#but I think they have a fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of Batman

[asha-mage]

🌶️👀

Y'all are doing a great service to my roommate by providing me an outlet for these that is not 'their dms at three in the morning'.

The Batman (2022) is probably the best Batman live action adaption to come out in my lifetime. This is because it's the first DC movie in years to not be embarrassed it's a Batman movie. There is this quaking insecurity that you can just taste from a lot of the superhero stuff that came out basically every DC movie except Wonder Woman, especially the Nolan Batman movies. That sweaty desire to be taken seriously is a weight around the necks of so many of the DC movies that keeps them from being fun, or inspiring, or saying something deeper. (Pretty much the only exception has been Wonder Woman which had was incredibly proud to be about Wonder Woman in a way you could feel on screen.)

But The Batman (2022) is not ashamed to be a Batman movie. It knows what it is and it understands what works about Batman- it digs into his motivations, his drive, and his shortcomings. The whole thing is a protracted examination of why simply being symbol of fear and vengeance is not good enough, and wont really help Gotham all that much. What Gotham needs is not a costumed badass punching it's problems into submission. What it needs is a light in the darkness, someone to inspire and fight for even their dirty, crime ridden, jungle of a city. He may not be as soft and kind as Superman, but he is someone with principles, and someone trying to do good for good's sake. Being Batman is not an ego trip, it's not even really a way to avoid therapy. It's Bruce's way of taking his pain and giving it meaning, taking the worst thing that ever happened to him and making it into the best thing that will ever happen to those he saves, and the movie shows that for it to work Bruce has to be more then someone who dressed up like a Batman to beat up criminals in back alleys. He has to stand for more. And by the end of the movie, he does.

[lylethewaterguy]

That last post I reblogged has given me thoughts so I’m about to go on a rant. Forgive me if this doesn’t make sense, my brain isn’t working.

I feel like one of the biggest issues of modern live action (and to a certain extent animated) Batman is a fundamental misunderstanding of the character. So many people who mostly know Batman through movies and tv shows, including writers, seem to think he’s ‘the grounded one’, he’s ‘the realistic one’. Which just makes me feel like y’all have him and Green Arrow confused.

Removing the more eccentric elements there to make it more entertaining, Green Arrow fights ‘realistic’ criminals. Assassins, cops, bankers and CEOs, etc. All issues we have in real life. Batman fights super terrorists with silly costumes and weirdly specific gimmicks. And even when they’re more realistic, like Abyss, they’re still way different from anything we would or could have in real life.

Batman isn’t in the ‘could exist in our universe’ group with Green Arrow, Black Canary, Batwoman, etc. He’s in the ‘larger than life fantasy’ group with Superman, Green Lantern, and the Flash. When he’s with the Justice League going up against gods and aliens he’s not out of place at all. It doesn’t feel like a group of super-powered gods and just some guy, it just feels like a group of super-powered gods including one who’s power comes from intelligence and technology.

He basically has superpowers, it’s just that his powers are his brains, money, connections, and completely unrealistic gadgets. Anyone could put a boxing glove on an arrow. But what the fuck is shark repellent? How would that even work? In a relatively recent comic Batman casually just has a helmet that lets Ghostmaker enter his mind (which of course has a bat logo on it) and it isn’t seen as weird or out of character at all. Yet movie writers still think he’s supposed to be grounded in reality.

One of my favourite Batman moments ever is from Batman Universe #2 when he and Green Arrow are talking to the Riddler. And they’re just having a casual conversation as if they aren’t a grown man in a bat themed leather gimp suit, a billionaire with a weapon that’s been outdated for about 400 years, and a domestic terrorist with a bowler hat and an unhealthy fixation with riddles. It’s so weird and funny and, whilst not realistic for us, so grounded in their fucked up reality.

And I just feel like movie Batman would be so much more entertaining if, instead of trying to make him more grounded to appeal to some alpha male power fantasy, they just stuck to the source material and made him as larger than life as Superman and the rest.

[dilfdoctordoom]

Been thinking about Hawkfire and why I don’t like it (beyond the obvious design choices) and I think it’s because it’s a microcosm of just... everything the Batwoman writers did wrong with Bette’s character, as well as a fundamental misunderstanding of her and what makes her so appealing. 

Bette’s an interesting character because there is no tragedy inherent to her story. Bruce Wayne’s parents have to die for him to become Batman; Bette Kane just becomes a hero because it’s fun. Because she genuinely enjoys it. She’s an adrenaline junkie, she wants to help people, and being a hero is the best way to deal with both of those. She’s never supposed to be edgy in anyway.

And that’s not saying you can’t tell serious stories with her, because you can, it’s just... this was not a good story for her character. Objective fact is, pre-52, Bette was competent. There was a whole thing in the Beast Boy mini series about it. And Hawkfire honestly feels like a far worse rendition of that arc. Like... a hero she admires tells her to quit, she doesn’t listen, she gets a new costume.

The difference with the Hawkfire arc is, it added on a step: Bette gets brutally maimed. It’s done pretty distastefully, IMO, with Bette having her guts ripped out intercut with images of Kate and Maggie having sex. I understand the juxtaposition the writer was presumably going for, but it... it’s just uncomfortable, to be honest.

