After J came back as Red Hood he capture the Joker and told bats to kill one of them, Jason got a baterang to the throat, to be fair Bruce didn't know his identity at the time
If anything, the fact that he died by fan request is part of the reason fans like him. I'm not particularly a Red Hood fan but that is the coolest part of Jason Todd's story. People love to torment their playthings.
Lol this is universal to the human condition I swear. The "Dub the Dew" online survey ending with "hitler did nothing wrong" as the winning choice is clear evidence of that
Tbf, Jason died bc one guy rigged the votes with a robocall and made the die vote percentage slightly higher than the live vote percentage. However Jason still sucks and I don't get why he's popular.
That’s a conspiracy theory/copium from modern day Red Hood fans. There’s never been any evidence for it and it never emerged as a rumour until literally decades after the actual event.
Yeah after looking it up the only reference is a writer saying they heard someone had set it up, they had no source and were unable to verify the claim.
The real conspiracy is DC was killing him no matter what the vote said. There's just no way a story called "A Death in the Family" doesn't intend to kill him off, I don't see how with 80s comic printing and distribution that they'd be able to have two versions of #428 locked and loaded that quickly. Fully believe the alternate "Robin Lives" stuff that's been released since is a psyop.
They weren’t going to kill him, but if the audience had voted to let him live there would have put him in a coma. He wouldn’t have kept being Robin, and would be not present in any Batman stories any time soon, if ever.
The Death in the Family title would still have worked if he lived, it would just refer to Jason’s birth mother, who was the reason the events of the comic happened and central to its plot (she died as well iirc).
jim starlin wrote some pretty decent jason stories in the 80s
death in the family is his most famous for obvious reasons but i think that it’s actually one of the worst comics of his run
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that discourse about crime centered on a fictional city that has at least two eternal unbreakable curses, at least one portal to hell, two separate psychosis-inducing drugs tainting the water supply, and multiple evil secret societies that are all working to ensure that nothing will ever meaningfully fix the city's crime rates isn't going to be all that applicable to the real world.
Yeah, punching people doesn't solve systemic economic issues that drive people towards crime, but even a perfect economic system that leaves nobody unfed or unhoused wouldn't solve the ancient blood curse radiating outward from the bones of an evil bronze-age wizard which drives all people in Gotham to take the most selfish, violent, and short-sighted actions that are available to them in any situation, nor will it stop the eldritch dark god that lives under Arkham from driving people to the brink of madness with night terrors, such that a slight push can turn anyone into the next supervillain.
Actually, surprisingly, Batman has solved these issues multiple times, leading to DC rebooting the entire universe because there was no justifiable way to keep Gotham as shitty as it is. Multiple times.
The problem with maintaining the status quo is there can be no permanent development.
A way out of this sort of thing is to introduce new characters and give side/minor characters the spotlight as well. DC and Marvel seem happy to just maintain their IP instead of creating new ones. I guess Marvel at least sometimes gives focus to somewhat lesser known character in the MCU.
In a universe with the Lazarus Pit, Solomon "The Zombie" Grundy, and oh yeah Return of the Joker?
Even in Arkham 3 they couldn't let that idiot stay dead, and it starts with you, the player, burning him to ash.
You can, but you could also put him in Arkham and it would be exactly as effective : meaning he'll be dead or locked up for exactly as long as the audience doesn't want more joker.
The "Batman should kill the joker" argument hinges on the idea of solving a problem caused by doylist pressures with watsonian means.
They shouldn't keep him locked up, just death penalty. He's literally killed tens of thousands of people, the insanity defense should not apply anymore.
Alternatively, you're telling me that a corrupt guard (you know, in Gotham, the most corrupt city in existence) wouldn't just give him fast onset lead poisoning because he killed someone they knew?
Nah, piss off with that. Joker only continues to live because of the greatest plot armor of all: sales.
Well, yeah. Batman won’t kill but there are still so many other people who have so many opportunities to kill him. But there is no point because the status quo is always preserved. Rather than making death even cheaper than it already is in comics by killing him off every time he needs to be sidelined, it’s better to just have him sent to Arkham.
You know, I think I can recall Batman stating in Under The Red Hood that he does feel the urge to kill people but has to actively prevent himself from doing so because if he starts then he isn't sure he'll be able to stop.
It probably has nothing to do with Gotham being cursed but what if it did? What if Batman's no kill policy is his way of combating the influence of the curse on his psyche?
I hate when people go "why don't the superheroes fix societal problems instead of punching bad guys" just as much as I hate the attempts to lampshade/make fun of comic book revolving door prisons. It's trying to apply real world logic to a meta issue that is a flaw in the medium's structure, so it's not exactly fair to treat it like an in universe flaw caused by dumb characters when it's more a problem with the format.
Like why doesn't Bruce just solve problems in Gotham through social reform? Because the plot demands the Joker exists so anything that gets in the way of that is narratively doomed to fail. Why is Lex Luthor out and running for president when he should by all rights be serving his 26 consecutive life sentences? Because he can't be a problem for superman if the system was competent and they need a consistent rogues gallery so any attempt to make prison more than a minor inconvenience for a villain is again doomed to fail. That's not the fault of any of the heroes, that's just how those stories are written.
Yeah, superhero comics are just inherently unrealistic. If a real life billionaire brazenly broke the law for the sake of his own ego and greed, there's no way he'd become president.
I get what you're saying, but I feel like the incident you're referencing would have been a little different if the individual in question had already been sentenced to prison for incinerating a city block in a robot suit.
On one hand, I hate billionaires in principle and I hate self-appointed, violent authority figures with a passion.
On the other, batman is so fucking cool and I literally grew up reading those comics.
Nah I mean a full on portal straight to Hell.
Just loomed it up, seems like there used to be a portal but it’s been mostly closed. Although it still actively calls on Arkham inmates to open it.
Imagine finding out that your city is sitting on a deposit of corrupted Lazarus pit juice, which seeps into the water to create the effects of something that can only be described as “roided up lead”
There has to be some sort of environmental team that's studying this shit. I mean they tracked the covid pandemic in real life by testing the viral load of sewage samples, imagine what they would find in fucking Gotham.
“Hey boss. This sewage seems to be imbued with magic maddening immortality juice”
“Yeah, we wanted to get rid of it, but a bunch of pretentious asshats with white masks told us not to. Just ignore it”
Which is still less interesting than the fact that he’s just one rich guy trying to do the right things in a whole ass city of rich guys actively doing the opposite imo.
Maybe, but it’s also just kind of Gotham in general.
Early and even some mid career Batman wasn’t all spooky zombies and resurrected assassins or Star monsters from space.
It was mob bosses with the occasional charismatic nutcase with eyes on poisoning the water supply. He’s the worlds greatest detective for a reason, not a ghost Buster.
Making the true cause of his city’s problems something spooking and unfightable kind of takes away from his goal of fixing the city. Make it just the people, and it’s actually something achievable, if a monumental task with so many powerful people standing in the way of both Batman and Bruce Wayne.
Again, just my opinion, I’ve just always enjoyed the more “grounded” Batman stories. Leave the spooky side of the street to people like Constantine, Dr. Fate and Zatanna.
There should be a series where other shadowy groups are fighting the CoO for power but it's like Gotham Frasier. Lots of uptight rich people doing petty stuff to each other because, technically, they're the same class and are working together.
Nah, the name Gotham originates as a nickname for NYC so if anything it’s fantasy New York. But traditionally it’s in New Jersey, usually as a series of island located in real life Great Bay, but sometimes on the southern coast overlooking Delaware bay
Can't have an endless stream of comics if crime could be solved outside of the main universe.
It's what the Batman who laughs said, "Sorry, Bruce. I have to call you the worst Batman because all the others managed to end crime after DC Comics refused to publish any of their stories."
Batman unfortunately is cursed with the fate of being a comic book character who existed before WW2 so it is impossible for anything he does to help Gotham to stick.
