fandom resources
a guide to help with ao3 tagging
useful resources for fanfic writers and readers
dc meta lists
lonnie machin / anarky reading guide
jason todd meta list
fic rec lists
star wars fic recs
dc fic rec lists
jason todd-centric fic recs
dc/marvel crossover fic recs
dc poly ships fic recs
brujay fic recs
brudick fic recs
sladick explicit fic recs
sladick mature fic recs
batfamily fic recs that will make you laugh
batfamily fic recs which are told through unusual formatting
batfamily fic recs which are told from an outsider’s perspective
batfamily/dc fic recs where original characters are main characters
batfamily fic recs where the main character is transgender and/or non-binary
dc/batfamily fic recs where the main character is asexual and/or aromantic
personal tags:
#sashene creates -> my art (fanfiction, fanart, memes, edits)
#sashene's drawer of wips -> my fic ideas
#sashene commentates -> my meta
#sashene reads [...] / #sashene watches [...] / #sashene plays [...] -> liveblogging my thoughts and reactions to books/comics/movies/tv shows/anime/manga/video games that i'm reading/watching/playing
#sashene answers -> my answers to asks that i've received
#sashene rambles -> my personal posts
#sashene’s diary -> other people's posts that describe me well
(i don't tag nsfw posts and rarely use trigger warnings. consider this blog "not rated" and "creator chose not to use archive warnings")
yeah so you remember when my old mentor told me that my path to revenge against the evil king would only leave me cold and empty? yeah it turns out that was a lie. yeah i actually feel really great now. the blood washed off my hands super easy
to be clear this is a fully sincere political belief that I have. I am pro copyright infringement and in fact anti "asking for permission to make derivative art"
In example #???? of mind rape (literally this time) that gets swept under the rug thereafter: Raven’s mind manipulation. It’s so frustrating how unnecessary it was. It’s simultaneously overindulgent and underbaked, and it happens right after Brother Blood. There was not any stop gap between when Dick was controlled then and now.
Essentially, post Brother Blood, Raven is able to experience her emotions. She loves Dick. This, along with her not understanding why she shouldn’t manipulate emotions if the manipulation is “positive”, causes her to conclude that the solution is to make Dick love her.
It goes exactly as it sounds.
The entire thing is contingent on Dick still being unsure of his feelings after the VERY RECENT 1+ YEAR LONG MIND MANIPULATION from Brother Blood. His struggle with reality and his own self is such that he can’t commit to Kory, since their entire relationship occurred while influenced.
Raven takes this wound and uses it as a wedge. It starts with enhancing his own doubts, introducing extra hesitation where there wouldn’t otherwise be.
Then it leads to further romantic feelings being injected, which Dick is demonstrated to be startled by after the fact. ALL OF THESE romantic thoughts or actions are all done via compulsion. THESE ARE NOT INNATE.
It’s vile. It is, again, contingent on Dick already being so bent and broken that he cannot trust his own actions or thoughts. To manipulate him by itself would be bad, but done on the back of such prolonged mental abuse is exceptionally horrible.
It both acts as a form of non-con and exacerbates his other mental problems post-Blood. He was already struggling to reconcile his own perception, his own sense of self, and to further further treat him as a thing to be possessed rather than a person worthy of their own self-agency is so frustrating.
But then there’s the dreams.
The fucking dreams.
For an entire month, Dick is forced to have dreams of having sex with Raven. This is rape. The fact that he perceives repeated non-con in a fake world rather than the real one does not negate that he experiences it.
And, luckily, this is where it ends. AFTER A FUCKING MONTH. But even how it ends is maddening, because as you can see starts to happen in the next dialogue boxes, the entire situation is waved off as “whoops, you know, she was just in love with you”. Capped off splendidly, after Kory takes Raven on a trip of self discovery and she learns to delineate her emotions, by a fucking joke where the punchline is one final forced fucking kiss. HAHA VERY FUNNY. HAHA. ARE YOU LAUGHING? ARE YOU?
I can’t villainize Raven, given she was ignorant of the harm (though you’d think after Wally and the remorse she showed for making him fall in love with her for only a little while, this would have been established as a bad thing). But Marv had to fucking do it, so it was done. And just because there’s no villain doesn’t mean there’s no victim. Dick has been controlled again for the umpteenth time. His confidence and his agency and his fucking EVERYTHING are IN FUCKING SHAMBLES. EVERYTHING. HE CANNOT THINK OR SPEAK OR BE WITHOUT ANOTHER AGENT CONTROLLING HIM. AND THERE IS NOTHING DONE ABOUT THIS.
