saw someone say months ago that the best cover story for jason coming back to life in the public eye is to say he was in witness protection. and i agree with that! but id like to add: jason would make a public statement saying that the reason he was in witness protection is “i saw joker kill robin”
idk if someone has already made this post but. imagine gotham upholding bruce wayne as an example of "you can have a tragic backstory and not start doing weird superhero/villain crap" and he just has to Deal with it
Batman is kind of the odd one out among DC’s major heroes, because if you reverse Superman’s hero/villain dynamic you end up with “capitalism good, actually”, and if you reverse Wonder Woman’s hero/villain dynamic you end up with “patriarchy good, actually”, but if you reverse Batman’s hero/villain dynamic you end up with a weird homeless guy who dresses like a vaudeville performer fighting a billionaire with a vampire fetish, which is in fact an improvement.
I feel like if you actually wanted to write this, you’d have to complete the gag by having Good Joker do all the same good deeds Batman does in canon, even when not directly Fighting Crime.™
Adopting a bunch of younger superheroes? Check. Trying to help all of his recurring enemies, occasionally including his gimmicky edgelord arch-nemesis, instead of solely beating them up as plan A? Check. Helping smaller-time criminals get jobs? Well, he’ll have to be more creative than “I hear Wayne Enterprises is hiring”, but if he’s clever enough to take on a supervillain who wants everyone to fear him and who has more money than God, he’ll think of something!
Also, the other thing that needs to be reversed is that Evil Bruce will be obsessed with everyone to recognize his artistic/comedic/edgelord genius, whereas Good Joker is going to be straight-facing the most ridiculous nonsense and his shtick depends on nobody being entirely sure if he’s messing with them.
I think the best way to approach the last one would be to swap the ethos, but not the subject matter. Like, Canon Batman is like “fear is my weapon” and Canon Joker is like “comedy is my art”, so Evil Batman becomes “fear is my art” and Good Joker becomes “comedy is my weapon”.
Now, I know one’s initial reaction might be “isn’t the ‘fear is my art’ guy just the Scarecrow?”, but the important distinction is that for Evil Batman, being an asshole billionaire isn’t necessarily a put-on. Let’s suppose Evil Batman fancies himself an Artist of Fear™, but he’s incredibly pretentious about it while at the same time having a very shallow understanding of how fear actually operates. Like, picture Patrick Bateman levels of shallow pretension and you’ll have have roughly the right idea – and I’m not just picking Bateman as my example because both Bateman and Batman have been played by Christian Bale, though it certainly doesn’t hurt! He only thinks he’s ahead of the curve because he’s playing with a stacked deck.
Meanwhile, Good Joker’s “comedy is my weapon” shtick forms a natural counterpart by working to demonstrate what laughable horseshit Evil Batman’s “I am the night” routine really is. He’s all about confronting the banality of evil, going in against villains who carefully cultivate the image of grand, romantic antiheroes and publicly exposing them as absurd little men with pie on their faces. Canon Joker’s comedy sucks because he doesn’t take anything seriously, but for Good Joker, nothing is more serious than comedy; like all really effective comedians, his best material comes from a place of white-hot anger at the systemic injustice that guys like Evil Batman represent. The text is “ha ha, I’m a silly clown”, but the subtext is “how dare you”.
I may have put entirely too much thought into this.
Evil Batman sounds broadly similar to a bunch of existing supervillains, but at least in my current tired state I am having real trouble thinking of any superhero characters remotely like Good Joker. I've actually been thinking lately about how lacking in chaotic good protagonists a lot of media is (I don't generally like D&D alignment but it's useful shorthand here), but a clown themed superhero wouldn't even have to be all that chaotic morally. I guess clowns are often seen as creepy and are not most people's idea of a power fantasy.
Googling got me the All The Tropes page on Non Ironic Clowns which points out that clown-like heroes used to be much more popular (see: The Marx Brothers) but have gone extremely out of fashion. Which means it would feel fresh and original! That... or it would feel like Homestuck...
