#nananana nananana bat-meta!

[greatwyrmgold]

A lot of authors try to make Batman and the Joker into foils, with the Joker as a sort of an evil Batman. That's an understandable impulse; foils are great, and the Joker is more iconic than the rest of Batman's rogue's gallery put together. But the Joker was just another rogue in the gallery before accumulating baggage and expectations, so it's hard to make that foil relationship work. There's just not much they have in common that they don't also share with, say, Hawkeye or Mysterio.

Their relationship boils down to little more than a master detective and a criminal that's really hard to detect. Attempts to make it more meaningful usually try to frame something Batman does as a symptom of insanity like the Joker's. And that just doesn't work. Aside from the yikes-ness of "crazy people" being painted as violent and dangerous, the Joker's "madness" manifests as violent acts that are too different from Batman's—domestic terrorism doesn't line up with brutal vigilantism, unless you rewrite one or the other.

But there's one angle that occurs to me that I haven't seen done before: The characters' focus on their past, or lack thereof.

Batman is hung up on the past. He's motivated by his parents' deaths, obsessed with making sure nothing like that ever happens again. Contrast Spider-Man; he's arguably motivated by the death of his father figure, but mostly in the sense that he wants to be a better Peter than the one who let Uncle Ben die. The event itself doesn't matter, just the mindset that enabled it. But Batman is hung up on his past, and Batman stories often focus on that, one way or another.

Meanwhile, the Joker barely has a backstory. His history is famously vague and inconsistent, with its most famous depiction in the comics coining the term "multiple-choice past" and makes it clear that the Joker prefers it that way. This carries over into his most famous adaptation (sorry, Hamil!Joker), who gives multiple inconsistent accounts of his past at various points in the film, implying radically different motivations for his violence.

We have a hero who is obsessed with his past and a villain who doesn't care about his. Why don't more stories use this? I can think of several possible ways to resolve this conflict off the top of my head.

Batman realizes that the Joker has a point. Dwelling on the past is making him miserable; the Joker's over-the-top joie de vivre comes from not worrying about anything except the present.

Batman realizes the Joker has a point; by living in the present, he's able to adapt better.

The Joker is wrong, because by ignoring his past he can't learn from his mistakes (but Batman can).

The Joker causes mayhem without an ounce of guilt because he doesn't worry about the past; Batman stays on the straight and narrow because he doesn't want to cause the same kind of pain that was inflicted on him.

The Joker is just running from his own past, and he can't run forever.

Batman is running from his past, throwing himself into training and then vigilantism so he doesn't have time to mourn...but he can't run forever, either. Someone in the Bat-Family worries that he'll spiral towards an unrestrained frenzy if he can't confront his trauma, an arc that might start after something like the Jason Todd incident.

Obviously, most of these are incompatible with each other. But that's kinda the point! You could tell a lot of different Bat-stories from this angle, and I'm surprised I haven't seen any.

(I wonder what the odds are someone's gonna reblog this pointing out a storyline that did exactly this.)