My (DC) Comic Hot Takes (Although most of them are pretty popular….)
Barbara Gordon should’ve stayed Oracle, and had Cassandra Cain as the main Batgirl from then on. Stephanie Brown can stay as Spoiler.
The Gotham City Sirens fundamentally do not work as a team up, because Catwoman is not a villain at all anymore, and Harley Quinn is an anti-hero for some reason. Ivy is in a weird spot where she is neither a villain nor an anti-hero. They don’t work as a team up because none of their goals align and they aren’t close enough to just be friends (Harley and Ivy are the exception.) I mean even in the actual comic series they don’t work well at all. Maybe they could work in Elseworld’s and Oneshots, but not in the main continuity.
DC should stop doing “Trinity” stuff, if they’re only going to focus on Batman and Superman. I get having all 3 is more interesting, but if Wonder Woman is just off to the side and her lore is not given the same love as Batman and Superman’s, you might as well do a World’s Finest story with a Wonder Woman cameo.
Adding onto my last point, Wonder Woman should get a new main design. Both Batman and Superman have reverted back to their “classic” designs, whilst Wonder Woman is over there in her DCEU tie-in costume.
Some villains, especially Batman ones, should stay fully redeemed. Riddler, Mister Freeze and Two Face should all get redemption arcs and stay redeemed, otherwise Batman’s whole ideology is kinda proven wrong.
Riddler should’ve stayed a detective.
The Batfamily should be smaller and Harley should never, EVER, be part of the Batfamily.
Selina and Bruce should stay married.
Selina should be as much of a surrogate mother to the Batfamily kids as Bruce is a surrogate father. (Whenever a writer makes Selina flirty with Dick or Jason I want to shoot myself.)
Wonder Woman should always have the clay origin backstory, fuck the Zeus thing.
Killer Moth should be written like an Anti-Batman more often, and shouldn’t be dumbed down to a joke villain, but also shouldn’t become some edgy, Zack Snyder level of angst.
I preferred when Red Hood was an Anti-hero who killed villains. I get why that changed but c’mon.
As much as I adore the Arkham franchise, a lot of character mischaracterisations started growing from those games (Harley Quinn, Two Face, Robin and even fucking Batman I’m so sorry…)
More Hot Takes!!!
Red Hood should be a straight-up villain, and should be a reoccurring member of the Suicide Squad. Not only that, but I think his “gimmick” should be that he kills off his fellow squad members because his ideology is still that he wants to kill supervillains before they do more harm. The most redemption he would get would be saving the day in his Task Force X missions, but I don’t think he should ever be redeemed, and stop killing villains.
The Joker was a more interesting character when he wasn’t a psycho killer, but more of a prankster. He only kills people when it’s funny, not that he kills people for fun. If you bring Harley into the mix then it only works when he’s written like this otherwise Harley is a complete dumbass for falling in love with an irredeemable monster.
To add onto my last point, Harley Quinn shouldn’t be written as a full-on victim, nor an evil psycho. If the Joker is a completely evil murderer, Harley has no reason to fall for him besides either being already evil herself, or being threatened and forced into it. Both of these suck. Harley only works if the Joker is a charming and funny guy who is also a supervillain, who seems genuinely redeemable. That’s why she works in the Animated Series. The only way this could somewhat work would be if Joker only turned psycho murderer after they’d dated for a while, and typically this is the case, but also Harley usually leaves him at this point.
Ivy should always have a creepy crush on Batman, at least during the earlier years. Her being attracted to the one guy unaffected by her seduction powers is genuinely an interesting theme from older Ivy comics, but now they focus way too heavily on just her environmentalism instead of choosing both. She can care for nature and be a femme fatale, c’mon.
Joker’s canonical backstory should be the Killing Joke one, but he still tells a million different ones to further distance himself from his past. HOWEVER, Batman and Harley should both know his true backstory, even if Harley isn’t certain whether or not it’s real or another fake one. They should be the only two people Joker tells.
Punchline should’ve been a daughter figure to the Joker, instead of a cheap rehash of Harley Quinn, but shit. Yes I know there’s a character literally called “Jokers Daughter”, but for one she’s shit, for two she’s also like a million other peoples daughter and three, she doesn’t really actually work with the Joker. Punchline could’ve been a pseudo-sidekick for him that served as a daughter figure, since I like it when Joker’s written to work well with kids, ironically.
Adding to my last point, I think Joker being generally less violent towards children and never really targeting them would work well, especially if he does eventually torture and kill Jason Todd. I like it best when, as I said earlier, Joker is more of a prankster, but I think him killing Jason and shooting Barbara, especially within such relatively close timeframes, should be the moment he kinda starts to lose the remainder of his humanity, and Harley leaves him. It’s more shocking that way, and Batman would blame himself for what happened to Barbara and Jason, feeling as though he should’ve seen the signs Joker was going to snap.
Linda Danvers shouldn’t have been erased as Supergirl, but should’ve instead become a Justice League Dark member. Maybe for continuity sake she wouldn’t be “Supergirl” anymore, but it would still be Linda.
Oracle should be more threatening. Like she should have the entire worlds data/tech (and the Justice League’s as well), in her grasp and all this power makes her very scary. If she wanted to, she could ruin the world, but she doesn’t because she’s a good person. Still there’s always that looming threat that Oracle could just take over the world if she wanted.
Batman shouldn’t remember his parents deaths clearly. He should only remember the gun and the pearls clearly and everything else is interchangeable every time he reflects on it. I like how the Arkhamverse handles it, for example, because in that series we get shown the Wayne’s deaths 5 or so times, and every single showing is drastically different, so it’s likely Bruce doesn’t remember it exactly. But like, he should genuinely not remember it properly and maybe even put some strange details in his own head. Shit like his dad fighting back, or the gun aiming for him and his mother jumping in front. Random fake details like that.