And it’s not too long after this that the next mental manipulation occurs. HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU BE DICK GRAYSON AND EVER ACCEPT YOUR PERCEPTION OF REALITY AGAIN? HOW CAN YOU EVER FEEL SAFE AGAIN? I FUCKING HATE IT HERE, MARV. WHY DID YOU MAKE RAVEN DO THIS???
My poor boy can't get a break!!! And another instance of his SA trauma being brushed under the rug LIKE PLEASE LET HIM HEAL FROM IT OR ATLEAST ACKNOWLEDGE IT!!!! And for Raven I feel bad but also like whyyyyy did your write her to do this??? I would like to know if this was put of left field or?
i want to start off my reply by stating some points i agree with OP on:
this storyline is an example of dick being victimized sexually/raped
marv wolfman did not write the storyline with the gravity it deserved
this situation and similar has happened to the character dick grayson many times, and is upsetting
my reply is not meant to rebut any of these arguments or the general content of OP’s post. i am writing this reply as a raven fan, because i think that understanding raven’s character and where she is coming from during this arc is:
interesting from a raven fan perspective
gives additional depth to dick’s trauma and overall the “titans as a group of abused teens” vibe
as a fan of raven and NTT, i want to talk about where raven was at when the arc happened, by discussing the three plot points that happened to raven immediately beforehand, and then going over the arc itself. i hope i can contextualize the magnitude of what she is dealing with at the time, and this arc’s significance in raven’s story of overcoming abuse. this is not to minimize what dick was also dealing with, a list which includes raven’s mind control.
all those caveats being given, let me yap about raven.
trigger warnings in this post: rape, parent/child incest
-
the Terror of Trigon arc happens not very long before the arc where raven mind controls dick into loving her. TOT includes several instances of raven’s bodily autonomy being violated in ways that are differing levels of metaphor for sexual abuse. in TOT, her father trigon wears raven down for months by appearing in her nightmares (many of which include raven being naked and other imagery that implies sexual abuse), until he is able to possess her. this is an example of the type of nightmare:
trigon has wanted to claim raven since she was a child, and is explicit in this:
trigon and demon raven attempt to conquer earth. in the battle, demon raven dies. azar possesses raven’s body in order to destroy trigon. she reveals that this was always her plan for raven. she raised raven, and taught her to deny all of her emotions to keep trigon at bay, knowing that trigon would eventually possess her anyway, and this would give azar the opportunity to possess raven herself, and end him. in TOT, raven’s body is literally taken over by her father and the woman who primarily raised her. here is raven's body possessed by azar:
raven returns from her TOT death as white-cloak raven, seen as above. this white cloak is a representation of her freedom from fear of trigon, as he has been defeated. she also is freed from azar’s rules against feeling emotions, since she no longer has to worry that she will be possessed by trigon when she feels strong emotions.
there are two main things that happen to raven between the end of TOT and the arc where raven mind-controls dick.
the first (prior to her wearing the white cloak in life) is that she was kidnapped by a group of people who realized that she had healing powers and used her for them. raven’s healing powers work when she absorbs others’ pain, and she does not want to do this for them. they tied her to a stake and kept touching her to heal themselves by transferring their pain to her. visually, this included tearing her clothes off while she begged them to stop.
RIGHT after this (which itself was RIGHT after Terror of Trigon, in which she was possessed by her father in a way that had sexual abuse subtext, died, then possessed by azar), raven is kidnapped by brother blood and mind controlled by him, while brother blood also has dick captive (and has been mind controlling him for months and months).
brother blood as a villain is a cult leader and has very uncomfortable vibes with women. when he interacts with raven, he tells her to “feel his godly power” and that they are a “matched pair”. mother mayhem, who is pregnant with brother blood’s child, sees raven as a rival: “how dare he hold her close now?” these are implications of sexual violence targeting raven. (in a later comic, teen titans 2003, brother blood explicitly targets raven for the purpose of marrying her and having a child with her.) also, the visual framing of brother blood and raven as well as brother blood’s rhetoric about taking over earth parallels trigon’s use/abuse of possessed demon!raven, a situation which raven has very recently gone through.
raven mind-controls dick into loving her right after dick and raven are rescued from brother blood’s compound. so, coming around to raven’s mindset during this arc and what she was dealing with: she was possessed by trigon. she died and was possessed by azar. she returned to life freed from her lifelong fear of/ban on feeling emotions. she is immediately kidnapped by people who torture and undress her, forcing her to use her powers. she escapes and is immediately kidnapped and mind controlled by brother blood. then, she and dick escape.