The best cover for Bruce Wayne would be dumb carefree playboy who is also Instagram Optimistic, everyday he’s posting a selfie of his smiling at his breakfast with a caption like “it’s a waffle day! #goodvibesingotham #grateful” or a picture of a sunrise with a caption that’s just “wow #blessed”
Bruce Wayne ending up as Gotham’s favoured son because he may be an idiot, but he’s a cheerful idiot, and he donates tons to charity and genuinely loves Gotham and actually, truthfully does put a lot back into the city. And his instagram is a bright ray of sunshine, and honestly there are a lot of people in the city who get surprisingly defensive of their Dumb Carefree Playboy because, okay, sure, every month or so Bruce Wayne falls off a yacht or sleeps with a reporter or whatever. The man clearly never met a healthy coping skill even once in his life.
But as far as news regarding Gotham’s prominent citizens go, Bruce’s ‘scandals’ are so normal that it’s downright refreshing. When a headline has ‘Bruce Wayne’ in the title, you know you’re either going to read some Celebrity Gossip level non-drama, or else something to do with a charity. Maybe he’s been kidnapped again, but that’s only happened a few times. Bruce Wayne news is like the Gotham equivalent to special reports about dogs who rescue their owners from drowning, or raccoons who’ve figured out how to get past the new self-locking garbage can lids.
And there’s something weirdly reassuring about following his twitter. Like, if Bruce Wayne is tweeting about a really neat old tree he just saw, things must at least be sort of alright.
(Meanwhile, Bruce’s social media persona is 100% him flanderizing Clark.)
This is basically Lord Peter Wimsey, the protagonist of Dorothy L Sayers 1920s-30s murder mystery novel series. He is open about his detective work and doesn’t have a Secret Identity, but his super-competence and trauma is hidden most of the time under a harmless dumb rich guy persona so people just dismiss him as a weirdo who thinks he’s a detective.
Which now has me imagining Lord Peter as Batman, which is amazing.
bruce wayne maintains a presence on all conspiracy theory boards with the screen name BruceWayneIsTheBatman and all his posts have titles like “BRUCE WAINE IS BAT-MAN INDISPUTABLE PROOF” and it’s just a picture of Bruce Wayne from the back next to a picture of Batman from behind and they both have the contours of their butt drawn on in a shitty MSPaint red line (note: Bruce is in a suit and Batman has a cape, neither of their butts are clearly discernible) and the quote “THE BUTTS MATCH!!! THE FACTS DON’T LIE!!!!!” and he makes at least three of these posts a day, and “Bruce Wayne is the Batman” becomes a meme a la “Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer” and he gets asked about it on a talk show and he laughs uproariously at the idea and Stephen Colbert just HAPPENS to have a batman mask under the desk and they do a bit together where Bruce Wayne puts on the mask and walks around saying things like “excuse me, bank robbers, can I perhaps offer you some money to stop you robbing this bank?” and “I say, cease and desist your criminal behavior or I’ll have my butler ask you to leave” and the audience is LOSING THEIR MINDS laughing at the idea of this pampered rich guy taking on the Joker on a bi-weekly basis and then anyone who suggests “Bruce Wayne is Batman” in earnest gets met with mocking “oh man do the butts match” comments
Reginald D. Hunter (via pussy-envy)
[crying gif]
THIS REVELATION HAS RUINED MY LIFE
(via lapocketrocket)
one of the main reasons I’ve never found batman a compelling hero
(via nmkerr)
And one of the reasons why I like Ollie so much
(via barbeauxbot)
Yeah, Arrow is a pretty patchy show but boy is watching him take down corrupt rich people satisfying.
“Gotham High” - What it’d look like if Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy were actually a teen comedy.
Perfect.
so fucking awesome.
This is really well done.
["10 things I hate about you" recut with scenes of the Dark Knight cast as highschoolers to make a trailer for the highschool romantic comedy "Gotham High"]
Goddamnit.
[A photoshopped poster of Joseph Gordon Levitt as Nightwing with the title "The Nightwing: Probably not COMING SOON]
Um.
Jim Emerson, filmmaker and critic, deconstructing the chase scene in The Dark Knight and going into why it was such a narrative mess. Honestly, I agree with the statement because I still remember the headache I got during the scene.
Some may cry heresy; what’s the point in criticizing one of the few legitimately great comic-book-based movies? The point is simple: Movies are, in great part, the language of our popular culture. Understanding how and why they work—and, in some cases, work despite themselves—is just learning to speak that language. (source)
Guys, I’m loving this. It’s so interesting. I love knowing how things are constructed and how film frames narrative. Whatever your feelings are on TDK this is a good watch.
