#perhaps you'll have different interpretations as you make your way through canon

[distort-opia]

Hello! So I recently got into batman, and I’ve been slowly climbing my way up my reading list while also browsing through tumblr in search for metas about him, which is how I found your blog, and I really enjoy your metas!

I have a question though that won’t leave my mind, yet I also don’t want to stop my current reading list to jump into another series (JL), so I hope you don’t mind me asking this question to you instead 🙏

Basically, I’ve been wondering whether Bruce has opinions about Clark in relation to his self—Bruce’s self? So far from what I’ve read, Dick is (excuse me if the wording isnt exactly accurate, but just as a sums up) “the one that brings the light to Bruce’s darkness & the ideal self—the best of him”, whereas Joker is “the mirror to his self—the him that ‘what could have been’, the him who took different route”, and I wonder if there is a similar thinking/opinion about this self thing from him @ Clark too (like some sort of parallels)? I’m sorry if it sounds confusing 😅 Thank you!

Welcome to the fandom! Thank you for the kind words, glad you've enjoyed what meta I've put out. Hope you're having a fun time with Batman comics.

Oh Bruce definitely has opinions on Clark and Superman in general, in relation to himself. Though I have to make the note that in no way was Superman intended or built as a narrative foil for Batman's character, a "mirror self". Dick and Joker are characters who populated Batman's world from early on and were always meant to say something about the protagonist. Superman is a protagonist onto himself; he was created before Batman, and his popularity was actually a big factor contributing to Batman's creation. But that doesn't mean these two characters haven't grown together and influenced each other in a myriad of ways.

On a surface level, you've got the... grumpy one/sunshine one dichotomy. Superman is brightly colored and more emotional and fights in the light to bring people hope. Batman is enshrouded in darkness and stoically represses his emotions and fights in the night for justice and vengeance. One in the light, one in the shadows, one alien, one human, the "boy scout" and the "bad boy"... Even though they work together and are both on the side of good, these contrasts between Bruce and Clark are easily noticed by both others and themselves, and have led to conflicts on more than one occasion. But the way this translates in Bruce's head, to approach it from the angle you mentioned, is probably best summed up by the following pages... which I'm putting under a cut since this gets a bit long. Spoilers too I guess, for the Rebirth Batman run (if you haven't gotten to it yet).

Batman (2016) #36

"He's a better man than I am. [...] Who am I, compared to him?" And this is no way a new sentiment for Bruce:

Batman: Hush

Bruce doesn't see himself as a good person. He's capable of risking people's lives, of blackmail, lying, torture and manipulation, of unbelievable brutality and violence in the service of what he believes is his Mission. But he sees Clark as an inherently good person; as an ideal that he himself is not capable of ever reaching, of ever being. If I were to summarize only the projection aspect when it comes to Batman and Superman's dynamic, I'd say it's this one-- Superman is the hero Batman wishes he could be, but not one he'd ever try to become, because he believes himself fundamentally incapable of it. If as you said Dick is someone Bruce relates to and sees parts of himself in, but better (in trying to help Dick he retrospectively tries to help his child self), Clark isn't that. Superman is less of a mirror Bruce actively acts on, and more of a... negative. Clark is technically an alien, and yet in many ways he's more "human" than Bruce, having grown up with a loving family that Bruce wishes he had. Where Bruce tries to rise above the humanity he sometimes sees as weakness, both in emotional and physical terms, Clark is someone who's already "above" humanity, and yet yearns to be part of it. Moreso, Bruce envies Clark's sheer god-like power, but he knows that he doesn't have Clark's good character; that if he had this kind of unstoppable power, his need for complete control would drive him mad. Which actually happened one time, in Superman/Batman (2003) #53-56.

That being said, as is noticeable even in the pages above, this can result in Bruce putting Clark up on a pedestal, and idealizing him a bit too much, to the point of forgetting that Clark is a person too, with flaws and weaknesses. And not just that... the more ruthless and calculated side of Bruce never truly stops seeing Clark's power, both as something he can wield and something that can be turned against him (hence the hoarding of kryptonite and the contingency plans, in case Superman went bad). Perhaps Bruce's attitude more generally is illustrated best in this very recent moment:

Batman (2016) #128

Superman as Earth's greatest hero, and its greatest weapon. And Bruce is willing to risk his life to preserve that, because by comparison, he isn't these things. (And because Clark is his friend.)