prior to trigon’s defeat, raven pushes down her emotions, and is repeatedly shown as scared of sex and sexuality. this is true of raven’s character afterwards as well. some years after this arc, raven dates a man named eric forrester who sucks and we all hate him. here are some panels where raven talks about her fear of sex and intimacy.
during the mind control arc, raven is open to experiencing emotions for the first time. the first emotions she felt were terror, guilt, and pain when forced by her kidnappers to use her powers. then, she is once again cut off from her emotions by brother blood’s mind control. i don’t necessarily think that it is out of character for raven, having gone through all that, to latch on to dick, the leader of the titans and somebody who went through a part of her ordeal with her (though again, he was mind controlled by brother blood for far longer; i am not comparing their trauma here or saying one was worse or better). so, yes, she (thinks she) loves dick romantically.
i also don’t think that it is out of character for her to use her powers to force the matter. who in her life has modeled proper boundaries or relationships for her? even azar only preached that raven could not let herself feel emotions, while raising her in order to become possessed by trigon (in a metaphor for sexual abuse), and then possess raven’s body herself. of course that doesn’t make her actions okay, or change their effect on dick. dick is a victim here, but as OP says, there isn’t really a villain either…
the arc begins when raven (who has already started to have feelings for dick) and dick are both wounded while fighting. dick is taken to the hospital while raven disappears into her soul self. she heals herself, and then uses her powers to heal dick.
it is this moment when she uses her powers to mind control him into loving her. i argue this because, in a later issue in this arc, raven also heals another man, whom she is not in love with, and this is his reaction:
this also, in my opinion, shows that raven did not maliciously, consciously do that. at the end of the arc, kory confronts raven and says as much:
when raven realizes what she has done (mind controlled dick; aka he did not kiss her out of his own will), she is overcome with guilt. the fact that raven did not know she was doing it doesn’t make her violation of dick’s body less real. but it is important to know.
after she mind controls him, dick is confused about his own emotions, kisses her and apologizes, and has nightmares where he and raven have sex. the nightmares are extremely distressing to him. i will argue that these nightmares came from raven’s seed of mind control--however, the raven in the nightmares is not the real raven. she is not actively a part of these dreams. at this point, raven is several years away from dating eric forrester, during which time she is still not ready for sex and terrified of intimacy. again, this doesn’t change the fact that she initially mind controlled dick, thereby causing him to have these dreams in which he is raped. but i do not believe she is in the dreams as an active participant, nor does she realize that her mind control has caused dick to have them.
during this arc raven uses her powers often. here we see her use them on catcallers, only understanding what they want as ‘happiness’...this raven is not ready for sex!
i very much agree with OP that there are parts of the writing in this arc that are minimized and the story itself doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of what is being shown. for example, the “joke” kiss at the end is horrible, ignoring that dick is now and has been for months deeply upset by this, minimizing of sexual assault, and also something that i do see as out of character for raven (who has so many arcs that show her as afraid of sex and sexuality!).
however, there are also places where the story shows us the negative consequences of raven’s actions. raven also uses her powers to force ‘positive’ emotions onto people other than dick, often people whom the titans are fighting. when she does this, the color of the panel backgrounds turns red. it also turns red when her mind control of dick is clear, such as when he kisses her. the implication here is that her actions are not good; the readers are not meant to take raven’s words about doing good/not doing harm at face value. we are meant to see the harm she is causing, though raven does not see it yet.
her powers work by her taking others’ pain into herself. azar taught her that this is good, this is what she was made for, and she should strive to not feel emotions (good or bad). this arc has a raven coming off a year or more of being tortured and controlled by others, now feeling free to feel emotions and be in charge of how she uses her powers for the first time in her life, with no idea of how to do so. the arc ends with raven asking kory for help, then realizing that she has friends (vic, etc). she is not a perfect victim. she has hurt dick deeply (and instead of a full honest discussion of his rape, the narrative hands us a “joke” kiss). but it is a step on her journey to recovering from a lifetime of abuse. raven’s story of dealing with and recovering from abuse is very meaningful to me and, in my opinion, one of the times (if not the only time lol) that marv wolfman wrote a good story about rape. so i wanted to speak up in defense of this arc a little bit.
Yup yup all of everything said here. Reading it, I hear, makes you at least 12% cooler.
