people still don’t understand batman’s rogue gallery and what they represent to him. hollywood i will kill you. listen: each batman villain challenges a different aspect of his character and/or philosophy, and it is why grim dark batman was never meant to work
joker: chaos and order.
the foil to batman’s suppressed madness. bruce is discipline; none is above the code and justice. “you’re just one bad day away from being like me” WRONG!! bruce wayne has not had a good day since he was 10 years old. every good thing that happens to him is followed by 100 bad things. he is the universe’s punching bag. and yet he persists, does he not? does he not still believe in goodness in spite of it all? suck my dick joker he does not think of you AT ALL you are nuisance to him he wants to spend the one day off he has every year with his family and friends and you had to ruin it with ur lame jokes and terrorist attacks
riddler: obsession and intellect.
the foil to batman’s ego. bruce wayne is one of the smartest people in the world, by way of writer favouritism. wdym you outsmarted brainiac, a being of pure intelligence, just because ur the author’s favourite pretty princess? alright king whatever u say. but he never lets it rule him. his intelligence is a tool to of protection; it’s a shield, not a sword. he’d never raise it against the innocent. edward uses his intelligence to prove superiority, that he is better. he is batman without humility, and that is why he will always lose, because intelligence is nothing without wisdom
the penguin: wealth and corruption.
the foil to batman’s class. they’re both billionaires, Gothamite socialites. oswald embraces his privilege and uses it to oppress the poor. bruce wayne understands his privilege and uses it to pull others up. “you wear a mask too” yeah and it’s prettier than urs u ugly bitch. oswald’s socialite mask is a polished classy persona that disguises his inner evil. bruce’s socialite mask is just a himbo and remains true to his desire to help people
mr freeze: love and grief.
foil to batman’s ability to move on from the past. victor fries cannot let go of his wife and makes it everybody else’s problem. this is also the philosophy of grimdark batman, which is why it cannot apply to batman’s true character. bruce wayne is traumatized from his parents’ deaths, but it also inspired him to become the person who he wished had saved him in that alley. how many times has he looked into the eyes of a scared child on patrol and saw himself? he became the saviour for his 10 year old self left in that alleyway. he was able to heal; yes, his parents deaths has shaped him into the man he is, that’s literally what life does. healing doesn’t mean the grief will shrink, but your world grows bigger around it. he has a family again, built by his own hands
scarecrow: fear and power.
the foil to batman’s darkness. batman is iconic for instilling crippling terror into others by a mere look, psychics hate him because his mind is a screaming hellscape, he dresses like a bat because when he was a kid he fell into a hole filled with bats and he associates it with fear. jonathan uses fear to control the helpless, bruce instills fear in evil to protect the righteous. “you’re just as ruled by fear” WRONG!!! batman is ruled by love. it’s not fear that powers him when he drags his mangled, half-dead body off the streets at every dawn to go home for a costume change and immediately go to a charity gala for disadvantaged youths named after his street-rat son. it’s not fear that inspired him to keep lollipops in his utility belt for the children he saves. it’s not fear that makes him do the same old shit of throwing you fuckers into that useless max security prison twice a week after getting his shit rocked, knowing full well he’d have to do it again in a few days, instead of just killing you.
two-face: duality and justice.
the foil to batman’s divided self. harvey started off as a batman, a lawyer wanting to do good. his trauma split him, but bruce integrated it into himself. bruce wayne does not reject his pain, he lets it shape him and he asks himself: “ok that sucked. how do i make sure nobody else will experience that?” harvey dent is completely split, indecisive in his morality, good and evil depends on the flip of a coin. but batman? people say that bruce wayne is the mask and batman is his true self. dawg do u think his kids call him batman? that’s some shit he’d say in his 20s when he was figuring himself out but he’s a middle aged father now and his children would drag him to filth if he says his black-leather bat fursona is his “true self”. they are all him. brucie wayne isn’t completely his mask either, because it’s the persona he uses to fuck with rich people and you know full well he’d delights in that to the bottom of his heart
his rogue gallery is a mirror to each aspect of himself. everything high-brow reddit bros and zack snyder says about batman’s edgy true self is literally disproven by the people batman spends his life trying to save. he’s not on the edge of villaindom; he stares his inner evil that takes on the faces of broken people in the eyes every night and says “this isn’t the way forward”
Let’s Talk About The Mad Hatter 🐰
Op, I absolutely love this post, and I agree with you wholeheartedly because it’s something I’ve been thinking for a while. I wanted to reblog with an edition of another rogue, because this very observation is how I think we can get so much better writing out of his storylines.
As a Jervis fan, a lot of his comic runs disappoint me because they’re so lazy in his villainy. We don’t need 50 million comics of him being some sort of creep, I frankly find it boring and bland and lazy, misogynistic writing.
So the question is, if the majority of his comics portray him a creep, why am I a Jervis fan in the first place?
I think he has some insane potential to challenge a usually taken-for-granted part of Batman’s character and philosophy.
Bruce’s happiness (or lack thereof)
Let’s take the most well-written (in my opinion) example of Mad Hatter as an example. This comes from Batman Gotham Adventures Issue #37, whose plot is based off BTAS s1ep24 “Perchance to Dream”
In this episode/comic, Jervis traps Batman in a fantasy world using his mind-control tech, a world where his parents live and he’s in a healthy, committed relationship. One where he’s happy.
At the end, Bruce rejects the fantasy world. Because it’s wrong to him to live in a world where he isn’t miserable. Because to live without his misery is to live without Batman. It’s who he is.
We’ve all seen Martha’s pearls fall a million times after all.
In one of Tim Sale’s new Absolute Batman: The Long Halloween 2026 issues, he still makes Jerv a creep (bc of course :(() , but he does make the Mad Hatter have interesting connection to Bruce’s childhood…by having Alice in Wonderland be one of the staple childhood stories that Martha read to Bruce.
I just think that Jervis would be a lot more interesting if the writers also treated him as a foil to Batman—
By representing that childhood innocence and happiness that defines who Bruce would be if Batman was not.
(Or maybe even the happiness he could get from the bat family / the family he created….)
