i don’t think it’s anything that thomas and martha did that was special – the thing is, i don’t even think bruce remembers his parents very much at all. things around his parents, yes. but his parents specifically – i think he’s suppressed his actual memories of them, because for so long, the thought of them would’ve led to the same place. he was so young when they died, it’s likely he just can’t separate the fact that they died from his memories of them.
he had a happy childhood, and he lost it all quickly and violently. there was no disney death, no holding them as they died, no last words, just a kid splattered in bits of brain and shattered skull kneeling in a puddle of blood. he spent the next decade pretty much friendless, so it’s not like he talked about it, or even had a lot of time spent away from his own head where he wasn’t thinking about it. the effects of loneliness on people – especially traumatized people – can be pretty devastating. and some degree of it is just bruce’s nature – he’s obsessive as a rule, and that’s just how he is. i think martha and thomas were just your regular, everyday multi-billionaires. my headcanons for them, though, do not follow canon at all. like, in the least. i basically looked at canon and was like lol catch this.
i tend to think of thomas as loud and boisterous, a man filled to the brim with life, like that one eccentric uncle you know – he’s just very emotive, feels every emotion at absolute strength. the kind of guy that cried watching toy story, screamed during nightmare on elm street. probably gives him kind of an anger problem. definitely a motor mouth – probably the reason bruce ended up quiet, because thomas couldn’t shut up for ten seconds to let bruce get a word in edgewise. you know, that kind of affable loud presence that people have when no one has ever devalued anything they have to say, that can be annoying but is also a little bit adorable.
martha, i think, is the parent bruce resembled in personality the most, even if he idolized his father – i headcanon her as quiet, snippish, probably comes off to everyone else in the world as a total snob. she’s not quiet at all around thomas, though, because they’re always bantering and teasing each other, and making really dumb, “rich people who have never been asked to stop in their lives” decisions together. also probably a little bit forgetful, which is where alfred probably started going from just a valet, to the unholy mashing of valet and maid, to what is essentially the super saiyan form of a butler, to babysitter. he probably only took up the role of babysitter because tiny bruce’s favorite place to be was wherever alfred was and the kid wouldn’t fucking stop.
Tag: meta
Superman
I just realized that Clark Kent probably works at the Daily Planet because it means he and his super-senses are planted right in the middle of a bunch of investigative journalists all day long. He probably knows more about Metropolis’ corruption and abuses of power than anyone else in the world, just by virtue of existing in the Daily Planet’s vicinity.
I imagine also that he works there for the reverse reason.
Think about all the things he knows about the people in positions of power in the city that Really Should be made known to the public, but he can’t figure out a way to legitimately excuse having that knowledge?
Well, all he has to do is drop a hint of a thread in the lap of someone like Lois Lane and his coworkers and friends will be on it like bloodhounds, with a firm air of legitimacy that he himself would never, ever have. Because honestly? Clark Kent probably knows that “I heard about it with my magic alien hearing” isn’t and SHOULDN’T be admissible in a court of law or public opinion. But aiming some good old fashioned investigative journalists in the most competitive news organisation in the city at it? Perfectly legitimate.Villain: “Hah! What are you going to do, punch me for tax evasion? Lock me up for conspiracy? With what court-admissible evidence? Admit it Superman, there’s nothing you can do here.”
Superman: “Guess not.”
Later, Clark Kent at the Daily Planet watching his colleagues work: “My god, they’re like bureaucratic piranhas. They went through his entire IRS filings for the last eight quarters in thirty minutes flat.”
So I’ve practically read/stalked all of your fics, and I’ve noticed that you make Hal extremely intellectual. Would you say that’s supported by canon or more from your own interpretation of Hal’s character?
