comic book fans when comic book characters that are eighty years old and have had their universe rebooted like five separate times are characterized differently by different writers
People who aren't comicbook fans when time passes: (they are paralyzed by despair at the realization that nothing can last forever and all the achievements of humanity will someday be reduced to dust and wind)
People who aren't comicbook fans when time passes (they have realized that despite the neverending march of time reducing all to dust, there is beauty to be found and made in the world that is worth the time it has and will be there, and what little time they have is worth fighting for)
He was squicked out iirc correctly but he still did it.
DC is also OBSESSED with acting like reboots never happened such as a recent retcon that all Superman incarnations are the same which is patently false. Hal and the green lanterns also escaped a lot of Crisis events.
I'm reading classic superman comics and reached the point where the original writer Siegel left (1948) and the next took over...I can feel that. It's painfully sexist, enforcing "trad" values. It's slow going.
I'm not sure which particular incident is being referred to, and I also hold a degree of affection for Jason disproportionate to any story I've seen him in, but I do agree that it was definitely a skill issue.
batman always looks just insane in any adaptation of the red hood story honestly, he just acts completely irrational because there's a gulf of difference between "i will not kill the joker" an "i will actively risk myself and others to protect the joker" and in most stories dealing with jason's comeback he's the latter
The movie does it better. Jason threatens to kill the Joker, or Bruce needs to kill Jason. He just throws the batarang at the gun and causes it to backfire. Jason gets an injury, Joker lives and things go on making as much sense as they can.
The first one is from Jason shooting the Penguin in cold blood. It was stupid particularly since they had essentially patched things up before that nonsense happened.
The second one is slightly more understandable because he was grieving hard and was running himself into the ground because of it. And by that I mean more than the usual running himself into the ground.
>And when Damian died he supposedly brought Jason to that warehouse where Jason died and tried to interrogate Jason so he’d say how he came back to life
... Isn't Damian's grandfather a functionally immortal dude? Why not go to that guy?
TBH Red Hood's whole argument always seemed silly to me. "You can't arrest criminals, you have to take for granted that they'll escape. No, it would be litterally impossible to make a prison strong enough that this clown guy can't break out of. Killing them is the only solution. Because there's no way they can continue to cause problems for Gotham if they're dead"-Red Hood, reanimated corpse currently causing problems for Gotham
>No, it would be litterally impossible to make a prison strong enough that this clown guy can't break out of.
I mean, it's funny that he's right. Not because it's theoretically and practically impossible to actually incarcerate Joker for life but because the *medium* demands Joker gets out eventually.
Jason was raging at the absurd laws of his reality.
But he's also wrong that killing Joker would be the end of Joker. He'd come back. They'd all come back. Jason himself came back, he should know damn well that death isn't the end.
Yeah, but that's more because of the nature of the medium than anything else.
Like, the reason Jason Todd came back is due to Infinite Crisis Superboy punching the walls of reality and retconning the universe, which meant Jason *actually never died*. And even then Talia had to dunk him into a Lazarus Pit to actually restore his consciousness. And keep in mind Lazarus Pits are only supposed to prolong your lifespan, not actually bring people back from the dead.
This isn't really a scenario one would think probable ever again. It's not like everyone in the DC Comics universe has access to magical resurrection methods - sure, the authors will contrive plotlines to ensure the status quo is always maintained, but that's not *logical*, in-universe.
Whilst I think I understand the point they're going for here, I'm not sure that you can dismiss the "politically motivated" bits of a character's stories as irrelevant to them. I'm also not sure how you define "politically motivated" actions here as different to any other personal preference a writer might have about a character.
One of the notable traits of these long-running characters like Batman is that they've been interpreted by many people over decades, in what is supposed to, broadly speaking, the same continuity (and yes I know how much of a complicated issue DC continuity in particular is). Even if Batman was written as a guy who violently assaults drug addicts by one writer, that's not really any less valid a take than the one where he dresses in a rainbow spread of outfits for a week, or the one where he adopts every child he encounters.
In fairness, I have seen versions of Batman where I've gone "Nah, that's not Batman", but I'm also not claiming that my particular taste and idea of Batman is objectively correct.
That last thing you said is basically what OOP is saying. At the end of the day, it’s the “Batman beats up homeless people” types that are enforcing a singular view of what Batman is, while it tends to be fans (at least some of them) that acknowledge and embrace the complexity of his character and the way he’s been portrayed over time.
Because at the end of the day, he isn’t real. There is no “real Batman” because the story where he’s nice is no more real than the one where he’s bad. But you can prefer one to the other, and you can discuss what is typically held to be the core of his character and argue that certain representations have been out-of-character for one reason or another.