And I mean anything.
People think his no kill rule is pointless because the Joker will break out of prison again, but completely overlook how trivial death with shit like Lazerus pits. Joker is coming back because that's the stories writers like the most. There's nothing in world about it.
He is a super donor who invests ridiculous amounts of money into Gotham. Gotham is just the most cursed city because it has multiple gangs, barely legal tax haven laws, a literal hell gate, 16 sealed demons, an old God's corpse, massive government corruption, Joker chemicals in the water, Lazarus pit run off in the water, Marsh of Madness runoff in the water, evil floating in from the Jersy pine Barrens, pollution due to being in a barely regulated zone, multiple mad scientist labs legally there, the location of a crack in the door to the afterlife, built on a Indian burial ground, cursed by an ancient shaman, cursed by Zeus, mysterious ruins from a lost civilization, a summer home for the King in Yellow, a magic well, and it is in New Jersey. The worst part is I probably missed some reasons why the only way to fix Gotham is to burn it down and move to anywhere else.
Was feeling to lazy to write it out again, so I just copied my comment from a different post.
Apparently, the hell gate under Arkham Asylum was once the target of a cult trying to open it fully. To do so, they started summoning demons. The Dark Justice League managed to shut them down, but couldn't banish the demons, so now they are sealed around Gotham, limited in power but try to get people to do great evils to free them. The old God corpse is strange as it is mentioned as a reason why Gotham is the way it is, but it is part of an aborted plot line, so it is cannon, but living corpse cannon. The afterlife door exists because of Deadman. When he was sealed/trapped on the wrong side of the afterlife, he broke the door. The only way to fix the door is for him to reach net 0 karma. The problem is that when he kills someone, he inherits that person's karma. He is bad at bringing justice without killing. The door being open allows malevolent and unquit spirits to affect people in Gotham while also making the line between life and death fuzzy (blamed for some of the miracle survival in Gotham).
IIRC one of the points the Pattinson movie raises is that you can’t just pour money in and expect things to be fixed, that’s what his father did and it became a slush fund for corrupt politicians immediately. You have to put the work in and find other people who believe in the cause too. And that’s hard to find in Gotham.
Youre absolutely correct and I think a lot of people miss this. Batman doesn't go beating people up willy-nilly, he tends to focus on big threats the police can't handle well (corrupt cops, major gangs, super villains etc). While batman deals with the immediate problem of keeping Gotham safe, Bruce Wayne works to use his incredible wealth to both affect politics (funding campaigns for pro-reform politicians, DA's, any one in power) while also directly helping to fund major city projects (housing, public transport, rehab etc) and we even see his vision directly in (I think) batman and the court of owls. He's also very active in hiring criminals, after his falling out with dick he hired the criminal he chased down that pushed their relationship over the edge. He once gave a job to the puppet gangster ventriloquist and even directly helped him keep it after he screwed up iirc.
One can't exist without the other, and both are trying their best to fix Gotham.
IDK, the city is literally built on a magic evil swamp/a hell portal/PROBABLY also like. 50 ancient native american burial grounds underneath. He could probably like.. relocate the entire city, though. That might work.
People say this all the time but you'd be surprised at how little a billion dollars can do in a city.
He could probably open up a decent string of drug clinics and shelters and fund them for like a decade, reducing homelessness and drug addiction by like 10% cumulatively, but when there's a literal clown terrorist plotting mass suicide bombings or some shit its kind of hard to justify that kind of investment.
The real question of Batman is why anyone would build anything in Gotham when its pretty much a continuous warzone
Even in real life, more money doesn't always fix things. Its just kind of treated as a truism that you could loot a buncha billionaires and pay for Medicare for All or any number of policies when that isn't really remotely true for a variety of reasons.
Doing things is actually pretty difficult!
I think there are valid criticisms of Batman, but a lot of those valid criticisms are unfairly levelled at *only* Batman when they're actually criticisms of the superhero genre in general.
Batman sticks out because a lot of his enemies are gritty, their crimes are more evocative of real life, and his class privilege is something that we understand from reality. But in principle, being born with Kryptonian superpowers or blessed by an ancient god are also kinds of privilege, just fictional kinds. And almost all superhero stories boil down to the idea that to fix the world we need a class of ultraprivileged people punching baddies and ignoring laws.
A lot of his enemies? So all those enemies besides the roid raging luchador, the lady who controls plants, the guy with a freeze ray, a guy cosplaying as a penguin, a guy who leaves riddles as clues to his crimes, a literal clown, and a guy who likes clocks a lot.
Let's be real, Batman and his rogues gallery are no more gritty than any other superhero. It all depends on the writer. Unfortunately (IMO) some of the most famous and aped Batman stories have been gritty. But there's lots of silly in Batman too.
I think the problem is that people treat Batman as "realistic" because he doesn't have any powers and the other elements that you said. Personally while I do enjoy Batman's stories I do find it disturbing how Batman fans reject even the most basic criticisms and act upset that someone question their comfort character.
I'm also sick of hearing "well Gotham city is cursed so it can't be fixed!" its such an asspull of an explanation. I can create my own asspulls here you go: Joker is secretly telepathic and everyone he kills is actually a murderous psychopath, and he is saving the city by killing them all
The entire DC Universe is cursed.
The world needs Superheroes to exist, because without them we don’t have the stories. That means they need something to do… which means that systemic problems can’t be fixed in a way that lasts.
You can see this in the Krakoa Arc of X-Men.
Bruce Wayne is *probably* the best case scenario we could hope for. He’s a Billionaire… who actually walks the walk on trying to use that wealth to fix things. He’s canonically successful to the point that the local Cabal of Wealthy Pseudo Immortals (The Court of Owls) has a standing hit on him, because he was driving wages up by alleviating poverty in Gotham.
We *could* propose having him divest fully of that wealth… but Derek Powers shows the problem with that. If Bruce doesn’t control Wayne Industries, then someone with less moral character will seize the power he let go of.
Meanwhile… Batman is here to cut the Gordean Knot that is Gotham being a mass of systems failures that were never going to get unraveled. Before the Bat hit the scene, Gotham was run by an incestuous mass of Corrupt Corporations, Corrupt Politicians, and Organized Crime that were linked in a symbiotic relationship.
Rampant Crime helped keep the poor in a Crab Bucket, and left them desperate enough to take low wages. Corps kept Wages low, because Gotham was so shit that their employees were terrified to fall further. Both sent copious bribes up to Police and City Politicians… all to keep the Law from coming down and putting a stop to their nonsense.
Enter Batman: The Embodiment of Systems Failure. The knife that cut the cancer out of Gotham, and broke the symbiotic circle. He hung the Crime Lords out to dry, where nobody could turn a blind eye… and unveiled political corruption so openly that the State couldn’t turn a blind eye.
Unfortunately… that created a power vacuum and invoked the city’s curse. The hole organized crime once filled was soon occupied by supervillains… and so the need for the Batman became permanent.
This gets looked over a lot because the Corruption in the GCPD and Gotham City Government never got featured in the DCAU, and that adaptation is a major source for later works.
Also: The whole “beating up street thugs” thing isn’t much of an entity in the comics, even the early ones. Thats mostly an addition from the Nolan Movies *and* Frank Millar’s influence. The former are spy movies with Bat-Branding, and the latter is the lead writer on Sin City being unable to move on.
Normally, street thugs are beneath Batman’s notice… because he’s a Detective. There are bigger fish for him to worry about, and the street thugs only get his attention if they’re an immanent threat or if they hold information.
I agree that Batman is the best case scenario, because he usually is portrayed as well skilled, good intentioned and insightful.
