Men will LITERALLY construct an entire persona based around their phobias as a result of trauma over witnessing the murder of their parents during a mugging orchestrated by crime bosses and spend millions of dollars on toys and gadgets to act out revenge fantasies and calling it vigilante justice rather than go to therapy.
Doesn’t he do both?
Bruce Wayne goes to therapy, not Batman, it’s different (canonically).
So uh … his therapist must suck for not treating that borderline Personality Disorder and uncovering his dissociative identity disorder
Given that the most successful therapists in Gotham are people like Dr. Harleen Quinzel, I’m not confident they can overlook their own issues.
No it’s fine, Batman is the real person. Bruce Wayne is the fake and that’s why he needs therapy.
Batman IS the primary personality and he’s never gone to therapy, so theres really nothing the Therapist can do about it at that point.
“Heroes In Crisis” There’s a top secret therapist for the heroes to consult with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_in_Crisis
Batman goes to the therapist in his cowl.
This thread is full of people who have never read Batman comics.
Gothman is literally cursed from head to toe to be the way it is.
Batman is effectively sisyphus in that regard.
Not only that, most fully realized versions of the character channel both the vigilante AND playboy personas to fight crime, using Wayne Enterprises to create welfare programs and jobs so Gothamites need not resort to crime to put food on the table.
There’s a scene where Batman pacifies a room of Black Mask goons without lifting a FINGER - he hacks the projector screen simply shows them a Wayne Foundation advertisement for better, safer jobs. One by one, every man simply drops their weapons and walks out the door as their crime boss irately yells at them to come back.
Gothman has syphillis?
Lmao, im gonna leave it.
Gothman is a meme in my friend group. He is effectively sad batman, a regular goth guy, and a visigoth all at the same time or which he ever needs to be at the time.
He may not be the meme we deserve, but he is the one that we need to burn Rome.
Now we need a Gothman comic!
Gothman is literally cursed from head to toe to be the way it is.
It’s more like, this post is full of people describing why the only way the storyline can stay realistic is by introducing supernatural evil.
If it were not a cursed city and if Batman was really a hero who wanted to help people, he would do the social programs and investment in community, but that would be a pretty lousy monthly comic book for kids to read and buy batman merchandise.
He already does all that on top of being batman.
He does do those though?
I haven’t even read Batman, but I’ve seen this same thread pop up enough times to know that:
-
Gotham is literally cursed
-
Gotham is extremely corrupt. Tax money wouldn’t go where it needs to
-
Bruce Wayne bankrolls tons of social programs
It’s cursed because comic writers couldn’t come up with a better way to explain why the city can’t be fixed by the world’s smartest billionaire.
The city can’t be fixed because then there wouldn’t be any more stories for them to write.
Sure, but “cursed” is lazy and raises a lot of questions.
It’s a comic book, I don’t know what makes curses “lazy”. Also the much more important factor is the deep corruption.
I say it was a process of elimination.
In a world in which heroes like Superman, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Cyborg, and Doctor Fate exist, your city has to be freaking cursed to keep getting all those cases of mental illness and corruption, keeping the city from really ever improving.
Organizations like the League of Assassins and the Court of Owls alone wouldn’t cut it. Detective heroes would unravel their plans. Tech heroes would root their data out. Magical heroes would counter their spells, fast and strong heroes would weed out the thugs, henchmen, and mercenaries.
Eventually, it would get more under control, like Metropolis, Star City, Central City, or Keystone City.
They would need something so ingrained in the city that nobody can really ever remove it to get to the high levels of madness and crime you get in Gotham.So at some point, a writer had to give up, throw their hands up in the air, and go “then… then… it’s freaking cursed!”
And then you watch the God/King of Cities talk with the avatar Gotham (Stormwatch #3), and it’s a freaking gargoyle talking about “the madness in me”, while Paris and Metropolis are just human-like women.
-
isn’t a big part of the whole setup that this would not help much? like Gotham is just too corrupt, whenever programs are set up to invest in the public, they’re mostly just stolen from.
Wayne is a philanthropist who gives a ton of money back through his own programs, right? presumably better overseen than the government ones.
