocket: And suddenly, just for a second, I knew him. This complete stranger, in a crazy costume, who runs around rooftops getting into fights all night, this guy who should be just a complete thrill junkie like me? He wasn’t interested in any of that. He was concerned about me. In that second, my life was the most important thing in his world.
• Heroic Willpower: Just when it seems that Batman's broken down under the strain of Crane's fear toxin, a vision of his younger self in the moment he made his Heroic Vow gives him the encouragement he needs to power through and turn the tide.
• Hidden Depths: Condiment King's eponymous arsenal is actually homemade. Apparently Buddy's parents managed to teach him some things about sauce-making in between making each other's lives miserable or making his life miserable.
• Higher Understanding Through Drugs: Pamela Isley's first brush with the Green comes courtesy of a mixture of coke, mescaline, and some comic book super-science chemicals of her own design.
• Hotter and Sexier:
  • Maxie Zeus, of all people, gets this, being changed from a history professor turned mobster with a gimmick to the son of Greek immigrants who made a killing in the porno business. One of his pictures has him flanked by an "Aphrodite" with a tommy gun, a dress bordering on Navel-Deep Neckline, and a very tight adherence to the Buxom Beauty Standard.
  DoctorEnn: 'Maxie Zeus' doesn't just accidentally sound like a porn name in this universe, let's put it that way.
  • Inverted/zigzagged with Poison Ivy, whose primary appearance goes from a scantily clad Plant Person to a bedraggled cult leader dressed like a cross between a druid and a mad scientist, but her classic look appears in a Green-induced hallucination as a Mythology Gag.
• Human Sacrifice:
  • Poison Ivy's cult appears to practice this. It's not made entirely clear why, but the caption implies it has to do with Pamela's search for an Elixir of Life.
  "To Heal, The Dead Rot Must Be Cut Away. (All Hail The Green.)"
  • The Acolytes of the Blackfire definitely practice this, and for them, it's very clear what the purpose is.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Implied, but the fact that one member of the Red Hood Collective is called "the Chef" does not bode well.
• In Spite of a Nail: Black Mask is largely the same here as in DC canon.
  DoctorEnn: If it ain't broke.
• Insufferable Genius: Riddler is this as always, but his Start of Darkness sees it bite him firmly in the ass: given how deeply unlikable he was, no one comes to his defense when Danny Mockenridge muscles him out of his own company.
• I Own This Town: The Penguin's influence is everywhere in Gotham City; there's no one he doesn't have files on and no one whose life he can't destroy if they cross one of his clients — except, of course, for Bruce Wayne.
  "His skill is knowing things. His job is getting things done. And his power is absolute."
• It Is Beyond Saving: Firefly sees Gotham this way, specifically comparing it to a controlled burn in a forest: clearing away the rot and undergrowth so the plants can grow back healthy. Of course, her burns are anything but "controlled"...
• Jump Scare: Executed with surprising effectiveness in "File #011: The Scarecrow". The POV shot of Scarecrow dosing Batman with fear gas initially seems to be a still image that's a bit bigger than normal, but look for too long and you'll get a flash of Scarecrow's hallucinatory monstrous form.
• Just Like Robin Hood: Every time the Cat robs someone, some struggling social program or other always gets an injection of untraceable cash from a mysterious source (after Selina herself has deducted a little finder's fee, of course).
• Kicked Upstairs: In this continuity, Jim Gordon's had an Adaptational Job Change to "Head of the Office of Community Relations", an essentially useless position meant to keep him from making trouble for the GCPD's more corrupt elements — but it's still high enough upstairs that he can keep in contact with a certain masked vigilante, as well as keep the press and the cops off his cape to an extent.
• Kill It with Fire: Both ways with Firefly: her wife died in a fire as a result of her employers bribing the fire department to let her burn, so now she uses the FIREFLY suit to pay them and Daggett Industries back.
• Knew It All Along:
  • Subverted with Poison Ivy, who it initially seems knows Batman's secret identity, but it's revealed that Bruce is just hallucinating her calling him by name since he knew Pamela before her turn to supervillainy; the real Ivy doesn't know who it is under the mask.