Hawkfire’s entire existence hinges upon one idea; that Bette could not be a serious hero, because she had not suffered. That she would never compare to Kate, because she had not experienced a massive amount of trauma. And I hate that idea, I really do. It goes against who Bette is, against what makes her so fucking good; that she has no big, traumatic origin story.

Hell, the only outright origin we’ve ever gotten for her, was that she saw Bat-Woman, saw what she could do, and decided she could do it too. No dead parents, no exploding planets, just... boredom, really, but she still takes it seriously.

“As Flamebird, Bette was in her glory”, is probably one of my favourite lines about her, ever, because it’s surprisingly great understanding of her (which was not expected, in a story that retconned in the Robin obsession). Bette loves being a hero. She fucking adores it. It’s fun and it’s her passion and it’s a little refreshing to see.

But that’s not there in the New 52. The Batwoman series follows up a lot from what was done in Detective Comics, especially regarding Bette, and what was done there, was just weird. Bette’s given up being Flamebird (why? We’ve never told), she’s enrolled herself in Gotham University (not explained much, but easy to assume it’s because Kate was back in Gotham and she wanted to spend time with her) and she’s... well, to be honest, her competence takes a nosedive.

The 2011 Batwoman series just runs with that. I could make a whole essay on how that killed what could have been a great dynamic between Kate and Bette (Kate’s military knowledge and training vs Bette’s actual field experience) but. That’s not what this is about. (I may have forgotten what this was about).

Hawkfire! Right, so, it’s just... it’s objectively a badly written arc. Bette’s never given a chance to actually recover from what happened to her before she’s tossed back into field and there’s no reasoning behind her name. We never knew Bette’s in-universe reason for choosing Flamebird, but the out-of-universe reason was, the writers thought it’d be a fun little joke that referenced her original concept of ‘Dick Grayson love interest’.

Hawkfire, on the other hand, kind of just exists. There’s no history, no reasoning. Sounds like they picked a random bird and slapped fire onto it, to be honest. 

The arc is so empty and devoid of any motivation for Bette. Why does she abandon Flamebird? Why did she pick Hawkfire? We don’t know. It’s Bette, it’s her stories with Batwoman, so we never actually know her motivations, which is what makes it so damn frustrating to read.

Bette’s fun and flirty and flighty and she can be jealous and petty and kind and compassionate. She’s smart and she’s reckless and she doesn’t always think before jumping into a situation and she understands people very quickly and there is absolutely none of that in the N52. She’s just a generic snarky sidekick, who gets her insides ripped apart to service the arcs of the characters around her. She becomes Hawkfire in seconds and even faster than that, gets written off the book.

This is the series Bette has the most appearances in and it’s also the one that treats her the worst and the stupid Hawkfire arc is just... the summary of that.

[davidmann95]

Why does the idea of "comics as myth/iconography" appeal to you so much more than "comics as soap opera"?

I guess I do tend away from superheroic soap opera, but there are definitely cases where that sort of thing does work for me, like in Invincible. I’m 100% fine with character-focused material like Ultimate Spider-Man or Starman, and I’ll beg off that some of the seminal works in that strain of the genre like Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men and New Teen Titans have aged horrifically (though in my opinion I can’t see how they were considered good to begin with, even and indeed especially compared to their contemporaries), and since then an endless parade of half-talented creators have used those tropes to prop up fundamentally weak books.

If I had to go deeper into my aversion, it’s probably that a lot of what that formula brings in wraps franchises up in elements that really have nothing to do with what those books are about - i.e. the comic about genetic mutants fighting racism being incredibly bound up in human-possessing cosmic firebirds and an endless cavalcade of parallel timelines, or the street-level nerdy superhero spending years contending with clones and deals with the devil - and rather than really using stuff like love triangles and major personal upheavals to substantively explore the characters, it’s used to fill up space with brooding and misunderstandings and further escalating plot twists in the same way other comics might fill space with a fight against a radioactive dinosaur - and as far as my own tastes go, I’ll take the dinosaur. Of course you’ll also get a book like Invincible, which really digs into the emotional states of the characters and lets consequences play out long-term in really interesting ways, or Spider-Man before the soap operatic elements essentially overtook the character over his most basic and relatable elements, so I think it’s more a matter of the common approach than the nature of the soap opera itself. Right now Detective Comics is operating in that mode, but along with characters I’m already predisposed to some degree to care about, it’s a book *about* things in a way that makes its personal concerns ring true to me.

As for a more ‘mythic/iconographic’ approach as you say, while that’s hardly my sole domain, it’s no coincidence that BIG characters like Superman and Batman tend to be my favorites; those kinds of well-defined mythologies allow exploration of a lot of different facets of them in reference to plenty of meaningful ideas over an extremely long term, and that to me has always been a model that tends to yield better results more frequently, even if it’s hardly the only way to approach things (Daredevil for instance isn’t really in that model, and he’s my favorite Big Two character after Superman and Batman).