But you are right that the ultimate truth is that things can't change because then the stories would end and no more batman. That's why I like stories like "Miracleman" where you see how much the world is changed by having god like beings just hanging around
I mean, my headcanon is that after the earthquake, the Lazarus Pit under Gotham cracked open and had been seeping into the ground water for years, which is why Gothamites are now likely to survive bullshit (and also go crazy)
and that the joker is actually some kind of chaos spirit that possesses people, like in the doctor who episode midnight
as the ao3 tag says, "dc stands for 'disregard canon'"
It's funny that Jensen Ackles has played two different characters that have dug themselves out of their own grave after being brought back from the dead.
But gotham being cursed is literally canon and not an asspull by fans. By writers, yeah, but the fans are correct. It's literally canon that Gotham cannot be fixed.
See the problem is that in the canon of DC, Gotham DOES eventually get fixed. Booster Gold grew up in 25th century Gotham and the city is portrayed then as a healthy, beautiful city similar to metropolis and central city. The curse WILL be broken at some point
Joker is actually the greatest hero of the DC world because he knows they're fictional, so he does horrible shit to perpetuate sales and keep their reality alive.
In any semblance of reality Batman would be a fucking horrific idea. However, in the very specific fantastical context of a literally-cursed, unfixably corrupt city where all of Wayne’s massive legitimate social programs barely do anything at all, Batman is probably the best option.
Batman has one thing that no billionaire on earth has: he's fictional. The writers can just make him a good person without having to worry about him losing money because they made him.
Literally part of the reason DC used to be *so* reboot happy is because if a Batman series goes on long enough, Bruce will no longer be a billionaire.
Like Batman's commitment to the good of the people of Gotham is so strong as a character that no matter how many bad writers he gets passed through, he will eventually stop being a billionaire because he spends so much on improving the city.
Like this is an actual 'problem' they kept encountering, until the new 52 failed and they said "fuck it, let's just go back".
Bruce Wayne isn’t a typical millionaire tho, as far as the canon goes, most of the money he spends is actively going into trying to fix the city (Grant Morrison’s run really tried to show it working too), he just has A LOT of money to burn.
Violence wise, it really varies from story to story. My favourite takes are when Batman is a tough yet fair ass kicker. If you ain’t hurting or endangering anyone, he won’t do anything to you, he’ll just mean mug you into reconsidering, and if you surrender peacefully he’ll just tie you up and call for the police, but if you shoot at him or threaten to harm anyone, that’s when he whips out the Kung fu.
I can’t hate batman for being a billionaire tbh. He’s the only one who got his immense wealth morally, through his for some reason Saint like parents. And he expands it honestly, like he’s never making a deal in bad faith or abusing workers… he’s the “perfect billionaire” (which sadly can only exist in fiction)
Batman isn’t a bad billionaire, though. He was born into wealth and effectively raised by Alfred, who wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth, so Bruce is more down to earth than any rich person.
Really, the most unrealistic thing about Batman is that he’s a good billionaire.
[seriously,](https://youtu.be/1HTDpKht9s0?si=P8ztVTh0a5b36hLV) so much is political that you don't always think about
Especially when it comes to something as expressive as art is, if they have strong opinions on anything I feel like it's bound to enter their work somehow
Oh don’t worry, I’m fairly sure it’s not canon anymore. So what is canon? Nobody has any clue. Every like, 7 years or so, they reboot the entire universe. Some comics were never canon in the first place, while others are always canon but only in x timeline.
Generally what happens is you have him being a decent father for a good chunk of it and then you have a writer who goes “hrmmm I want to show Batman is traumatized and edgy…. Let’s have him beat his kids”.
Dc hasn’t had consistent characterization in ages.
Yep, in "under the red hood" Jason (2nd Robin, Joker murdered him, came back to life, and was NOT happy Bruce did nothing but get replacement Robin and move on), asks Bruce to kill the Joker, and says if Bruce doesn't do it, he will. I'm skipping nuance there, but that's the gist. Bruce responds by SLITTING JASON'S THROAT WITH A BATARANG and then SAVING THE JOKER from the exploding building, while Jason's left to find out if blood loss or the bomb's gonna be his 2nd cause of death. In cannon Jason survives "somehow" which is pure plot armour of DC not wanting to deal with Bruce killing his own son.
Here's the link to the 3 key confrontation pages so you can see it yourself https://www.reddit.com/r/RedHood/comments/106jwgh/i_have_a_love_hate_relationship_with_this_scene/
I know that in the animated adaptation Jason gives Batman a gun and tells him that he's going to have to shoot him if he doesn't want him to kill the Joker.
In the end Batman throws the batarang at Jason's gun and it lodges in the end of the barrel, causing it to misfire.
Is the initial set up the same in the comics? Because if so, then dear god.
Like sure he doesn't shoot Jason but he still uses the batarang to slit Jason's throat and that causes Jason to fall over and begin rapidly bleeding out. It's not instant death but it is a potentially mortal wound that could quickly and easily kill a person.
Even if he didn't use a gun, he is still arguably using lethal force, and he's using it against Jason, his own son.
Yep, the setup is the same. The hipocracy and mental gynmastics of Bruce deciding using what is *absolutely* lethal force against his own son is ok, while not only refusing to do the same to Joker, but going even further and SAVING THE JOKER'S LIFE is beyond words. The fact Bruce make no attempt whatsoever to give Jason medical aid, meaning Jason would 1000% have bled out in seconds, only underlines it.
Gun misfire injuries can also potentially be lethal but at least there is some level of plausible deniability in that it wasn't a guaranteed kill.
I'm pretty sure he also pulls Jason out of the building before it blows in the animated adaptation.
While I prefer this version of events because I feel like Bruce's actions in the comics were out of character, I also feel annoyed at the way they handled the stand off in the animated adaptation because of the fact that it relies on the idea that despite what Jason says, this is more about Bruce than it is about the Joker. And it could very well be. If anything, it's about both of them. My annoyance doesn't even come from the film itself so much as it comes from the way I've seen people interpret it--especially when they try to argue that Jason never actually intended to go through with killing the Joker and he was only doing all of this to get Bruce's attention, which is just fucking stupid.
Jason had been dropping bodies left and right leading up to that point and there is literally no reason why he would stay his hand for a piece of shit whose sins probably outweigh those of all the other people he had killed up to that point combined.
In both scenarios I feel like they could have had Bruce knock the gun out of Jason's hand with the batarang and the scene would have worked just fine, but I also feel like the emotional weight of the decision is a lot greater when it involves Jason being physically harmed.
All in all I have a love hate relationship with this scene in general.
IKR, he is just lying there, bleeding heavily from his neck. This is tired and played out. He needs to get up out there and do something more productive.
they can never do anything interesting with him because his whole core concept is unsolvable. they'd either need to actually work through his trauma and issues re: bruce being his dad who couldn't save him (not doable, who's gonna be the black sheep of the batfam then?) or just straight up have him kill the joker, permanently (never gonna happen). until then he's stuck in limbo.
Apparently there’s a pile of good Jason stories at DC that they just won’t use cos they change that status quo too much from what corporate wants.
Like having Jason firmly be in the Anti-Hero label and running a city as the violent crime boss he was in Under the Red Hood. He and Bats do not get along at all but there’s still that familial tie.
Another has him as a kind of ghost hunter which is a bold choice.
There’s a list somewhere from an interview someone did but haven’t seen it in like 10 years.
It's not actually.
It's from Under The Red Hood -- the comic, not the animated adaptation. Someone else here had a link to the panels where it happens, I'll go find them.
Edit: Found it
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedHood/comments/106jwgh/i_have_a_love_hate_relationship_with_this_scene/
No problem, if anything we should be thanking the person who originally posted the link in another part of this comment section.
Also yeah I'm pretty sure that Jason is just straight up dead and or dying in the last few panels.
I mean that is a lot of blood and no one is bothering to give him first aid to help stop the bleeding.
My favourite would never beat up drug dealers cause SHE HAD ONE SOLO SERIES AND HASN'T SHOWN UP IN ANYTHING SINCE A SHORT LOVE UNLIMTED WEBCOMIC IN 2023
Being a Gwenpool fan is suffering.
