Batman General Discussion

It doesn't let Bruce succeed, but his mistakes aren't treated as one would feel they should be.

Yeah, it's so weird. Yeah, Batman doesn't beat Failsafe, but he isn't really facing serious consequences for it.

This is a bigger fuck up than Tower of Babel since it not only endangered the League, but also Gotham and it's citizens.

Or the mess of Brother Eye.

I think Brother Eye contributed to the whole expulsion from the league. Tho I might be wrong about that. But at least he has some justification since Zatanna and the other secret mind erasing league members erased his memories.

But Failsafe took over Gotham, violated his allies, and killed innocent people. That is one of the greatest failures Batman can have as a hero.

Brother Eye is probably the biggest example of it, simply because it led and contributed to MANY deaths.

Edited by immortaleditor on Apr 17th 2024 at 11:10:09 AM

Wait, what happened there again? Was that because Maxwell Lord took it over? I don't remember much about that.

But Failsafe wasn't taken over. So I'd legit blame all of Failsafe's damage on Batman for negligence at best.

Any other hero who screwed up this badly would probably have to be retired for the next decade or so. Or spend a lot of time in disgrace.

It's certainly a waste that the run is deconstructing superficial shit that's more a meme than reality, like Bat God or Batman always winning, but aren't focusing on the actual damage and fuck ups that Batman did.

That's something I've noticed about a lot of these "deconstructive" takes on Batman. They're based more off shallow internet Outside Joke memes more than the actual DC canon, with the result that they feel like they're punching at something that doesn't exist and feeding into the actual problems and recurring concepts in the series that are worthy of being examined and deconstructed.

We're getting a million "Batman always wins" or "Batman beats up the poor", but never any "Batman is a legit abusive parent" or "Batman is directly responsible for the deaths and trauma of innocents because of his own flaws". We're getting lots of superficial Twitter hot takes and very little serious examination of Batman as a character and a franchise.

At least part of the issue, I suspect, is that actual serious deconstruction of Batman tends to destroy the Escapist Character aspects of him and DC doesn't want to do that to their cash cow in anything outside Elseworlds, if that. As a result, the only two Batman "deconstructions" that I feel really get brutal and in the guts with it and show an actually "realistic" Batman are Serious House (where he's depicted as a pathetic, misogynistic, puritanical, and insecure Manchild with massive emotional and sexual repression issues who's been completely consumed by his One Bad Day) and The Imposter (where he's mentally ill in a realistic, non-glamorized way and Awesome, but Impractical at best, being an antisocial and introverted thug whose vigilantism not only destroys his body, ruins relationships with and lives of friends, and creates collateral damage, but is ultimately just a bad coping mechanism that gives him a sense of control).

Funny enough, I think one of the most entertaining and unique looks at Batman was from a dream sequence in one of the Injustice comics.

After the Joker nukes metropolis (but Lois is saved), Batman stops Superman from killing the Joker. Instead, Batman does the job in privacy away from everyone else. And...then Bruce turns himself in. He admits to everything and goes to jail. The most interesting thing is that Bruce doesn't go crazy or try to escape responsibility. There is no Failsafe or slippery slope. Bruce does what he thinks is right but also acknowledges that he needs to face justice for it.

I feel like it's a fascinating look at Bruce's character. He worries all the time about what would happen if he stepped over the line, but when push comes to shove he's still a good person.

I wish more deconstructions explored the idealistic aspects of the character.

Edited by Freshwater on Apr 17th 2024 at 12:10:49 PM

That's not what deconstructions do unfortunately.

Or rather, that's not what people think they should do.

Anyway, I completely agree that focusing on the meme aspects of Batman's character while ignoring his actual, horrific mistakes is a huge mistake.

It only makes him look worse in the end. They either got to have him take real responsibility for those things and retire (or get put in jail) or he needs to actually be taken down by fellow heroes.

Because at this point, he's done too much shit, and regardless of good intentions or how much he wants to help, I feel like he's become a liability.

Also, maybe they should stop having him do that stuff so he won't reach that point.

It's a shame Batman didn't become a legacy character. When Dick became Batman after (I think it was Final Crisis), it was a fun idea and I think helped both of their characters. It let Bruce as a character move on from the cycles of paranoia, terrible mistakes, learn to trust...back to paranoia. While at the same time, it let Dick honor his mentor figure while still doing things his way. I guess now it would be Damien or Tim that would step up but it still feels like something that should have been allowed to happen.

I think part of what makes exploring a character fun is seeing all the different interpretations, contexts, and spins. Maybe Bruce is a traumatized child struggling to make sense of the world or maybe he is a relatively normal maybe even morally upright guy underneath all of makeup. Both offer interesting story possibilities.

Edited by Freshwater on Apr 17th 2024 at 12:29:33 PM

It's still so infuriating that Dick didn't take over completely as Batman during the Morrison run and was basically just holding onto the title until Bruce came back.

>We're getting a million "Batman always wins" or "Batman beats up the poor", but never any "Batman is a legit abusive parent" or "Batman is directly responsible for the deaths and trauma of innocents because of his own flaws".

That is brought up sometimes, but often is from characters who have no business criticizing either because of a lack of higher moral ground, like the Joker and Harley Quinn.

