#pennyworth the tv show

[thebibliosphere]

Being in the Pennyworth fandom will have you googling shit like "How to fortify an umbrella against acid rain" to try and give a smidge of credibility to the storyline you're plotting.

Meanwhile, the official writers are just giving interviews like, "Yeah, the mad cultists who got turned into super weapons by a drug activated by a popular song sung by Alfred Pennyworth's pop star girlfriend survived the nuclear bomb that got dropped on London, so now there are these irradiated mutant cultists cannibals roaming the streets of London who go ballistic for 70s pop ballads. What do you mean, 'how did we plan to resolve that?'"

[nighhtwing]

alfred & bruce's relationship in gotham tv is so based. ur telling me bruce told alfred some asshole hit him and insulted martha wayne and alfred TAUGHT BRUCE HOW TO PUNCH AND DROVE TO THAT KID'S HOME JUST TO HAVE BRUCE PUNCH THE KID. alfred fucking pennyworth u absolute madman. no wonder bruce dresses up as a bat and fights crime as a grown ass adult

[bubblesxo]

de-aged bruce: yeah, that's definitely a deep bit of legal trouble you've gotten into. why don't you have harvey dent on the case?

batfam: harvey... dent?

bruce: yeah, he's one of the few good lawyers in this city. i trust him with basically all of my personal stuff.

batfam, to one another: should we tell him?

bruce: tell me what?

--

alfred, a room away: dear me, was that an explosion?

[the-wanderer]

I love the relationship between Alfred Pennyworth and Bruce Wayne; especially in the Gotham TV Show and just melt whenever Alfred calls Bruce 'my boy' and Bruce calls Alfred his family

[holstries]

my favourite boys :( literally me & @angelcorics ; she is my alfred <3

[aphmcu-mha]

I haven’t finished watching Gotham yet but so far, by far, my favorite episode is S2 E20. The ending is just so mwah🤌🏻💋. Gordon, Alfred, Penguin, Butch! All so utterly badass. I love ‘em! Bruce also got a badass moment! I love this episode!(can you tell?)

[batcavescolony]

I think we need more fics of the batfam reacting to the Gotham tv show Bruce/the world in general because that show is fun but insane. You got Jim Gordon dating Leslie. The Riddler working at the same police station as Jim. Baby Bruce is friends with Selina, causing all types if havoc. And that's just the beginning!

[psalmsofpsychosis]

Dark Gotham TV show me the forbidden post 1×15 "Alfred carries baby Bruce to their car after they watch the sunrise together because Bruce can't walk and then back at Wayne Manor he sits him down and gently, quietly washes and cleans Bruce's ankle and smoothes a hand down his calf and slowly bondages it tight as he memorises the sound of Bruce's reluctant involuntary hisses" scene

[unstablequeerbitch]

I’m going to say it

2002 Birds of Prey show was a good show. And I’m tired of people not knowing it exists/shitting on it.

It did a good job with Barbara (minus one thing I hated in the finale) as Oracle and her talking about being Batgirl. It did a good job with Helena Kyle-Wayne as Huntress. I’m still up on the air with Dinah. I enjoy Dinah, but then remember who Dinah Lance is in the comics and go “…huh”. But Dinah as a new character, I enjoy her. Alfred? God I love him. Alfred deserves the world. Some of the villains, pretty decent, especially for the fact is was freaking 2002 and the superhero obsessed world hasn’t come to full fruition.

I rewatch this show a lot. It’s one of my comfort shows. “But it’s cringe” oh shut up. Without this show you wouldn’t have much of a CW superhero superhero-verse. “But this part doesn’t seem very realistic” Shut up. I don’t care. It’s okay. I don’t think it’s realistic either but it’s a show. It’s okay

Also while I’m at it. WTF dc. I’m still waiting for the ending of my 90s Birds of Prey arc. I have so many unanswered questions and characters who don’t exist anymore and never got an offical backstory on

[cantsayidont]

June 1964. A month into Batman's "New Look" period, Alfred the butler is dramatically killed off in DETECTIVE COMICS #328. Writer Bill Finger gives Alfred a suitably heroic demise, sacrificing his life to save Batman and Robin from the Tri-State Gang.

Ouch. This is fairly grisly for Silver Age DC, and, more significantly, obviously intended to be final. (If you're going to seemingly kill off a character with the intent of bringing them back later, "crushed to death by tons of rock right in front of their closest friends" is probably not the way to go.)

Two points of interest here: First, the Alfred Foundation, as will be explained later, is the antecedent of what later became the Wayne Foundation (whose building was redesigned in the early 1970s), which did not yet exist at this point. Second, it's awkwardly obvious here that Alfred had never been given a canonical last name. In one 1945 story, he'd used the name "Alfred Beagle," but that hadn't been mentioned again afterward. The name "Pennyworth" was first used in 1969, five years after this story.