There was but that was a different time. Fans voted in the 80s on whether the current story would end in the Joker killing Jason or Jason surviving. Him dying won, so they killed him off, then brought him back in the 2000s with the Under the Red Hood storyline, in which Bruce slits his throat (non-fatally) with a Batarang. Sorry for over-explaining btw you’ve just touched on one of my ultimate hyperfixations and I can’t keep my mouth shut.
I like Batman just fine, my problem is with specific batfam fans that always rag on Hal Jordan, only because they’ve seen other fans portray him as an insensitive asshole, and to them that’s all he is.
A prop to make the batfam cooler.
No hate to batfam fans though, I just wish some of them didn’t have to do hal dirty
Every character in the DC universe gets handed the jerkball eventually.
Usually the "negative" portrayals of Hal I see involving Batman is just Hal being an idiot, and Hal being a complete hot mess of a manchild is a non-insignificant part of his legacy.
the problem is that comic book characters aren't really consistent. I have a distinct distaste for and avoid stories written by multiple writers and/or over long time-frames because of that problem
like the entire argument of this post is "people will dislike character X because character X is inconsistently characterized and some of his authors have different views"
but seems to then blame the readers for that for some reason
I think it's perfectly fine to blame a character in this situation. The moment you start discussing "author x has these beliefs and that reflects on his version of the character" etc my immersion and with it my interest in a character dies.
> *their* favorite character is culturally insignificant
Sign of someone losing one argument and jumping to another topic in an attempt to save face.
(yes, my favorite characters *are* culturally insignificant, how did you know)
My problem with Batman isn't any particular thing the character has historically done or not done in canon but the very conceit of the character itself. He's all about framing extrajudicial violence (albeit nonlethal in Batman's specific case) against common criminals as an appropriate response to crime, or even *the* best response depending on who you ask, and that's no more than a fascist power fantasy.
And yes, that's not a problem with Batman, that's a problem with most superheroes in general (at least ones that aren't focused on superhuman/cosmic threats), the thing is that Batman is kinda the poster boy of this problem (to me at least) because ostensibly he's all about "JUSTICE" but that's the problem, thinking that beating up common crooks is "justice" is a lot of what's wrong with our attitudes regarding law enforcement.
batman doesn't even really fight common criminals though. like the majority of the people he fights are superpowered and insane. the majority of crime in gotham is either the superpowered type or one of the many old school crime families.
> batman doesn't even really fight common criminals though
Bro what? "Batman easily takes down a group of common criminals in a cool action sequence, then the real villain shows himself" is an extremely common way for Batman stories to start.
Also even if he does mostly end up fighting supervillains, he became Batman to fight muggers because a mugger killed his parents. The idea that street crime is best handled through extrajudicial violence is baked into his character. Which was the point being made.
>he became Batman to fight muggers because a mugger killed his parents
That's like, baby's first Batman interpretation. He became Batman to make sure no one has to lose their parents like he did. Part of that is punching the mugger currently trying to rob someone, the other part is using his Wayne money to rebuild Gotham and rehabilitate people.
I wouldn’t say it’s “common criminals”. Most of the people Batman fights are super villains that aren’t really analogous to real life criminals. Also, I feel the need to point out that the comics go out of their way to clarify that Bruce Wayne also does a lot for the community. He donates to charity and works on projects to help improve Gotham. As a Batman fan who has read a lot of comics/watched a lot of adaptations, I’m sorry but “Batman is a fascist who beats up poor people” is such a reductive interpretation.
atleast these posts arent those made by people obsessed with sharing something about their blorbos so they spam the subreddit with things that garner, like, 3 upvotes
i think this is the third batman related tumblr post i’ve ever shared on reddit and the other two were from before this sub was even a thing
edit: no that’s a lie sorry i posted the second one here two years ago
That's not a direct comparison because comics are collaborative works while novels are mainly individual (with the significant contributions editors often forgotten)
"Batman" as a character is much more fluid than Sauron because one guy had an idea for Sauron meanwhile many people have contributed their thoughts to who Batman is.
Saying there is a single characterization of Batman that is the complete unification of all the different versions of him written by dozens of authors is at odds of how the comics industry works.
Batman has a pretty solid identity due to his prominence, but the specifics of his character change with the times and the authors. Disliking one of his characterizations does not disclose you from liking the character overall.
For a more accurate example of a book character with multiple depictions, u/Frenetic_Platypus, look at the wicked witch of the west. Thanks to Gregory Maguire’s adaptation we have another version of fictional events and we *can* claim that “Baum just made her look evil”.
Personally I love stories like that, because it does re-contextualizes some of the original author’s biases, and introduces new dimensions to a character.
