I love your metas! I was wondering... have you or anyone else tried listing all of Bruce's childhood traumas? Comics zero in on Crime Alley, but EVERY time I see a snippet from his childhood it's invariably a little-to-a-lot fucked up whether his parents are involved (loneliness, bedtime stories, his mom lovingly promising to haunt him) or not (falling into the cave, going to a boarding school run by a killer in Batman Gothic, Tommy Elliott in general, a childhood friend died of diphtheria in Batman Through the Looking Glass... he saw a LOT of death as a child, actually...)
Thank you! I unfortunately don't know of a post listing all of Bruce's childhood traumas. You've kind of already covered a lot of bases, Anon, but for the sake of completeness I'll go through all you've mentioned and the traumatic incidents I can recall too:
Bruce falls into a well full of bats and develops a phobia in response [notable post-Crisis flashback in Batman: The Man Who Falls]
At five years old, Bruce's favorite story to have Thomas read to him every night for a month is “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury, which is largely about kids with such neglectful parents that they bond with an automated house and then leave their parents for dead [mentioned by Bruce(s) in Batman/Superman (2013) #2]
Bruce witnessed his father performing surgery on a dying man [flashback in Batman: The Long Halloween]
Thomas reads to Bruce “The Animals and the Pit” by Alexander Nikolaevich Afanasyev, a story containing cannibalism and brutal fights for survival [flashback in Batman (2016) #74]
Thomas had Bruce watch horror movies with him, with Martha having to comfort Bruce afterwards in a bit of an unorthodox way... by promising that if they died, his parents would haunt him [flashback in Detective Comics (2016) #1027 -- Ghost Story]
Bruce experienced neglect as a child, with his father's parenting style being potrayed in multiple stories as authoritarian, which led to Bruce idolizing him and craving his approval, but running to Martha for comfort when his father was too harsh [notable flashbacks in Batman: The Dark Knight II (2011) #12, but bits of this can be seen in Batman: The Long Halloween, Batman: Hush, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #58, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth etc.]
Bruce had a friend called Celia Small for a while, whom he adored. He watched her die of diptheria while he recovered, blaming himself for it [Batman: Through the Looking Glass]
Bruce was sent to a private school as a child, which he resented as being "sent away"; the school is described as hell, a place where children where beaten, humiliated and had to fight off the sexual advances of older teachers. Bruce gets spanked as physical punishment by the headmaster, who turns out to be a serial killer, because Bruce glimpses the severed head of his only friend Robert as it happens [flashbacks in Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #7 -- Gothic]
Bruce accidentally shoots a duck with a rifle his friend Mooley had brought with them, and the death of the animal becomes a traumatic memory associated with the death of his parents, because of the gun [Batman: Secrets #4]
Bruce's childhood friend, Tommy Elliot... um. I guess I can just list Tommy Elliot, but the most direct traumatic experience at the time must've been having to stop Thomas from killing another kid, after which Thomas was put in a psychiatric institution [flashback in Detective Comics (1937) #837]
Bruce's father hits him while angry about a stock investment, with Bruce declaring in childish rage to his mother afterwards that he wants him dead... on the same day that his parents got gunned down, because Bruce's survivor's guilt needed more ammunition [flashback in Batman (1940) #430]
And then there's the shooting of his parents at the tender age of 8 years old! So all of this is prior to that! Two dead friends, one who avoided him after the unfortunate duck incident, and one friend who had a violent breakdown and got taken away... And Bruce attempted suicide after his parents died too, as told in Batman (2016) #12.
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