#so this got.........Long

[navree]

I don’t know if it’s been asked before but why do you like Batman? What’s so special about him?

It's been talked about a bit by me just rambling, but never really explained in depth, and even then, I never mind repeating myself <3

So, a not insignificant part of it is that one of the first TV shows I ever remember watching, other than Redwall and Dragon Tales was the DCAU Justice League show, and I immediately fell in love with their version of Batman, especially how he was performed by the late, great Kevin Conroy. So I just started seeking out that version of Batman through the DCAU shows when I was really young, like, seven years old, and it just kinda imprinted itself on me, the way media often can when you're a young child. And I do maintain that, despite some flaws (like the Jason Todd-ification of Tim Drake for no reason, and the obsession with making Bruce and Barbara a couple, which just.....hurl) the DCAU characterization of Batman as a person and as a hero is is the gold standard. But I did start reading comics once I ran my way through all the shows, and that core love still remains.

Part of it is, again, he's Amélie's very first blorbo ever since the mid-2000s, but Bruce as a character is genuinely compelling. Bruce goes through an unimaginable trauma at a very young age, and rather than how most people would react, he chose to do something with it. Seriously, if you think about something like the death of Batman's parents happening in the real world and you just read about it on the news, that's horrific, and it makes sense that it's not only fucked Bruce up, but could have potentially resulted in him turning into a mess. And he is a mess, don't get me wrong, but he also chose to be more than that. He chose to create Batman, to try and help a city that was drowning and make it better. There's an element of choice to Batman's character and his arcs that I've always liked. He doesn't need to do anything that he's done. There's no outside force compelling him to try and create a better version of his city where no one has to experience the hurt that he went through. There's no external pressure demanding that he protect the world even in the face of odds that he cannot win just to keep innocent people safe. There's no ulterior motivator making him take in children who have nothing, children who need a home and a family and loving care, other than the fact that he wants to do right by them and he has an infinite capacity for love in his heart. Bruce has no responsibility to Gotham, the people of Gotham, to other heroes, to the world, to random kids he meets on an off chance. No one asked him to do anything he does, and he's under no obligation to do it or continue. Bruce could stop being Batman tomorrow and dismantle the entire operation and turn his entire family into civilians, and nobody would be able to say he can't do that because he had no duty to start it in the first place. But he did. He chose to do good, to turn his pain into a drive to try and make life better for people in his city, to take a drive that could become a very selfish motivator (for instance, devoting resources solely to finding Joe Chill) and using it for something purely selfless (putting his own self on the line, in all possible ways, just to make sure people can lead better lives and that no one ever experiences the pain that he has).

There is a fundamental goodness to Bruce Wayne's character that is incredibly compelling. Because it would be so easy for there not to be. And he's had a fair amount of writers who've forgotten that it's there (people who write abusive Bruce Wayne are never seeing heaven), but if he's got someone who understands the character, then yeah, he's good. He's selfless and he's kind and he's got a capacity for love and care that is astounding. He opens his heart to children he has no connection to purely just to give them a good home, he refuses to harden himself against letting people in even with the amount of times he's been hurt, he never stops trying to help people who are hurt or sick get better (as clearly seen in his neverending quest to try and help Harvey Dent be rehabilitated). He's a good person who chooses to keep that goodness and not let it slip away from him, no matter what, even when he would be well within his rights to. He never lets himself. I mean, God, Bruce Wayne is someone who will personally resuscitate a man he hates more than anything, a man who murdered his child, just so that his other son won't become a killer and have to live with that guilt (that's real fyi, Dick Grayson once beat the Joker to death after the Joker had taunted him with details of his murder of Jason Todd's, and Batman, along with possibly Robin, managed to revive him so that Dick wouldn't be guilty of murder). Bruce Wayne is someone who could have been fundamentally broken by the things that happened to him, if not the murder of his parents then certainly the murder of his child (and we know it did alter a lot of his personality, which makes sense, cuz his kid died), and no one would have really blamed him. He could have become cold and cruel and a killer, and he knows he has that capacity within him, but he actively chooses not to.

And he doesn't always do the right thing; trust me, if you're a fan of Jason Todd, you're well aware of the fact that Bruce doesn't always do the right thing. He falls short. Batman is only human, and he makes mistakes. He makes wrong and bad choices, he fucks up and needs to try and fix it, he fails to meet his own standards (I don't know how many times I need to say it, but for all intents and purposes, Batman has absolutely broken his no kill rule, going into his confrontation with the Joker in Batman #429 with the express intent to kill, refusing to save him when he can, and never expressing a moment of doubt or remorse when he's believed to be dead, is basically Batman breaking his no kill rule, the only reason it doesn't technically count is because the Joker is revealed to have survived, but he had intent and he never had any remorse or second guessing, it counts as breaking the rule). Bruce has fucked up, with rogues and cases, and with friends and family too, and he's had to live with those mistakes and, if he's got a good writer at least, try to rebuild from there and earn whatever redemption he needs to depending on how big the screwup (and how much the writer either thinks Bruce is an untouchable god/hates whoever he hurt, no I'm not bitter about Certain Storylines, why would I be bitter?).

Bruce Wayne is incredibly human, painfully human. He lives in this world of gods and monsters and there he is, a man with a plan. And it is enjoyable, from a character perspective, that this man who is nothing but human, entirely ordinary, is able to fight and talk and think circles around people who'd routinely be considered superior, who has this place as one of the most god-tier people in his universe entirely because he's earned it, because he's lived up to his potential and his reputation. But there's also something beautiful in that. Like yeah, Bruce is stupid levels of rich, but beyond that, there's really nothing outwardly special about him. He's just a man. But he becomes larger than life through his actions, the choices he makes, the fact that he be brought low as he could be, low as he'd have the right to be, by his circumstances. His goodness remains intrinsic to him, and he refuses to give it up, because it's the core aspect of his humanity, a humanity that he refuses to relinquish in the face of greater and mightier odds and unspeakable evils, and it speaks to an immense fortitude as well as just how good he is.

