Also he is trying to find a cure to his wifes disease.
Which Bruce helps him with in the end. He could of sent Nora to a hospital, Freeze to jail, and washed his hands of it. Instead he makes an effort to transfer her to Arkham so Freeze can continue his work.
He does something similar in virtually every single iteration. Of his principle Rogues Gallery, Freeze is nearly always the villain Bruce makes the most effort to assist.
The line is quippy, but it’s silly when you look at the batman stories. Anything can be funny if you get reductionist with it
When the writers have her saving plants, they do it in a way that you root for her. Same with Mr. Freeze, those episodes and the movie is really touching, solely because of his motivation.
You don’t root for batman to beat them up or flex his wealth on them, you want Batman to help them. You want them both to get happy endings.
The stories usually end with batman stopping the carnage, while also arresting whatever CEO was cutting down trees or doing experiments on Nora. In other stories, he funds social programs and advocates for reforms as Bruce Wayne.
Maybe there are other stories where he acts like a frat boy. I skip content that has shitty writing
Yeah people that make this joke don’t pay attention the actual content. Bruce is routinely demonstrated to be a positive force with his wealth. He’s socially conscious, generous, invests in progressive causes, runs numerous charities, restricts his company from participating in unethical practices, creates jobs for convicts, and treats his employees very well.
Now, I’m not suggesting this is realistic. No one of Bruce’s wealth, in the real world, would be anywhere near as good as Wayne is depicted.
But within the context we of this world, the actual text of the stories tells us quite plainly he is a positive, progressive influence.
… and yet, he’d STILL be infinitely more effective if he either properly funded Gotham, or started actually killing evil people. Instead, he does neither… Batman still sucks balls even in the good interpretations. . … mind, I still enjoy most of his comics and stories, but dude is just as healthy of a role model as The Punisher: Not at all. For the opposite reasons, ironically.
Yeah, the refusal to kill is the worst part about Batman. Like, it’s cool that you have a moral code or whatever, but when you keep putting mass murderers like the Joker in a prison you know he’s gonna escape from, you should probably think about your life choices. You kind of get why Jason Todd went a little nuts when Batman didn’t kill the Joker after he brutally murdered a child that Batman dressed up and put in his way. Holy shit, just shoot the guy in the fuckin face, you know?
IIRC, one of the films noted that his parents had tried to fund serious reform in Gotham (I think the newest film, with Robert Pattinson?), and that corruption and crime siphoned off and diverted all the money away from the causes they were trying to support. I’m not sure if that’s cannon or not.
Looking at a number of cities in the US that have historically had a serious problem with public corruption, it’s not really an either/or approach; you need to adequately fund public works, but you also need to fight the crime and corruption that tries to take all the public money away from the public.
There’s a clip from The Batman ( the animated show) I can’t find at the moment, but it basically involves Batman clearing a room of thugs by offering them jobs. They all walk out, without a punch thrown.
In the real world, no one that has Bruce Wayne’s degree of wealth is a truly positive influence on the world on the whole. There are no ethical billionaires. But within the context of the DC Universe, Bruce has been routinely demonstrated as using his wealth in the most socially conscious, progressive, and generous ways. He is always shown in stark contrast with the likes of Lex Luthor.
I guess Mark Cuban is the closest we get to ethical billionaire
Edit you chuds didn’t really realize this was a joke? Lemmy has just continually gotten worse the more redditors it absorbs
Scratch that. Dolly Parton. Her net worth shows as much less because she keeps giving it away.
Bruce has been routinely demonstrated as using his wealth in the most socially conscious, progressive, and generous ways. He is always shown in stark contrast with the likes of Lex Luthor.
Depends heavily on the author.
In “Kingdom Come”, for instance, Wayne and Luthor are partners and Wayne’s main contribution to Gotham is a fully automated dragnet of police-robots across a city he effectively owns lock-stock-and-barrel.
In “Batman 2099”, he’s a recluse whose personal tragedies have rendered him incapable of engaging in more than self-pity, while his board of directors does all sorts of evil shit completely off the leash.
In Joaquin Phoenix’s “Joker”, his family is just another one of the members of the criminal cartel that has corrupted the city, with Bruce’s doctor-father spending more time hob-nobbing with the elite socialites than attending to the city collapsing under his feet.
There are definitely more utopian takes on Bruce and his family. But Gotham is inherently dystopian, and you can’t escape how the city’s wealthiest family is - at least somewhat - responsible.