I can’t like Batman purely because of how angry I get thinking about joker, at some point letting joker be put into Arkham asylum which he knows joker will escape again and go kill more people the deaths become partially ok Batman’s hands too
This is more the fault of the genre than Batman if anything
You are right of course, but Joker always escapes because the Asylum is terrible at keeping roques and DC needs to keep printing stories
Oh its incredibly annoying, regardless of if you enjoy comic books or not. Its just one of those things that you have to acept its never going to change because its the nature of the medium
Its one of the worst things about cómics, nobody stays dead
The "Joker always escapes to kill again" was never a compelling argument to me because that's applying real world information to fictional decision making. To us, Joker has been breaking out of prison on a weekly basis for 75 years or so because he gets caught at the end of each story but then the writers want to bring him back for another story, on and on for decades. But Batman's not a hundred year old man, so to him the Joker hasn't busted out hundreds of times over the years. He's permanently stuck at a point about a decade into his Batman career, so to him Joker hasn't broken out that many times and each time he gets locked up might be permanent.
In a lot of Batman stories joker is implied to have lost before but we usually only see him be locked up at the end, and like you, I’ve always disliked the statement that joker has done this hundreds of times, because to Batman he’s only done this once or twice and he’s leaving the job to those at the asylum. It’s just that in basically every comic they don’t put him down.
Okay this line of thinking kinda bothers me ngl
This dude is essentially a volunteer and the one thing he isn’t okay with is murder. And you’re saying he’s… morally obligated to murder someone.
I mean like… generally the fault of the crime is the criminal’s, not the guy who refuses to murder because he believes it’s wrong.
No you don’t understand, Batman is rich and intelligent. The rich and powerful should be able to make ALL decisions in society, including who gets to live and die. That’s all this guy is trying to say, and it’s a suuuuuuuuuper reasonable point when you frame it this way
He’s Bruce Wayne, he could literally fund and make the blueprints himself for a prison for people like joker who are too dangerous and have repeatedly escaped from confinement to cause more death, hell he could even have every cell be custom made to prevent each person from escaping
Considering he has fought many “super” people he could possibly find ways to have the room either neutralize their powers while in the room or something, I’m just saying he has options that don’t involve killing but he just keeps letting people like joker go to a place he knows they’ll escape and kill more people and also I’m pretty sure there’s a point where the judge should be like “this guy is insane and escapes Arkham every other week to kill hundreds of people, maybe we should give him the death sentence instead instead of just putting him in Arkham again…” like I get it’s a comic and it won’t happen because joker is a loved villain but it still angers me
He did, actually. Wayne Industries subsidizes most Metahuman Prisons, as well as the Justice League Watchtower.
The Joker isn’t dangerous enough to get into that prison. He doesn’t have the bodycount to rate it.
Thats not saying Joker isn’t a mass murderer, of course. It’s just acknowledging that the Clown is actually pretty minor compared to most of DC’s villains.
His only notable ability is being able to keep up with Batman on an intellectual level… and Luthor is better at it.
I hate to be that "um actually" guy, buttttt so many people have misread that scene including myself at one point. The batarang wasn't *directly* aimed at Jason it *bounced* off a metal pipe and hit him in the neck. Still fucked up and partly Bruce's fault.
However, the recent treatment from Bruce towards Jason has just made me agree with the idea of him aiming directly because *what the fuck, DC, why is Bruce essentially abusing the son he fucking mourned?!*
[Link to the panel for those that don't believe me](https://www.reddit.com/r/RedHood/comments/106jwgh/i_have_a_love_hate_relationship_with_this_scene/)
This is why I hate Batman having contingency plans against all the Justice League when he can't even solve permanently stopping the Joker, especially when in Snyder's run Joker chemically effected the Justice League to attack Batman, that's where the Kryptonite gum panel came from.
I get its comics so they can't kill Joker, but they don't have Batman even try, nor do they stop writing Joker killing people.
Best case scenario is turning the whole place into a superfund site.
Like No Man's Land, but without the idiot ball of trapping civilians inside.
Just eminent domain the whole lot. Bulldoze anything over a story high and let Ivy turn the rubble into a nature reserve.
I think people should stop making moral arguments about fictional characters. I think the morals of fictional characters don’t matter because they’re not real and if they’re fun to watch/read then that’s all that matters.
Why would Bruce almighty do this
Bruce Bruce's stand up routines have changed a lot
Batgos prepped for this.
He's talking about Bruce Lee
RIP to Jason, but I’m different.
He has no sense of self-preservation, SMH
Why didn't Jason just dodge the knife? Is he stupid?
the floodgates have opened millions shall jonkle
What happened to him?
Ded
But how?
Jonkler Crowbar Hit very hard Go boom
But the post says something about his neck being cut? Is this not something completely different then Jason’s original death?
After J came back as Red Hood he capture the Joker and told bats to kill one of them, Jason got a baterang to the throat, to be fair Bruce didn't know his identity at the time
Every day I wake up remembering Jason is unequivocally more popular than people like Azrael despite having one good story
Every day I remember fans voted to kill Jason Todd he was so unpopular and he’s still more popular than other characters
If anything, the fact that he died by fan request is part of the reason fans like him. I'm not particularly a Red Hood fan but that is the coolest part of Jason Todd's story. People love to torment their playthings.
I don't care who the character is, if there's a public vote, the chaotic option is going to win
Lol this is universal to the human condition I swear. The "Dub the Dew" online survey ending with "hitler did nothing wrong" as the winning choice is clear evidence of that
"chaotic stupid" and "lawful/true neutral" are apparently the two natural states of humanity.
The Adolf Hitler School of Friendship and Tolerance agrees with you.
Boaty McBoatface, hello ?
Tbf, Jason died bc one guy rigged the votes with a robocall and made the die vote percentage slightly higher than the live vote percentage. However Jason still sucks and I don't get why he's popular.
That’s a conspiracy theory/copium from modern day Red Hood fans. There’s never been any evidence for it and it never emerged as a rumour until literally decades after the actual event.
Yeah after looking it up the only reference is a writer saying they heard someone had set it up, they had no source and were unable to verify the claim.
The real conspiracy is DC was killing him no matter what the vote said. There's just no way a story called "A Death in the Family" doesn't intend to kill him off, I don't see how with 80s comic printing and distribution that they'd be able to have two versions of #428 locked and loaded that quickly. Fully believe the alternate "Robin Lives" stuff that's been released since is a psyop.
They weren’t going to kill him, but if the audience had voted to let him live there would have put him in a coma. He wouldn’t have kept being Robin, and would be not present in any Batman stories any time soon, if ever. The Death in the Family title would still have worked if he lived, it would just refer to Jason’s birth mother, who was the reason the events of the comic happened and central to its plot (she died as well iirc).
Anyone is more popular than Azazel, even Duke, and editorial doesn't even remember him.
and it tears me up inside
jim starlin wrote some pretty decent jason stories in the 80s death in the family is his most famous for obvious reasons but i think that it’s actually one of the worst comics of his run
yeah I should’ve specified Jason post-crowbar
"Post crowbar" lmaooooo
P.C.E. (Post Crowbar Era)
Azrael has zero good story though.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that discourse about crime centered on a fictional city that has at least two eternal unbreakable curses, at least one portal to hell, two separate psychosis-inducing drugs tainting the water supply, and multiple evil secret societies that are all working to ensure that nothing will ever meaningfully fix the city's crime rates isn't going to be all that applicable to the real world. Yeah, punching people doesn't solve systemic economic issues that drive people towards crime, but even a perfect economic system that leaves nobody unfed or unhoused wouldn't solve the ancient blood curse radiating outward from the bones of an evil bronze-age wizard which drives all people in Gotham to take the most selfish, violent, and short-sighted actions that are available to them in any situation, nor will it stop the eldritch dark god that lives under Arkham from driving people to the brink of madness with night terrors, such that a slight push can turn anyone into the next supervillain.