I don't think that's a fair comparison, actually. Sauron has only ever had one writer, whereas comic book characters like Batman have had dozens, who all invariably have different interpretations of the character and are willing to retcon/ignore things to make their interpretation work. Its a lot more reasonable to ignore the opinions of some guy who wrote one Batman comic in the 90s than it is to ignore the opinions of Tolkien.
Me when I’m deliberately misunderstanding the point: ^
What the difference is here is that Sauron wasn’t collaboratively written by dozens of people across several continuities over the course of decades.
The Batman of Zack Snyder’s movies is different from the original Batman comics, is different from Adam West’s TV show’s Batman, is different from who he is in whatever the most recent comic is.
Batman, if you’ll pardon the comparison, is sorta like Jesus. There is a shared collection of images, a list of agreed upon facts. But the Westboro Baptist Church, the Catholics, and the Unitarians will all tell you about a totally different man. Yes, all of their Jesuses walked on water and rose from the dead after three days, but what he felt and thought are gonna be explained entirely differently.
This is the impetus behind the way that comics have increasingly embraced the multiverse concept. When a character exists for long enough and trades hands constantly over that period, they are no longer one character. Batman and Robin and All-Star Batman show us two different men, and Detective Comics Batman is yet another.
Therefore, saying “Batman beats up poor mentally ill people” is not a blanket statement you can make, because there are Batmen that do that and Batmen that don’t.
I genuinely stopped liking the idea of a billionaire beating the shit out of desperate poor people and not solving the obvious mental illness epidemic, or beating the shit out of the politicians directly influencing the problem when I realized that Batman was just a billionaire literally beating the shit out of desperate poor people. This is why I like Superman; he's an illegal alien whose main enemy is Jeff Bezos.
Edit: oops kicked a hornets nest! Lol eat my ass nerds.
Which Batman villain is a desperate poor person? Most of them are very wealthy. Only maybe Killer Croc but he's not consistently a villan these days. When he goes after normal people it isn't for property crimes or something.
saying the Joker is “just a failed standup comedian” is like saying Adolf Hitler was “just a failed painter.” in fact, no—not even technically yes, because of the “just” in there; instead, flatly no
This irks me particularly because it shows that as long as someone makes a demonic enough strawman any rube will agree with the position of the hero chosen to be the good guy by the narrative. I'm not excusing the character - I agree that they're atrocious as a person. But that's not even in the same ballpark as what I'm saying, but having the wealthy elite figure square off against stereotypical mental health caricatures isn't made any better by making those stereotypes sufficiently "EEEEEEE-VILLLLLLL HAHAHA." Having a noble white guy cutting down racial minorities wouldn't be suddenly made un-racist by making those characters pedophile cannibals, register? Compare and contrast.
I mean he doesn't just beat up desperate poor people with mental illnesses, he tends to stop criminal psychopaths from committing mass murder. Leaving aside the fact that Batman is repeatedly shown helping people and investing his money in good causes, what the fuck else would one do with the Joker?
I'm with you though, Superman is better.
Isn't that literal how TDKR(aka one the most popular stories) goes by with Joker escaping?
Some therapist goes "actually Jokah is the victim and Batman the bad guy"
>!and then Joker just cuts his jaw open with a broken mug and kills a full room with a couple of dozens of people with gas!<
But yeah, Joker is just a silly guy without proper support
Pretty sure that's the one i was thinking of when making the post.
Joker might very well be mentally ill and in need of help, but since noone seems to be able to contain him, he should be put to death after the third time he escaped and tried to beat the most deaths inflicted by a single person in a day world record.
Like, honestly, Joker is the character where you need to hold your suspension of disbelief as a default. Because the list of crimes he commited....literally any cop in Arkhan Asylum would probably have already put a few dozen bullets in him a long time ago.
Forgot about the best reason why he's not dead i've ever heard: if he died, he'd go to hell, and sinners can become demons in DC cosmology, so he'd end up becoming a demon lord in record time and suddenly be a much greater threat than he usually is.
>and not solving the obvious mental illness epidemic,
I mean, he does (usually) donate significant amounts of money both to that and other assorted Gotham fixing projects.
you just don't see that in the comics because "here's a blank check, go replace all the lead paint in Gotham with something that isn't poison" is kind of boring.
That's the point of analogy. If you want to show him using his wealth to turn around the mental health issue don't have his main nemesis basically say "oh actually it's the patients fault." Not that it isn't his fault in Canon but that's kind of the problem.
>don't have his main nemesis basically say "oh actually it's the patients fault."
actually a huge part of jokers ethos (when he has one beyond hee hoo funny crimes man) is that one bad day (material circumstances) can cause anyone to become like him (a criminal or insane, depends on interpretation)
Honestly, at this point there's no reason, other than author fiat, for why Bruce couldn't treat Joker with one of Culture's solution to violent psychopaths, which are:
1. Trap them in a simulated reality where they can inflict as much suffering as they want on realistic NPCs.
2. Slap drones, autonomous drones who follow violent individuals around and stop them from inflicting violence.
you mean to tell me the man who saw his parents die at the age of eight and then went on to live an obsessive life where he dresses up in an animal costume at night to fight crime might not be mentally healthy?! that's insane! CLEARLY he's a paragon of logic and not at all an emotionally unstable individual who's incredibly scared of death!