I think it’s awesome that different Batman stories can examine different versions of Bruce and his position as a billionaire - it allows different aspects of the world to be interrogated: criminals sometimes doing crime because they know of no other way to survive in a capitalist hellscape, the apathies of billionaires to the evils of their financiers, Batman’s obsession with order leasing him to militarise the streets of the city he loves, etc.
In the real world, no one that has Bruce Wayne’s degree of wealth is a truly positive influence on the world on the whole.
Bill Gates almost completely eradicated polio, contributed seriously towards the eradication of malaria, and is addressing the AIDS epidemic in Africa. He and Buffet have been working on a micro-reactor energy project for several years now.
He’s also done a lot of wide-spread horrible things to get that money though, that’s the thing, the good stuff billionaires do rarely makes up for the stuff they’ve done to get that money in the first place. The most fantastical thing about Batman is that he and his parents are usually depicted at face value as good rich people who get their money legitimately without hurting anyone and then only do good things with that money. And despite that Gotham is still an eternally crime-ridden cess pit. Most billionaires donate huge amounts to non-profits or start their own. Hell I bet trump himself has done plenty of philanthropy, but that automatically doesn’t make up for the way they earned their blood money in the first place. Is Bill Gates going out of his way to lobby for taxing the rich, or universal healthcare, or other systemic changes that would help a lot of people but likely reduce the rate he accumulates wealth? Because he has more than enough money to make large waves in those political arenas and still be rich for the rest of his life. If he never made another cent and gave away 90% of his money to homeless people he would still have enough left to be rich for the rest of his life.
That’s true. He was a ruthless businessman while running Microsoft, and hurt a lot of people, and the industry as a whole.
Hell I bet trump himself has done plenty of philanthropy
I seriously doubt that. Every one of his charities that I’ve heard of was actually a fraudulent grift. He stole from cancer patients! I’d be seriously shocked to learn that he’s done a single charitable thing in his life that didn’t directly benefit him.
Is Bill Gates going out of his way to lobby for taxing the rich
No, but he has stated that he thinks he and his peers should be taxed a lot higher than they are.
Idk if Gate’s overall influence balances towards the negative or positive, but I do recognize that he has done some seriously positive things for the world after accumulating his wealth.
Of course he does.
The point is that Batman is the archetype of a right-wing superhero. Batman is how rightwingers understand social justice: accumulate as much wealth as you can, use crushing physical violence to punish bad guys, act charitably at an individual level but do not ever work to solve social issues at a systemic level.
Even in-universe he’s nowhere near as much of a positive force as he could be if he used his money to force political and social change instead of as an outlet for his mental issues.
He’s not actively villainous because right-wingers don’t see themselves as such. But when that fantasy meets reality, you get Elon Musk.
a right-wing superhero.
There is any other kind? It seems to me that the entire genre is little more than right-wing individualism combined with right-wing power fantasy and right-wing vigilantism worship.
It’s fantasy for kids. There are constantly people getting hit in the head, with no sign of brain damage. In real life, Batman would be crippling people constantly, and he would die every week.
Are the Smurfs an Anarchist commune? Is the Federation in Star Trek space Communism? You can’t give them labels from political science in the real world because they are fantasy. They literally have different laws of physics.
I’d argue many super-heros actually embody a social force for good, which is depicted through the actions of a single person for practical writing reasons. When Captain America finds himself out of the Avengers and fighting against the government, it’s not vigilantism but thinly-veiled political commentary.
Of course what you describe also happens, and lots of the times it ain’t that deep. But I wouldn’t say it’s “all super-heroes”, and Batman stands out a lot for me with his ultra-individualistic values (at least among the mainstream superheroes).
I mean yeah there are tons of other kinds. I can think of lots and lots of superheroes who are fundamentally anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, anti-nationalist etc. Spider-man for example is hardly right-wing, his motto is literally antithetical to the individualism of right wing ideology: with great power comes great responsibility. He’s seen as a working class man’s superhero who isn’t an old rich guy, the friendly neighbourhood teenage hero. And when you get into iterations like Miles Morales it gets even less right-wing. I’m sure the presentation of Spider-man differs depending on the writer, but at the core he’s not what I’d consider a right-wing fantasy by any stretch.
