#a fucking bar amaury

[fibbermcgee123]

Man like there had better be a final step in the "Amaury Guichon makes an entire bar out of chocolate" process where someone picks the whole thing up and takes a huge cartoon bite out of the side, otherwise what are we even fucking doing here

[thekidthesuperkid]

THE FUCKING CHOCOLATE GUY

[thessalian]

Thess vs The Batman

One of the things I love about watching generations of people in a very rapidly changing world is their approaches to certain types of media. It’s really telling, to me, of what we’re going through and what the general mood is in terms of changing it. Best example? Batman.

Nobody I knew looked very hard at Batman and his rogue’s gallery of villains when I was a kid. They were cool, sure, but they were villains. We followed the narrative and were pretty much okay with that. These days, though? We’re looking at our deluxe suite of mental health problems and our coping mechanisms for same, and we’re looking at a world where the wealthy could help but don’t, and we’re putting it all together and we go, “So ... why doesn’t Batman do something more constructive than beat them up and put them in a particularly shitty high-security prison masquerading as a mental health care facility?”

Because, seriously. If Arkham was run worth a damn, Joker could never have got his claws into Harleen because the psychiatric staff would have regular evaluations and his attempts to groom her would not have got far enough to plunge her into that abusive relationship. If the patients/prisoners had more in the way of enrichment, they probably wouldn’t escape so often. Let the Riddler have a YouTube channel. If we had to have Harleen become Harley Quinn, let her have her radio show, along with Poison Ivy and Killer Croc. Hell, build the studios for such right in Arhkam - still under heavy guard, but something for them to do beyond stare at the fucking wall. Hell, you could start a whole radio show and podcast hub just with the villains; let them play their favourite music. Let them run D&D sessions. (Imagine Critical Role but with Batman’s Rogues’ Gallery. Imagine Penguin working through his issues about his appearance by playing a super-charismatic bard, and Killer Croc playing a dragonborn in a world where the only response to face made of scales is “That’s cool”. Imagine the Riddler running his own take on the Tomb of Annihilation. Imagine the Scarecrow running the Ravenloft module in his own inimitable style. Probably with therapists watching to make sure it stays on the healthy side, and also to act as referree when someone like the Joker inevitably becomes That Guy, but still, it’d be hilarious.)

Mr Freeze? Bruce Wayne is rich - let him fund the research he needs to do to save his wife or people like her. We’ve seen enough situations where cures for rare diseases have been announced but then disappear because it’s “not profitable”, but even if the cure never really sees the open market, the research alone would give a great deal of insight into related diseases and benefit the scientific community. And we already know that there are some situations in which Bruce Wayne will look at a bunch of goons and be like, “Come work for me; I pay better and I don’t get violent”. Why doesn’t he set up something like we saw in Gordon Behind Bars and teach some of the less violent inmates to cook so they can get jobs on release? Hell, given Joker’s elaborate use of colour, so long as you were really careful about the ingredients he was using, you could probably end up with him as the next Amaury Guichon (imagine Joker as The Fucking Chocolate Guy; I dare you).

We don’t just want Batman to beat up the villains and keep Gotham safe anymore. Now we want him to change Gotham so the villains just become really weird people living their lives. I mean, we still have views about evil, but we’re more likely to go after Lex Luthor than we are most of Batman’s villains. We see enough of “Wealthy asshole wants world domination” and we want that crushed. When we see people with significant mental health problems acting out, we try to fix it. And we do it through superheroes, same as we ever did.

And as for Batman himself? We write fanfic about his Bruce Wayne life. We write about his being a parent. About his coming out as bi. About his taking on Walmart. About his fixing the injustices we see every day, because he is the only hero who can. Not because he’s The Batman, but because he’s a dude with mental health issues, fathomless compassion, and all the fucking money. Hell, we do the same to Tony Stark, more or less; just less often.

This is why we need fanfic. We’re never going to see any of these rehabilitation ideas in comics because there’s too much need to leave loopholes to return to a status quo. We who are sick to the back teeth of the status quo need someplace where we can actually have the heroes we need and deserve.