#is wrt ship developments. nobody likes it when you say that but it's true

[roobylavender]

oomf has been reading the caped crusade: batman and the rise of nerd culture and sent me some excerpts that i think really highlight why the consistent, progressive development of female characters within the batman mythos, particularly bruce's love interests, has been so stagnant and all too often regressive in the worst way possible. the following quotes are from frank miller and grant morrison respectively

putting aside that the argument for batman having homoerotic undertones is conveyed by dunking on women rather than actually discussing any of his notable relationships with men, these opinions on bruce's relationships with the various women in his life are so self-explanatory as to how not only these writers but plenty of others over the course of batman's history are loath to even perceiving the women close to bruce as anything other than props and toys meant purely for fan service. it's incredible that we have a history of comics where bruce is consistently the person wearing his heart on his sleeve and falling for women left and right (to the point that this was a focal point of the very first batman issue ever with catwoman!), yet the impression is somehow that the women in his life are mindless and scantily clad bimbos whose only narrative purpose is to run after him. there's not a single breath spared for even considering these women have been presented with hopes and dreams of their own at the outset bc what supersedes that in terms of priority is expression of a male power fantasy marked by obsession and isolation and undercurrent misogyny. writers like miller and morrison wax rhetoric about how batman is a fascist and they don't think he should be idealized, but they do absolutely nothing to even try to challenge that notion in good faith and on top of it use it as an excuse to peddle the ridiculous editorial and narrative treatment of women in batman's stories where their personal agency and exploration are worthless in the face of the masculinity and pride that mass appeals to audiences obsessed with patriarchal grandeur over anything meaningful

and what makes it all worse is a reader base absolutely loath to fielding any of these concerns bc it's more important to them to argue which love interest is most worthy of bruce dependent on her moral character. so many women in batman's history were created with independence and unique goals in mind but the fact that they may happen to love bruce is used to deride them repeatedly until they exist for nothing more than the sake of being a prop to him eternally. no batman love interest has consistently developed to the extent she can carry her own story completely divorced of a dependence on bruce. every single one is inevitably hindered by what she has to mean to bruce and it's bc that's exactly how writers believe they're capable of existing forever