#haha it could be

[distort-opia]

The talk about Bruce’s relationship with the Family, and his abusive parental style, made me think of this specific issue in King’s Knightmares (Batman #61-63, #66-69) -- so I need to exorcise the thoughts before it starts bugging me. The arc is part of an ongoing effort to break Batman’s mind, orchestrated by Bane and none other than his father from an alternate Universe, Flashpoint Batman (who... well it’s just interesting to see that a Batman version of Bruce’s father is also not getting any ‘Best Dad ever’ mugs for his birthday any time soon). Bruce is strapped to a machine and pumped full of Scarecrow’s gas, having a series of hallucinations; each of them is centred around a different issue/important person he’s been grappling with.

The issue I mean is #62. In it, Bruce dreams that he’s restrained by a rope and hanging upside down, bleeding and bleeding, while Professor Pyg is standing there with a knife waiting to slaughter him. The comic is drawn in very bright colors, in a style that’s clearly supposed to evoke a psychedelic feeling and experience. From the start, we are more or less told of the key players (or symbols) of the dream: blood, a man in a mask, rope, a knife. All of these elements undergo change and impact each other, one way or another.

But the most important thing about this dream is that it’s clearly supposed to symbolically reflect the way Bruce relates to the Robins -- and more precisely, it reflects what he fears from them. The key to understanding this mess is keeping in mind who Professor Pyg actually is under the mask (Damian, his son), and who he represents.

What follows under the cut are lots of comic panels and wild extrapolation and interpretation on my part, since overthinking is my hobby. Fair warning, there’s lots of blood involved.

There’s already a lot to unpack, at the beginning. “The rope was talking, now it’s yelling. Understand, sympathize, thank it for its help. And cut. And cut.”

It’s an interesting contrast, the fact that the rope -- what’s keeping Bruce restrained -- is the one with a voice. Meanwhile, the “enemy”, the man in a mask (who, again, is actually Damian underneath) keeps talking and shouting, but Bruce cannot hear anything at all.

“They all want the same thing. Year after year they beg for it. And you can’t give it to them.”

What, Bruce? Love? Approval? That’s very likely it, and in light of this, I think the ropes in the beginning signify Bruce’s own emotions. What he always sees as an obstacle and something that binds him. They yell and they beg, but all Bruce really does is acknowledge them as he cuts them anyway. He escapes in order to attack Professor Pyg, whose voice Bruce still cannot hear.

“You should have heard him... listened... There’s a knife in you now.” Here an exchange of elements takes place. Bruce sheds the rope, and gains the knife. As the story progresses, Bruce tries to pull out the knife and survive, using the pain to ground himself. All along, he can’t hear a word of what his assailant is saying. But the inner dialogue begins to suggest (like on the cover of the issue itself) that what Professor Pyg is saying is “Little pig, little pig. Let me in.”

And Bruce does this:

He turns the knife on his enemy, but not for long. Bruce tries to interrogate him by inflicting pain, and has to remind himself not to kill him. All the while, Professor Pyg manages to pick the knife back up from the floor.

At this point, Professor Pyg begins to rant again, with Bruce not hearing any of it -- but all the while, his memories are coming back. He remembers being attacked by Bane, and by his own father. Slowly begins to realize that this is all a dream, that they’ve done something to him. He begins to fight Pyg with batarangs and then asks himself, “What is Pyg? A metaphor. A myth. A story. A dream.”

And here come the crucial elements to interpreting it:

“Your children aren’t safe. They’re dying. You love them, you created them, created their love, and they’re not safe.”

The “she” in there is Selina, of course. Since all of this takes place quite recently after Bruce proposed, and after she left him at the altar, a lot of the whole arc of Knightmares is Bruce dealing with that. There’s definitely an amalgamation in Bruce’s head, when it comes to his attachments: Selina, Alfred, Dick -- his children, all of it is love, and all of it is something he thinks he built. To Bruce, it’s all dead marble that he shaped and sculpted into being his ideal. It’s something he desperately wanted but couldn’t muster on his own, so he prayed to make it come to pass. 

In the end, he desperately asks Professor Pyg, “How did I get here? How do I get out?” And for the first time... he can hear the answer.

And then Damian leaves. The dream ends. Nothing is truly resolved, because Bruce has a couple more hallucinations before he manages to break out of it. The idea that Bruce built his love is the point his mind is trying to make through them, and the moment he gets confronted with that by Selina in issue #69 -- with the fact he didn’t truly love her, but that he wanted to (”I have to love you,” he says) -- he finally comes out of the dreams.

But in this issue... it’s just interesting to me that his Family, his children, Damian (possibly as a stand-in for all the Robins) are included in this too. What textually happens in the dream is Professor Pyg simply having Bruce tied up and talking while holding a knife, with Bruce attacking him twice -- and Pyg only stabbing and defending himself the moment he does.

There’s a continuous exchange happening. The rope never comes up again: Bruce thanks it for its service, but sheds the hold of his emotions. What’s left is the blood and the knife. The knife is the power love affords you over another. Blood represents all the things you lose when the knife sinks into you; it’s weakness. And it keeps switching. Bruce is overcome with blood and then gains the knife, and uses it to hurt a person he cares about. But then Damian gains the knife and all Bruce is left with is the blood. And all along, while Bruce is attacking, Damian is reaching out but Bruce can’t hear it. And what he’s saying is, “Let me in.” Bruce only hears it when he stops fighting and uses his damn words to ask.