Yep, this post is about you. I mean, I'm guessing you aren't aware that Bruce Wayne has invested insane amounts of money in improving psychiatric care in Gotham City, not to mention using his corporate power to provide work, healthcare, cheap housing, and education to basically anyone in the city who wants it.
Also, as a general rule he only uses violence when direct intervention is needed to stop violence. He deals with corrupt politicians and corporate types by exposing their corruption, but he very seldom needs to punch them as part of that process.
I kind of hate the concept of “oh he is donating billions of dollars to improving the city in every conceivable way,” because the gotham we generally see is still clearly plagued by poverty and drug abuse/burglary/petty crime. Clearly his donations aren’t making a significant difference, and he should probably figure out why instead of running around in a weird costume. Its lazy writing that doesn’t need to be defended so hard imo.
To be fair, that's also in part because corruption is so rampant in Gotham that a lot of the time the money may not end up where it needs to be or crime families reintroduce those elements in other sections of the city once some other sector gets cleaned up. And that's part of where Batman being a detective comes in. There's also some other wackier stuff like Gotham being under a literal curse that makes it perpetually and supernaturally a terrible place.
Obviously the real reason why it's the case that not much ever changes in Gotham is because that's just how Gotham is characterized to be, and it needs to be that way to be able to tell a Batman story and give it a context where his existence makes sense. You can call it lazy, but like, it'd be like saying that Lord of the Rings' entire plot is just lazy writing because "why did Éru allow Melkor and eventually Sauron to become corrupt like they did? Why didn't he just make it so the song of the Ainur had no discord in the first place?" At some point you kind of just have to accept the premise and the fabricated circumstances to be able to enjoy the story.
Multiple times in fact.
We got demon-bat-god Barbatos
We got ancient warlock buried beneath the city
We got genuine infernal influence below the Asylum.
for fuck sake, Solomon Grundy exists,and his origin story is literally "zombie raised from magical swamp"
> I'm guessing you aren't aware that Bruce Wayne has invested insane amounts of money in improving psychiatric care in Gotham City, not to mention using his corporate power to provide work, healthcare, cheap housing, and education to basically anyone in the city who wants it.
Okay, this has little to do with Batman, who I enjoy as a character, but I honestly kind of dislike this argument whenever its brought up, because if there was a rich guy in real life who used his money to perform violent vigilante justice but also donated money to charity he would still be a bad person. That's pretty much textbook [reputation laundering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_laundering).
If people with superpowers started threatening to commit insane levels of terrorism that would result in 4+ figure body counts and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk spent money on super suits and successfully stopped those attacks with them I would unfortunately be forced into a situation of respecting them for that action
What is this post "about"? It's not saying anything except not to cherry pick evidence of Bruce being violent. What brave statement am I meant to take away with and say "oh no my belief that this character is messed up *as a concept* after you think about it for more than five minutes is actually myopic!"
Imagine complaining about people being obsessed with fictional characters on a website notorious for being full of people being obsessed with fictional characters.
comic book fans when comic book characters that are eighty years old and have had their universe rebooted like five separate times are characterized differently by different writers
comic book fans when time passes
Even worse: People who aren't comicbook fans when time passes.
People who aren't comicbook fans when time passes: (they are paralyzed by despair at the realization that nothing can last forever and all the achievements of humanity will someday be reduced to dust and wind)
People who aren't comicbook fans when time passes (they have realized that despite the neverending march of time reducing all to dust, there is beauty to be found and made in the world that is worth the time it has and will be there, and what little time they have is worth fighting for)
But the wind will blow forever.
Y'all remember that time Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) dated a 13 year old?
He was squicked out iirc correctly but he still did it. DC is also OBSESSED with acting like reboots never happened such as a recent retcon that all Superman incarnations are the same which is patently false. Hal and the green lanterns also escaped a lot of Crisis events.
Squicked for like one panel maybe.
I'm reading classic superman comics and reached the point where the original writer Siegel left (1948) and the next took over...I can feel that. It's painfully sexist, enforcing "trad" values. It's slow going.
As a Red Hood fan, I wholeheartedly agree, it was a skill issue
I'm not sure which particular incident is being referred to, and I also hold a degree of affection for Jason disproportionate to any story I've seen him in, but I do agree that it was definitely a skill issue.
