#this is me just hurling abuse at an elseworld for a half hour

[phantomchick]

I’ve spent months ignoring the existence of batman: white knight for my own sanity and for that of my followers and yet the universe has conspired against me.

And so, I’ve been forced to acknowledge that it does in fact exist and sold relatively well and now I keep remembering even MORE details about it that made it a bad bad bad comic in spite of its decent aesthetic. 

So this is me working out some personal frustration.  

Through an analysis that involves very little actual plot arc by plot arc or panel by panel analysis because by Hera who, WHO? Has the energy or the emotional wherewithal to put that much effort into a post about this comic. I mean maybe if it was the only way to fully exorcise the bad content but I’ve managed to not let it hook too deeply to my poor soul yet so just this should be fine. Right? right.

So because of that this is mostly just some of my personal feelings on it. 

It is a rant that no one should read and was made with the only purpose being personal catharsis of negative emotions.

I send this forth, into the abyss. 

In the hopes that I won’t have to think about this comic ever again once it is done.

It’s like a never ending onion, the more I think about it the more LAYERS of mistakes and horrible characterisation are revealed. Layers and layers of just slightly off and annoying things that really feed into deeper misconceptions about what the heroes and villains in Gotham really stand for and how they interact with each other so it turns out that actually even the little annoying things are just contributing to the BIG narrative problems that this comic has. I LITERALLY KEEP COMING UP WITH REASONS WHY IT’S THE WORST. I CAN’T STOP. HELP ME. 

What’s worse is I can tell that the writer was definitely trying to do something cool and psuedo deep and say something (no clue what it was) about heroes and villains and the joker as a character, like really explore it, he just did in the worst possible way. Holding up a mirror to Gotham and reversing things so that the Joker’s Heroic and Batman’s Criminal in their approaches isn’t a particularly new or original idea but the writer really went for it or seemed to be trying to which is why I tried it in the first place. BUT NO. It’s bad, it’s full of bad takes. This writer has bad Batman opinions and it shows. 

IT’S A MULTI-FACETED MONSTER, THERE ARE MULTIPLE FACETS TO THE BAD WRITING. 

I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty but symbolically and spiritually it’s the anti-thesis of a good batman comic, it tries to be hard boiled and shocking but mostly it just heaps on bad things, it tries to do dark knight level cynicism but just misses the point entirely even as it assures you that people just aren’t ready to face the truth about how things are and it’s never clear on what that truth is. 

The cynicism is kind of like the injustice comic but it’s not balanced out by the fact that at least some of the characters are genuinely good people and will continue to be no matter how bad things get. It’s not balanced at all. 

It’s like how with the Suicide Squad movie the trailers promised supervillain breakfast club but then in the movie didn’t really provide a strong emotionally resonant reason for the characters to band together, besides ‘just coz’. It sold itself as misfits finally finding a place to belong when it was just: cool looking lady tries to control a pack of supervillains while swindling the money for tax money and everything that can go wrong does go wrong. But at least suicide squad had aspects that WERE entertaining, like the character designs and the comedy and the hints of deeper character motivations that were never really followed up on. 

Batman: White Knight on the other hand is just a slog of a batman comic that thinks it’s good when it isn’t. The only good point is the aesthetic and that gets old fast when combined with THESE characters. 

Where Suicide Squad promised quirky well written found family dynamics. Batman: WK promises game changing character exploration and imbalances of power between the GCPD and The Batman when really? It’s just a re-hash of the worst of the pessimism DC’s more odious writers have worked into the Batman mythos over the years. 

“Vigilantes being genuinely good people and not getting too big for their britches? That’s just not realistic.” I can hear the writer say. “We’ll do police brutality. But with Vigilantes!” I can hear him thinking, believing mistakenly that he has hit on a not boring idea. 

WELL NEWS FLASH JERKFACE! BATMAN AND THE ENTIRE GENRE OF SUPERHERO COMICS ARE WISH FULFILMENT POWER FANTASIES YOU ABSOLUTE CRETIN. 

The idea that batman can only make a difference because he’s a bad person who doesn’t hold himself accountable is so tired.  The idea that regular good cops like Jim Gordon would have conflicting feelings about relying on Batman isn’t a bad topic to explore but the guy presents it way too one-sidedly, like is a regular police department supposed to be able to deal with Poison Ivy or Mr. Freeze level meta humans just on their regular budget? No. So it makes sense for other supers to step in to fill that gap. (See: post singularity superhero stories like the BNHA manga) Which is why we have regulation debate style stories like marvel’s Civil War but the REASON dc doesn’t do that is that they made the very much conscious choice to keep one foot of their fictional world firmly in the fantastical whereas marvel has more of a real world slant. This writer missed that memo and what he came up with for his real world-ish batman critique was not good.

It’s like those people who don’t think Robin is a realistic character and so go too far down the child soldier route, which of course automatically makes Batman read worse as a person and I’m like it’s a wish fulfillment fantasy because kids want to have agency and help people. How do you not get this comic writer man? I just... if you don’t get Robin then why are you writing Batman and Robin at all. Seriously this story is just....

IT’S LIKE A STINK BOMB MADE ALL THE STINKIER BY THE UNIQUE COMBINATIONS OF THE TERRIBLE SCENTS AS WELL AS THE INDIVIDUAL BAD THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN PUT IN.

And look none of this is me saying that hero deconstruction stories can’t be good and interesting or that DC can’t do them but this is not a good deconstruction story, it is not well made nor is it well executed. It is a steaming mess. But fucking hell is it groundlessly confident in itself despite this basic fact.