Okay, I know this might sound wild, but hear me out. So we know Batman has to be loaded, right? Like. Nobody is buying the Batmobile on minimum wage. And we know that kind of money isn't easy to get. He'd be working like sixteen hours a day and then hanging around outside for eight hours at night and that leaves zero hours for sleeping, plus he's got to pay his other bills. ....what do you think are the odds he's Bruce Wayne's sugar baby?
YES! See THESE are the conspiracy theories I want to hear! Not some lurid, true crime bullshit treading over the death of the Waynes another 8000 fucking times.
(Just to let you all know, Prismatic actually reached out to me ahead of time asking if this question would be "appropriate" and I swear I laughed my ass off for 15 minutes. I would be OFFENDED and HURT if anyone thought this blog wasn't the correct space for SPECIFICALLY THIS)
Now, let's get down to brass tacks. Are Batman and Bruce Wayne doing the nasty?
(A rather famous photo of Batman and Bruce Wayne together, part of a plot to stump famous criminal psychologist Huge Strange. Whose face has been a meme for a while. Look at him. He's so surprised)
The unfortunately lame answer, like a lot of tabloid gossip is that we have no way of really knowing. Wayne, despite his outwardly lavish lifestyle is famously reclusive about his personal life. Candid insights into his life or the lives of his adoptive children are scarce and have been so basically since Bruce's return to Gotham in young adulthood. Batman is even MORE secretive, what with being a masked noir vigilante whose activities mostly consist of tracking a great many active criminal cases at one time. You could probably fit ALL of the quotes he has intentionally given the media on ONE piece of printer paper in size 12 font.
Not to mention the pure logistics of the size of the FAMILY that would involve. Wayne has no less than FOUR children. One, Damian, biological through a mother who is very mysterious all we know is she is of Arab/Chinese descent because Damian himself claims ancestry from those groups and he did NOT get it from the Waynes. And then the other three, Dick, Tim and Cassandra. Though Dick Grayson at least has moved out to Bludhaven where he's quietly become quite the property owner.
Batman has somewhere upwards of a DOZEN partners, sidekicks and proteges who hold some nebulous relation to the man. They may be a loose confederation of superheroes with similar roots or a totally related clan of family crime fighters we simply don't know. Meaning that we'd have a situation where Dick Grayson and Nightwing are spending at least SOME time under the same roof and I think we probably would have heard whispers of THAT golden nugget of drama at some point.
Really the idea that Batman is trading ass for cash is kind of unnecessary, Wayne has already been very candid about the fact that he funds Batman's activities somehow. Its how and why the organization known as Batman Incorporated was established, to allow Wayne to funnel his resources into an even wider span of good works. Wayne, for reasons that should go without stating, is VERY involved in crime, rehabilitation and poverty assistance in his native Gotham and he sees Batman as just one more branch of that. To him, The Batman is the same as the Thomas and Martha Wayne Foundation sees the city's fortunes rise via large charitable and infrastructure works and the Leslie Thompkins Shelter sees the city's populace through housing, food and medical insecurity. Lots of people in the midwest and west coast make fun of Gotham but do THEY have a publically subsidized, city wide, 24 hour monorail? No, no they do not.
This has, of course, only further INCREASED rampant speculation as to who the Batman could possible BE, how the two men met and when or how their connection was forged. Clues will probably always BE thin on the ground. Wayne is a man of VAST means, whose family has GENERATIONS of experience in keeping the media chasing its own tail, and Wayne spent nearly a decade traveling the ENTIRE WORLD with a fully unknown purpose and itinerary. (My parents tell me it got to the point that Bruce Wayne sightings were almost beating out Elvis sightings in certain magazines, claiming he'd shown up dead after a high speed chase in Hong Kong or something stupid).
But Wayne is also a notorious horndog who lives his partners lavish, expensive and a little bit dangerous. So *shrug*
