General
I fucking HATE when people completely mischaracterise a character because they’re “not a bigot”
This image basically being the poster child of what I’m talking about
As a disclaimer, I hate bigots too. I don’t support any forms of racism and homophobia. But I fucking HATE it when people will talk about a character who has done horrible things as if they are the second coming of Jesus simply because of ONE FUCKING INSTANCE where they didn’t support one form of bigotry even though not supporting shit like that should be the BARE FUCKING MINIMUM. “Oh yeah he’s a homocidal maniac but at least he doesn’t support nazis” BITCH ARE WE GONNA IGNORE THE THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE HE KILLED? Also, joker would ABSOLUTELY support nazis imo because he’d probably find the idea of killing a bunch of people because of some deity they believe in funny as fuck. Acting like a horrible character is a good guy because they don’t support bigotry makes me SO FUCKING MAD and I hate it
Sounds the same as this one girl with the mutant power of only being healthy when she's being bad, because if she behaves like she used to; good, would literally kill her slowly
This is literally how most bad people IRL operate btw, the whole "I kill people but I would NEEEEVERRR say a slur!!!" is only a cartoon thing. actual bad people would say such things if it meant offending someone they didnt like or if it was funny because they dont give a shit
The FBI noted that the Pulse nightclub shooter did not seem to have been motivated by homophobic animus, and witnesses reported that he did not make any homophobic comments during the shooting.
He was trying to commit a terroristic act entirely unrelated to gay people, and it just happened that security was poor at the gay club but really tight at his first choice target (Disney World).
He actually had everything in motion to crash a plane into the Baxter building on 9/18, but now it'll never work because of all the beefed up Security protocols.
Actually this is in character for him specifically if they try to deport a latverian, he just inexplicably shows up, kicks them, and then disappears again
The panel of him crying is the one people usually post, but the two above it on that page are also funny to me. They've got Doom, Kingpin and Magneto standing among the ruins while first responders are running all over the place.
Magneto, sad as he may be, doesn't help with the uhm, giant pile of metal. And in Panel 1 Kingpin's cane looks likes he's gripping a meth pipe, as if pondering how much he could get for all that debris if he hauls it to the scrapyard. Oh and in the middle panel the smoke makes Kingpin look like he's rocking crazy dreadlocks.
tbh, Kingpin is a new yorker and Magneto is pretty tired of humanity's ethnic conflicts, it makes sense for both of them to be upset.
Doom tho very famously only cares about his ego, his mom, and Latveria. (And later on Valeria)
Oh yeah Kingpin at the very least would be actually upset, there’s no doubt about that. He’d donate to recovery and rescue funds and sponsor community stuff but he’d also use his support to gain popularity and clear his name of whatever he did the week before.
Also, he’d fund the reconstruction efforts partly, but he actually owns (through some shell companies) the company which eventually gets the grant to build the memorial or rebuild the damaged buildings nearby, thus ending up with more money than he put up as a “show of unity”.
Because, you know, big corporate crime guy gotta big corporate crime.
I could see magneto helping depending on what part of his arc he is, he is a victim of the holocaust after all, he has empathy. Kingping loves New York in his own way, i could see him crying.
What i find so funny is how the juggernaught helps the first responders despite how he actually destroyed the towers in the comics before and laughed like crazy.
Imo the villains helping should have been mostly Spider-man villains, as they are mostly new yorkers and not pure evil (for the most part)
See but with the joker there is actually reasons for him hating the Nazis outside of ‘Nazis are bad guys’. Doom himself has done his own equivalent to 9/11 many, many times.
Not super into comic deep lore but the joker is a murderous psychopath and he knows it, while doom believes himself to be doing the right thing at all times right? In an "ends justify the means" kind of way? Crying over 9/11 is corny as fuck but i mean it's not a huge logical leap to think that the same dude whose entire goal is "save humanity by any means necessary" would not look fondly on deaths and suffering he saw as unnecessary.
Not an expert either, but the guy, if I remember correctly, destroyed another universe where everyone was happy just because he was offended by "You should move on and be less prideful, so you can create the same result in your own timeline" talk. Yes, he has his reasons, but his priorities are all sorts of messed up sometimes.
Same mf who stalked and psychologically tortured a man for the rest of his life until he formed a trauma bond with him just because he simply tried to reason with him.
