#definitely bootlickers and fash but i think that this interpretation of batman's character rings much truer

[vespectral-a]

was talking a bit about this with cherry last night, but it has me Thinking thoughts that i intend to inflict on the dash. i feel like an idea that is vaguely touched upon in the dark knight trilogy that is also very important to the batman mythos is the fact that bruce wayne and batman separately cannot save gotham, regardless of the batfam’s strength both as a family and their entire arsenal of military weaponry, and not even with the amount of money bruce can throw around gotham. bruce could bankrupt himself, but it wouldn’t be enough to fix gotham city let alone the rest of the world. 

but to focus more so on gotham city - there is a reason why yes, batman’s rogues gallery is iconic and prevalent in his story, but the (italian) mob and other organized crime, white collar criminals, corrupt politicians - those are batman’s truly most prominent antagonists. bruce views his mother and father’s legacy with rose-tinted glasses and thought their philanthropy helped shake the rich elites of gotham city out of their apathy. he thought via becoming batman in addition to expanding on his family’s philanthropy, that he’d be able to shake them out of apathy even more. not only rich elites, but regular people. that regular individuals could somehow make a difference thanks to batman’s inspiration, that people who may not necessarily be Good would want to make a difference in their own lives because of batman’s existence as a symbol in gotham. 

but of course, bruce is not in touch with regular people. regardless of his training, the amount of time he spent in disguise around the world as a working class or poor person with nothing, he will always be bruce wayne, a billionaire. very quickly, he was jarred from his own naivety and began to understand how crime  and poverty structurally works, especially in gotham city. the deep amount of corruption in the gotham city especially in the police force and in the local municipal government disgusted him, the greed that the elites collectively shared, it disgusted him, and is why his reputation has now reached urban legend and boogeyman status. it must rely on fear rather than hope to even have a chance to make a difference. especially in the wake of events like harvey dent having acid splashed on his face after being blackmailed by the mob for trying to speak out against them.

it’s why the tweets about bruce wayne donating all of his wealth instead of fighting the mentally ill do definitely bother me, because he literally does donate most of his money. does he partly dedicate himself to the batman role because Mental Illnes, Luv as an escape mechanism and partly because of his addiction to violence and control and adrenaline rushes? yes, absolutely, and that money could be repurposed for better shit. like this makes him flawed and i’m not saying he’s not.

i’m saying that gotham city is so fucked up structurally that it created batman’s rogues gallery for a reason. individualism doesn’t fucking work when it comes to gotham city’s problems, not like he originally thought it did. the individualist capitalist myth of one man donating enough to charity to save the world is as old as rockefeller but it is a myth that i feel a lot of people fall into, even with fictional characters like batman.