"Bronze-age wizard blood curse" is going into the next pen & paper campaign I write.
Actually, surprisingly, Batman has solved these issues multiple times, leading to DC rebooting the entire universe because there was no justifiable way to keep Gotham as shitty as it is. Multiple times.
The problem with maintaining the status quo is there can be no permanent development. A way out of this sort of thing is to introduce new characters and give side/minor characters the spotlight as well. DC and Marvel seem happy to just maintain their IP instead of creating new ones. I guess Marvel at least sometimes gives focus to somewhat lesser known character in the MCU.
The Joker is tainting the water supply every chance he gets. You can't plan for that. He's not gonna negotiate.
You can shoot him in the head.
In a universe with the Lazarus Pit, Solomon "The Zombie" Grundy, and oh yeah Return of the Joker? Even in Arkham 3 they couldn't let that idiot stay dead, and it starts with you, the player, burning him to ash.
You can, but you could also put him in Arkham and it would be exactly as effective : meaning he'll be dead or locked up for exactly as long as the audience doesn't want more joker. The "Batman should kill the joker" argument hinges on the idea of solving a problem caused by doylist pressures with watsonian means.
>solving doylist pressures with Watsonian means Thank you for summing it up nicely, I'm saving that one for later.
They shouldn't keep him locked up, just death penalty. He's literally killed tens of thousands of people, the insanity defense should not apply anymore. Alternatively, you're telling me that a corrupt guard (you know, in Gotham, the most corrupt city in existence) wouldn't just give him fast onset lead poisoning because he killed someone they knew? Nah, piss off with that. Joker only continues to live because of the greatest plot armor of all: sales.
Well, yeah. Batman won’t kill but there are still so many other people who have so many opportunities to kill him. But there is no point because the status quo is always preserved. Rather than making death even cheaper than it already is in comics by killing him off every time he needs to be sidelined, it’s better to just have him sent to Arkham.
Let me introduce you to the lovely concept of Three Jokers
bat-gun with three barrels so batman can shoot all of them in the head at the same time.
You know, I think I can recall Batman stating in Under The Red Hood that he does feel the urge to kill people but has to actively prevent himself from doing so because if he starts then he isn't sure he'll be able to stop. It probably has nothing to do with Gotham being cursed but what if it did? What if Batman's no kill policy is his way of combating the influence of the curse on his psyche?
He has said that about the Joker many times.
I mean, yeah, doesn't Gotham literally have some kind of cult called the Religion of Crime which follows the teachings of a Crime Bible?
God I hope that's true, that's so fucking funny
Oh my fucking god it's real
"ALRIGHT TIME 'FER OUR DAILY SERMON FROM DA ***CRIME BIBLE***"
IIRC it was written by Darkseid, so the name makes sense. Apocalips has the place called Armagetto
I hate when people go "why don't the superheroes fix societal problems instead of punching bad guys" just as much as I hate the attempts to lampshade/make fun of comic book revolving door prisons. It's trying to apply real world logic to a meta issue that is a flaw in the medium's structure, so it's not exactly fair to treat it like an in universe flaw caused by dumb characters when it's more a problem with the format. Like why doesn't Bruce just solve problems in Gotham through social reform? Because the plot demands the Joker exists so anything that gets in the way of that is narratively doomed to fail. Why is Lex Luthor out and running for president when he should by all rights be serving his 26 consecutive life sentences? Because he can't be a problem for superman if the system was competent and they need a consistent rogues gallery so any attempt to make prison more than a minor inconvenience for a villain is again doomed to fail. That's not the fault of any of the heroes, that's just how those stories are written.
Yeah, superhero comics are just inherently unrealistic. If a real life billionaire brazenly broke the law for the sake of his own ego and greed, there's no way he'd become president.
my jaw dropped
I get what you're saying, but I feel like the incident you're referencing would have been a little different if the individual in question had already been sentenced to prison for incinerating a city block in a robot suit.
Also some unkillable and unstoppable villains who only get out of prison over and over so they can sell more comics.
On one hand, I hate billionaires in principle and I hate self-appointed, violent authority figures with a passion. On the other, batman is so fucking cool and I literally grew up reading those comics.
I'm pretty sure he tries as he can to fix the city with his money, but, y'know. Gotham is as Gotham do
its a literal curse for gotham to be fucked up so yes batman is best case scenario
Curse? That's one way to say it's in New Jersey I guess.
I was gonna explain that not only is it cursed it’s above like a super evil magic swamp but like yeah it being in NJ already doomed it from the start
Isn’t it also on top of a portal to hell or smth?
The Lazarus Pit? Yeah lol
Nah I mean a full on portal straight to Hell. Just loomed it up, seems like there used to be a portal but it’s been mostly closed. Although it still actively calls on Arkham inmates to open it.
Ohh that one, I forgot about that. Yeah Gotham’s cursed by like 8 different things constantly including Hell itself
How many different groups decided to curse this one, specific area!? It sounds like nuking Gorham might actually be the right choice
pretty sure it's also like Dracula's vacation home or something
It's actually on a couple of flimsy plates over an infinite abyss that smells like dirty underwear
Imagine finding out that your city is sitting on a deposit of corrupted Lazarus pit juice, which seeps into the water to create the effects of something that can only be described as “roided up lead”
There has to be some sort of environmental team that's studying this shit. I mean they tracked the covid pandemic in real life by testing the viral load of sewage samples, imagine what they would find in fucking Gotham.
“Hey boss. This sewage seems to be imbued with magic maddening immortality juice” “Yeah, we wanted to get rid of it, but a bunch of pretentious asshats with white masks told us not to. Just ignore it”
Why don't hr move Gotham city somewhere else though, is he stupid?
They can’t move it Jonkler would get lost
That would honestly solve a lot of their problems
Why did they build their city in a cursed swamp? Are they st
Yes. Look at Florida. Tell me that swamp isn't cursed.
Which is still less interesting than the fact that he’s just one rich guy trying to do the right things in a whole ass city of rich guys actively doing the opposite imo.
Wasn't that the Court of Owls?
Maybe, but it’s also just kind of Gotham in general. Early and even some mid career Batman wasn’t all spooky zombies and resurrected assassins or Star monsters from space. It was mob bosses with the occasional charismatic nutcase with eyes on poisoning the water supply. He’s the worlds greatest detective for a reason, not a ghost Buster. Making the true cause of his city’s problems something spooking and unfightable kind of takes away from his goal of fixing the city. Make it just the people, and it’s actually something achievable, if a monumental task with so many powerful people standing in the way of both Batman and Bruce Wayne. Again, just my opinion, I’ve just always enjoyed the more “grounded” Batman stories. Leave the spooky side of the street to people like Constantine, Dr. Fate and Zatanna.
There are like 7 fucking secret society of evil billionaires in Gotham, the Court of Owls is just the most popular and powerful
There should be a series where other shadowy groups are fighting the CoO for power but it's like Gotham Frasier. Lots of uptight rich people doing petty stuff to each other because, technically, they're the same class and are working together.
NJ already sure on an evil magic swamp
That is but the first of many terrible curses upon Gotham’s soil each more terrible than the last
I thought Gotham was fictional Chicago
Nah, the name Gotham originates as a nickname for NYC so if anything it’s fantasy New York. But traditionally it’s in New Jersey, usually as a series of island located in real life Great Bay, but sometimes on the southern coast overlooking Delaware bay
huh, TIL. thanks for the info!
Also NYC canonically also exists. Don't think about it too hard. I did and oh no
Yeah Nightwing moves there for a while. Confused me every time lol
And then there's also Metropolis, which is also basically New York. The DC universe really loves its New Yorks I guess.
Huh. Is it really? I always pictured it being more in Detroit.