I do believe Damian here is not just Damian. From the start, Professor Pyg is drawn in colors reminiscent of the Robin uniform, so I do think this applies more generally to all who’ve been Robin to Bruce. Always begging to be let in, and Bruce not being capable of it, because he inherently sees that as a threat; the edge of a knife, weakness. Always trying to talk to Bruce, but Bruce not hearing them.

The issue also pretty much says that Bruce thinks he made them, like Pygmalion made the object of his love. That he chose them to be Robins, and chose to love them, and made them love him. Not only that, but since this is all under the influence of fear gas, there’s also what Bruce sees as a threat... what he created slipping his control, and turning against him. The people who love him not getting their love returned in full, not being let inside, and thus Bruce finding himself under the sharp edge of the knife because he didn’t listen. And yet... the final nail in the coffin, I feel, is that the ending of the issue isn’t simply Damian leaving.

It’s Damian asking to be let in, with the “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down” another potential reference to how opening up to someone can make you weak. This is the answer to Bruce’s question; this is what he needs to do in order to wake up. Let himself be vulnerable. And then Damian waits, but Bruce just falls back into old patterns, the things he’s been saying to himself all along. “Evaluate. Reassess.” He doesn’t answer. And when Damian leaves, he doesn’t call out -- he just looks resigned.

The way Bruce is constantly torn between wanting love and his utterly monumental fear of it, which makes him crave control so badly and hurt so many people and in the end himself... it certainly makes me feel all kinds of ways. Some of which I can definitely descibe as ‘feral’. And sad.

[hansoeii]

let time pass.

[saradiation]

Hey it's that time of the year again :D

HAPPY 413! 🎂

[o0kawaii0o]

Ace Attorney x Hades

[hayden-christensen]

It all started with a farmboy, a scoundrel, a princess, and a dark lord...

HAPPY STAR WARS DAY STAR WARS WEEK 2024 DAY 6: MAY THE 4TH BE WITH YOU

[the-phantom-peach]

skyward sword… yeah <3

Crimson Loftwing

↻ ◁ || ▷ ↺

[sysig]

Permission to headbutt: Granted (Patreon)

[lilybug-02]

Wrong Door…

@akanemnon a thing popped into my head and I am very impulsive. ❤️

[qrowscant-art]

hey man i think your computer is sick

[livelovecaliforniadreams]

[galaxgay]

based on this post i made, im kind of obsessed with the idea of Aziraphale pissing Crowley off on purpose so that he'll get all close to him because he tends to do that when he gets hissy

just a little suspicious imo 👀

[kezhke88]

Crowley's smug little head wiggle and smirk is definitely one of the top 10 best things of this season.

Look at them go.

[shmaroace]

don't get me wrong, i love all the positivity around being aro, like "be proud of being aro!! love who you are!!", but we never talk about how hard it is to reach that spot. so here's to the aros who are still trying to understand themselves, who aren't proud of who they are yet, who are still coming to terms with their new identity.

[no-brain-just-akutagawa]

two sides of the bsd fandom

[ID: An edited The Office meme. In the first picture Chuuya is smiling. The text reads “I think you’re over-thinking it”. In the second picture Dazai is turned to the side away from the viewer. The text reads “I think you’re under-thinking it”. End ID]

[hychlorions]

a what-if i've been thinking about for forever... trucy knowing the truth before anyone could tell her

[inkskinned]

100,000 dollars is not a lot of money.

it is also a lot more money than i will ever have. my student loans make up half of that - they're coming back, i'm told, like we all bounced back recently. the other day while paying for gas to go to work, i overdrew my account without knowing it.

i sat in the car and looked at the charge and tried to do the math. where the fuck is the money even going? i don't live extravagantly. i live in a hole in the ground, in an apartment the size of a sneeze; covered in ants. yes, i wanted to live close to a population center. maybe that's my fault. i've downloaded the apps and i've spoken to the experts and i've cut back on excess. i can't help the pharmacy bills or the medical debt.

i have a good, well-paying job. when i googled it to see if i was getting a fair salary, i found out i'd be making "upper middle class" money. which doesn't make sense - is "upper middle class" now just "able to afford a one-bedroom without a roommate". when i was younger, upper-middle meant a nice big house and a backyard and vacations and not flinching about eating at a resturant.

i was talking to my friend who is a realtor. he said 100,000 dollars is extremely cheap for housing. he's not wrong. 100,000 dollars would change my life. 100,000 dollars also won't really buy you anything. it could get you out of debt, potentially, if you were lucky and had a certain amount of scholarships to tack onto your degree. you could pay off the car and then have enough left over for "spending" money. how fucking amazing. one vacation, maybe two if you're thrifty. and then - like magic - the money would evaporate into nothing. people would sigh and tell you see, you should have put it into savings! like "upper middle class" people can't afford to value "actually living" over squirrelling wealth. you should spend your life only in scarcity. like that is what made the rich people all their real "actually a lot of money".

100,000 dollars would literally set me free. it also would just set me back to "earning normally" instead of paying down debt into infinity. god, do you know how many of us just want that? that our first thought is we could stop scrambling and just be free of debt if we won the lottery? that we don't even necessarily need to stop working - we just wouldn't have to worry about failing or falling?

and. at the same time. 100,000 dollars is next to fucking nothing.