Have enough money to solve almost any social issue, but put on a weird black latex suit and beat up the mentally unstable at night instead.
There's a clip from The Batman ( the animated show) I can't find at the moment, but it basically involves Batman clearing a room of thugs by offering them jobs. They all walk out, without a punch thrown.
In the real world, no one that has Bruce Wayne's degree of wealth is a truly positive influence on the world on the whole. There are no ethical billionaires. But within the context of the DC Universe, Bruce has been routinely demonstrated as using his wealth in the most socially conscious, progressive, and generous ways. He is always shown in stark contrast with the likes of Lex Luthor.
Bruce has been routinely demonstrated as using his wealth in the most socially conscious, progressive, and generous ways. He is always shown in stark contrast with the likes of Lex Luthor.
Depends heavily on the author.
In "Kingdom Come", for instance, Wayne and Luthor are partners and Wayne's main contribution to Gotham is a fully automated dragnet of police-robots across a city he effectively owns lock-stock-and-barrel.
In "Batman 2099", he's a recluse whose personal tragedies have rendered him incapable of engaging in more than self-pity, while his board of directors does all sorts of evil shit completely off the leash.
In Joaquin Phoenix's "Joker", his family is just another one of the members of the criminal cartel that has corrupted the city, with Bruce's doctor-father spending more time hob-nobbing with the elite socialites than attending to the city collapsing under his feet.
There are definitely more utopian takes on Bruce and his family. But Gotham is inherently dystopian, and you can't escape how the city's wealthiest family is - at least somewhat - responsible.
I think it's awesome that different Batman stories can examine different versions of Bruce and his position as a billionaire - it allows different aspects of the world to be interrogated: criminals sometimes doing crime because they know of no other way to survive in a capitalist hellscape, the apathies of billionaires to the evils of their financiers, Batman's obsession with order leasing him to militarise the streets of the city he loves, etc.
Of course he does.
The point is that Batman is the archetype of a right-wing superhero. Batman is how rightwingers understand social justice: accumulate as much wealth as you can, use crushing physical violence to punish bad guys, act charitably at an individual level but do not ever work to solve social issues at a systemic level.
Even in-universe he's nowhere near as much of a positive force as he could be if he used his money to force political and social change instead of as an outlet for his mental issues.
He's not actively villainous because right-wingers don't see themselves as such. But when that fantasy meets reality, you get Elon Musk.
Stark contrast… you could have done something with that.
Still goes around beating people without trial. Reminds me of the comic run where all these low level criminals who Batman has crippled and left for dead for small offences, come after him for revenge since he fucked them up for life, while letting the Joker escape or go to Arkham yet again
In the real world, no one that has Bruce Wayne's degree of wealth is a truly positive influence on the world on the whole.
Bill Gates almost completely eradicated polio, contributed seriously towards the eradication of malaria, and is addressing the AIDS epidemic in Africa. He and Buffet have been working on a micro-reactor energy project for several years now.
He's also done a lot of wide-spread horrible things to get that money though, that's the thing, the good stuff billionaires do rarely makes up for the stuff they've done to get that money in the first place. The most fantastical thing about Batman is that he and his parents are usually depicted at face value as good rich people who get their money legitimately without hurting anyone and then only do good things with that money. And despite that Gotham is still an eternally crime-ridden cess pit. Most billionaires donate huge amounts to non-profits or start their own. Hell I bet trump himself has done plenty of philanthropy, but that automatically doesn't make up for the way they earned their blood money in the first place. Is Bill Gates going out of his way to lobby for taxing the rich, or universal healthcare, or other systemic changes that would help a lot of people but likely reduce the rate he accumulates wealth? Because he has more than enough money to make large waves in those political arenas and still be rich for the rest of his life. If he never made another cent and gave away 90% of his money to homeless people he would still have enough left to be rich for the rest of his life.
Bruce also didn't do all the scummy things people typically have to do to become that rich. He inherited his wealth and there's so much of it that it's self perpetuating. He could sell his company, give 99% of his money away, and still have enough to live comfortably on just the interest it generates.
There are no ethical billionaires.
Oh, to the extent everyone else can be they are. Which is very little.
Couldn't he use his batman persona to intimidate the rich to affect social change? Like Bruce Wayne can do so much if he had a dude in the night breaking into other billionaires houses in Gotham and telling them to raise wages or stop influencing politicians to not raise taxes and let healthcare for all go through
The line is quippy, but it's silly when you look at the batman stories. Anything can be funny if you get reductionist with it
When the writers have her saving plants, they do it in a way that you root for her. Same with Mr. Freeze, those episodes and the movie is really touching, solely because of his motivation.