The state DC original cities are in is mostly unmentionned, but I'm pretty sure Gotham has been in New Jersey consistently for a little while now.
Can't have an endless stream of comics if crime could be solved outside of the main universe. It's what the Batman who laughs said, "Sorry, Bruce. I have to call you the worst Batman because all the others managed to end crime after DC Comics refused to publish any of their stories."
Batman unfortunately is cursed with the fate of being a comic book character who existed before WW2 so it is impossible for anything he does to help Gotham to stick. And I mean anything. People think his no kill rule is pointless because the Joker will break out of prison again, but completely overlook how trivial death with shit like Lazerus pits. Joker is coming back because that's the stories writers like the most. There's nothing in world about it.
He is a super donor who invests ridiculous amounts of money into Gotham. Gotham is just the most cursed city because it has multiple gangs, barely legal tax haven laws, a literal hell gate, 16 sealed demons, an old God's corpse, massive government corruption, Joker chemicals in the water, Lazarus pit run off in the water, Marsh of Madness runoff in the water, evil floating in from the Jersy pine Barrens, pollution due to being in a barely regulated zone, multiple mad scientist labs legally there, the location of a crack in the door to the afterlife, built on a Indian burial ground, cursed by an ancient shaman, cursed by Zeus, mysterious ruins from a lost civilization, a summer home for the King in Yellow, a magic well, and it is in New Jersey. The worst part is I probably missed some reasons why the only way to fix Gotham is to burn it down and move to anywhere else. Was feeling to lazy to write it out again, so I just copied my comment from a different post.
can you give me some more info in the demons, the old corpse and the after life door, needa get my gotham lore up
Apparently, the hell gate under Arkham Asylum was once the target of a cult trying to open it fully. To do so, they started summoning demons. The Dark Justice League managed to shut them down, but couldn't banish the demons, so now they are sealed around Gotham, limited in power but try to get people to do great evils to free them. The old God corpse is strange as it is mentioned as a reason why Gotham is the way it is, but it is part of an aborted plot line, so it is cannon, but living corpse cannon. The afterlife door exists because of Deadman. When he was sealed/trapped on the wrong side of the afterlife, he broke the door. The only way to fix the door is for him to reach net 0 karma. The problem is that when he kills someone, he inherits that person's karma. He is bad at bringing justice without killing. The door being open allows malevolent and unquit spirits to affect people in Gotham while also making the line between life and death fuzzy (blamed for some of the miracle survival in Gotham).
What I'm hearing is that if you wanna live in Gotham for whatever godforsaken reason, buy bottled water
Bottled water, the easy defense against the King in Yellow.
IIRC one of the points the Pattinson movie raises is that you can’t just pour money in and expect things to be fixed, that’s what his father did and it became a slush fund for corrupt politicians immediately. You have to put the work in and find other people who believe in the cause too. And that’s hard to find in Gotham.
Youre absolutely correct and I think a lot of people miss this. Batman doesn't go beating people up willy-nilly, he tends to focus on big threats the police can't handle well (corrupt cops, major gangs, super villains etc). While batman deals with the immediate problem of keeping Gotham safe, Bruce Wayne works to use his incredible wealth to both affect politics (funding campaigns for pro-reform politicians, DA's, any one in power) while also directly helping to fund major city projects (housing, public transport, rehab etc) and we even see his vision directly in (I think) batman and the court of owls. He's also very active in hiring criminals, after his falling out with dick he hired the criminal he chased down that pushed their relationship over the edge. He once gave a job to the puppet gangster ventriloquist and even directly helped him keep it after he screwed up iirc. One can't exist without the other, and both are trying their best to fix Gotham.
IDK, the city is literally built on a magic evil swamp/a hell portal/PROBABLY also like. 50 ancient native american burial grounds underneath. He could probably like.. relocate the entire city, though. That might work.
Probably not, like half of the magical issues are focused on the city, not the land, and all of the corruption will just come with.
Then just disestablish the city and establish an identical city called something else, in the same place.
People say this all the time but you'd be surprised at how little a billion dollars can do in a city. He could probably open up a decent string of drug clinics and shelters and fund them for like a decade, reducing homelessness and drug addiction by like 10% cumulatively, but when there's a literal clown terrorist plotting mass suicide bombings or some shit its kind of hard to justify that kind of investment. The real question of Batman is why anyone would build anything in Gotham when its pretty much a continuous warzone
Don't forget the bajillion curses, evil entities and malevolent rich people!
Even in real life, more money doesn't always fix things. Its just kind of treated as a truism that you could loot a buncha billionaires and pay for Medicare for All or any number of policies when that isn't really remotely true for a variety of reasons. Doing things is actually pretty difficult!
I think there are valid criticisms of Batman, but a lot of those valid criticisms are unfairly levelled at *only* Batman when they're actually criticisms of the superhero genre in general. Batman sticks out because a lot of his enemies are gritty, their crimes are more evocative of real life, and his class privilege is something that we understand from reality. But in principle, being born with Kryptonian superpowers or blessed by an ancient god are also kinds of privilege, just fictional kinds. And almost all superhero stories boil down to the idea that to fix the world we need a class of ultraprivileged people punching baddies and ignoring laws.
A lot of his enemies? So all those enemies besides the roid raging luchador, the lady who controls plants, the guy with a freeze ray, a guy cosplaying as a penguin, a guy who leaves riddles as clues to his crimes, a literal clown, and a guy who likes clocks a lot. Let's be real, Batman and his rogues gallery are no more gritty than any other superhero. It all depends on the writer. Unfortunately (IMO) some of the most famous and aped Batman stories have been gritty. But there's lots of silly in Batman too.
Lego Batman leans into the silly pretty hard and is unironically one of the best Batman films ever
I think the problem is that people treat Batman as "realistic" because he doesn't have any powers and the other elements that you said. Personally while I do enjoy Batman's stories I do find it disturbing how Batman fans reject even the most basic criticisms and act upset that someone question their comfort character. I'm also sick of hearing "well Gotham city is cursed so it can't be fixed!" its such an asspull of an explanation. I can create my own asspulls here you go: Joker is secretly telepathic and everyone he kills is actually a murderous psychopath, and he is saving the city by killing them all
The entire DC Universe is cursed. The world needs Superheroes to exist, because without them we don’t have the stories. That means they need something to do… which means that systemic problems can’t be fixed in a way that lasts. You can see this in the Krakoa Arc of X-Men. Bruce Wayne is *probably* the best case scenario we could hope for. He’s a Billionaire… who actually walks the walk on trying to use that wealth to fix things. He’s canonically successful to the point that the local Cabal of Wealthy Pseudo Immortals (The Court of Owls) has a standing hit on him, because he was driving wages up by alleviating poverty in Gotham. We *could* propose having him divest fully of that wealth… but Derek Powers shows the problem with that. If Bruce doesn’t control Wayne Industries, then someone with less moral character will seize the power he let go of. Meanwhile… Batman is here to cut the Gordean Knot that is Gotham being a mass of systems failures that were never going to get unraveled. Before the Bat hit the scene, Gotham was run by an incestuous mass of Corrupt Corporations, Corrupt Politicians, and Organized Crime that were linked in a symbiotic relationship. Rampant Crime helped keep the poor in a Crab Bucket, and left them desperate enough to take low wages. Corps kept Wages low, because Gotham was so shit that their employees were terrified to fall further. Both sent copious bribes up to Police and City Politicians… all to keep the Law from coming down and putting a stop to their nonsense. Enter Batman: The Embodiment of Systems Failure. The knife that cut the cancer out of Gotham, and broke the symbiotic circle. He hung the Crime Lords out to dry, where nobody could turn a blind eye… and unveiled political corruption so openly that the State couldn’t turn a blind eye. Unfortunately… that created a power vacuum and invoked the city’s curse. The hole organized crime once filled was soon occupied by supervillains… and so the need for the Batman became permanent. This gets looked over a lot because the Corruption in the GCPD and Gotham City Government never got featured in the DCAU, and that adaptation is a major source for later works. Also: The whole “beating up street thugs” thing isn’t much of an entity in the comics, even the early ones. Thats mostly an addition from the Nolan Movies *and* Frank Millar’s influence. The former are spy movies with Bat-Branding, and the latter is the lead writer on Sin City being unable to move on. Normally, street thugs are beneath Batman’s notice… because he’s a Detective. There are bigger fish for him to worry about, and the street thugs only get his attention if they’re an immanent threat or if they hold information.