I would argue two things. Actually, that’s a lie, I will argue seventeen things all at once, I will fight myself if I have to, but my point is: a) I don’t write an overly intellectual Hal, I write a whipsmart Hal who covers a lot of his more overtly intellectual tendencies. And b) is, look, this guy graduated from the Air Force Academy. Service appointments are not handed out like lollies; they go to the best of the best of the best. You absolutely hands down DO NOT graduate from Annapolis or West Point or the AFA if you are not borderline genius in terms of mathematical prowess and acumen. The guy is fucking smart, all right? That’s just canon. But pilots – they are this strange cultural crossing point, you know? Because on the one hand before you qualify to sit in the cockpit of a fighter jet you have got to be a borderline fucking mathematical genius. But on the other hand, there is no more ruthlessly machismo culture than pilot culture, so what does that give you? A hell of a lot of overly testosteroned dudebros who read Bronte on the sly, is what it gives you. I have some personal experience with pilots, and I can tell you this is true. They are smart as fucking hell, but socialized not to display it. I see nothing in canon to contradict this interpretation, and everything to support it. Does he have Bruce’s level of erudition? Hell no. Nobody does. But I think of him as a voracious and indiscriminate reader – information, you know? The more information the better. So I maintain (and point it out whenever I can) that Hal’s bookshelf/kindle library is fucking terrifying in the sheer array of bizarre things it contains. The part that is my interpretation is the motivation for being that kind of reader, and I go back and forth on that one. Either a) he read what he could whenever he could, whenever he got enough access as a kid, in order to escape from his hellish surroundings, or b) he read like a house afire once he got to the Academy and realized how wide was the gulf between what his peers knew and what he knew, and he stayed up till all hours tearing through as many basic reading lists as he could – stupid lists he got off the internet about “twenty books everyone needs to have read” and “the ultimate great books quiz” off buzzfeed, that kind of shit. I do not think his first year at the Academy was an easy one. I think he was made to feel the gulf in more ways than one, and that part is just my own interpretation of the character. But the smart-as-hell Hal is canon, as far as I’m concerned.
I’m writing a fic that’s centric around Dick, Bruce, and Jason, so I was wondering if you have any tips on writing Bruce? Or if you have any links to good tips? I’m at a total loss here, so literally anything helps.
i’m so happy you came to me, because now i get the excuse to ramble about batman. just know, i’ve got you. i have got you. i have all the batman rants in my archive, you understand. all of them.
so, some tips
- batman invades your privacy. he knows if you bought a different brand of underwear. he’s stupidly attentive to detail, because he’s trained himself to be. batman’s the best at what he does, and what he does is, quite literally, “know all the things better than everyone else.” this also means he’s curious. he wants to know how things work because he wants to know. science, math, any form of discovery, bruce has a knack for it.
- he respects two authorities: alfred, and himself
- …….sometimes alfred
- …………..only when alfred raises his voice
- ………………..sometimes when alfred raises his voice
- constantly waxing poetic about how much he loves gotham – it’s literally his dream for gotham to be safe, happy, a shining city. it’s also his dream that his entire family will be safe and happy. he himself is not a thing, in most of his dreams.
- “batman is the manifestation of bruce wayne’s trauma and grief” is not how i see it at all. that’s not how it is. tom king said it best; batman is an engine that turns pain into hope. bruce wayne is a grieving, traumatized man. batman is the force that stands between the innocent to protect them from suffering that way. in scott snyder’s run, bruce – before his parents’ deaths – would sneak out after school and explore gotham, because, by bruce’s own admission, gotham will let you be anyone you please. in gotham, you don’t have to be bruce wayne; a boy who was hurt very, very badly, and never recovered. in gotham, you can be batman, who saves people, who protects people. bruce is the pain, batman is the hope. gotham doesn’t need grief; gotham needs hope.
- bruce’s worldview is at odds with his demeanor. he’s a dour man who believes that everyone deserves a second chance, that everyone deserves to be saved; he believes in redemption. (“i know i am fighting a war i cannot win. but there are small victories that encourage me to keep trying. if i can win back one child, there may be hope for many others. if it starts with one person, and then a neighborhood, then perhaps redemption can spread through an entire city, and finally back to me.”)
- which means he understands and respects people who are trying to better themselves
- control freak. i mean, everyone calls him a control freak, but i don’t think they understand the level of control freak, here. it’s my general view that bruce feels things extraordinarily powerfully, and has purposefully cut himself off from showing those emotions because he fears being controlled by them. his reaction to his parents’ deaths was not just to fund the GCPD and try to eliminate crime that way, it was to go in and do it himself.
- such a perfectionist he had to be more perfect at everything than every other perfectionist
- he’s got a hell of a temper when you tell him he’s wrong about something, but if he’s being written like the batman i love, he will apologize for being out of line. give him some time to simmer down, and he’ll figure out a ridiculously complex present to give you that’s got 3 metaphors behind it, and honestly watching bruce try to apologize is like watching grant morrison get to an idea succinctly, swiftly, and with as little confusion as possible. it takes a while, and honestly you kind of want to interrupt him and say, “i know, bruce.”