I’m a Dick-centric blog so I didn’t go in-depth on Raven’s side of things (I think I would die if I tried to write another 20 paragraphs of relevant context), but I would hope my clarification not to villainize Raven would be enough. She’s not evil. She was also a victim of Brother Blood, and Trigon before that, and numerous other circumstances.
There are no villains imo, just a lot of very very shittily-treated victims.
Anyways, thank you so very much for the additions @thebestestbat!
(Also just a side note, but I’ve always kind of wondered whether how she was conceived also plays a role? Because Trigon had also relied on significant mental influence on Arella, including both compulsions and distortion of form? While Raven understands this to be wrong, she also had no exposure to other, healthier forms of love, meaning it could be another way in which her circumstances failed her.)
Oh yeah, re: your question, I would definitely say that's part of it too (though perhaps not as big of a part as what @thebestestbat already outlined). Going back to the Eric Forrester arc again, how Raven was conceived still impacting her to this day is a big theme in her struggles in her relationship with Eric.
(Though I will say, I tend to read Raven saying "I'm traumatized because of what Trigon did to my mother" as kind of a shorthand for that as well as everything else, because they couldn't explicitly reference Raven being a victim of incest, even if subtextually it seems quite evident. The main idea is that Raven is scared of sex because of her father.)
Also, I have to recommend this interview from George Perez about Raven's sexuality:
I would say that Raven was set up for failure by the way she was raised. She was raised to internalize the idea that she was born wrong and bad because she was a child of rape. That already would be more than traumatizing enough, but then as she grows up she's repeatedly sexually assaulted. Poor Raven just does not have a good life 😔
I would also just like to say: yes, Trigon did 'trick' Arella by appearing to her in a human form initially, but a very common misconception is that the trickery was the main traumatic event for Arella. It wasn't. Trigon didn't let her go immediately after revealing his true form. He held her captive for several days longer and violently raped her.
Again, this is an extremely common misconception, and maybe not the most important distinction to make in the long run, but I think it is worth pointing out that emotional manipulation wasn't really the main abuse happening with Trigon and Arella. If anything, I would say that Raven manipulating other people's emotions without understanding what she's doing or why it's wrong is more something she gets from Azar - the mother figure who manipulated and abused her, who Raven still sees as a goddess who only had her best intentions at heart.
The Batman comics are generally very bad about psychiatry but in a very funny way usually, but I do think Alan Grant did have some interesting stuff. I keep thinking of the elseworlds story where they diagnose Poison Ivy with mental illness for thinking women deserve equal rights and Bruce (who in this is Batman by night and Arkham Doctor by day so he beats up people and then treats them as a psychiatrist) goes 'oh well what can you do that's mental illness for you sucks for her'
i keep rereading this comic (an elseworld story called batman of arkham) because I can't get a full grasp on what it's trying to say. On other hand it understands psychology and the nature of 'mental illness diagnosis' better than this stuff usually does but it sure also paints batman's actions as good. i think?? the premise of this comic is that batman also works as the head or arkham asylum and he beats criminals up as batman and then treats them in the asylum as dr wayne. considering i know the writer's other work i am willing to give him (alan grant wrote an another elseworlds story where batman gets called a fascist and then gotham citizens rise up and kill him) the benefit of the doubt but it sure is bizarre. I like how jon looks tho
Luke being created before Jace and Jace being introduced later actually makes Luke's story more interesting to me in retrospect. The reason Lucius was so intent on Luke working at Wayne Enterprises is because he was the eldest/only son, but now we know that's not true, because Jace is the eldest. That means when Luke was a kid all the eldest son expectations were probably placed on Jace instead of him. When Jace gets sent to boarding school after the hit and run, then, Luke is suddenly burdened with expectations he'd never had before. No wonder he chafes against Lucius' desire for him to have a stable job, no wonder he resents what he sees as Jace's irresponsibility! And no wonder he hates the Fox family's tradition of prizing respectability above all else, because that results in the extremely restrictive expectations placed on him. In a lot of ways Luke's story is about breaking free from societal and familial expectations.
Batwing #20
His whole life he's been the "good kid," he's done everything that's asked of him, and it just doesn't fulfil him at all. He's had no room for "self-exploration" and he barely knows who he is. It's not merely a matter of rebellion that has him take up Batwing, but a fundamental shift in his values. He is trying to no longer care about what Lucius, or anyone else, thinks of his choices - he doesn't want to "wor[k] for someone else" anymore.
So I think what Luke finds so alluring and inspirational about Batman is that he defies expectations.