[riftwalker-limbro]

as someone who finds the concept of age as a hierarchy IRL interesting ("i'm the elder sibling, you should listen to me", "respect your elders"), a game like warframe REALLY fucks with my perception of how-things-should-be

because you have

trauma child whose physical age is somewhere between child & late teenager (citation Needed) but who is actually >1000 years old but who has perhaps spent a single percent of those awake. fan theory has these kids as no longer aging physically due to sat-too-long-in-my-cryopod-syndrome

trauma adults(?) who were physically transformed into the ideal soldier. do they age? do they eat? do they sleep? did they go into a similar 1000 year old cryosleep? (my canon says yes but depending on the frame & headcanons you go with your mileage may vary outRAGEOUSLY, including but definitely not limited to alive for a while -> cryosleep for a bit -> literally dead and in pieces -> reassembled????)

some people who are entirely unaccounted for for those full 1000 years. were they awake? hanging out somewhere? also in some kind of slumber?

drifters.

and like, 3 being in charge of 1 is reasonable. before the Millenium of Fuckery, they were already adults. now, they are like. super adults. them being responsible makes sense.

but somehow, all (of my) first-instinct interpretations of the relationship between group 2 and 1 places 1 in charge of 2. this feels super wrong bc they are children.

so i've been contemplating the finer details of this for my canon. and they are as follows.

tenno had the mental maturity of children/late teens when the zariman oopsie happened. i'm hc'ing my kelth at like 17 to still be below the MITW's seemingly arbitrary Going Murderously Nuts limit but i have certain skills i want them to have before the jump (coding, you'll find out).

then, due to all the cryosleep business, their bodies get frozen that way. they get fucked up beyond repair biologically. are they now functionally immortal? i think that would be a fantastic horror cherry on warframe's trauma sundae.

but what's their mental state like? their adolescent brains frozen like that? imagine being a permanent teenager. the idiot hormones. and at the same time, they're going through all the horrors of war, being manipulated by almost all adults in their life (margulis is on thin fucking ice) for one purpose or another. did they know their life was hanging on by a jurisdictional thread until it was discovered they alone could reliably control warframes? wouldn't that have fucked with their mental state horribly? but at the same time, they must've been somewhat distanced from it - they went through so many battles but through piloting the body of another, it was never their own neck on the line, or the necks of the other tenno, not directly.

i think tenno must be mentally mature in some ways, like Horrors of War, but absolutely not in others, like emotional. they could have great strategic capabilities, but processing a small slight would happen with out-of-proportion swearing of vengeance and very little rationality. they are masters of combat, but not of their own mental state.

let's briefly discuss warframes before combining these thoughts. there is an absolute wealth on 1. different frames with different canon backstories both before & after the helminth 2. absolutely fantastic headcanons. so a few differences here are:

original role: part of one of the soldier castes, someone else somehow in direct service to the Orokin Empire, or common public?

intent: did not want to become a warframe but was forced, did want to become a frame, was completely tricked into becoming a warframe without even making their opinion known, and Oops (e.g. my vince)

as you can see, breeding grounds for a variety of mental states here, but i've never really heard of a child warframe - did we finally find the limits of orokin cruelty? - so for this post i'm assuming they were all adults pre-warframification

so you have a tenno, who is emotionally still a child but due to exactly that + their expertise in decidedly unchildlike things such as the art of war they can act like the most seasoned veteran. and you have warframes, who likely were used to following higher-ups' orders, who maybe never even see their Operator in the flesh.

when i put it like this, i am happy, because that way, it makes sense to me that warframes would obey tenno as they generally do. i am mentally putting umbra in the "yeah this does not apply to you, have a biscuit & some tea" corner, but only because he's the only sentient frame in canon and i personally disagree with that. the problem, for me, arises like. post-second-dream. sentient warframe suddenly realizes they've been taking directions from a child for so long.

worse, sentient warframe realizes they've allowed a child to bear the burden of their own pain and trauma for so long. a warrior and wise for their years, but still a child.

my own thoughts kind of run out here. but i will be rotating this more.

[theres-no-protocol-for-this]

Fandom and Interpretation

There was a discussion in one of my Discord servers that gave me lots of thoughts. And I want to share them here before they're not fandom-specific. I wanted to preface it with this is about fandom holistically and not any particular space. And also that this is neither good nor bad, and I'm not assigning judgment here. It just is. Sometimes.

I think all fandom is ultimately interpretive in nature.

You can't read and ingest content without filtering it through your own experiences, culture, and perceptions. Written work relies on the rather flimsy medium that is words; inaccurate and easily misinterpreted, even on the best of days. When people read Murderbot books, for example, they are inherently imagining a future somewhere out in space that doesn't exist through the lens of perhaps the modern world or the science-fiction tropes they're familiar with or whatever else the books might conjure for them. And once the words are ingested, so to speak, anything the fandom creates only adds to the interpretation.

In my mind, there's no such thing as "accurate canon" or "correctness" in the context of a work. We might all agree that Murderbot is a SecUnit, but what that means to each of us is likely going to be slightly different. We might say that a SecUnit has machine parts, and again, we all define machine parts a little bit differently. It feels good to be right, but I think right is overrated when it comes to almost everything.

In a fandom, it can sometimes feel like there's a particular interpretation that's "correct" (and I use the word in quotes for a reason here). Especially in established fandoms where people have had time to collaborate, some interpretations will naturally emerge as the most likely ones or the ones most people like.

And, as that happens, other, less-common interpretations either fade or become no longer canon compliant. Dividing lines can also form around particular interpretations and concepts. I think it's easy to join a fandom and take these as truth, and it's important to question them and the assumptions that underlie them.

In established fandoms, you also see echoes of their beginnings. Like static from the Big Bang. Before some particular established reading emerges, people often feel freer to interpret the works, and those original musings often find their way into established fandom in a weird game of broken telephone. No longer what the original fan intended but still sort of there. For me, CSU handlers are a great example of this.

