Why do you dislike batman?
Ooooh vaste subject
So funnily enough, I do dislike his character, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume you came to that conclusion because of my "what if my blorbo and your blorbo came together and beat up batman" or my "how I would write mia winning a fight against batman" posts- and I didn't write these posts because of my dislike to the character, so I thought I'd explain that first. Regularly you see dc character vs dc character polls, or batman vs everyone polls, and while it's silly to get upset about polls, I happen to really like thinking about fighting and writing superhero fighting scenes, and those kinds of polls, by essence, frustrate me for two reasons. The first reason is that this is pure power-scaling, based on the idea that each character has some kind of stat, power level and they beat or lose to others depending on that stat, which is such a demoralising loss of all that makes writing and reading fight scenes so fun: motivation, timeline (which version of each character is fighting which), initial state (do they have any previous injuries or vulnerable points?), environment, sheer luck, how good or bad a match they are to eachother specifically... In short, power-scaling is the creativity killer. The other reason is that these polls don't actually take in account the characters' actual abilities so much as their popularity, and with batman being both super popular and very known for his competence, this leads to people assuming Batman can beat just about anyone without knowledge of the character and their actual skillset, leading to aberrant results where a character that's basically invulnerable and godlike and unbelievable amounts of OP would lose against a highly trained human. At the same time, I was also working on attempting to make heads or tails of the DC Heroes ttrpg handbook 3rd edition, which uses fictional characters as examples for their different stats, and had the harrowing experience of learning that according to DCH3, Starfire has a lower strength stat than Batman which would shock anybody who knows anything about Starfire (no one is saying Batman isn't strong, he's in peak physical condition for a human, but Kory isn't a human, she's an alien on par with kryptonians and amazons).
So my frustration wasn't so much with Batman as with this general tendency to not take into account all the beautiful things about writing combat and all the intricacies and data about the characters' specific abilities, reducing them instead to a stat heavily influenced by popularity and a good amount of dc's careless glazing. And I was like "I can write about anyone beating the hell out of batman and make it credible", and I think maybe it got lost in translation (because many people don't know Mia, or were just, for their own reasons, enthusiastic about this idea) is that "my blorbo" is canonically weaker than Batman. It's about how fun it would be to figure out how different characters would work together, playing with context and everything that makes fighting fun, and sometimes even silly ideas (like, I think Green Arrow could easily win against Batman if he targeted him with the atomic warhead arrow, unless of course we're talking about Adam West Batman, in which case a dolphin would probably appear in front of the nuke arrow last minute and sacrifice itself for Batman). It's this idea that anyone can beat Batman, and power-scaling is dumb and the idea of your personal fav no matter the strength beating up this kind of symbolic character can be both cathartic and funny!
So, tldr: I didn't write those posts out of a dislike towards Batman so much as a love towards writing combat, because thinking about fighting is so fun and if you do it while listening to music you can create epic fight scenes in your head and that's a wonderful boon.
Now, onto your actual question, because I do unfortunately happen to dislike Batman. As you may have noticed from my stalling, and while I'm a confirmed hater, I don't love dissing characters other people like unless it's about making a specific point about something else, because just because I don't find them compelling doesn't mean others don't and that's really just the heart of it: I just don't find Batman compelling. And I don't want my reasons for it to come off as me trying to make others feel bad about finding him compelling, because that's just silly. Also this is specifically about comics!Batman, I'm well aware he had interpretations in so many stuff that I mostly didn't watch (except for like Nolan's., Battinson and of course Adam West Batman), this is specifically me disliking Batman in the comics. With all that said, I think the major reasons for that are:
-I don't find billionaire heroes compelling. I know for others, the fantasy of a good billionaire is appealing, but for me it's just off-putting. There's not much more to it.
-being such an old hero, Batman has been written in so many different ways by so many different people it's hard to pick just one characterization. Of course, I could just pick the most compelling, but I happen to love a lot of characters who interact with Batman in comics when he's not necessarily at his best- and sometimes those comics are very important groundwork for these other characters. I like the disturbing parallels Batgirl 2000 draws between Bruce and Cain, I like the conflict between Batman and Anarky, I like how Seeing Red portrays Bruce as a dark reflection of Ollie that he's scared to resemble, etc, etc.: in general I feel like Bruce's behaviour is important for these characters and my understanding and appreciation of them, and I don't mind "sacrificing" his better characterizations, in a sense, in order to better appreciate these stories.