- master of terrible jokes. “who died and made you batman?” bruce i am going to kill you myself. also, he signs his notes with a doodle of the batsymbol, and dumped a goon in the trash once and said, “your ride’ll be here on tuesday,” this man needs to be stopped. he likes one-liners, but puns are an embarrassing form of humor, and also remind him too much of when dick was robin.
- add 5 gallons of survivor’s guilt to everything he does
- if you hurt one (1) child around him they’ll have to pick your teeth out of the concrete with pliers
- “hnh” is his favorite thing to say
- mostly he’s just kind of sad
You often describe Bruce as feline (“lazy jungle cat” is a favourite). It’s interesting because some fans and writers compare him to a wolf, which I would argue despite being predatory and lissom suggests a different personality. What do you make of this difference? Do you think it comes down to a preference for cats or dogs, or do you think some writers might find that comparing Bruce to a cat would emasculate him? (Some fans, esp of anime, seem to associate cats with femininity or submission.)
Hmm, interesting! I had never thought of this before. For what it’s worth, I think people who associate cats with either femininity or submission have never owned a cat. But I love both cat and dogs, and own both, so I’m not sure that my similes have much to do with my personal preference in pet ownership – except I will say my cats are all savage beasts and my dogs are lazy shlumpfs, and as someone who falls in between those two extremes, we all seem to get along well enough. Anyway.
When I associate Bruce with a large predatory cat (and I mean a jaguar or a leopard, not, like, an overweight tabby) it has to do with his motion – the way he moves his body. A large cat moves with perfect economy of muscle, and that’s the way I see someone as highly trained as Bruce moving, all the time. I don’t see it as wolf-like, really. If you watch a wolf when they move, there is a certain loping quality to their gait. A cat moves much more smoothly, more guardedly. Those are qualities that I tend to associate with Bruce, both in his gait and in his life. Also, I think if a wolf has you in their sights, there are any number of things you can do to either distract them or dissuade them from eating you. If a jaguar has you in their sights, you are dead before you are even aware you were being tracked.
However, Bruce’s tendency to form and rely on a pack? Wolf all the way. So I would say both apex predators describe him, in different aspects of his life – a wolf at home, and a panther on the streets, maybe?
it’s really wild to see how batman has evolved over time as a consequence of writers wanting to change everything while also changing nothing because any comic that lives that long is a shambling stitched-together corpse
early batman is a swashbuckler and he’s having a good-ass time beating up these bad guys, because he existed in the context of organized crime being a big fucking problem. they were coming out of the 1930s. that’s the era of al capone, you know? john dillinger only died five years ago and he was a fucking celebrity. and batman shows up to be like YOU KNOW WHAT’S COOLER THAN SHOOTING PEOPLE AND BRIBING GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS? BEING BATMAN.
early batman could not have been more clearly edutainment, pulpy enough to make kids feel like they were reading That Good Shit but always with a really obvious message (the message was DON’T DO A CRIME). he fights a lot of giants because having to protect yourself from people twice your size is very #relatable to children.
when he adopts robin it’s very clearly to give kids a character to relate to more strongly than they can bruce wayne–FIGHTING CRIMES ISN’T JUST FOR RICH MEN, IT’S ALSO FOR COOL KIDS LIKE YOU. see how cool robin is, kicking the shit out of these dudes? don’t you wanna be cool, like robin? he’s from the circus, that thing you wanted to run away to because that’s a viable life choice in this era!
bruce wayne was rich but his whole cover was that rich people are fucking useless. a man who inherited money? a fucking useless, lazy shit, no question. this was just accepted by everyone, that obviously an heir would never be suspected of doing anything that might take effort. the difference in attitude on a fundamental level toward the idle rich is staggering.
his wealth is also MONUMENTALLY downplayed, in the same way you see in old movies. they deliberately did not film the philadelphia story in an actual mansion because they didn’t think anyone would believe that the rich got to live like that. so bruce wayne ends up looking like he lives in a tract home in a suburb. “is this how rich people live? yeah, sure, probably. who cares, let’s fight crimes.”