(and I know there are a lot of generally bad faith criticisms made about the concept of Batman, and what Bruce chooses to do but a) no he does not go around beating up pickpockets and the mentally ill, he either stops crime non-lethally and informs the cops or is specifically asked to intervene in something by the authorities, not to mention that the "mentally ill" people that are his rogues are also basically domestic terrorists who are often full murderers, sorry that my heart does not bleed for the fact that the Joker has some kind of disorder while Batman punches him in the nose, and b) the fact that the system Gotham has in place is made explicitly clear on numerous occasions to not be remotely adequate to deal with what they have to deal with, that a lot of the cops and politicians and people meant to protect citizens are either completely inept and terrible at their jobs or just straight up corrupt and actively making the situation worse, and I do find it amusing that a lot of the criticisms of Batman come from left wing Twitter activists who crow about the incoming revolution but then go catatonic at the idea that a fictional character has decided the system is too corrupt to work with and thus forcibly changes it from the outside, isn't that what y'all's fucking incoming commie revolution is meant to do? Just sayin. Also no, he's not a fascist, tf, words mean things.)

And from a character perspective, from my enjoyment of him as a part of a fiction and an overall puzzle piece in a greater story (cuz I always do try to separate liking a character as a person vs liking them as a character), I'm not immune to the fact that Bruce's complexities come from a good number of tragedies. He's not real, and it does add to interest in him as a narrative device that he deals with a lot and needs to react to it and overcome it (and he deals with a lot, I wrote a list and it's not even comprehensive I definitely left out a lot just out of pure forgetfulness). Watching Bruce as a character, already with all the traits I enjoy listed out above, deal with the things he has to deal with makes him not just a character to enjoy as person, but a character to enjoy as a character, as part of a larger story, as a significant part of what makes that story rich and compelling and routinely interesting even when it's been going on for close to a century. Plus, again, from a character perspective, he's got fascinating interpersonal relationships that are captivating as well and add to his own complexities, relationships not just in terms of romance, but with friends and allies and enemies and especially with family (I think it's kinda impossible to be a Batman fan and not have an insane number of thoughts about the relationship he has with at least ONE of his kids).

There's a lot that's been written about Batman that I don't like, I am not a fan of DC's insistence that Bruce is a shitty dad who routinely beats his children, and it does feel a lot of the time these days like Bruce is a character that I like more for his potential than the way he tends to be written. But I still love that potential, and the kind of character he can be in the hands of a competent writer (and given what a decentralized medium comics are when it comes to canons and characterizations, you have to allow for that kind of leeway in a way you can't with other forms of storytelling) is one that can be truly great. As a character, he's kind of everything you can want, flawed and imperfect and deeply human, but always trying, and with not just a rich interior but complex relationship dynamics that have helped shape who he is.

Ultimately, I think why I like Bruce is best summed up by something Amanda Waller said in the Justice League Unlimited episode Epilogue: I've never met anyone who cared as deeply about his fellow man as Bruce Wayne. And I love him for that.

[itsscaredycat]

so ok yeah fine i watched gravity falls again and read the book of bill

[druid-for-hire]

There's this sort of anthropomorphizing that inherently happens in language that really gets me sometimes. I'm still not over the terminology of "gravity assist," the technique where we launch satellites into the orbit of other planets so that we can build momentum via the astounding and literally astronomical strength of their gravitational forces, to "slingshot" them into the direction we need with a speed that we could never, ever, ever create ourselves. I mean, some of these slingshots easily get probes hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Wikipedia has a handy diagram of the Voyager 1 satellite doing such a thing.

"Gravity assist." "Slingshot." Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We're getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a "slingshot," because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can't be sure about the exact physics).

Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. "Black hole?" Damn yeah it sure is. "Big bang?" It sure was. "Galactic cluster?" Buddy you're never gonna guess what this is. I think it's an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like... idk, botany.

But, like. "Gravity assist." I still can't get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.

We are assisted.

And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:

"... You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. ..."

Gravity assist.

[hansoeii]

hannigram

[kensatou]

make men slutty again.

HEAT STROKE | GQ CHINA Photographer: Wintam; Editor & Image: Shawn Gao Ding; Makeup: Lucas; Hair: Tao Liu; Art: Grade 2 & Lei Min; Art Assistant: Jiang Mi; Models: Kim; Ye Hao, Yu Hang, Ho Jun; Fashion Assistant: Yiyi, Coco; Photography Assistant: Li Zhenxi; Song Luanyi

bonus as rightfully added by @polyabathtub:

[jomo-is-here]

how long you think it'd been since he'd last seen his reflection?

[lamina-tsrif]

they are already planning your spontaneous burial (slingshot incident)

[abandoned-quiche]

I LOVE ALL OF THESE CHARACTERS BTW. I DO NOT WANT TO SEE YOUR HATE FOR THEM ON MY POST

[chloesimaginationthings]

Poppy playtime should have more Harley Sawyer ngl

[datcravat]

DANDADAN

[daeyumi]

I am what you made me 🩸

[silosbears]

i think alphonse would still experience depersonalization and dysmorphia even after getting his body back

[egophiliac]

o-oh my god

[skipblebee]

Sv au where everything is the same but it's like a reality tv show (the system takes interviews)

[raffi-cat]

red crowned crane grian

[sp00kymellonn]

meeting a quiet chatty cat