Its hilarious how the Suicide Squad game actually had Harley tell off Batman "how he hurts the lives of those around him" when this is the same woman who once helped Joker murder a child and then convinced her father to commit suicide so they can own his amusement park.

If there's anything I've noticed in the last few years, if people are going to start criticizing Batman in-universe it's generally not going to be just individual characters like Joker or Quinn. It's going to be, like, the whole goddamn Batfamily who suddenly are written as having no empathy for the guy any more (or vice versa).

Also, I'd argue that outside of very specific writers, "Batman is a legit abusive parent" or "Batman is directly responsible for the deaths and trauma of innocents because of his own flaws" are also good examples of superficial Twitter hot takes. Especially the latter.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Apr 17th 2024 at 4:37:26 AM

Of course, if Batman has done that, it's because he keeps getting written as a Paranoid asshole making plans to take down his own teammates that inevitably blow up in his face.

Sometimes by writers who claim to (and may in fact) like him, but also by the people making those criticisms, because they get to write him as they please.

Indeed, tbh usually the primary means that writers use to suddenly make or inflate something into a flaw isn't just using a particular character as a mouthpiece: it's to suddenly write the character with the flaw as a dickhead, have everyone around them treat them like a dickhead, and then attribute that dickishness to the inflated flaw. Then you get stuff like random ass civilians popping up, reflecting the hot take to the hero as if the writer was the first one to think of it.

Bad writers generally have issues finding ways to make characters flawed or nuanced beyond just making them suddenly be terrible, callous or incompetent people.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Apr 17th 2024 at 4:38:02 AM

Nuance flaws take time so writers go for big loud flaws

Bad and/or lazy writers go for the big loud flaws.

Especially when they actually have the hero fail in a human way, like Failsafe going rogue and endangering Gotham thanks to Batman's negligence, and the writer....doesn't focus on the consequences on this, and instead on dumb shit like how Batman can't be happy with his family at any point.

When they should at least be wary of him after Failsafe mentally violated Barbara and killed people.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Apr 18th 2024 at 12:37:44 AM

I would also add that exploring Batman's character can be difficult because he exists in the DC comic universe across multiple decades.

Some stories when they explore Superheroes, especially Batman, look at him in the context of a universe that is very different from the typical DC universe. When you put Batman in a world that is similar to our world than you can say "yeah, a rich guy who dresses up as a bat and fights crime might actually be doing it because they are actually crazy or because they want the thrill." But in the context of the DC universe, that's not unusual or crazy. Lot of people dress up and fight crime but are considered sane and beneficial to society. What can make Batman stand out is how he acts different from other crime fighters. Batman sometimes (and I stress sometimes because this very much depends on the book and the decade) is usually portrayed as more paranoid, obsessed, and stressed compared to his co-workers. Those are the aspects to explore: "Why does Batman decide to make Brother-eye but not Green Arrow or Steel or Black Orchid?

It's also the same with Batman's good qualities. In a world without supervillains or super-threats, Batman seems superfluous or even detrimental to the world. However, in the decades of protecting the Earth, Batman has fought off alien invaders, nuclear superbeings, magic monsters, etc. The question to look at is: "what makes Batman so good at helping to protect the planet? Is it his lateral thinking or maybe his ability to stay calm even against the most bizarre and unusual threats or is it the benefit of years of professional training across multiple disciplines?"

Edited by Freshwater on Apr 18th 2024 at 11:46:28 AM

That's really good observation.

The good Batman deconstructions I mentioned earlier provide a bit of perspective of that. The Imposter takes place in a more realistic world and the entire concept of it is basically portraying how Batman would function in real life. Serious House, however, embraces the comic book stuff and freely includes things like the superpowers and such; it's deconstruction is focused more on examining Batman's personality and how he behaves. With the latter, it's worth noting that it was written in the late 80s and specifically targeting Golden, Silver, and Bronze Age Batman rather than what the character has evolved into today, so there was a fair bit of exploring Values Dissonance in older comics to it as well.

I'd say for a modern Batman deconstruction that takes into account his role in a wider superhero universe rather than trying square peg him into a round hole, it would look something like Adi Shankar's Guardians of Justice, which does precisely this as a Take That! and subversion to "evil Superman" stories, mocking how such stories tend to glamorize Batman by having the Batman stand-in be the one who turns evil and becomes a fascist dictator justifying all his evil actions with talk of preventing some vague oncoming danger he isn't even sure will actually come.

The original Tower Of Babel was also kinda this, with it and stories like it basically showing how Batman is pretty much the Chevy Chase of the superhero community; he has a reputation for being challenging to work with at best, and pretty much the only Leaguers who seem to consistently get along with him on a regular basis are Clark and Diana.

That's very much a good point that seldom gets raised. In the context of the DC Universe, undergoing intensive training and then putting on a costume and fighting crime in response to a traumatic incident or personal tragedy isn't something that's crazy—while probably not common, it happens a good bit. He's a super-hero in a world where super-heroes exist.

I'm personally sick to death of Batman stories that are built around questioning or deconstructing the elements that make Batman stories possible.

The contingencies really cross the line, the worst is probably the Injustice movie revealing Batman infected Cyborg with a computer virus ''the first day they met"

That just crosses so many lines into pure dickhole territory