I don’t mean to direct this at only you, but I hate this take. There are plenty of comics that dive into this, him using his wealth to help Gotham, the city just had too many problems. Court of Owls for instance, the group that is always watching Gotham and influencing it state and its key figures.
Comment on If Batman were real today, he'd go after the CEOs of companies, not gangsters.
pyre@lemmy.world 4 months agonot to mention he’s a psycho himself. instead of using his seemingly infinite wealth to engage in any real systemic change, he puts on a fucking bat costume and prances at night to beat the shit out of low level goons while letting the biggest maniacs and the ones leading these gangs run away every time.
SuperSaiyanSwag@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
pyre@lemmy.world 4 months ago
don’t worry i don’t take it personally. I’ll look into the court of owls.
SuperSaiyanSwag@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
One of my favorites story arcs. I do agree with you to some degree though because there are a lot of comic book writers that have a habit of romanticizing his wealth, that’s why he does come off as a “typical billionaire” most often. Then it is up to the next writers to mitigate the damage. Comics are tricky like that, you just have to pick and choose your own head canon.
ICastFist@programming.dev 4 months ago
the group that is always watching Gotham and influencing it state and its key figures.
Bruce is just jealous of being left out of the “cool kids” group, so he plays the other team
pyre@lemmy.world 4 months ago
that’s on him tbh, he should’ve been owlman
TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 4 months ago
Well he did have his parents murdered in front of him as a child.
That shit twists people.
pyre@lemmy.world 4 months ago
i mean yeah, I’d totally support this angle but DC usually uses him as the moral compass of the entire universe while making Superman go nuts instead.
echodot@feddit.uk 4 months ago
Yeah but he never actually went after the original murder if you notice. He spent his entire time going after lunatics who thought that they were going to take over the city because they had planted a bomb on a bridge or something.
At least Spider-Man actually got vengeance.
Zorque@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Depends on the story.
And that “vengeance” is what taught him that vengeance is dumb, and it’s better to fight to better the world around him than go after people Punisher style.
III@lemmy.world 4 months ago
instead of using his seemingly infinite wealth to engage in any real systemic change
Do we know this? I don’t follow the comics at all but do they ever go into the things Bruce Wayne does as CEO of Wayne Enterprises? I can’t fathom we have gone decades without someone touching on this.
pyre@lemmy.world 4 months ago
i don’t follow but things that are established that i know of are:
- Bruce Wayne is insanely wealthy
- Uses his wealth for his bat-themed middle age crisis (bat sports car, bat private jet, bat motorcycle, bat gondola probably)
- Other than that the best thing he does for other people is “philanthropy” (in the real world this is a scam by the wealthy) unless you count taking in his
young loversidekick - The police and the politicians are extremely corrupt and are for sale.
Now from all this i gather it would be very easy for Bruce to get actual political power in Gotham to make real change but he doesn’t do it because running around in a furry costume is more fun.
Even apart from that, sneaking around in a costume talking about how you’re the night or the knight or whatever is on its own very cringe and psychotic.
Zorque@lemmy.world 4 months ago
So basically you know very little, but have come to the conclusion that he sucks anyway?
pyre@lemmy.world 4 months ago
dude it’s ok. I’m not going to slap batman comics off of your hands.
Cowbob12@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Why do you refuse to answer the comments disproving you?
pyre@lemmy.world 4 months ago
idk what the hell you’re talking about. there’s one comment that gives reasons, and excuse me for being asleep at the time. other comments are just people being offended on batman’s behalf. that’s not disproving.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Some of the better Batman comics introduce him as skilled detective, rather than a superhero whose power is infinite money.
Like any good crime thriller, his work starts with some innocuous crime or tragedy that gets swiftly covered up by corrupt police. Batman steps in as a noir vigilante, listening to the witnesses everyone else ignored and tracing the crime back to the low-level thugs who serve as pawns in a much bigger game. He extorts them for information in order to move on to bigger fish - the crime boss who runs the docks or the sleazy businessman who thought he could pay to make a problem go away - and uncovers a deeper systematic corruption. He runs into various freaks and geeks - your two-faced DA or your web-fingered club owner - who facilitate the city-spanning crime. And, in the climax, he discovers the whole system is rotten, even to the point where his own Wayne Enterprises is complicit in these cruelties.
He discovers the limits of vigilantism, its not just a question of biting into a few bad apples, but tearing the rotten tree out of the earth root-and-branch. And he realizes its too much for one man to change. So he goes back to that first original witness/victim, and he brings him back to his cave. And he sets himself to training this survivor of a broken system how to fight crime like he does.
The best Batman stories aren’t the ones where he punches a Clown Prince out of a factory window. Its ones in which he pulls another scared child out of the wreckage of his parents’ home and gives him a second chance at life.
tehmics@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Wish we had this instead of a growling guy in a mask headbutting a clown