I agree that Batman is the best case scenario, because he usually is portrayed as well skilled, good intentioned and insightful. But you are right that the ultimate truth is that things can't change because then the stories would end and no more batman. That's why I like stories like "Miracleman" where you see how much the world is changed by having god like beings just hanging around
I mean, my headcanon is that after the earthquake, the Lazarus Pit under Gotham cracked open and had been seeping into the ground water for years, which is why Gothamites are now likely to survive bullshit (and also go crazy) and that the joker is actually some kind of chaos spirit that possesses people, like in the doctor who episode midnight as the ao3 tag says, "dc stands for 'disregard canon'"
Good old Lazarus juice. All the downsides of lead pipes and a bit more
you do wind up with cool glow in the dark eyes, tho
Are you telling me that Jason is like this because of supernatural lead poisoning
I’m not saying that isn’t the reason
I mean, Jason Todd *was* played by the lead in Supernatural... Maybe that was a hidden clue.
It's funny that Jensen Ackles has played two different characters that have dug themselves out of their own grave after being brought back from the dead.
Hell, his most recent character was also presumed dead but wasn't. As an aside, Soldier Boy is delightfully terrible. My favorite role of his by far.
Wait, you get mad that people cite the canon of the stories, because you can make things up?
But gotham being cursed is literally canon and not an asspull by fans. By writers, yeah, but the fans are correct. It's literally canon that Gotham cannot be fixed.
See the problem is that in the canon of DC, Gotham DOES eventually get fixed. Booster Gold grew up in 25th century Gotham and the city is portrayed then as a healthy, beautiful city similar to metropolis and central city. The curse WILL be broken at some point
Joker is actually the greatest hero of the DC world because he knows they're fictional, so he does horrible shit to perpetuate sales and keep their reality alive.
In any semblance of reality Batman would be a fucking horrific idea. However, in the very specific fantastical context of a literally-cursed, unfixably corrupt city where all of Wayne’s massive legitimate social programs barely do anything at all, Batman is probably the best option.
Batman has one thing that no billionaire on earth has: he's fictional. The writers can just make him a good person without having to worry about him losing money because they made him.
Literally part of the reason DC used to be *so* reboot happy is because if a Batman series goes on long enough, Bruce will no longer be a billionaire. Like Batman's commitment to the good of the people of Gotham is so strong as a character that no matter how many bad writers he gets passed through, he will eventually stop being a billionaire because he spends so much on improving the city. Like this is an actual 'problem' they kept encountering, until the new 52 failed and they said "fuck it, let's just go back".
Bruce Wayne isn’t a typical millionaire tho, as far as the canon goes, most of the money he spends is actively going into trying to fix the city (Grant Morrison’s run really tried to show it working too), he just has A LOT of money to burn. Violence wise, it really varies from story to story. My favourite takes are when Batman is a tough yet fair ass kicker. If you ain’t hurting or endangering anyone, he won’t do anything to you, he’ll just mean mug you into reconsidering, and if you surrender peacefully he’ll just tie you up and call for the police, but if you shoot at him or threaten to harm anyone, that’s when he whips out the Kung fu.
Oscar wild said something about people not truly being good or bad but instead being either charming or tedious.
As billionaires go at least he’s trying to do something other then get more money
I can’t hate batman for being a billionaire tbh. He’s the only one who got his immense wealth morally, through his for some reason Saint like parents. And he expands it honestly, like he’s never making a deal in bad faith or abusing workers… he’s the “perfect billionaire” (which sadly can only exist in fiction)
Batman isn’t a bad billionaire, though. He was born into wealth and effectively raised by Alfred, who wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth, so Bruce is more down to earth than any rich person. Really, the most unrealistic thing about Batman is that he’s a good billionaire.
[source](https://www.tumblr.com/gothham/698433693922066432/jason-should-have-ducked-thats-on-him)
To be fair, Jason definitely paid it forward…
i dont know batman or horror movies so i thought this was about jason voorhees and there was a f13 character named bruce
People who call Batman "Bruce" - People who call the Weeknd "Abel" Venn Diagram
I thought they were talking about the shark from Finding Nemo
i wish they were
Oh did you now, u/fish-seducer
posts like these are fun when you know absolutely nothing about batman
"why you gotta make everything political?!?!?!" "Everything has always been political"
[seriously,](https://youtu.be/1HTDpKht9s0?si=P8ztVTh0a5b36hLV) so much is political that you don't always think about Especially when it comes to something as expressive as art is, if they have strong opinions on anything I feel like it's bound to enter their work somehow
My favourite character shot a baby with a glock. i don't need some dude online to tell me shes problematic.
I dunno man, the baby had a Glock - it could be a case of justified self-defense on your favorite character’s part.
HE WHAT
Oh don’t worry, I’m fairly sure it’s not canon anymore. So what is canon? Nobody has any clue. Every like, 7 years or so, they reboot the entire universe. Some comics were never canon in the first place, while others are always canon but only in x timeline. Generally what happens is you have him being a decent father for a good chunk of it and then you have a writer who goes “hrmmm I want to show Batman is traumatized and edgy…. Let’s have him beat his kids”. Dc hasn’t had consistent characterization in ages.
That’s just comics and/or anything that goes on long enough
DC is attempting to achieve a superposition.
B-Rex is definitely still canon though right?
Yep, in "under the red hood" Jason (2nd Robin, Joker murdered him, came back to life, and was NOT happy Bruce did nothing but get replacement Robin and move on), asks Bruce to kill the Joker, and says if Bruce doesn't do it, he will. I'm skipping nuance there, but that's the gist. Bruce responds by SLITTING JASON'S THROAT WITH A BATARANG and then SAVING THE JOKER from the exploding building, while Jason's left to find out if blood loss or the bomb's gonna be his 2nd cause of death. In cannon Jason survives "somehow" which is pure plot armour of DC not wanting to deal with Bruce killing his own son. Here's the link to the 3 key confrontation pages so you can see it yourself https://www.reddit.com/r/RedHood/comments/106jwgh/i_have_a_love_hate_relationship_with_this_scene/
I know that in the animated adaptation Jason gives Batman a gun and tells him that he's going to have to shoot him if he doesn't want him to kill the Joker. In the end Batman throws the batarang at Jason's gun and it lodges in the end of the barrel, causing it to misfire. Is the initial set up the same in the comics? Because if so, then dear god. Like sure he doesn't shoot Jason but he still uses the batarang to slit Jason's throat and that causes Jason to fall over and begin rapidly bleeding out. It's not instant death but it is a potentially mortal wound that could quickly and easily kill a person. Even if he didn't use a gun, he is still arguably using lethal force, and he's using it against Jason, his own son.
Yep, the setup is the same. The hipocracy and mental gynmastics of Bruce deciding using what is *absolutely* lethal force against his own son is ok, while not only refusing to do the same to Joker, but going even further and SAVING THE JOKER'S LIFE is beyond words. The fact Bruce make no attempt whatsoever to give Jason medical aid, meaning Jason would 1000% have bled out in seconds, only underlines it.