I don’t know how much money of Wayne’s is actually used for philanthropy, but he can’t just give the city all his wealth because it’s too corrupt for it to be used well, right?
whenever programs are set up to invest in the public, they’re mostly just stolen from.
I’m reminded of the time Walgreens reported they were raising prices and closing stores because of rampant crime, but later admitted they made it the fuck up.
presumably better overseen than the government ones
That’s a particularly post-Reagan presumption, and is the product of the kind of deregulation that the Reagan administration spearheaded. In fact, government programs are especially good at fulfilling their roles, since the Pournelle motivation of survival of the department is actually a weaker diversion than the motivation of profit.
We’ve seen plenty of examples, how California regions that had public power fared better during the Enron crisis in the aughts or how Medicare was stronger and yielded a higher rate of positive outcomes before it was privatized by the George W. Bush administration. A similar thing happened in UK in which the NHS got privatized and reshaped for efficiency over redundancy, creating long lines and more poor outcomes.
Wayne has exactly the same kinds of right-wing biases that Andrew Carnegie did, and Bill Gates does, preferring to make decisions based on his own anecdotal experiences than based on data sets. Sure, he saved a kid from crime, and in the meantime more kids suffer from food precarity, from family precarity, from housing precarity than are getting pushed drugs and bullied by gangs. In fact, the gangsters are coming from the precarious environments of the first group.
Batman is ultimately a fantasy of personal responsibility, that we should each be strong enough to bootstrap our fortunes, even though actual data shows most don’t, especially when there are extenuating factors like not being a non-disabled white dude with at least middle-class backing by family. Batman is glad to let everyone else that doesn’t fit into that category suffer.
Granted DC can write what they want, which is why Batman can have a code vs. killing while still smashing the faces of half of Gotham. IRL bare-knuckle fisticuffs will actually kill, and Batman doesn’t pull punches.
Rubber Bullets. Honest. – Batman, The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller, 1986
Batman was created as the reverse of Superman: light vs darkness, superpowers vs a human being, just a journalist vs a billionaire, …
That’s why were Superman is an ideal of everything that’s good in humanity, Batman is the vision of the humanity not as a hero but as a vigilante.
Here is a short list of shit going on in Gotham at any given time, not including the wide array of psychopaths and supervillains doing shit at any given time:
- The insane asylum with the portal to hell (Depending on if you consider Living Hell canon or not.)
- The Lazarus pit in the city spewing chemicals into the water supply.
- All the other chemicals likely in the water supply from a wide array of sources, including regular pollution and goofy shit.
- The remnants of the evil warlock who was sealed under the city for centuries.
- The massive mafia presence and general corruption.
- The Illuminati that uses zombie soldiers.
That is not shit proper taxation is going to resolve. You can’t protected bike lane away the zombie controlling Illuminati.
- The Lazarus pit in the city spewing chemicals into the water supply.
- All the other chemicals likely in the water supply from a wide array of sources, including regular pollution and goofy shit.
Fixing contaminants to the water supply is absolutely something proper taxes should be able to solve.
Key word, Should. If taxes actually went where people say it does, it might. And even then, it’d also take a lot of funding outside of just taxes, not to mention someone to actually start doing stuff about with all that funding. Also note on that list is rampant corruption and criminal syndicates mingling with the government.
I think you underestimate the power of actual taxes, say if we taxed billionaires and corporations.
Or you may be arguing, as Marx did in Das Kapital that democracy and self-government are incompatible with capitalism. With some qualifications, I’d agree.
I am absolutely arguing that. The rich in actual mid-to-south New York and elsewhere aren’t actually taxed, why would the rich in Gotham be?
Well in the case of Bruce Wayne, as an allegedly ethical billionaire, he’d pay his fair share of taxes wouldn’t he? Or he’d spend that money dressing as a bat and punching poor people.
I think the Batman fiction depends on the notion of ethically rich. Heck, even the bible challenges the notion over fifteen centuries ago. 🐪🪡💰
ETA: TBF variations of Robin Hood are aristocracy, as was the Scarlet Pimpernel, and I think Zorro was as well. So Bats is not the first rich superhero by far.