You don't root for batman to beat them up or flex his wealth on them, you want Batman to help them. You want them both to get happy endings.
The stories usually end with batman stopping the carnage, while also arresting whatever CEO was cutting down trees or doing experiments on Nora. In other stories, he funds social programs and advocates for reforms as Bruce Wayne.
Maybe there are other stories where he acts like a frat boy. I skip content that has shitty writing
Yeah people that make this joke don't pay attention the actual content. Bruce is routinely demonstrated to be a positive force with his wealth. He's socially conscious, generous, invests in progressive causes, runs numerous charities, restricts his company from participating in unethical practices, creates jobs for convicts, and treats his employees very well.
Now, I'm not suggesting this is realistic. No one of Bruce's wealth, in the real world, would be anywhere near as good as Wayne is depicted.
But within the context we of this world, the actual text of the stories tells us quite plainly he is a positive, progressive influence.
... and yet, he'd STILL be infinitely more effective if he either properly funded Gotham, or started actually killing evil people. Instead, he does neither... Batman still sucks balls even in the good interpretations. . ... mind, I still enjoy most of his comics and stories, but dude is just as healthy of a role model as The Punisher: Not at all. For the opposite reasons, ironically.
I mean, somebody must have agreed, because they made a whole movie about it.
This tweet is the entire premise of The Batman.
It does end kinda going back to justifying why he's more useful in the suit instead, but at least they spend a bunch of time talking about it, I suppose.
I actually haven't seen the one in the screenshots, is it this one?
Over 60 years of "crime-fighting" but no noticeable decrease in Gotham's crime rate.
Curious.
Considering there's, variously,
One can see why the city might not have the best base to positively grow from.
Joker might be supernatural in origin, too. The 'vat of chemicals' story is explicitly a maybe, Batman can't find any evidence he existed before he showed up as Joker, and he keeps surviving things it should be impossible to survive. That last one could be connected to the lazarus pit, though.
Depending on the timeline, that's not true, but that's the problem with resetting a timeline a dozen or whatever times. We see an endless amount of him fighting the crime and never the results.
They didn't explore it as much as I thought they should. Batman created Bane, indirectly, and in some ways attracted Bane to Gotham which set off the events that lead to all of Arkham criminals being released. Which in turn led Arzial to Gotham. Which brought about the events of Contagion and Cataclysm which lead to No Man's Land.
So in a way the entire city of Gotham was brought down by him being there.
Sure. But you can take a step back from there and assert the crime cartels of the earlier era - the Falconnes and Mannheims and Marchettis - and their corrupt police confederates created Batman (since they're indirectly the cause of his parents' death and the main antagonists that head up the crime wave that young Bruce pits himself against).
And since there's a (even in-universe) hard association between organized crime and the various state and federal intelligence agencies, I guess you could put the entire Batman Villain universe at the feet of Harry Truman, J. Edgar Hoover, and Allen Dulles.
Time to take a meme on the internet too seriously! :D
There are two things that bug me about the weirdly frequent discourse on Batman.
Firstly, there's no one version of Batman. You can find bastard fascist Batman, and you can find actual justice Batman. Hell, you can find both by Frank Miller, depending on the point in his career. My favorite version is from The Animated Series, and you'll find tons of examples of Batman using kindness and compassion to affect meaningful change, instead of reveling in violence as though it solves anything. Heck, he's nicer to working-class folks, even sympathetic criminals, than to his fellow rich people.
Secondly, I think it's a talking point with bad optics. Batman rules. Why let the fascists have him? If there are loads of ways to look at and interpret the character, I'd rather focus on the one that makes him the good kind of class traitor, anti-fascist, anti-cop, and fighting for economic and social justice.
I like TAS Batman A LOT especailly since he gave his villains every shot at redemeption, many of them were simply too damaged to live a normal life.... Heck, for Harley Quinn all it took for her to start being evil again was a single PTSD attack, and it was induced by a mall cop, implying her trauma was started by police brutality
Yeah, that's one of the episodes that immediately came to mind.
Harley: There's one thing I've gotta know: why'd you stay with me all day, risking your butt for someone who's never given you anything but trouble?
Batman: I know what it's like to try and rebuild a life. I had a bad day, too, once.
It was absolutely a rehabilitative vision of justice. The same thing happens with The Ventriloquist, where Batman is extremely supportive, and goes to great lengths to talk him down after he was manipulated into returning to crime. Heck, there's even a villain, Lock-Up, who personifies a cruel, punitive form of justice. He even reveals the guard's abuse, through a clever ploy, as Bruce Wayne, in a hearing about Arkham.