they only introduce a backstory after the comic has been going for a while, because at first it’s like? why would he need a reason to fight crime? it’s fun? but i guess they figured they had to create SOME reason for bruce wayne to not be completely useless, as all rich men are. why is bruce wayne the only rich man capable of doing cool shit? because his parents died, that’s why. check out robin kicking this dude in the head. fucking sweet, right?
there’s a whole storyline where batman fights a whole fucking town because it’s corrupt and the cops are corrupt and THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IS CORRUPT so he’s gonna FIGHT THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IF HE HAS TO, FUCK YOU AND FUCK YOUR COCAINE.
then the comics code happens and fucks everything. batman can’t fight, like, systemic corruption and dudes with tommy guns anymore. all the crimes get CARTOONY AS SHIT. the joker isn’t just a murderous jewel thief with a weird face, he’s a fucking clown. he’s a weird clown man committing clown crimes. puns everywhere. suddenly batman is fighting Supervillains, and they’re all insane. but they aren’t, really? they are a cartoon’s idea of insanity, like a wolf in a straitjacket getting hit on the head with a mallet. when a character is insane what that actually means is they’re wacky, they do weird shit, they have no meaningful motivation and do crimes for no reason because the alternative is having them commit real crimes for good reasons and that’s not good for the kiddos. the fact that batman changed so much after the code is fucking WILD because, remember, it was ALWAYS for the kids. it was BLATANTLY for the kids. the code still managed to fuck it just through the culture shift it created.
then later there’s this shift, again, away from the code and away from kids entirely. late seventies, i think? fuck if i know, i don’t know shit about damn. suddenly they want to be more GRITTY and REAL and DARK. they want REAL CRIME. batman is PUNCHING RAPISTS IN ALLEYS. but this isn’t the era of dillinger anymore. as a society, collectively, we understand more about crime and the societal forces that drive people to crime and so on. there are a lot of alley rapists in this era of comics tbh and this is probably why. rapists always deserve to get punched regardless of class struggle. also at this point we understand more about violence, and people who are violent, who commit acts of violence and solve problems with violence and enjoy being violent. a rich guy having a blast kicking a guy in the head for robbing a bank is no longer great optics.
so batman stops having fun. this is now his dark mission, his grim assignment. he doesn’t like this job, but someone’s gotta do it. he will not smile as he punches a rapist in the head. this is serious business. i don’t necessarily have a problem with this decision, because i think it’s a legitimate course of action to say “in a modern context, these behaviors become unacceptable, and so we will change his behaviors so that he can continue to be a heroic figure”. that’s valid as a motherfucker and i wish more people would remember that the whole point of making batman a grump was so that he could continue to be a good guy, as opposed to the alternative of gleeful violence.
(getting rid of most of the violence is also good–he’s a detective–but these are comics we’re talking about here so lol)
and then there’s the villains. you’d think this would be the point where they say “hey, maybe let’s go back to the way some of our villains were before the code”. you’d think that if they hated the goofy villains so much they’d just move on. but it’s comics so nothing ever goes in the trash for good. and that’s when you have writers who look at a cartoon wolf in a straitjacket and they say “that’s not what insanity looks like! we should make him a sociopath.”
i mean you could have just said “let’s stop calling him crazy and try to find a better motivation for these crimes, like being an asshole” but instead now batman has all these villains with sociopathy and OCD and DID and schizophrenia, because that makes it REAL, because now instead of being cartoon crazy people committing cartoon crimes they are real crazy people committing real crimes!! OH BOY
and at some point someone looks at this and goes “you know i feel like this might be ableist as shit” and writers could have said “yeah in retrospect the only evil clown i’m aware of was legally deemed sane and didn’t actually commit thematically appropriate crimes, so maybe mental health isn’t the issue here” but instead they said “yes, batman is kind of an asshole to be punching these sick people, but he’s a necessary asshole because without him there would be Crazy Crimes and we all just have to come to terms with that i guess”
now we’re at this place where we’re trying to reconcile about eighty years of nonsensical horseshit and all of these decisions that were made because of shifting cultural attitudes or to sell comics or because one writer in particular assumed everyone would love his cool OC as much as he did, and there are writers going “you know, bruce wayne probably has pretty severe ptsd” and there are writers going “what if batman was the REAL villain all along” and there are writers going “lol rich man wears bat costume to punch the mentally ill and poors, did u ever think about that” and there are writers going “hey have you heard of this ayn rand chick because boy howdy i just did and now i’ve got ideas”
but the reality is that heroism and goodness are not static concepts that look the same to all people even within the same era and trying to reconcile every different version of what the popular conception of heroism has looked like for almost a century is dumb as hell and batman should have entered the public domain in 2014
it’s just bizarre to me that what draws me to bruce wayne as a character is how broken he is psychologically, how easy it is for him to want to ignore his own code, how much time he spends in ISSUE after ISSUE dreaming of killing criminals, of killing himself, of the deaths he has caused by accident and trying to bury them so far back he never has to deal with them.