  • A possible case with Jim Gordon; like some other continuities, it's implied he may have already figured out who the Batman is, but either way, he's not telling.
  Hallucinatory!Ivy: Join me, Bruce...
  Real!Ivy: Join us in the Green, Batman.
• Last of His Kind: Anatoly Knyazev, AKA KGBeast, is described as one of the few members of the old-school Russian Bratva left after an internal conflict. The cybernetic arm and Charles Atlas Superpower probably helped with that.
• Laughing Mad: Who else but the Clown Prince of Crime? After seeing his new appearance, the last survivor of the Red Hood Collective starts laughing... and doesn't stop, even as he butchers the doctors who gave him his face-lift.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Killer Croc is a lot more genteel here than he usually is, but he's still a towering crocodile man with a Dark and Troubled Past and a lot of Suppressed Rage. Cross him, and he'll tear you apart.
• Locked into Strangeness: Jonathan Crane's hair goes prematurely gray after getting dosed with his own fear toxin.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Downplayed with Harper Row, here working as Bruce's PA, who doesn't exactly know her boss is secretly the Batman, but has enough of an idea to do her job effectively and maintain plausible deniability about his identity.
• Loony Fan: Joe Chill is here reinterpreted as one of these in the vein of Mark David Chapman or John Hinckley Jr., described as having both "idolised and resented" Martha Wayne.
• Mad Artist:
  • The Red Hood Collective. Their thinking goes: art is meant to challenge societal conventions; societal conventions tell us that "Thou Shalt Not Kill"; ergo, killing people for our art makes us the ultimate artists. Their membership includes the Conductor, the Dancer, the Painter, the Photographer, the Sculptor, the Writer, the Chef, and the Actors.
  • Selina Kyle in this universe is a downplayed example. In her civilian identity, she's an acclaimed postmodern artist; as the Cat, she leaves art pieces at the scenes of her thefts. Some in rather... unique mediums.
  "There are those who consider the loss of "Black Mood" one of the great artistic tragedies of the day, but to be totally fair, the man who it was painted on had to shower eventually."
• Madness Mantra: Riddler's lore post has him supremely confident about his plot to take Revenge on his former colleagues, sure that there's no one smart enough to find the set of The Riddle Factory...
  Until someone cracks the connection.
  Who is the Batman?
  And traces the signal.
  Who is the Batman?
  And hacks the Riddler.
  Who is the Batman?
  And helps that lying, cheating bitch Quinn cheat her way out of death.
  Who is the Batman?!
  And ruins everything.
  WHO IS THE BATMAN?!?!
• Man of Wealth and Taste: Plenty of examples, but the Penguin's black-and-purple fur-lined coat and Killer Croc's swanky white suit take the cake.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
  • Maxie Zeus' belief that he's the Greek god of thunder incarnate is almost certainly bunk, but there are still plenty of instances of Maxie having some truly insane luck that make the idea hard to rule out completely.
  • Firefly's madness is described as seeming like the fire is "calling to her", and the picture of her recovering in hospital has her exposed eye glowing a vivid orange, but as far as is known, she's just a relatively ordinary supervillain.
• Mentor Archetype: A young Selina Kyle finds one in, of all people, Richard Swift, who helps turn her from an average street punk to a brilliant artist and an even more brilliant thief.
• Mistaken for Cheating: One of the insults Gilda throws at Harvey is accusing him of an affair with Barbara Gordon, but it's implied that all the late nights they were out together was just them meeting with a friend.
• Mistaken Identity: The GCPD initially mistake the Man-Bat for the Batman, and send a hit squad after him expecting to take down a dangerous vigilante. Unfortunately for them, that wasn't what they were up against.
• More than Mind Control: The members of Hedera were lured like the victims of a siren by Poison Ivy's hallucinations, and it was incredibly potent; in her lore, one former member is still questioning how much of his will is his own months or possibly years later.
  "She got into his head and under his skin, and after it all, after the madness and the withdrawal and the clawing himself back, the thing that frightens him the most, even now, is this: he can’t be sure she’s not still there."
