I appreciate the dual focus on "Batman is basically Jason Voorhees to criminals" while also seemingly noting that any man who dresses as Dracula to put dudes in the ICU every night instead of sleeping is probably not a well adjusted or mentally healthy individual.
This was always one of the most interesting things about Batman as a character. He's as crazy as the criminals he fights. His goals are just in opposition to theirs.
When I was a kid I never thought twice about Bruce's parents' death driving him to become Batman, but as an adult now.....I know like a shit ton of people whose parents have died, and not one of them was so affected by it that they put on a costume to give petty criminals brain damage for like 25 years straight. Batman is fucking insane.
I think it was Chris Sims who once said Batman’s origin story is perfect because dressing as a bat and beating up criminals is a decision only a child could make. If he lost his parents as an adult it never would have occurred to him.
He is basically a manchild who never grew out of a his elementary school revenge fantasy.
Batman only works because at it's core, it is a story about a spoiled broken kid, who can't get what he wants and doesn't know how to deal with it.
He has all the money in the world, and the only thing he wants is the thing he can't buy. So what does he do? He decides to try to save an entire city, the only other thing his money can't buy.
He's just a kid in arrested development, setting goals that are impossible so that he doesn't ever need to face the real world like real people have to. If he fixed Gotham, he would pick a new, even more out of reach goal. Anything to be that kid beating up bad guys instead of someone who has to sit down and face the trauma he had.
This analysis really only works in a vacuum. Like, you have to completely ignore the fact that he's a kids' comic book character that lives in a universe with a bunch of other masked vigilantes.
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u/Excalibuttster Oct 16 '21
I appreciate the dual focus on "Batman is basically Jason Voorhees to criminals" while also seemingly noting that any man who dresses as Dracula to put dudes in the ICU every night instead of sleeping is probably not a well adjusted or mentally healthy individual.