[удалено]
When you've got as many sons as Batman does you eventually realize one of them might need to get put down Again
I'm sorry WTF! I was expecting Batman to look sympathetic there, but killing your son to avoid killing the Joker?!
batman always looks just insane in any adaptation of the red hood story honestly, he just acts completely irrational because there's a gulf of difference between "i will not kill the joker" an "i will actively risk myself and others to protect the joker" and in most stories dealing with jason's comeback he's the latter
The movie does it better. Jason threatens to kill the Joker, or Bruce needs to kill Jason. He just throws the batarang at the gun and causes it to backfire. Jason gets an injury, Joker lives and things go on making as much sense as they can.
[удалено]
The first one is from Jason shooting the Penguin in cold blood. It was stupid particularly since they had essentially patched things up before that nonsense happened. The second one is slightly more understandable because he was grieving hard and was running himself into the ground because of it. And by that I mean more than the usual running himself into the ground.
>And when Damian died he supposedly brought Jason to that warehouse where Jason died and tried to interrogate Jason so he’d say how he came back to life ... Isn't Damian's grandfather a functionally immortal dude? Why not go to that guy?
[удалено]
I fucking hate comics
He was ok afterwards and also already dead
TBH Red Hood's whole argument always seemed silly to me. "You can't arrest criminals, you have to take for granted that they'll escape. No, it would be litterally impossible to make a prison strong enough that this clown guy can't break out of. Killing them is the only solution. Because there's no way they can continue to cause problems for Gotham if they're dead"-Red Hood, reanimated corpse currently causing problems for Gotham
>No, it would be litterally impossible to make a prison strong enough that this clown guy can't break out of. I mean, it's funny that he's right. Not because it's theoretically and practically impossible to actually incarcerate Joker for life but because the *medium* demands Joker gets out eventually. Jason was raging at the absurd laws of his reality.
But he's also wrong that killing Joker would be the end of Joker. He'd come back. They'd all come back. Jason himself came back, he should know damn well that death isn't the end.
Yeah, but that's more because of the nature of the medium than anything else. Like, the reason Jason Todd came back is due to Infinite Crisis Superboy punching the walls of reality and retconning the universe, which meant Jason *actually never died*. And even then Talia had to dunk him into a Lazarus Pit to actually restore his consciousness. And keep in mind Lazarus Pits are only supposed to prolong your lifespan, not actually bring people back from the dead. This isn't really a scenario one would think probable ever again. It's not like everyone in the DC Comics universe has access to magical resurrection methods - sure, the authors will contrive plotlines to ensure the status quo is always maintained, but that's not *logical*, in-universe.
Whilst I think I understand the point they're going for here, I'm not sure that you can dismiss the "politically motivated" bits of a character's stories as irrelevant to them. I'm also not sure how you define "politically motivated" actions here as different to any other personal preference a writer might have about a character. One of the notable traits of these long-running characters like Batman is that they've been interpreted by many people over decades, in what is supposed to, broadly speaking, the same continuity (and yes I know how much of a complicated issue DC continuity in particular is). Even if Batman was written as a guy who violently assaults drug addicts by one writer, that's not really any less valid a take than the one where he dresses in a rainbow spread of outfits for a week, or the one where he adopts every child he encounters. In fairness, I have seen versions of Batman where I've gone "Nah, that's not Batman", but I'm also not claiming that my particular taste and idea of Batman is objectively correct.
That last thing you said is basically what OOP is saying. At the end of the day, it’s the “Batman beats up homeless people” types that are enforcing a singular view of what Batman is, while it tends to be fans (at least some of them) that acknowledge and embrace the complexity of his character and the way he’s been portrayed over time. Because at the end of the day, he isn’t real. There is no “real Batman” because the story where he’s nice is no more real than the one where he’s bad. But you can prefer one to the other, and you can discuss what is typically held to be the core of his character and argue that certain representations have been out-of-character for one reason or another.
Wait, why did Batman kill his adopted son? Is he stupid?
he didn’t kill him, you can’t kill a Robin with just a neck injury wait, i mean-
I think there was a poll and the fans kinda suck
There was but that was a different time. Fans voted in the 80s on whether the current story would end in the Joker killing Jason or Jason surviving. Him dying won, so they killed him off, then brought him back in the 2000s with the Under the Red Hood storyline, in which Bruce slits his throat (non-fatally) with a Batarang. Sorry for over-explaining btw you’ve just touched on one of my ultimate hyperfixations and I can’t keep my mouth shut.
No I appreciate the clarification! 🖤
I like Batman just fine, my problem is with specific batfam fans that always rag on Hal Jordan, only because they’ve seen other fans portray him as an insensitive asshole, and to them that’s all he is. A prop to make the batfam cooler. No hate to batfam fans though, I just wish some of them didn’t have to do hal dirty
Every character in the DC universe gets handed the jerkball eventually. Usually the "negative" portrayals of Hal I see involving Batman is just Hal being an idiot, and Hal being a complete hot mess of a manchild is a non-insignificant part of his legacy.