Batwing #25
Someone says "this is the part of Gotham nobody cares about," and then Batman enters to prove them wrong. At this point Batman is only "rumors," but now Luke sees he's real - a figure meting out justice outside the law, who cares for all the parts of Gotham others don't. Luke is a young high school student who is perhaps thinking about the rest of his life, weighed down by a burden he doesn't think should be his. And he loves MMA, which to him is about fairness - he thinks earlier in this issue about how life isn't fair, but that MMA, the ability to fight for yourself, can balance the scales. So in this moment Batman and MMA both represent a way out of the unfair expectations he's been struggling with.
Although these expectations are rarely explicitly racialised, it's obviously a major factor that he and his family are Black. Lucius and Tanya's insistence on respectability is because they are intimately aware how the public will tear down a well-off Black family with even a hint of scandal. Luke is less explicitly aware of it, but this monologue from his admired MMA teacher is very important to Luke's character:
Batwing #25
MMA is an escape not just from generic expectations but racialised ones in particular. In the ring, the only thing that matters if "what mark will you leave on this world." Luke ardently desires to be defined by what he does rather than by his last name or the colour of his skin, and the promise of a place free from preconceived expectations leads him to MMA, to Batman, and to Batwing.
But of course this race-blind, gender-blind fantasy is just that - a fantasy. Because as much as Luke tries he never truly escapes the shadow of other people's expectations, which is encapsulated in the bitter irony that by trying to escape working for Bruce Wayne, he ends up working for Batman. Despite it all Luke is still an employee. Batwing ruins him in a different way from an office job, but it still ruins him.
Part of what makes Luke unable to escape these expectations is that I don't think he fully grapples with the systemic nature of racialised biases. Unlike fellow Batfam member Duke or his brother Jace, Luke remains fairly naïve even at his lowest, tending to blame individuals (his father, Russell, even himself) rather than understand the multifaceted systems at play.
Anyway Luke is a very interesting character who despite it all really does love life and justice and helping people. Whether his motivations are naïve or misguided or not, at his core he is someone whose self-discovery takes the shape of being a hero, of getting out there doing good in the world. That night with Batman he wasn't just seeing someone who defied expectations, but someone who cared. And Luke Fox cares about everything so much!!! Read Batwing issue 19-25 for more Luke Fox goodness ❤️
So I've been reading a lot of Batman and Detective Comics lately, and I stumbled onto this absolute gem (/s). Content warning for racism, Islamophobia and Orientalism.
The issue opens with Batman doing what Batman does best: beating up petty criminals like back-alley drug dealers and jewelry store robbers, the usual. We all know jewelry store owners' property must be protected at all costs, of course.
While he's busy stopping a mugging, though, he completely misses two Muslim Marxist men walking into a Vietnam veterans' club in Gotham and opening fire. They kill seven people, wound thirteen more, then commit suicide with cyanide pills.
Yes, you read that correctly. Muslim Marxist terrorists shoot up a Vietnam veterans' club while shouting both "For the glory of the revolution!" and "Allah Akbar!"
Batman naturally wants to track down whoever supplied them with the weapons. The supplier turns out to be Abu Hassan, a diplomat with diplomatic immunity. And where is this diplomat from? The People's Republic of Syraq, a fictional Arab country whose name is literally a mash-up of Syria and Iraq.
Incidentally, this story came out just one month before The Diplomat's Son, where a man from a fictional South American country assaults a woman but can't be arrested because his father is an ambassador. Then, just four months later, A Death in the Family has the Joker become Iran's ambassador to the U.N., giving him diplomatic immunity from prosecution.
Anyway, Bruce decides he doesn't particularly care about annoying little technicalities like international law. Someone has to get justice for those poor American Vietnam veterans. And by "justice," he mostly means retribution.
So he follows Hassan to London, arriving just in time for Guy Fawkes Night. At the Syraq embassy, Hassan is busy calling his London agents, using quotations from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Edward FitzGerald's Victorian translation and adaptation of Persian poetry attributed to Omar Khayyám) as passwords to apparently kick off some sinister master plan. Batman breaks into the embassy, beats up the guards, and confronts Hassan.
There's also, for absolutely no subtle reason whatsoever, a painting of a hammer and sickle hanging in Hassan's room. Just in case you didn't get that he is a Marxist / communist.
Hassan pulls a sword. They fight. Batman wins, obviously. Before losing, Hassan explains that his terrorism is simply a response to western imperialism and that terrorism is the only weapon available to oppressed peoples.