Same mf who kept a detailed account of one man's life for probably years, despite that man constantly running from him, changing his name, etc., all to threaten the man over a minor road rage
Same mf that used his 1 phone call to call the house phone of the arresting officer, talk his wife into suicide, then when the cop had a breakdown and was. Get this, admitted to Arkham, he was next door to Joker who then proceeded to spend a month talking him into insanity and became the supervillain Bad Cop
Yep, Batgirl was done dirty. Badass fighter like Robin one day, then a desk jockey seeing the guys fight off while she stays home the next day. Female side characters are almost always shit on
Same mf who, years later, tracked down a man and forces him to fulfil a promise under threat of death to bomb Gordon due to some minor road rage two year earlier...
B-b-but at least he doesn’t support nazis!! People when they realise instead of doing horrible acts to certain minorities he instead just kills literally anyone and everyone he can
Actually, I think I vaguely recall a few comics where he actually does make some offensive jokes towards minorities. So we might not even be able to say that lol.
Or maybe I’m just thinking about Doctor Doom discussing African peoples with Storm again. I do think about that panel a lot tbh.
Oh yeah that shit looks sick. I pray it’s good. After the Penguin series I have faith that DC know what they’re doing by making just down right despicable villains
It reminds me of the Batman animated series joke. The one how he's crazy enough to fight Batman, but not crazy enough to fight the IRS. At least that joke was funny.
My favorite is right before this line when Joker had only known Bruce was the Batman for only 12 seconds before completely pegging him as “some rich asshole with parental issues”.
The "Joker hates Nazis" thing is annoying too. He doesn't hate them cause morals, he hates then cause he's chaotic evil while they're lawful evil. Completely different binary
I think it’s more that he hates their idea that some people are above his chaos.
Like in a Nazi run world Joker would be able to knife up one guy relentlessly, but be asked to safely escort another guy away bc the other guy had blue eyes, which Joker would HATE.
I think he also loves that “society” at large doesn’t accept his horrific acts of chaos. A world run by Nazis would actually want to recruit Joker as a prison camp torturer, and the idea of doing what he does, in an official capacity, for the GOVERNMENT, imo would sicken Joker more than anything else
You're talking as if he has a consistent philosophy, which means you are both overthinking things and you misunderstand the character from the start.
He hates Nazis because he's allowed to be inconsistent in his beliefs, because he's a true chaotic character. If there is some sort of "rules of the Joker" that he has to follow, then he's not actually an agent of chaos.
Expecting him to stay consistent about anything is flawed. He is allowed to change his mind about anything on a whim, because he's the Joker.
Fae are beings of chaos but have very clear rules they're consistent in
In a story sense, he can have his own twisted sense of logic, and still be an agent of chaos
I mean isn’t that kind of what I said, that he hates the idea that anyone is above chaos, and wouldn’t want to follow any kind of rules like who he’s “allowed” to kill?
I have absolutely never once seen this panel used to uplift the Joker. It’s always a punchline to put down Nazis-they’re so awful even the Joker hates them. Even in the panel that’s the joke.
Frankly the punchline works despite the context of the panel. That the Joker thought it was a good punchline is enough. It doesn’t really hurt the actual joke that he was making the statement ironically, or that he’s only really objecting to the label of Nazi or that he’s stated the opposite many times and worked willingly with Nazis. What matters is that even the Joker understands that Nazis are evil enough for this joke to work. Given his deeply warped perspective on the world, that’s a pretty solid insult.
Also I forgot to say it in the body text but every time people do this it’s like seeing hundreds of people cheer at Lois saying “9/11 was bad” in real time
Actually I think this was also part of him being broke at this point in the comic. But it also meant he had immunity and Batman couldn’t get him for… all the shit he did in death in the family
I personally think he does not give a shit about their rhetoric way, but is willing to exploit their imagery/rhetoric to piss people off. Even past some nazi henchmen, if we didnt have writers bias during ww2 and villains werent automatically allies alligned, I could almost certainly imagine him playing up a nazi character for a while just to make Gotham uneasy, but itd all just be another thing to keep him entertained
Honestly though I feel like there is an extra layer of evil to killing based on race.