Why did editor Julius Schwartz kill off Alfred, who'd been a staple of the Batman strip since 1943? According to Schwartz, it was to help lay to rest the insinuations that had been floating around for years (especially in the wake of Frederic Wertham's SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT a decade earlier) that the Wayne household seemed awfully gay. It should be understood that the modern conception of Alfred as a military veteran and one-time badass didn't arise until the 1980s; since his introduction in 1943, Alfred had been primarily a comic relief figure, and generally a bit of a ninny. Schwartz wanted to replace him with a "a sort of chaperoning den mother," which became Dick Grayson's Aunt Harriet, introduced at the end of this story:

Schwartz claimed that he borrowed the name "Aunt Harriet" from the lyrics of the 1929 Hoagy Carmichael standard "Rockin' Chair." Like Alfred, she didn't initially have a last name (the name "Cooper" came from the TV show, and didn't appear in the comics until DETECTIVE COMICS #373). In the comics, she was not as old or quite as matronly as Madge Blake, who played the character on TV; she was perhaps a decade older than Bruce Wayne.

I'm a little skeptical of Schwartz's assertion that his goal in killing off Alfred in favor of Aunt Harriet was to make Bruce and Dick seem less gay. If that was the plan, it wasn't terribly effective: For one, as the TV show demonstrated, her presence in the Wayne household hardly decreased the camp factor, and the principal dynamic of her comics appearances was to have her nosiness constantly threaten to "out" her nephew and his guardian! Moreover, the "New Look" period actually discarded the three recurring female characters who'd previously been positioned as romantic foils (Batwoman/Kathy Kane, Vicki Vale, and Bat-Girl/Betty Kane) — there would be new ones, but they wouldn't appear for a while, nor did Catwoman (who had been absent since 1956 and didn't return to the comics until 1966) — so Schwartz actually cemented Bruce and Dick's "confirmed bachelor" status, at least for a while.

My guess is that Schwartz, who had been given just six months to turn around BATMAN and DETECTIVE COMICS (whose sales were in very bad shape in 1963–1964), figured that killing Alfred would be an easy way to shake things up a bit. As with the yellow oval Carmine Infantino added to Batman's chest emblem, it was a dramatic but largely cosmetic gesture that didn't really alter the direction of the strip in any very meaningful way.

[thebibliosphere]

I'm down the rabbit hole of Pennyworth fan theories on reddit (leave me alone, it's research) and found an absolutely hilarious take about the ending that dropping an atomic bomb on London wouldn't have any major consequences because they "didn't even aim at Parliament, just 10 Downing Street," and it's like, buddy.

I know Pennyworth takes a gruesome loony-toons-esque approach to violence sometimes, but if you drop a nuclear bomb on 10 Downing Street, Parliament is absolutely in the blast radius. That shit's gone.

Also lol, I forgot that in Gotham, Miami gets nuked, which is the explanation for why Florida is like that. Like, yeah. Sure, I'll headcanon that as the origins of Florida Man.

[thedevilundercover]

WHO WAS GOING TO TELL ME THAT ALFRED FUCKING PENNYWORTH SLEPT WITH THE QUEEN?

I saw a clip from the Pennyworth TV show and he sleeps with the queen. What the hell Alfred????

[bubblesxo]

the way gotham!alfred speaks is so unique compared to the way alfred speaks in the comics (not that the way he speaks isn't unique, but that it is unique as an alfred in comparison). most batfam fandom members are at least somewhat based on the comics, so this new view on a younger alfred who calls bruce "son" and "mate" basically interchangeably is just. crazy to me.

and in regards to my gotham!bruce meets the batfam au, (a de-aged) bruce would totally call alfred out for talking so formally. cue the batfam going "but he always talks like that??" and bruce raising an eyebrow and examining alfred again to see if it's really him (fear toxin flashbacks fr)

[nighhtwing]

GOTHAM TV ALFRED IS THE FUNNIEST MAN ALIVE

[lessyandmina]

Five: I know Ecco is very protective of me, but not even expecting that from Alfred 🤣

Bruce: Alfred, stop cussing at Jerome!!

[queer-rose]

Pennyworth has been cancelled

RIP Pennyworth. Such a fucking phenomenal show that surprised me so much when I watched it. We've been left on such a rough finale and my day has truthfully be ruined due to this news. I loved that show.

Despite all of this, you should still check it out. The name is dumb and the advertising sucked but the show is genuinely so fun, so good, I've watched it through multiple times and enjoyed every watch.