and then we got that version of bruce wayne on screen, and people said it wasn’t really batman, batman would never act like that. it’s all i’ve EVER read batman as, and people who have never picked up a comic want to take away what makes him intensely precious to me? they don’t want to see him struggle with weighty moral problems and his own mental labyrinth? they don’t want that?
that’s why bvs criticism really, really bugs me, like on a deep level. it’s really crazy that people didn’t want to see ONE version of batman that’s as broken on the outside as how he always feels, when there are a million other versions of batman that are calmer, saner, more confident. like why are you so afraid of letting bruce wayne be afraid?
It’s the same reason they can’t stand a Superman that has doubts and existential dilemmas. They can’t stand the idea that these characters, who are ideals to them of what we can be, the perfect, strong, powerful hero, they can’t stand that they are still human, with human struggles and slave to their emotions.
You can’t have a power fantasy with emotional weaknesses, because we’re trained to think that the perfect person is a flawless person. But that’s not true. To be a perfect human is to be flawed. If you’re not flawed you’re essentially a god, and that separates you from humanity.
Arguably what makes Superman perfect is that he has all of the emotional strain that we do and still manages to save the world. He has godlike powers, but he isn’t a god, he doesn’t want to be a god either, he just wants to help people.
And what makes Batman such a compelling character is that he is so broken, and could be the most powerful villain ever, but he is still compelled to do good. Even when he loses his way, it’s still for the greater good, in his mind. And of course, that’s why he really was the main villain of BvS. Because villains always think what they’re doing is right, and can always justify their wrongs. What the audience struggled with is reconciling the ideas that a hero can be wrong. And he was wrong. People complaining that his actions aren’t true to the character are missing what his character is. Because this was Batman finally going off the edge that he’s balanced so precariously on. The edge that he looks down from and knows how easy and comforting the fall could be. But when he hits the ground, he realises that it’s ugly, painful and messy down there. So he has a choice, stay down there, a broken, ugly creature, or climb back up and get a clear perspective again.
Being shown this in a superhero movie is unprecedented. And to be shown it with arguably the most well known and well loved characters in superhero history is unfathomably brave and bold.
And people struggled to understand that if they had a problem with the way the character was behaving, it’s because they were supposed to.
But it damaged their perfect ideal, it punctured the puffed out chest of their power fantasy. There was no understanding that in saying that these characters could fail and still overcome, that they were even more powerful than ever shown. And to be shown them overcoming such obstacles is in fact an inspiration to people with personal struggles. They don’t want to accept that, because to put an element of effort into the power fantasy takes away their “fun”, but it adds so much more meaning. They want perfection and they want zero effort to achieve it. They don’t want human personalities and enotions, because those are seen as weak and distracting. They want cheat codes and convenience, and watching Batman struggle with the very mental illness that makes him the hero he is wasn’t convenient for them. It was difficult, it was real, it was human… it was perfect.
like why are you so afraid of letting bruce wayne be afraid?
Something that I thought was an amazing storytelling choice in BvS is the specific way they tried to show how broken Batman was via shifting his age.
I feel like a lot of people’s ideas of Batman is influenced by the pair-up comics and animated episodes between Batman and Superman, where it’s easier to see their similarities and differences. But the thing is, that Batman is Vengeance that exists with Hope.
DCEU’s Batman has spent 20 years without Superman hanging around being a peer and a confidant and a counterbalance.
And I think that’s a very hard thing to look at, and recognize, that you can spend twenty years doing something, with no light at the end of the tunnel.
My millennial soul is looking at that going: hard same.
Red Hood 