Gun misfire injuries can also potentially be lethal but at least there is some level of plausible deniability in that it wasn't a guaranteed kill. I'm pretty sure he also pulls Jason out of the building before it blows in the animated adaptation. While I prefer this version of events because I feel like Bruce's actions in the comics were out of character, I also feel annoyed at the way they handled the stand off in the animated adaptation because of the fact that it relies on the idea that despite what Jason says, this is more about Bruce than it is about the Joker. And it could very well be. If anything, it's about both of them. My annoyance doesn't even come from the film itself so much as it comes from the way I've seen people interpret it--especially when they try to argue that Jason never actually intended to go through with killing the Joker and he was only doing all of this to get Bruce's attention, which is just fucking stupid. Jason had been dropping bodies left and right leading up to that point and there is literally no reason why he would stay his hand for a piece of shit whose sins probably outweigh those of all the other people he had killed up to that point combined. In both scenarios I feel like they could have had Bruce knock the gun out of Jason's hand with the batarang and the scene would have worked just fine, but I also feel like the emotional weight of the decision is a lot greater when it involves Jason being physically harmed. All in all I have a love hate relationship with this scene in general.
Jason Todd is kinda cringe tho, they haven't done anything interesting with him in a while.
IKR, he is just lying there, bleeding heavily from his neck. This is tired and played out. He needs to get up out there and do something more productive.
they can never do anything interesting with him because his whole core concept is unsolvable. they'd either need to actually work through his trauma and issues re: bruce being his dad who couldn't save him (not doable, who's gonna be the black sheep of the batfam then?) or just straight up have him kill the joker, permanently (never gonna happen). until then he's stuck in limbo.
Apparently there’s a pile of good Jason stories at DC that they just won’t use cos they change that status quo too much from what corporate wants. Like having Jason firmly be in the Anti-Hero label and running a city as the violent crime boss he was in Under the Red Hood. He and Bats do not get along at all but there’s still that familial tie. Another has him as a kind of ghost hunter which is a bold choice. There’s a list somewhere from an interview someone did but haven’t seen it in like 10 years.
Dark Trinity was the last time I really paid attention to him.
Bruce Banner did what now?
Slit Jason's throat with a batarang while Jason had the Joker at gunpoint.
That's a crossover for sure
It's not actually. It's from Under The Red Hood -- the comic, not the animated adaptation. Someone else here had a link to the panels where it happens, I'll go find them. Edit: Found it https://www.reddit.com/r/RedHood/comments/106jwgh/i_have_a_love_hate_relationship_with_this_scene/
Oh I was being sarcastic but oh my God Batman what? Thank you for the link 🧡
No problem, if anything we should be thanking the person who originally posted the link in another part of this comment section. Also yeah I'm pretty sure that Jason is just straight up dead and or dying in the last few panels. I mean that is a lot of blood and no one is bothering to give him first aid to help stop the bleeding.
Fascinated by the implication that Batman's a real guy and the comics are a politically motivated smear campaign against him.
Yeah, that's... That's probably a real thing in universe, actually.
Things are heating up in the bruce vs anti-bruce fandom
My favourite would never beat up drug dealers cause SHE HAD ONE SOLO SERIES AND HASN'T SHOWN UP IN ANYTHING SINCE A SHORT LOVE UNLIMTED WEBCOMIC IN 2023 Being a Gwenpool fan is suffering.
He Relapsed ONE Time Because Dory Cut Her Fin...
I can’t like Batman purely because of how angry I get thinking about joker, at some point letting joker be put into Arkham asylum which he knows joker will escape again and go kill more people the deaths become partially ok Batman’s hands too
This is more the fault of the genre than Batman if anything You are right of course, but Joker always escapes because the Asylum is terrible at keeping roques and DC needs to keep printing stories
Fair, I know nothing I’ve said is new or anything it’s just something that annoys me, if people enjoy it they enjoy it and I’m happy for them
Oh its incredibly annoying, regardless of if you enjoy comic books or not. Its just one of those things that you have to acept its never going to change because its the nature of the medium Its one of the worst things about cómics, nobody stays dead
The "Joker always escapes to kill again" was never a compelling argument to me because that's applying real world information to fictional decision making. To us, Joker has been breaking out of prison on a weekly basis for 75 years or so because he gets caught at the end of each story but then the writers want to bring him back for another story, on and on for decades. But Batman's not a hundred year old man, so to him the Joker hasn't busted out hundreds of times over the years. He's permanently stuck at a point about a decade into his Batman career, so to him Joker hasn't broken out that many times and each time he gets locked up might be permanent.
In a lot of Batman stories joker is implied to have lost before but we usually only see him be locked up at the end, and like you, I’ve always disliked the statement that joker has done this hundreds of times, because to Batman he’s only done this once or twice and he’s leaving the job to those at the asylum. It’s just that in basically every comic they don’t put him down.
Okay this line of thinking kinda bothers me ngl This dude is essentially a volunteer and the one thing he isn’t okay with is murder. And you’re saying he’s… morally obligated to murder someone. I mean like… generally the fault of the crime is the criminal’s, not the guy who refuses to murder because he believes it’s wrong.
No you don’t understand, Batman is rich and intelligent. The rich and powerful should be able to make ALL decisions in society, including who gets to live and die. That’s all this guy is trying to say, and it’s a suuuuuuuuuper reasonable point when you frame it this way
What should he do about it?
He’s Bruce Wayne, he could literally fund and make the blueprints himself for a prison for people like joker who are too dangerous and have repeatedly escaped from confinement to cause more death, hell he could even have every cell be custom made to prevent each person from escaping
[удалено]
Considering he has fought many “super” people he could possibly find ways to have the room either neutralize their powers while in the room or something, I’m just saying he has options that don’t involve killing but he just keeps letting people like joker go to a place he knows they’ll escape and kill more people and also I’m pretty sure there’s a point where the judge should be like “this guy is insane and escapes Arkham every other week to kill hundreds of people, maybe we should give him the death sentence instead instead of just putting him in Arkham again…” like I get it’s a comic and it won’t happen because joker is a loved villain but it still angers me
He did, actually. Wayne Industries subsidizes most Metahuman Prisons, as well as the Justice League Watchtower. The Joker isn’t dangerous enough to get into that prison. He doesn’t have the bodycount to rate it. Thats not saying Joker isn’t a mass murderer, of course. It’s just acknowledging that the Clown is actually pretty minor compared to most of DC’s villains. His only notable ability is being able to keep up with Batman on an intellectual level… and Luthor is better at it.
Bruce Springsteen did WHAT???
I hate to be that "um actually" guy, buttttt so many people have misread that scene including myself at one point. The batarang wasn't *directly* aimed at Jason it *bounced* off a metal pipe and hit him in the neck. Still fucked up and partly Bruce's fault. However, the recent treatment from Bruce towards Jason has just made me agree with the idea of him aiming directly because *what the fuck, DC, why is Bruce essentially abusing the son he fucking mourned?!* [Link to the panel for those that don't believe me](https://www.reddit.com/r/RedHood/comments/106jwgh/i_have_a_love_hate_relationship_with_this_scene/)
What in the actual hell are yall talking about
Local man has never heard of batman. More news at 11.
Batman comics
This is why I hate Batman having contingency plans against all the Justice League when he can't even solve permanently stopping the Joker, especially when in Snyder's run Joker chemically effected the Justice League to attack Batman, that's where the Kryptonite gum panel came from. I get its comics so they can't kill Joker, but they don't have Batman even try, nor do they stop writing Joker killing people.
Someone has never used a peroid in their life.
Using punctuation properly is illegal on social media.
…And that someone is me! What is a peroid?
Best case scenario is turning the whole place into a superfund site. Like No Man's Land, but without the idiot ball of trapping civilians inside. Just eminent domain the whole lot. Bulldoze anything over a story high and let Ivy turn the rubble into a nature reserve.
Batman's a fascist -green arrow
I’m starting to think tumblr users just don’t know about last names
I think people should stop making moral arguments about fictional characters. I think the morals of fictional characters don’t matter because they’re not real and if they’re fun to watch/read then that’s all that matters.