I feel like it's important to remember that fandom is ultimately people who are working both together and individually to create a vision of a work that was, in and of itself, an interpretation. Pull apart the illusion of cohesion and underneath you'll find splinters and fractured bits. As should be -- we're all too different to suddenly adopt the exact same trains of thought.

The Borg will not take us this night!

And, once there's a particular interpretation (a ship that people like), some fans will make an effort to make it canonically true. In some way, it's a tug of war about whose interpretation is the most correct by making it extra correct somehow. Voltron had this with Keith and either Lance or Shiro. People would stare at a single line of context and argue its validity (or not) to the point of harassing the voice actors.

And finally, people enjoy media for different reasons. Escapists wanting to read a romance novel probably don't much care that some people read Twilight and wanted Edward jailed as a creepy stalker. The point of reading Twilight, for many, was not to enjoy a realistic depiction of a healthy relationship. So while the interpretation that Edward is an a*hole is valid, most people aren't starting petitions to get him barred from all schools across the fictional US where he resides.

All of these are just my ramblings, thoughts I've had for a while but didn't bother to write. And if I have a point at all, it's that fandom is complex and, like any other human space, should be regarded with minimal reverence. Dance even when you're wrong because "wrong" is relative and dancing is beautiful.

[hey-zelda]

you a fake geek mate, have you even ever watched a star wars movie, hope you read the response that was given to you because just watch the damn prequels and you'll know your argument for the Last Jedi is pathetic, wrong and like i said, fake geek, completely uninformed, shows zero understanding of the movies, the actual canon, and you probably watched tfa and thought you knew, stfu

Emotion, yet PeaceYou're welcome to share your thoughts on the movie off anon, and I'd love to have a chance to better express my viewpoint. I don't see any purpose in yelling at each other about this. We probably have some fundamental disagreements about past Star Wars movies, and that's alright, but I'd appreciate the opportunity to pursue that conversation without aggression.Ignorance, yet KnowledgeIn fact I went to fantastic-nonsense in private messages to sort things out after her reply. I did a pretty poor job of representing my position in my original comment, and I had to clear some things up with her. I didn't do it through the post thread because of language, which is sort of a trade off I had to accept, knowing that others would see her first reply to me but nothing afterward.Passion, yet SerenityThis movie is likely divisive because of how personal Star Wars is to so many people. This is the other reason I pursued a private conversation with fantastic-nonsense. It's obvious that Star Wars is very important to the both of us, and I wanted to first communicate that notion and second explore where we agree and how we differ on our relationship with the franchise and universe. The post thread is nothing like this because it contains broad statements from both parties that are meant for a general audience, not a personal conversation. Her original post was in response to certain Hollywood trends she saw reflected in Star Wars; my comment was in response to some broadly held opinions that I disagreed with. The result was two pieces of two larger conversations that didn't properly mesh. I'm sure Star Wars is important to you too, but I submit that you're doing a poor job of showing it, like I perhaps did in my comment, by coming to my inbox anonymously with inflammatory accusations, questioning the legitimacy of my experience as a fan based on a perceived disagreement. Again, you're invited to engage in a more elegant conversation, perhaps from a more civilized age, off anon so we can have a real discussion about something we both enjoy.Chaos, yet HarmonyUnfortunately, my decision to make a short comment on an opinionated post has caused inflammation that is spreading a little faster than I can keep up with. There are a multitude of opinions floating around, many I quite agree with. I hope to make this clearer in the future. I'll begin by stating that I don't think Star Wars is or should be pessimistic or grimdark, despite what I apparently implied in my comment. I will go into more detail on a different post, but suffice it to say that I am not equating hope and optimism, and this semantic distinction (pretentious and overcomplicated it may be) resulted in a lot of confusion over my point. I think there's a healthy, harmonious conversation to be had in the chaos. I would like some help extricating it, to the benefit of everyone involved.Death, yet the ForceI'm just gonna have to make things up for this one because it's not directly relevant... the force, which in a lot of ways is becoming a metaphor for Star Wars, is bigger than any one of us. The mythos and mysticism that the force adds to the Star Wars universe has always struck a chord with me, offering a level of spiritual inspiration, if you will. It's something we never stop learning about. I'm learning a lot about it in the perspectives of others, even in this conversation, and I learned a lot about it from The Last Jedi. This is what I meant about the story moving forward...I understand being unhappy about losing the happy ending of RotJ, but I want my view of the force to be expanded...not stagnated. When I talk about the force being what it is regardless of what people think it is, I'm talking about it as being more than lifting rocks and deflecting blaster bolts. I'm sure plenty of people understand that, and I'm sure I did a great job of sounding pretentious and preachy, but I think it's important in light of what I see as a prevailing casual interpretation of the force. As I say, I was probably preaching to the choir, and the choir didn't like it too much, and that's on me. Anyway, I hope we can all keep moving forward even as we look back. At the risk of sounding cheesy and fake, I'll go ahead and finish up this testimony of sorts with a good ol' May the Force be with you.