#because what of bruce wayne the lover for example... married to a woman he nearly never sees because everyone knows gotham comes first

[boyfridged]

What do you think about bruce wayne?

that is such a broad question… but i guess i rarely talk about bruce specifically, in isolation. and i love bruce dearly, despite despite despite… despite the fact that it took me so long to get there even, because for years of reading dc comics he was a nuance to me. but i am now tremendously interested in bruce wayne. i have a soft spot for pre-crisis bruce, his geniality and zest, that easy affection. but i’m also interested in bruce of the “dark” post-crisis era, and where their personalities meet at…

so i’m interested in bruce wayne who took the idea of “grief work” too literally. in how he invented a myth for his tikkun olam and did it wrong. and hence in a myth that grows hungry and implicates others in tragic cycles. in bruce wayne whose kindness makes him project on people that would be better off without it. all to say, i’m mostly interested in how batman sees a man, dead in crime alley and thinks: that could be me. my beginning and my probable end. and who ought to rectify that opinion later, by admitting he thought he’d be a victim of his own mission, but it was his son instead.

his biggest trouble: he perfected the vigilante-civilian lives compartmentalisation, but it lasted no longer than a few years, only for his newly-found family members to enter the picture and mess his brilliant system of identity split… because with children, there’s no dichotomy - they will be his in cowl and out of it, and there will be a price to pay. and bruce realises that, when his abandonment issues also come into play - when he pushes his sons away to protect them from a life of his own invention.

i want these narratives to be complex; i want stories in which his love, just as his grief, gets ugly. and his grief, just as his love, becomes graceful and merciful. however that quote went, about being like gd -- loving everything/everyone and therefore nearly no one/nothing. not a comparison too out of place, since the whole world bends to his personal story.

but i also want the real, breathing thing, ordinary. i want bruce wayne a socialite that truly enjoys high society, as per old canon, that bristol man who drags his body through gotham whole, one with it and yet separated through the numbers in his bank account. i’m interested in bruce wayne rich and a rehabilitationist and therefore worryingly liberal-leaning-conservative. bruce wayne and his stupid, soft robes, and reading glasses, and barbecue parties, and that mini-golf in his WE office, having all of that while playing an every-man.

but that doesn’t answer the question, does it- i suppose what i think of bruce wayne is that: he’s wrong about nearly everything but that love matters. and he's most compelling when put in opposition to leslie, who reads him like an open book and thinks of him: a monster of her own.