‘Wayne foundation’
…
It doesn’t look like a lot of people even read the comic books before forming these opinions about his storyline.
We are assuming that somehow if Wayn pays large sums of wealth to the government, the government wouldn’t just be their usual wasteful, corrupt, self serving self with said money. You get every current billionaire in the USA to pay a fair tax. Where do you think the money goes? Funding for food stamps or Lockeed-Martin?
Underfunding the government through tax cuts makes corruption more likely. The richer the rich are, the easier it is to manipulate the government for them. Why do you think so much money goes to Lockheed Martin? Who gets government contracts isn’t chosen at random, there are moneyed interests involved.
Also in the DC universe, the equivalent of Lockeed-Martin is Wayne Enterprises. There’s stories where Bruce is conflicted in making weapons, but nonetheless, his fortune is built on the military industrial complex.
So Bruce Wayne is somehow worse than freaking Tony Stark?
Then again Stark is an inventor and comics-level genius who lacks a secret identity, so pivoting to another industry was way easier for him. Bruce Wayne probably can’t change his company too much without losing a ton of pull and drawing unwanted attention to himself, plus losing access to the gadgets he relies on.
Didn’t Stark divest from weapons manufacturing to researching clean energy instead, after he got hit by that one bomb of his?
I haven’t read the comics, just what I remember from the movies
Yeah, that’s why I said worse than Stark. He pivoted away from supporting the Military-Industrial Complex when he realized it was hurting people, whereas Batman hasn’t.
It’s just odd since Batman is supposed to have ironclad ethics, whereas Iron Man is famously a hypocritical ass (though much less so in the MCU than in the comics, from what I’ve heard).
Meanwhile, the DoD is like: “Hey, anyone else kinda wondering why these bombs, ammunition boxes, and rifles are all kinds bat-shaped. Wayne enterprises is weird”
I should stop coming to these threads. At the end of the day, Batman is rich by day and personally fights crime at night. Everything else is just added on to make that premise work. It feels like a bit of a Thermian argument (“she’s naked because she breathes through her skin”)
Edit: there’s also something interesting to say about why “comic book” means “superheroes” in the US but “Donald Duck/Tintin/Astérix” in Western Europe
In the Batman Year 1 comic the thing that makes the police believe there really is a ‘Bat-Man’ is when he attacks a fancy dinner party and warns Gotham’s movers and shakers that justice is coming for them, too.
Yeah, it’s pretty clear Gotham was full of corruption from top to bottom, which pushed him into becoming Batman. Philanthropy would just fuel the corrupt politicians into funneling money to the crime bosses, and taking a cut. Probably if he started a soup kitchen and was on the ground getting people out of poverty, he would achieve improvement, but when the police, courts, and politicians are on the crime bosses payrolls, funding those institutions more will not solve Gotham’s problems
I vaguely remember some stories, he does do the whole non-profit thing, too. It’s still a little bit too pro-billionaire but yeah, in their setting it’s quite likely the government is too corrupt.
Also he fucking funds other superheroes, so it’s a little hard to say what actually works in that crazy universe. I can’t imagine superheroing to be profitable.
In some of the Silver Age comics, Superman has a vast fortune from old Spanish treasure ships he can find deep undersea. Yet no one ever calls Supes on being a skinflint.
[jk]
Tax wealth not work
Oh you’re saying we should tax wealth, and we should not tax work.
For a second I thought you were saying “taxing wealth does not work” like a tribal. Few word sometimes do trick.
Tax income no work
Wealthy still get more wealth
No wealthy get even less wealth
Must tax wealthy not no wealthy
Tarzan ass tax policy lmao
“Flat tax good, all pay same share”
(Flat tax not good, hurt poor more)
Well. Part of batman mythos is that no amount of money is enough to save the city from itself.
I don’t think this person ever read batman.
This person is arguing for higher taxation of the wealthy in the real world, not necessarily engaging in detailed analysis of the fictional world of Batman
And yet here we are.
