True that
True that
Comments
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That's also the same reason why Jason Todd died the same night Batman's Robin disappeared and no one batted an eye. Poor kids don't matter.
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I'm pretty sure Bruce Wayne is Batman is an open secret of Gotham, because rich people get away with everything. And this is unrelated to Bruce beating up poor people rather than implementing civic projects that might reduce crime.
The only town with a higher crime rate than Gotham, New York is Cabot Cove, Maine, and that's largely due to the population difference.
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He makes that lil boy run around in underwear 2
Also .... we were all comfortable and accepting of a super hero fighting crime with his billions of dollars of wealth to buy military hardware, vehicles and new tech to fight villains one at a time ... instead of doing something constructive changing the corrupt political system or like feeding the poor or funding public housing
He spent spend his billions fighting the symptoms of the problem .... rather than going after the root causes
Bruce Wayne absolutely did spend billions fighting the root causes too. It just isn't as effective as you'd think given that the city is actually cursed and has a hellmouth or something underneath.
Not to mention that many of the villains are actually people who're experiencing a mental health crisis and need care. Batman has seen the inside of Arkham and yet does nothing to improve the treatment at the facility.
I loved Batman as a kid but have become increasingly disappointed in him as an old.
Many of the villains are literal shark people, plant people, clay people, clown people, crocodile people, or bat people to name a few, there's some leeway in the confinement of them compared to humans.
Why do so many people think he doesn't spend money on things like that? Is it because the movies don't really show it, and that's a lot of people's only impression of him? He does plenty to try and improve Gotham's situation as Bruce Wayne, but the place is literally cursed, so no amount of money can fix it.
Because he's still a billionaire
Because the story lines and ideas reinforce in everyone the idea that bad guys just exist out of thin air ... or they are demonic maniacal mentally maladjusted people who were just born bad and do only bad things in the most extraordinary ways ... that we need super heros in order to protect us from the monsters that lurk around us.
It reinforces this childlike mentality that the world is full of complicated questions that can be easily dealt with by employing simple answers
The point is not that Bruce Wayne doesn't spend money on charity. The point is it doesn't matter that he does; his commercial interests cause more damage than all his Batmanning around and charity can compensate for, and his Batman shenanigans cause more harm (or would IRL, when you don't have a dozen legal teams making all the adverse effects disappear).
Batman really is a story of rich dudes doing whatever they want, whether it's punching poor people or taking rocket joyrides or fucking little girls, and then their fanboys trying to justify how their exploits are right and proper.
Just stop.
You know what would make a great comic book story? A rich man giving all his money away. The end. Wow what a read, are you publishing?
He gives it away to charities and organizations that embezzle the money, use a part of it to bribe and threaten their way into decriminalizing their actions and use the rest to steal and hoard even more money in order to wrest control over the populace and treat everyone as less than shit.
Better?
It would be a fun little limited alternative universe run to release starting on April 1 or something.
You don't want to give it all away, even in death, that's a fail. Now the rich man has no money to grow, nothing left to give in the future. That's why smart money sets up endowments. The principle earns interest, the interest pays for whatever charity or cause in perpetuity.
There's an Indian proverb about a rich man who travels the country giving 100 rupees to every beggar he sees. Eventually he has no more money and becomes a beggar himself. In the end, he made no impact on the world and now has no more opportunity to do so.
I assure you, if Ursula K LeGuin would have written it, the story would slap af.
Are you comfortable and accepting Superman lasering villains when he could singlehandedly end food shortages worldwide and give free unlimited energy to the world by just turning a large turbine for years?
It's comic books, there's only so much real world logic one can throw in there before they run into the wall of "Someone would have shot the Joker in the head by now, c'mon.".
Also, Gotham is a shithole from root to stem. The good folks are the exception, not the rule.
You should read the "Red Sun" comic.
Kal-El lands in the USSR and is raised by Stalin. Eventually Kal realizes that Stalin is a madman and kills him, but leads the world into glorious revolution. Only the USA under President Lex Luthor is free, and Superman is opposed by an orphan lad who saw his parents killed by the KGB.
A corporation would just buy the turbine. Superman absolutely should laser supervillains, starting with his bald nemesis Jeff Bezos. It's not a coincidence that in the 2010s Lex was redesigned to look like Zuckerberg, and in the new movie he's a gamer (he probably plays Path of Exile)
Are you comfortable and accepting Superman lasering villains when he could singlehandedly end food shortages worldwide and give free unlimited energy to the world by just turning a large turbine for years?
Someone's been reading SMBC.
Curiously, Superman is given more latitude because he tries to find ways to best utilize his gifts, noting he'd still be doing his best to uphold good even if he was just a mortal journalist. Again, Batman could be directing Supes to deal with elite deviance (which would make a badass premise of a comic).
Bruce Wayne could absolutely be focusing his material assets towards creating a constructive network of programs towards a better society, but he just likes punching things too much.
Even with Batman as a tragic figure (Mom and Dad Wayne haunt his dreams and insist that he's not a good son unless he's punching people), the cost to the rest of society is (or would be in a realistic setting) untenable. To be fair, our real-world billionaires have really highlighted that they are the worst humanity has to offer, even more so than all the usual rogues gallery of petty criminals (so yeah, worse than Dahmer and Gacy).
Gotham is meant to be a city of darkness. If Gotham was redeemable through normal actions it wouldn't be Gotham and we wouldn't have Batman.
I'm not into Batman but from what I understand, newer comics straight up tell you that the city is cursed.
idk the town i grew up in was built on an indian burial ground and they still ain't got fiber internet. i'd like to blame a curse.
A curse is a cheap excuse. Even cursed Gotham without Batman would be better off than cursed Gotham featuring Batman. It's a false product meant to treat a false ailment.
I feel like I've read this comment like 3 times in 3 different batman threads this past week.. luckily all the others were down voted as they should be. He actually does do that
The issue is that Gotham is cursed so it can't be fixed, no matter how much he tries.
No. He doesn't.
He thinks he does. And maybe even the DC writers are convinced he's doing all he can. But his Batman budget is much better spent on civics and leaving closing hellmouths and fixing curses to the experts who fix such things.
ETA Then there's the matter that large unilateral capitalist enterprises have a detrimental effect on society that is orders of magnitude greater than all the good that can come of its charitable works, even when no profit is spared.
I get it. Hard truths are hard, yet Batman cannot be justified as a moral good.
If it makes you feel better, neither can the Roman Catholic Church -- nor any large religious ministry.