#anyway i say this and i love b99 even if it is copaganda at its core

[a-vctlan]

shin-ra has a media division and it definitely has a brooklyn 99 adjacent tv-show centered around fictional SOLDIER members and their quirky escapades, with the occasional 'real life' SOLDIERs making an appearance / playing a cameo part. it helped in the recruitment proceedures by a noticeable margin.

[cryptids]

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Honestly I find the '2022 Riddler is alt right/a white supremacist' interpretation really frustrating not only because he genuinely just isn't one, but it's also lacking in any critical analysis of the source media itself.

Despite being given extensive explanations of his motivations and beliefs, nowhere in the movie, the novel or even the deleted scenes does he say anything at all about race, nationalism or any other alt right/fascist belief (and I am including dogwhistles too) these are a very distinct ideology. If it was there it would be identifiable, and its just not.

I shouldn't really have to explain his motivations bc like I said they're explained at length... but he's targeting wealthy and politically powerful people in Gotham, most of all those with links to Falcone and the mafia, because he blames them for the suffering he went through as a child after they stole the renewal money, and he wants revenge for it. In his view its more than just the faults of a few bad people though, he believes the system itself is corrupt and designed to keep those people in power while everyone else is pushed further into poverty, and that its beyond ‘fixing’ and the only real option is to destroy it outright. And these are very obviously radical leftist and Marxist beliefs.

The first point of confusion imo is the way that his online following is reminiscent of how the alt right use the internet to recruit angry and socially outcast white men, since the one follower we saw unmasked was another white man. While this isn't exactly the same situation (it's ignoring the fact that they're angry about completely different things? Being a nazi or believing in racist conspiracy theories is a pretty far cry from being justifiably angry about very real government corruption that we know for a fact was actually happening), I DO believe however that it was an intentional choice to give him followers and depict them this way, rather than just giving him regular henchmen, and I'll get to that.

The second of course is his attempt to kill Bella Reál, who is different from his other victims because she's progressive and a good person, as well as a black woman (the other 5 of his targets all being white men). But in the video to his followers he explains that his motivation for targeting her is because he believes she's the same as every other politician, and because she was just elected he wants to use the spectacle to make a statement. Like I said before he considers politicians all equally complicit, and he thinks it's just "more lies" when she says she genuinely wants to do better. He is wrong about her of course, but I'm just talking about his motivations here. The guy that Selina had on the roof (I forgot his name lmao) said that the election was a joke and it wouldn't have mattered who won because everyone is being controlled by the mafia anyway, and that's fully what Riddler believes to be true.

But what I really want people to stop and think about is why this movie has a "good politician" character in the first place. And I love Gordon, but he is there to be a "good cop" for the same reason, and its deliberate that they are both poc. I think if you understand why a character like Holt from B99 is designed to be copaganda, you'll be able to see what I'm getting at here.

Superhero movies as a genre are absolutely full of very thinly veiled military and police propaganda and really have been for a long time now. As much as I enjoy 2022 Batman it really is no exception. I think it does a bit better than most... it surprises me they'd go as far as depicting the majority of politicians as unambiguously corrupt, though if course they still had to add a little "not ALL of them though, there's still some politicians who are good and trustworthy" in there through Bella's character.

This is also why so many superhero movies feature storylines where the villain is the person who is trying to drastically change society in some way (they will often have leftist motivations mixed in with with actions that are scary and bad, which is deliberate to make radical leftism look scary and bad, and I would not be surprised if that's what they were doing with depicting his followers in a way that would immediately bring alt right internet groups to mind in the audience) meanwhile the heroes fight to keep everything the same as it already is. Because the police and the military do that too, their function in society is to protect the existing social order.

And I mean.... Bruce.... I love him very much, but the hero in this story who we're supposed to root for to stop Riddler's violent anticapitalist revolt is literally a billionaire. Do I really need to say more lmao.

Now I know I need to add a disclaimer before I get accused of doing this, but I am NOT saying Riddler's actions were justified in any way at all, or that anyone has to be sympathetic to him. He's a serial killer and a terrorist lmao. My points are just to stop conflating any kind of violence carried out with political motivations as being the same as the alt right's as if it's all interchangeable (also think about who it benefits when we do that), and we need to go beyond just arguing about fictional characters as if they're people and be more critical of the media itself and why these characters and stories are being written and portrayed the way they are in the first place.