Heck, even if you look at the Punisher, I haven’t read the comics so take this with a grain of salt but a lot of people who have read them have noted that the Punisher hates cops and the series does not actually align with right-wing ideals the way right-wingers seem to think he does. From what I’ve heard the Punisher comics, especially modern iterations, usually depict him as someone doing bad things as a result of the system failing him and driving him to try and take things into his own hands in all the wrong ways. Not a glorification of vigilantism but rather a deconstruction of it. But even if you set aside the problems with vigilantism, enjoying it as a fictional concept isn’t exclusive to right-wingers. A lot of people who fall under other political ideals can enjoy it for different reasons. Robin hood isn’t a superhero but he is a classic vigilante archetype who is not right-wing in nature. He literally steals from the rich to give to the poor. And enjoying the concept in fiction is fine, fiction can be escapist sometimes, what’s important is understanding why it isn’t a good thing in real life.
Even rich superheroes aren’t automatically a right-wing power fantasy, it can be the fantasy of people with other political ideals for rich people to care about the little guy and take accountability. Tony Stark for example is someone who did become a billionaire by being a bad person and inheriting it from a father who was also a bad person. He becomes a superhero after being hit in the face with the consequences of that and seeing the truth of where his money is coming from, and after that point with most versions of his character he does use his money to try and enact real social change large scale and help people on top of funding himself and other super heroes, who are necessary in a universe with aliens and gods and magic and shit. His story is centered around him realizing that his money was ill-gotten and him trying to take accountability for that by trying to undo the damage he’s done and use his money to help people instead. That is at heart a fantasy that isn’t right-wing even if it is unrealistic. In comparison Batman as a character reads as more right-wing (if unintentionally) mainly because there’s generally not much criticism levied at him as a billionaire. Even his father is usually depicted as a good person, a loving parent who didn’t deserve to die, because the loss of his parents is his motivating factor, compared to Iron Man, whose motivating factor is making up for the things he and his father did to become rich in the first place. Batman is depicted as a good rich guy, son of another good rich guy, and you know he’s good because he doesn’t kill people. His money is bloodless and innocent. Though of course I’m sure there are iterations of him and stories which do address this, but the most well known version of him does present in a way that is appealing to right-wingers in a lot of ways.
Over 60 years of “crime-fighting” but no noticeable decrease in Gotham’s crime rate.
Curious.
Considering there’s, variously,
- the Lazarus pit leeching into the groundwater,
- The
IlluminatiCourt of Owls enabling more crime alongside the general pervasive corruption by the ruling class, - The buried evil bat god Barbatos who was summoned and remains under the city
- The corruption of insane wizard Dr. Gotham who has also been buried under the city for over 40,000 years (Who gave him a doctorate 40,000 years ago is what I want to know.),
- Amadeus Arkham (and seemingly every warden of Arkham since) grossly mistreating the patients there.
- The city being surrounded by swampland lending it to be perpetually gloomy.
One can see why the city might not have the best base to positively grow from.
Joker might be supernatural in origin, too. The ‘vat of chemicals’ story is explicitly a maybe, Batman can’t find any evidence he existed before he showed up as Joker, and he keeps surviving things it should be impossible to survive. That last one could be connected to the lazarus pit, though.
They didn’t explore it as much as I thought they should. Batman created Bane, indirectly, and in some ways attracted Bane to Gotham which set off the events that lead to all of Arkham criminals being released. Which in turn led Arzial to Gotham. Which brought about the events of Contagion and Cataclysm which lead to No Man’s Land.
So in a way the entire city of Gotham was brought down by him being there.
Sure. But you can take a step back from there and assert the crime cartels of the earlier era - the Falconnes and Mannheims and Marchettis - and their corrupt police confederates created Batman (since they’re indirectly the cause of his parents’ death and the main antagonists that head up the crime wave that young Bruce pits himself against).
And since there’s a (even in-universe) hard association between organized crime and the various state and federal intelligence agencies, I guess you could put the entire Batman Villain universe at the feet of Harry Truman, J. Edgar Hoover, and Allen Dulles.
True but it is not on the same level. It is sorta like Indiana Jones.
That general and his scientist were going to use Venom and like 5 soliders to attempt a coup. Which would have failed. You can’t take over the US with 5 guys. Ffs it doesn’t even make sense. The government has nukes. You are not going to win that war. Because Batman interfered they fleed to that knock-off Cuba. So Batman followed which meant that the thugs ruling that country knew the serum was worth it. Making them use it on Bane. But it doesn’t end there. Bane wants to rule the world so he needs to go to the most powerful country. Which city does he pick within it? He picks Gotham because he sees that Batman is the single point of failure.
Had Batman done nothing the coup would have failed and the serum would have been forgotten. At most a few people die. Had he interfered but later on retired after Jason Todd other vigilantes would have stepped in making Gotham have more than one failure point. Stopping Bane.
Anyone who has ever seen Harley Quinn has definitely rooted for Poison Ivy.