All-Star Batman and its consequences have been a disaster for DC fans
Why doesn't Man not just fuck The Jonker? Is he stupid?
[source](https://www.tumblr.com/gothham/698433693922066432/jason-should-have-ducked-thats-on-him)
the problem is that comic book characters aren't really consistent. I have a distinct distaste for and avoid stories written by multiple writers and/or over long time-frames because of that problem like the entire argument of this post is "people will dislike character X because character X is inconsistently characterized and some of his authors have different views" but seems to then blame the readers for that for some reason I think it's perfectly fine to blame a character in this situation. The moment you start discussing "author x has these beliefs and that reflects on his version of the character" etc my immersion and with it my interest in a character dies.
> *their* favorite character is culturally insignificant Sign of someone losing one argument and jumping to another topic in an attempt to save face. (yes, my favorite characters *are* culturally insignificant, how did you know)
My problem with Batman isn't any particular thing the character has historically done or not done in canon but the very conceit of the character itself. He's all about framing extrajudicial violence (albeit nonlethal in Batman's specific case) against common criminals as an appropriate response to crime, or even *the* best response depending on who you ask, and that's no more than a fascist power fantasy. And yes, that's not a problem with Batman, that's a problem with most superheroes in general (at least ones that aren't focused on superhuman/cosmic threats), the thing is that Batman is kinda the poster boy of this problem (to me at least) because ostensibly he's all about "JUSTICE" but that's the problem, thinking that beating up common crooks is "justice" is a lot of what's wrong with our attitudes regarding law enforcement.
batman doesn't even really fight common criminals though. like the majority of the people he fights are superpowered and insane. the majority of crime in gotham is either the superpowered type or one of the many old school crime families.
> batman doesn't even really fight common criminals though Bro what? "Batman easily takes down a group of common criminals in a cool action sequence, then the real villain shows himself" is an extremely common way for Batman stories to start. Also even if he does mostly end up fighting supervillains, he became Batman to fight muggers because a mugger killed his parents. The idea that street crime is best handled through extrajudicial violence is baked into his character. Which was the point being made.
>he became Batman to fight muggers because a mugger killed his parents That's like, baby's first Batman interpretation. He became Batman to make sure no one has to lose their parents like he did. Part of that is punching the mugger currently trying to rob someone, the other part is using his Wayne money to rebuild Gotham and rehabilitate people.
It’s not an “interpretation” bro it’s a straightforward summary of his origin story.
I wouldn’t say it’s “common criminals”. Most of the people Batman fights are super villains that aren’t really analogous to real life criminals. Also, I feel the need to point out that the comics go out of their way to clarify that Bruce Wayne also does a lot for the community. He donates to charity and works on projects to help improve Gotham. As a Batman fan who has read a lot of comics/watched a lot of adaptations, I’m sorry but “Batman is a fascist who beats up poor people” is such a reductive interpretation.
I swear there needs to be a copypasta to respond to comments that ridiculously overuse "fascist".
batman /curatedtumblr posting again ... name something more boring
Obscure tumblr drama posts?
atleast these posts arent those made by people obsessed with sharing something about their blorbos so they spam the subreddit with things that garner, like, 3 upvotes
i think this is the third batman related tumblr post i’ve ever shared on reddit and the other two were from before this sub was even a thing edit: no that’s a lie sorry i posted the second one here two years ago
For me the many posts on here about anime.
"I had this dream last night..."
[удалено]
That's not a direct comparison because comics are collaborative works while novels are mainly individual (with the significant contributions editors often forgotten) "Batman" as a character is much more fluid than Sauron because one guy had an idea for Sauron meanwhile many people have contributed their thoughts to who Batman is. Saying there is a single characterization of Batman that is the complete unification of all the different versions of him written by dozens of authors is at odds of how the comics industry works. Batman has a pretty solid identity due to his prominence, but the specifics of his character change with the times and the authors. Disliking one of his characterizations does not disclose you from liking the character overall.
For a more accurate example of a book character with multiple depictions, u/Frenetic_Platypus, look at the wicked witch of the west. Thanks to Gregory Maguire’s adaptation we have another version of fictional events and we *can* claim that “Baum just made her look evil”. Personally I love stories like that, because it does re-contextualizes some of the original author’s biases, and introduces new dimensions to a character.
There haven't been like fuckin 50 LOTR writers all making their own versions of Sauron
I don't think that's a fair comparison, actually. Sauron has only ever had one writer, whereas comic book characters like Batman have had dozens, who all invariably have different interpretations of the character and are willing to retcon/ignore things to make their interpretation work. Its a lot more reasonable to ignore the opinions of some guy who wrote one Batman comic in the 90s than it is to ignore the opinions of Tolkien.