-speaking of his better characterizations, the things I see most often pop up from his fans are how he's an optimist character who represents hope and love because he's a rehabilitationist, he doesn't believe in punitive violence, he just wants to help his villains get better, he never gives up on anyone. All of that sounds good, except I'm not a rehabilitationist, I'm an abolitionist. Perhaps one might say that it's a step over punitive justice, and maybe that was the case when Batman was first created, but my dislike of his rehabilitationist politics goes hand in hand with perhaps my biggest nemesis in DC: Arkham Asylum and the Joker. The Batman-Arkham rehabilitationist model explains crime from an individual standpoint, whereas many of the greatest causes for crime are systemic; but if we address the system, if we fix these issues and Gotham criminality diminishes, well, there aren't anymore comics to sell. It also comes against the vision of the traditional superhero villain, who can be bright and colourful or dark and terrifying but is always out-of-pocket one way or another, there's a sort of whimsy in the traditional batman villain a la joker or ventriloquist that sets them apart from normal people because regular evil, in DC's eyes, is boring. All of that leads DC to prioritise, at least in bat stories, a medicalized model of crime where yes, criminals are not hopeless causes that need to be locked away forever, but they are psychiatrized, there is something psychologically wrong with them that needs to be fixed so they can become functional models of society again- making Arkham into a magnified vision of this very real issue we see in our societies, with aberrant inventions such as the ASPD diagnosis criteria, which basically boil down to "doing crime" and "being poor", are extremely susceptible to racist bias, and in praxis are most used as an argument to refuse prisoners parole than for any sort of therapeutic purpose. We criminalize mental illness and psychiatrize crime. This feedback loop of hell, along with Joker's massive edgelord mainstream popularity, is probably the reason for how overwhelmingly sanist/psychophobic DC consistently is in media, and especially bat-stories, to the day. One could argue that this is not a Batman problem so much as a DC problem, and that's true, but to me the issue starts at the core of Batman: Batman has to be rehabilitationist, because we need Batman to represent hope that things can change for the better, but things cannot change for the better (because oh my god we would have to take risks with creating new rogues/new stories for Gotham instead of relying on old villains we know are gonna sell, the sales who's going to protect the sales we need to sell a product) and Batman cannot actually cause systemic change (because that's political and controversial and what about the dudebros who are gonna read the comics and because oftentimes dc writers are not as progressive as they might believe themselves to be and most importantly because comics can be a tool for propaganda and the DC editorial who keeps letting fucking Tom King writing Wonder Woman and Batman titles is probably not super interested in a prison abolitionist batman). So in the end, to me this portrayal of Batman tied in to hope just feels like slapping a label of progressivism on storylines that ultimately promote the reaffirmation of the status quo, and mentally ill people are the ultimate losers in this equation -with very real consequences, since the Joker is far too often the general public's conception of a mentally ill person, and all this mythos about the dangerous crazies feed into real life criminalization and demonization of mental illness.
-finally, the last thing that makes me uninterested in Batman, and I will say mostly modern Batman, is that he's a perfect character written by imperfect people. Obviously, the aim of writing a perfect character is impossible, since what's perfect for one is flawed for another -just to take the example from earlier, to me, a "perfect" vigilante would not work with the police and they would have an abolitionist perception of justice, whereas for someone with a rehabilitationist perception, a perfect vigilante would be something else entirely. On top of that, DC has the annoying tendency to hire terrible people to write their comics (neo-nazis, sexual offenders, war criminals...) and those people tend to have equally terrible worldviews that very negatively impact what they would consider a perfect hero. Of course, thankfully, these are not the only people out there writing Batman, hence the heterogeneity in Batman characterizations. On top of that, well, we need conflict -and, probably because of the modern super popularity of the batfam, conflict within the batfam shocks and sells: let's not forget Batman is DC's favourite cash-cow. However, and despite evidence to the pointlessness of the task, DC is determined to hammer down on Batman being perfect, and the consequences of that is that we get Bruce doing things oscillating between "that kinda sucked" and "actual abomination" and the narrative bends over backwards to validate it. Again, this is more a DC issue than a Batman issue, but it is centred around what appears more and more frequently as a characteristic of modern Batman: he is perfect, infallible, and fuck it if we need to get more and more classist and psychophobic and promote abuse apologia to continue feeding into the narrative because all of those messages appear increasingly more acceptable to DC than the idea of Batman being wrong. Also personally I don't like perfect heroes I like it when they fuck up and eat shit and learn and keep learning and becoming better people all their lives so obviously that image of Batman isn't compelling to me.