• Motive Rant: Plenty of them, but special mention has to go to the unlikeliest candidate yet: Gilda Dent.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The names of the showrunners on the LexFlix docuseries about Pamela Isley's fall from grace are given as Charlotte Halstead and Roger Hayden. Halstead is a Gender Flipped version of the Golden Age Psycho-Pirate, while Hayden is the modern age one made famous by Crisis on Infinite Earths.
  • The final line of the Red Hood Collective's manifesto is the vow they make all members swear by: "I will make art until someone dies." Similarly, Ace Chemicals is renamed to Axis Chemicals, and the Joker's introduction is based heavily on the equivalent scene in Batman '89 — only his Rage Against the Reflection goes a lot further...
  • The Red Hood Collective themselves are a tweaked version of the Red Hood Gang from Batman: Zero Year. Both share similar outlooks on morality, but while the Gang were Straw Nihilists in it For the Evulz, the Collective believes that murder is the ultimate form of transgressive art.
  • The captions for Man-Bat's first appearance initially wonder if he's a bird or perhaps a plane, before being swiftly corrected with a Jump Scare.
  • The Acolytes of the Blackfire despise Batman for using his Terror Hero schtick to give hope to the downtrodden, going against their Social Darwinist philosophy. You could say that he merely adopted the dark; they were born in it, molded by it!
  • The lore entry for Deacon Blackfire opens with a reading from the Bible of Crime, which was introduced in 52 in use by Intergang.
  • "File #011: The Scarecrow" is heavily inspired by the Scarecrow sections from Batman: Arkham Asylum, as well as Batman's final confrontation with him in Batman: Arkham Knight: Bats is dosed with fear gas, forcing him to confront his trauma over the death of his parents, before breaking out of the hallucination through sheer Heroic Willpower and giving the villain a taste of his own medicine. Crane even paraphrases his Arkhamverse counterpart:
  Arkham Asylum: Poor little bat. You're in my world now!
  Caped Crusader: You're in my world now, little bat.
  • Another part of the file references Bruce's nightmare from the BTAS episode "Two-Face: Part 2": "Why didn't you save us, son?"
  • Selina's message to Bruce has her reminiscing about a time in their youth where they snuck out of the orphanage, ran down to Lake Mazzucchelli, then came back like it was no big deal, much to the surprise of Old Man Miller. In the same message, she mentions a statue of Hippolyta in Gotham made by Julia Kapatelis, a supporting character in the Wonder Woman mythos.
  • Selina's first major art exhibition is called "Seduction of the Innocent", after Frederic Wertham's book of the same name that inspired The Comics Code (Wertham himself got a reference in the very first post, which mentioned the findings of the Wertham Commission regarding the Wayne murders), and its centerpiece is a Warhol-esque pointilist rendition of the iconic cover to Action Comics #1.
  • Catwoman being called simply "the Cat" is a throwback to her earliest appearances in the Golden Age, when that was her nom de crime.
  • Bruce and Selina's nicknames for each other, "B" and "C", echoes Tom King's habit of having them call each other "Bat" and "Cat" as pet names (here, the "C" comes from a young Bruce thinking Selina's name started with that).
  • This time around, it's James Gordon who takes a bullet in the spine! (Speaking of Gordon, his image in "File #016: The Bat Cloud" has him holding a red phone.)
  • Aunt Harriet's entry in "File #016: The Bat Cloud" notes that her predilection for getting into Love Triangles once led to Basil Karlo and Dexter Myles getting into a fistfight at an Academy Awards ceremony.
  • Lynn Garfield's wife, Theodora Carson, is named after the New 52 Firefly, Ted Carson, who was himself an ex-firefighter.
  • Roxy Rocket mentions in her interview that she once doubled for Jennie-Lynn Hayden. She also mentions a Gotham landmark called the Beaumont Building, and at the close of her interview, she says she's considering moving to Metropolis after having her Heel Realization; her DCAU counterpart did just that when Batman disappeared in "Knight Time".
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: "Police Commissioner Gillian G. Loeb. Dislikes: bleeding-heart pinkos. Likes: listening to recordings of Hitler's speeches."