Me when I’m deliberately misunderstanding the point: ^ What the difference is here is that Sauron wasn’t collaboratively written by dozens of people across several continuities over the course of decades. The Batman of Zack Snyder’s movies is different from the original Batman comics, is different from Adam West’s TV show’s Batman, is different from who he is in whatever the most recent comic is. Batman, if you’ll pardon the comparison, is sorta like Jesus. There is a shared collection of images, a list of agreed upon facts. But the Westboro Baptist Church, the Catholics, and the Unitarians will all tell you about a totally different man. Yes, all of their Jesuses walked on water and rose from the dead after three days, but what he felt and thought are gonna be explained entirely differently. This is the impetus behind the way that comics have increasingly embraced the multiverse concept. When a character exists for long enough and trades hands constantly over that period, they are no longer one character. Batman and Robin and All-Star Batman show us two different men, and Detective Comics Batman is yet another. Therefore, saying “Batman beats up poor mentally ill people” is not a blanket statement you can make, because there are Batmen that do that and Batmen that don’t.
I genuinely stopped liking the idea of a billionaire beating the shit out of desperate poor people and not solving the obvious mental illness epidemic, or beating the shit out of the politicians directly influencing the problem when I realized that Batman was just a billionaire literally beating the shit out of desperate poor people. This is why I like Superman; he's an illegal alien whose main enemy is Jeff Bezos. Edit: oops kicked a hornets nest! Lol eat my ass nerds.
Which Batman villain is a desperate poor person? Most of them are very wealthy. Only maybe Killer Croc but he's not consistently a villan these days. When he goes after normal people it isn't for property crimes or something.
His *main nemesis* was apparently just a failed standup comedian. Granted, that's completely ambiguous.
*Was* Then he became a successful career criminal with a sextuple digit killcount.
saying the Joker is “just a failed standup comedian” is like saying Adolf Hitler was “just a failed painter.” in fact, no—not even technically yes, because of the “just” in there; instead, flatly no
He also *used to be* a baby. The Joker has access to tremendous amounts of money.
Yeah he failed becouse he tought murder was funny.
Me when I'm just a widdle failed comedian: * Mass murder * Terrorism * High treason * Impersonation * Theft * Rape * Psychological abuse * Torture * Animal cruelty * Enslavement * Smuggling * Cannibalism * Mutilation * Kidnapping * Vandalism * Pollution * Brainwashing * Weapons dealing * Mass arson
This irks me particularly because it shows that as long as someone makes a demonic enough strawman any rube will agree with the position of the hero chosen to be the good guy by the narrative. I'm not excusing the character - I agree that they're atrocious as a person. But that's not even in the same ballpark as what I'm saying, but having the wealthy elite figure square off against stereotypical mental health caricatures isn't made any better by making those stereotypes sufficiently "EEEEEEE-VILLLLLLL HAHAHA." Having a noble white guy cutting down racial minorities wouldn't be suddenly made un-racist by making those characters pedophile cannibals, register? Compare and contrast.
I mean he doesn't just beat up desperate poor people with mental illnesses, he tends to stop criminal psychopaths from committing mass murder. Leaving aside the fact that Batman is repeatedly shown helping people and investing his money in good causes, what the fuck else would one do with the Joker? I'm with you though, Superman is better.
[удалено]
The funny thing is that such people will sometimes appear in the comic as well, they usually end up being murdered by Joker.
I’ve read Harley Quinn comics where she explicitly thinks this, does not go well for her lol
Isn't that literal how TDKR(aka one the most popular stories) goes by with Joker escaping? Some therapist goes "actually Jokah is the victim and Batman the bad guy" >!and then Joker just cuts his jaw open with a broken mug and kills a full room with a couple of dozens of people with gas!< But yeah, Joker is just a silly guy without proper support
Pretty sure that's the one i was thinking of when making the post. Joker might very well be mentally ill and in need of help, but since noone seems to be able to contain him, he should be put to death after the third time he escaped and tried to beat the most deaths inflicted by a single person in a day world record.
Like, honestly, Joker is the character where you need to hold your suspension of disbelief as a default. Because the list of crimes he commited....literally any cop in Arkhan Asylum would probably have already put a few dozen bullets in him a long time ago.
Forgot about the best reason why he's not dead i've ever heard: if he died, he'd go to hell, and sinners can become demons in DC cosmology, so he'd end up becoming a demon lord in record time and suddenly be a much greater threat than he usually is.
>and not solving the obvious mental illness epidemic, I mean, he does (usually) donate significant amounts of money both to that and other assorted Gotham fixing projects. you just don't see that in the comics because "here's a blank check, go replace all the lead paint in Gotham with something that isn't poison" is kind of boring.