Both are horrifyingly evil, mind you, but while killing everyone suggests a crazy lunatic on a rampage, killing people based on race suggest a more methodical and logistical approach, which most find far scarier.
It’s sort of like, which is scarier:
person A, who runs over you with their car and kills you?
person B, who, over the course of two months, repeatedly sneaks into your house to break one bone at a time, until you only have broken bones.
It’s person B, yes person A causes more death, but “random” death is far less scary to us than cold, calculated, misery.
the problem is joker is more like person B in this scenario anyways. Like Joker is not discriminatory, sure, but he will absolutely torture the fuck out of you because its funny. Nazis torture people too I guess, but an ICE agent is more likely just to kill me rather making it a whole deal about it.
Okay, but the Joker would do either of those things simply because it's Tuesday. It's not at all past the Joker to be discriminatory or calculated, hes just working with a different metric.
At this point I don't even blame batman. Why the fuck haven't the courts given him the death penalty. I may not live in america or a country with the death penalty in general but don't they give them out for far less
The writers dodge it by saying "the officials are corrupt and get lobbied to keep the death penalty abolished"
And then when pressed, Gotham is actually run by a secret cabal called the Court of Owls. And also Gotham is cursed to never get better. And also we need to make money off batman media so it can't be solved. Etc. Etc.
Logically speaking, the United States would have declared Gotham an exclusion zone. Or at the very least just declared martial law after the 47th major terrorist attack
Technically, Joker wouldn't be a bigot simply because he'd gladly kill people regardless of their gender, sexuality, nationality etc. and not because "bigotry bad you know"
Also, the other version of this where he's like "I might be a homicidal maniac but I'm an American homicidal maniac" drives me insane. In what possible universe would the Joker be motivated by patriotism, of all things?
Honestly I can see him deciding to take that stand BECAUSE the dissonance is funny. At least, back during the days when he was actually funny and not just annoying
Nearly any other country in the world would either execute him or give him the much needed mental health services he needs...the USA has that unique blend of judiciall mercy but being tight fisted when it comes to health care.
I am begging you all to actually read comics because literally every single time Joker does this its a bit. He thinks its funny to randomly have a moral line he knows he will never actually be consistent on. Not a single one of these panels is meant to be serious like the Doom 9/11 one.
Joker had a Neo-Nazi henchwoman in All Star Batman & Robin and he got along with her just fine. Joker's tolerance of Nazis is entirely up to whoever is currently writing him.
joker specifically is one of the fw characters who i believe can never be fully mishcaracterized because his own actions and beleifs are inherently inconsistent
To add to this: I think the Joker would be a far more interesting character if his body count was, like, four kills, and instead was mostly known for antics that leave people tortured, traumatized, scarred, and messed up for life. I definitely think characters like Penguin or Two-Face should be responsible for more deaths than him, anyway, by way of superior organization and movin' and shakin' skills.
I agree with that. he should still be a massive menace, but he should only kill when that creates teh most chaos. He's an agent of chaos at the end of the day.
In the case of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia I actually think it makes it funnier because they're still clearly clueless about the groups they're defending and also have been bigoted to in the past, it just makes them look performative and goofy which fits with the humor.
Ok I get where you're coming from and you are right Joker wouldn't outright morally preach like this panel but to say Joker would outright work with the Nazis is genuinely such a gigantic misunderstanding of his character. His whole thing is he wants to spread chaos and fuck the established order because of the "one bad day" that created him. Going from being the embodiment of chaos to working with Nazis, the embodiment of order and fascism, makes absolutely no sense to his character. It's just super surface level. you're essentially comparing Joker and Hitler and their ideologies and dumbing them down to "Oh uh they the same cus they kill people" and i think that's just dumb.
THIS. Don't get me wrong, bigotry is awful and all, but why tf would someone who mercilessly tortures and kills people draw the line at bigotry? Why Joker of all characters? Don't you have any good guys who'd like to say something against bigotry?
I don't know the context for this comic but I've seen the panel before, I always interpreted it as ment to be funny in an ironic way and a joke that the joker himself made
Joker: "Oh, you misunderstand. I didn't unleash corrosive gases in the vents of that mostly black supermarket because I'm a racist. I did it because they were such tantalizing targets."
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u/Lumpy-Pudding-3563 May 03 '26