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The project makes extensive use of this, but Tropes Are Tools, as the celebrities in question are just used as inspiration to add verisimilitude instead of just making the characters straight-up Expies.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Condiment King's gimmick usually gets him relegated to C-List Fodder or made Darker and Edgier somehow, but this iteration of the character is a lot Smarter Than He Looks. To begin with, the main purpose of his kit is intimidation: the people of Gotham are a lot more afraid of supervillains than regular crooks, and any bank teller is gonna think twice about disobeying when one of them says not to call the cops. Then there's the condiments themselves, which are technically harmless unless you have an allergy, but a shot of mustard or hot sauce right in the eyes still hurts without getting Buddy a murder charge — and even then, what judge could call it assault with a deadly weapon when the weapon is condiments?
  "Yeah, he's got all the angles covered. Because Buddy Mayo ain't crazy. And Buddy Mayo ain't stupid either."
• Numerological Motif: Two-Face indulges in this as usual: his post is the 20th installment in the series with 20 images, the story itself is a two-parter, and in-universe, Harvey went to ground before Gilda could try to kill him a third time, saying it would have "thrown the balance off". When his coin comes up on the scarred side, he even shoots her twice!
• Off with His Head!: A number of the firefighters killed by Firefly are on the receiving end of this, courtesy of a fire axe.
• One Last Job: A variant in Batman's first encounter with Mr. Freeze, which comes about because Freeze finally finds a way to cure Nora's disease, and returns to Gotham to raid Ferris Industries for what he needed to create the cure (and take revenge on Ferris Boyle while he's at it).
• Out of Focus: Some entries, such as "File #009: Man-Bat" or "File #013: Deadshot", are notably sparser on lore than others. Justified, as Caped Crusader is a one-man project, and DoctorEnn is, by his own admission, not always sufficiently motivated or possessed of enough time to write up more comprehensive stories for certain characters.
• Painting the Medium: Firefly's Motive Rant completely lacks punctuation and randomly vacillates between lower-case and upper-case, giving the whole thing the air of being written by a deranged terrorist, which... yeah, sounds about right.
• Powered Armor:
  • Mr. Freeze's suit is rendered as this, similar to the Batman: Arkham Series.
  • Firefly wears one of these originally designed for fighting fires. Turns out it's also very good at setting them, and swinging an axe hard enough to decapitate someone as well.
• Precision F-Strike: "File #012: Condiment King" has two: Buddy's story about a bank employee telling a gang of bank robbers from out of town to "fuck off", and him declaring that "Gotham is, to put not too fine a point on it, utterly fucked in the head."
• Pretender Diss: The Blackfire cult's scripture contains one of these Played for Drama, directed at Batman, who they decry as twisting the darkness they hold sacred to his own ends.
• Psychological Projection: Roxy Rocket initially assumed the Batman did what he did for the same reason she did what she did: boredom. Her first proper meeting with him disabused her of that notion, though.
• Purple Prose: Scarecrow's lore entry is framed as a Motive Rant written by Crane himself. Appropriately for a character inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, the prose is positively amaranthine.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Riddler manages to escape both the Batman and the various powerful people he pissed off with Riddleaks, but he's stuck in the Corto Maltese Embassy for the foreseeable future (the caption for this image places him on Day 467 of his exile), and even with his focus set on besting Batman, the confinement is starting to get more than a little claustrophobic.
  "(What is the ability to have a good walk around the block in the fresh air worth?)"
• Race Lift:
  • King Tut, who originated in Batman (1966) as a white guy, is here reimagined as a Black supremacist convinced he's descended from Ramesses II himself.
  • Kirk Langstrom is rendered as Ambiguously Brown rather than the usual Caucasian.
  • Leslie Thompkins and Slam Bradley are both rendered as Black, and Harvey Dent has a noticeably tan skintone similar to his animated counterpart, who, per Word of God, was meant to be Sicilian.