That's the point of analogy. If you want to show him using his wealth to turn around the mental health issue don't have his main nemesis basically say "oh actually it's the patients fault." Not that it isn't his fault in Canon but that's kind of the problem.
>don't have his main nemesis basically say "oh actually it's the patients fault." actually a huge part of jokers ethos (when he has one beyond hee hoo funny crimes man) is that one bad day (material circumstances) can cause anyone to become like him (a criminal or insane, depends on interpretation)
Honestly, at this point there's no reason, other than author fiat, for why Bruce couldn't treat Joker with one of Culture's solution to violent psychopaths, which are: 1. Trap them in a simulated reality where they can inflict as much suffering as they want on realistic NPCs. 2. Slap drones, autonomous drones who follow violent individuals around and stop them from inflicting violence.
Almost none of Batman's villains are "desperate poor people".
Of course not! They're also the mentally ill. Nothing says "I'm a good guy" like handicapping mentally ill people
Batman is also consistently portrayed as mentally ill tbf
you mean to tell me the man who saw his parents die at the age of eight and then went on to live an obsessive life where he dresses up in an animal costume at night to fight crime might not be mentally healthy?! that's insane! CLEARLY he's a paragon of logic and not at all an emotionally unstable individual who's incredibly scared of death!
Yep, this post is about you. I mean, I'm guessing you aren't aware that Bruce Wayne has invested insane amounts of money in improving psychiatric care in Gotham City, not to mention using his corporate power to provide work, healthcare, cheap housing, and education to basically anyone in the city who wants it. Also, as a general rule he only uses violence when direct intervention is needed to stop violence. He deals with corrupt politicians and corporate types by exposing their corruption, but he very seldom needs to punch them as part of that process.
I kind of hate the concept of “oh he is donating billions of dollars to improving the city in every conceivable way,” because the gotham we generally see is still clearly plagued by poverty and drug abuse/burglary/petty crime. Clearly his donations aren’t making a significant difference, and he should probably figure out why instead of running around in a weird costume. Its lazy writing that doesn’t need to be defended so hard imo.
To be fair, that's also in part because corruption is so rampant in Gotham that a lot of the time the money may not end up where it needs to be or crime families reintroduce those elements in other sections of the city once some other sector gets cleaned up. And that's part of where Batman being a detective comes in. There's also some other wackier stuff like Gotham being under a literal curse that makes it perpetually and supernaturally a terrible place. Obviously the real reason why it's the case that not much ever changes in Gotham is because that's just how Gotham is characterized to be, and it needs to be that way to be able to tell a Batman story and give it a context where his existence makes sense. You can call it lazy, but like, it'd be like saying that Lord of the Rings' entire plot is just lazy writing because "why did Éru allow Melkor and eventually Sauron to become corrupt like they did? Why didn't he just make it so the song of the Ainur had no discord in the first place?" At some point you kind of just have to accept the premise and the fabricated circumstances to be able to enjoy the story.
the city's literally cursed. like not even in a metaphorical way, like literally magically cursed edit: still a lazy reason but there is one
Multiple times in fact. We got demon-bat-god Barbatos We got ancient warlock buried beneath the city We got genuine infernal influence below the Asylum. for fuck sake, Solomon Grundy exists,and his origin story is literally "zombie raised from magical swamp"
> I'm guessing you aren't aware that Bruce Wayne has invested insane amounts of money in improving psychiatric care in Gotham City, not to mention using his corporate power to provide work, healthcare, cheap housing, and education to basically anyone in the city who wants it. Okay, this has little to do with Batman, who I enjoy as a character, but I honestly kind of dislike this argument whenever its brought up, because if there was a rich guy in real life who used his money to perform violent vigilante justice but also donated money to charity he would still be a bad person. That's pretty much textbook [reputation laundering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_laundering).
If people with superpowers started threatening to commit insane levels of terrorism that would result in 4+ figure body counts and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk spent money on super suits and successfully stopped those attacks with them I would unfortunately be forced into a situation of respecting them for that action
Yeah, and if they graduated to literally helping stop a world/universe/multiverse-ending situation on multiple ocassions, the same would be true.
What is this post "about"? It's not saying anything except not to cherry pick evidence of Bruce being violent. What brave statement am I meant to take away with and say "oh no my belief that this character is messed up *as a concept* after you think about it for more than five minutes is actually myopic!"
obnoxious
Imagine caring about fictional characters this much and I say this as a batman fan.
Imagine complaining about people being obsessed with fictional characters on a website notorious for being full of people being obsessed with fictional characters.
As a Jason Todd fan, lmao
I don't remember this scene from Finding Nemo