Rewrite of Arkham Knight's (comic) Origin Story
So you know how the Arkham Knight in the comics is Jeremiah Arkham's daughter? And you know how complete dogshit her origin story is? Here's my version:
After the death of Jeremiah's wife, he kept his daughter in the lowest levels of Arkham Asylum out of fear for her safety. However, he was very neglectful towards his only child, having orderlies tend to her needs and otherwise leaving her alone for long periods of time.
As Astrid got older, she became curious about the upper levels of the asylum and the outside world and started sneaking out to explore. She met various patients and workers, and learned how they came to be there. Eventually she came across the members of the Rogues Gallery. And the Rogues, for reasons that varied from one to another, took the child under their wing. Not all of them - some tried to harm the child for her connection to her father, but the others managed to protect her. The biggest surprise was the Joker - it was no secret that her father utterly despised him, and he didn't exactly have any scruples about harming children. But when asked, he would just smile and laugh, like he just heard the funniest joke. Through the Rogues, she learned many things about the world - or at least, their perspective of it. And most important, she learned about Batman. The Dark Knight. Gotham's City's masked hero and guardian. Some spoke of him with hatred and vitriol, others with fevered obsession, and some with wistfulness, dare I say, fondness. Her father, though? To him, Batman may as well have been the devil incarnate. Apparently, he blamed the Caped Crusader for the death of her mother and, well, pretty much everything else wrong with Gotham. When Astrid tried to probe further, in one of the few conversations she managed to engage him in, he sternly told her to drop it.
Now, the thing is, Astrid, sheltered as she was, was not stupid. Far from it. She was her father's daughter, after all. And after years of being raised and taught by some of the greatest manipulators and masterminds in Gotham, she had learned how to tell when someone was lying, or at least not telling the whole truth.
She went snooping around and eventually came across a series security tapes of the day her mother died. Her heavily pregnant mother, who was in the cafeteria in the middle of a riot, and who she witnessed be violently assaulted by an inmate before going into labor on the floor. As her mother was carried to the nurse's office by orderlies, Astrid scanned the footage for any sign of the Batman and... she found none. He had not been in the cafeteria that day. Nor in the nurse's office, where her mother gave birth to a tiny, pale Astrid, before dying with her baby in her arms. In fact, as far as she could see, he had not been at Arkham at all. With this in mind, she concluded that her father had lied... either to her or himself.
And as for the Batman himself? Well she wouldn't meet him in person until years later, as a young adult. She did, however, come across Robin who, thinking she was a visiting relative of a patient, greeted her civilly. Before he could leave, she asked, curious. "Hey. Why do you...do what you do?"
Robin could have said anything to that. "Because it's the right thing to do." "Because no one else will." Instead, he merely shrugged and said, "Just trying to make Gotham a little better than I found it." And then he turned and left.
That...resonated with Astrid. She thought about those words later in her room. Batman and Robin must live in Gotham, right? It's their home. So of course they would want their home to be livable, to be safe. For Astrid, Arkham Asylum was a prison. A gilded cage, but a cage nonetheless. But even so, it was her home, the only home she had ever known. Did she not deserve to have her home as safe and comfortable as possible? She thought of the patients, of their pain and suffering, both external and internal, of the conditions they were being kept in. She thought of the guards and orderlies, who dealt with so much disrespect and vitriol, from the patients and higher-ups and each other with so little pay. She thought of the doctors, who had all but given up on actually treating their patients from lack of funds, proper equipment and just overall help, and were just trying to earn a paycheck and make sure they live another day. She thought of her father, who surely must know that all of this was going on... and was just letting it all happen.
She thought of the Rogues, this group of men and women who raised her and treated her as one of their own. The closest thing to family she ever had. Oh, they weren't saints. Astrid knew that they had all done terrible things, unforgivable things. But she loved them all the same. And Arkham was their home too, was it not? Did they not deserve to be safe and comfortable in their own home? Did they not deserve better?
... Yes, Astrid decided. They did deserve better. She deserved better. And if her father, or Batman, or the city wasn't going to give them what they deserved, then she would. No matter how long it took, no matter what she had to do, she would become Arkham's Knight. She would become a guardian of the asylum and all within and do everything she could to make Arkham the shining castle it was meant to be, the utopia her people deserved.