• Riddle Me This: After stealing enough data from his former company, the Riddler creates an app called Riddleaks that can give people access to data mined by Question's algorithms if they can answer the riddles protecting it. The real riddle, however, is in the nature of the data itself: some extremely important and sensitive stuff is easy as sin to decrypt, all of which pertains to certain figures from Eddie's past who soon become guests on The Riddle Factory.
• Rogues' Gallery Transplant: Downplayed, since the two never meet, but the Shade is generally a Flash villain, whereas here he serves as a mentor to a young Selina Kyle, who, of course, would go on to become a part of the gallery proper.
• Sanity Slippage: Losing her wife turned Lynn Garfield from a model firefighter lauded for her bravery many times over to an unhinged pyromaniac hell-bent on taking Revenge on the people who killed Theodora, no matter who gets in her way.
• Scatterbrained Senior: Played for Drama and Horror in the case of Mr. Freeze. As some other adaptations have hinted, he essentially has Complete Immortality thanks to the accident that altered his physiology. The problem is, The Fog of Ages is in full effect, and Victor's been alive and marinating in his own trauma for seventy years. He's left with what's effectively an extremely advanced case of dementia, which means that he's unable to realize that the women he abducts aren't Nora, that there are multiple Noras dotted throughout his lair, or that the real Nora has been dead the whole time.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: Daggett Industries' attempts to bribe Theodora Carson with cash or cushy positions fell on deaf ears. Unfortunately, once they realized that, they resorted to... more drastic measures.
• Serial Killer:
  • The Calendar Man is in fine form here. Except he's closer to a Psycho for Hire, being used as a blunt instrument by his brother to eliminate anyone who could blow the whistle on some of the GCPD's less savory activities. He does end up dipping into this when he starts killing people Greg didn't ask him to, though...
  • "File #017" reveals that Victor Zsasz is active in this version of Gotham.
• Shout-Out:
  • The dynamic between Sofia and Alfredo Falcone is described as "Succession with guns".
  • Lynn Garfield's introductory portrait has her wearing a yellow-and-red medal that the caption calls the "Stark Medal". Fittingly, she later becomes the pilot of a suit of Powered Armor, though she isn't exactly on the side of the angels.
• The Social Darwinist: Mixed with a healthy dose of Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad when it comes to the Acolytes of the Blackfire. In their mind, the world belongs to the Beast, so evil is the order of the day, and anyone strong and evil enough to trample over the weak in their path can do whatever they want.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Most depictions of Batman's origin story have Bruce taken under Alfred's wing immediately after his parents' murder, but here he goes into the care of the state while his relatives and Wayne Enterprises work out who'll get guardianship (and, of course, who'll control the Wayne family fortune).
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: The caption for Bruce Wayne's image in "File #016: The Bat Cloud" refers to him as a "generally useless billionaire who probably shouldn't be on this list".
• Technologically Blind Elders: Slam Bradley apparently has a habit of delivering massive boxes of paper files to Bruce and co. which Oracle then has to digitize all by her lonesome, and by a comment from Stephanie, Alfred's cast in the same mold.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Lampshaded in Riddler's lore:
  Years pass. Billions roll in. The little web-platform that could grows even more. To be honest, it gradually gets worse, but it brings in billions so who cares. They're unstoppable. The sky’s the limit.
  What is tempting fate?
  • Gilda tells Harvey he has no proof she tried to have him killed, and taunts him by asking what he'll do about it. Unfortunately for her, she's talking to the wrong Harvey...
• The End... Or Is It?: Quoted word-for-word by "File #009: Man-Bat", as the ending shows Frankie Langstrom transformed into She-Bat.
• The Real Heroes: Grimly subverted in Firefly's lore: the FIREFLY suit was supposed to be a way to put Gotham's firefighters on par with the city's supervillains, but the project itself was essentially a money-making scheme on the part of Daggett Industries, the suit itself was horrifically unsafe (for fighting fires, anyway), and most of the FDGC were bribed into endorsing the thing. When one of the project's designers, Dr. Theodora Carson, started to look a little too deep into it, Daggett Industries had her killed — which wound up turning her grief-stricken wife into a murderous supervillain out for revenge against them.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: Done in "File #011: The Scarecrow" from the perspectives of both Batman as he's dosed with fear gas and Crane when he's Hoist by His Own Petard.