Then, because comic book villains apparently can't resist exposition, he tells Batman that suicide bombers are already on their way to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
Batman suddenly gets jumped by a guy who walked into the room without him noticing while he was busy talking to Hassan. During the ensuing struggle, Hassan gets accidentally kicked out of the window by the guy Batman is fighting, falls onto the embassy's barbed-wire fence, and dies impaled.
Remember when Batman just didn't really care if people died because of him? Yeah. Apparently the no-kill rule doesn't apply if you only kill someone indirectly.
The police arrive, see the dead ambassador, and naturally don't believe Batman when he warns them that Parliament is about to be attacked. After all, it's Guy Fawkes Night. So Batman hijacks a car and drives there himself. Hassan's men try to enter the Parliament, firing their weapons while the narration helpfully informs us that Allah has promised martyr's paradise to every soldier who dies for the jihad. Batman rams them with the stolen car, dives clear at the last second, and accidentally detonates their bomb early. Conveniently, nobody seems to die except the terrorists themselves.
An injured Bruce Wayne returns to his hotel suite and throws his costume into a street bonfire so London's authorities won't connect him to the incident. He reflects that Hassan and his followers deserved to die, but maybe Hassan wasn't entirely wrong about Western imperialism. Watching the batsuit burn, he wonders: "Could it be true? Could my country - my America - be so guilty? There has to be an answer, but I don't know it."
Looking back over the issue, what's striking is how it packages so many geopolitical anxieties of the late 1980s into a single story. Batman isn't fighting ordinary criminals, he's fighting Muslim Marxist terrorists who shot Vietnam veterans before attempting to blow up the British Houses of Parliament on Guy Fawkes Night. Wow.
I do not see these choices as accidental. For me, the killing of Vietnam veterans symbolizes a USAmerican fear that imperialized countries, having defeated their imperial victimizers, would retaliate against them. The bombing of Parliament represents the fear of Western democratic institutions themselves being attacked, destabilized, or corrupted by foreign enemies. Abu Hassan isn't really a character so much as a political collage: an Arab diplomat, a Marxist, a Muslim, an anti-imperialist, and a terrorist all rolled into one. Syraq itself isn't really a country but a repository for every fear Western audiences were encouraged to associate with the Middle East in the late 1980s. In that sense, the story reflects a broader Orientalist and Islamophobic tendency to collapse a wide range of political movements, cultures, and national identities into a single threatening image of the "foreign enemy."
In my opinion, this comic issue also reflects a broader political idea that often appears in Batman comics: that ordinary legal institutions are too limited to deal with "extraordinary" threats. Gotham's police and the FBI are unable to pursue Hassan because of diplomatic immunity, making the law itself appear less like a safeguard and more like an obstacle. Meanwhile, the London police are portrayed as ineffective and slow to catch up. The day has to be saved by Batman.
Although nominally a vigilante operating outside the law, Batman is consistently portrayed in the comics as an extension of state power rather than its opponent. He does not reject the authority of the state, rather, he steps in when its institutions are supposedly too restricted to act. His violations of international law in this issue (storming an embassy, assaulting diplomatic personnel, indirectly causing an ambassador's death, and carrying out a counterterrorism operation on British soil) are treated as morally justified because they are committed in defense of the existing order and against enemies the story presents as unquestionably evil. The implication is that threats like terrorism are so exceptional that they require someone willing to operate outside normal legal boundaries. This echoes real-world arguments for expanding state power in the name of counterterrorism: when faced with a sufficiently dangerous enemy, legal restrictions and procedures are treated as "luxuries" that can no longer be afforded.
The story also relies on a familiar storytelling convention. Hassan's critique of Western imperialism isn't dismissed outright, and Batman ultimately concedes that there may be some truth to it. The problem isn't the critique but the method. Hassan and his followers are depicted committing spectacular acts of violence, ensuring that regardless of the validity of their analysis, their politics become inseparable from their perceived brutality. It's a common way for pop culture stories to acknowledge structural injustice while reaffirming that radical or revolutionary attempts to fight back are ultimately excessive and morally unacceptable.
In a way, the story becomes a form of moral self-reassurance for both the author and the reader. The ending reads like an imperial core citizen trying to justify their bigoted beliefs while managing their guilt: yes, maybe the people we are dehumanizing are right about some things, but surely their actions are much worse than anything the imperial core has ever done or could ever do and their methods are too violent, too barbaric, too extreme for them to ever present a serious moral or political alternative. Because if that isn't true, if the people resisting imperial power are not somehow worse than the system they oppose, the conclusion becomes much harder to accept and live with.