Several versions also have him channeling huge amounts of money to charities as Bruce. Also trying to influence local politics with his company or hiring petty criminals he runs into as Batman to work at Wayne Enterprises so they have legitimate income. Batman is working on things that are happening right this second, but Bruce is trying to fix systemic issues so that Batman eventually won't be needed.
Couldn't he use his batman persona to intimidate the rich to affect social change? Like Bruce Wayne can do so much if he had a dude in the night breaking into other billionaires houses in Gotham and telling them to raise wages or stop influencing politicians to not raise taxes and let healthcare for all go through
Yeah, one of my favorite depictions of him are the Year One movies/comics, where Batman is fighting corrupt cops just as much as he's fighting the mafia and other villains of the week.
wonder why this is top post of lemmy.world today
to effect* meaningful change
That's always the issue with super heroes. All these people with these crazy abilities and powers and the only thing we can think to do with them is beating up petty criminals.
Like that's really what the world needs: tougher cops with no oversight.
Except that actual super villains exist in their universes.
What's the difference between the super villains in their universe and the ones in ours? Mass shooters, serial killers, billionaires who own sweat shops, leaders of drug cartels, Jeffery Epstein, corrupt cops, corrupt judges, Putin, all the soldiers commiting war crimes and those who lead them who are either ok with it, or instructing then to do so.. we've got super villains
Doesn’t change the fact that much of what they do is beat up petty criminals. Hell, that’s usually their goal early on, before super villains get introduced.
She's trying to regrow the forests like the Orphan Crushing Machine is solving child hunger.
She's also an environment strawman. Think of how often mainstream media portrays environments as radicals vs how often they're portrayed as reasonable heroes. Thanos? Kingman's villain? Think that's by accident? Well, maybe some of it is. Being able to find success within a power structure means you may find it reasonable and fair, so you end up writing stories that reinforce that power structure.
Thanos' MCU depiction isn't a distillation of a decades old comic character, it's a result of them not adapting the subplot where he wants to bang Death. Seriously, his motivation in the comics is that he has a boner for Death and thinks she'll want to sleep with him if he kills an incredibly large number of people. They hadn't gotten that far into the cosmology by the time they used Thanos in the movies, so they had to come up with some other reason that he might want to kill half the population of the universe.
Isn't it tho?! trust the process bro
I love to hate this movie, but I think Freeze's costume, made by an actual armor fabricator is just sick as hell, nipples be damned.
Also he is trying to find a cure to his wifes disease.
Which Bruce helps him with in the end. He could of sent Nora to a hospital, Freeze to jail, and washed his hands of it. Instead he makes an effort to transfer her to Arkham so Freeze can continue his work.
He does something similar in virtually every single iteration. Of his principle Rogues Gallery, Freeze is nearly always the villain Bruce makes the most effort to assist.
Can't remember it. I thought he defrosted his wife.
I get the overall vibes but
The basic premise of the Gotham universe is that everything is fucked. It's grimdark, it's DC's 40K. Actually it would make near perfect sense if those two were one universe.
OTOH the Harley Quinn series (the one with Harlivy) does take jabs at Bruce's sheltered status, "People pay rent?". Lots of stuff going on in that series that don't fit standard canon, though, the series is as much a contemporary commentary on the universe as it's an in-universe show. Do watch that series btw even if you're not into comics, or the universe, or whatever, it's hilarious.
"Because a warlock is interred on Gothams soil." I'm sorry, WHAT?!
Bro needs a lore update
Pedantic literal interpretations of what amounts to a 90 minute burlesque show are my fav!
Just say you don't understand batman comics.
Anyone who has ever seen Harley Quinn has definitely rooted for Poison Ivy.
... dressed as an ebola vector
Bro hates millionaires so much he actually went and misunderstood Batman, a literal hero in the dryer and most basic way possible
Just realized fr freeze has costume nipples too
For more pleasure
Still better than any real life billionaire.
Costume design actually used to be more cool. Now everyone looks like an iphone.
How do you know he's not working on all those issues while beating others up?
This is maybe the stupidest take on Batman in the history of the Internet. Prior to the Internet, anyone weird enough to think this way would've felt far too alone in the opinion to speak it out loud. Those were better days.
That's why every heavyweight character from the fictional and mythic canon is getting 'rebooted' at the moment. Many things changing fast in culture, many people having studied the humanities.
Wait until artists start using these characters - then it will really start getting interesting.