• Tragic Villain:
  • Mr. Freeze somehow manages to be this even harder, since his backstory is much the same as in "Heart of Ice" — only it happened decades ago, leaving Victor as an immortal quasi-corpse frozen in a single horrible moment, reduced to abducting and freezing women that look like his wife who died just minutes before his accident. The worst part? Even if Nora had survived, they found a treatment for her condition twenty years before the story starts.
  • Firefly goes from a Pyromaniac with no real motivation for his crimes other than the sheer joy of it to a prime example of this. Lynn Garfield was a decorated firefighter who lost her wife in a fire that her fellow officers were bribed to let take her (and worse, she was on the scene before anyone else, so she had to hear her dying in pain), and, driven insane from the grief, stole an experimental suit of Powered Armor, modifying it into a weapon against the FDGC and the corporation that ordered her wife's death, Daggett Industries. The tragedy really comes through in her first lore entry: while most entries from the perspective of a villain are grandiose Motive Rants or self-aggrandizing accounts of their backstories, Lynn's is a rambling, barely coherent threat against Batman that just bleeds Survivor's Guilt.
  "do not talk to me about innocent casualties"
  "they are not innocent SHE WAS INNOCENT AND SHE DIED"
  "and there is nothing good left"
  "they are rotten the whole system is rotten the whole city is rotten and i will burn it down so we can start over"
  "that's why the fire SPARED me don't you GET IT i should be dead with her but i'm not"
• Tyop on the Cover:
  • The caption for Stephanie Brown misnames her as "Samantha".
  • Dick Grayson's surname is misspelled as "Greyson" in his introduction.
• Uncertain Doom: Invoked with the Blackfire cult's abduction of Julie Madison; in response to a commenter wondering whether or not they sacrificed her before Batman stepped in, DoctorEnn declared that, after a change of plans, they were leaving it up to interpretation whether Batman saved or avenged Julie.
• Underestimating Badassery: The Calendar Man attempts to kill Renee Montoya as a birthday gift to his brother. Unfortunately for him, she's... well, Renee Montoya. When the cops arrive, Renee is bloodied up a bit, but Day's the one kneeling on the floor with cuffs on his wrists and a gun to his head.
• Victory Through Intimidation: This is Condiment King's modus operandi: if you walk into a bank in Gotham dressed like a PAYDAY 2 character and carrying an AK, you'll get ignored. If you walk into a bank in Gotham in a primary-colored jumpsuit with some futuristic-looking tech, that's what'll make people take you seriously.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • Riddler, Smug Snake that he is, does not take it well when some guy in a flying rat costume outsmarts him and saves his ex from his death trap.
  • Blackfire and his cult are utterly shocked that no matter what, Batman just won't give up against them. Dala is reduced to furious flailing and screaming, and Blackfire's face when Batman gets to him is nothing short of aghast.
  Sister Dala: Break, damn you, Pretender! Break! BREAK!
• Wham Episode:
  • "File #014: A Patient". The Joker is here, and he's ready to paint the town red...
  • "File #016: The Bat Cloud". There's a Robin operating independently of the Batman... and it's not Dick Grayson, who's had a major Age Lift that makes him old enough to have been one of Bruce's teachers during his training to become Batman.
  • "File #017: Dr. Strange Has A Theory (And A Guest)". A certain self-scarring serial killer is on the loose in Gotham, Harvey Dent is beginning to lose his grip on sanity, some of the clay in the city's soil is starting to come alive, the Joker is hard at work preparing to make his grand debut, and that guest? It's Harleen Quinzel starting her tenure at Arkham.
• Wham Line: From "File #017": "Let me be the first to welcome you to Arkham... Dr. Quinzel."
• Wicked Cultured: Both the Shade and his student Selina Kyle, "because one does not simply learn the ways of thievery from Richard Swift; one gains an education in the arts and the higher cultures that rivals the Sorbonne."
• Younger and Hipper: Mustachioed game company owner Dan Mockridge becomes billionaire tech bro Danny Mockenridge.

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