#batmanigans

[littleeyesofpallas]

damian has so many stupid fake and alternate reality and pseudo or half siblings running around he could make a whole multiversal league out of them. (also i never noticed but i like how Athanasia is "immortality" and Aion is "eternity" and both greek names for some reason)

[littleeyesofpallas]

Screw Talia and Deathstroke having Respawn together(boooring) where the hell is Deathstroke and David Cain's weird assassin baby? Those two would absolutely both be dumb enough to thinking they could raise the perfect child together, only to never agree on anything and imprint their toxic double divorced dad energy into their idiot science project and make him into just the most insufferable piece of shit imaginable.

Look at these two old white men and tell.me you don't think they would both absolutely think running a eugenics baby fight club was a good idea

[littleeyesofpallas]

As ever, sick of Batman writers being boring and lame about Jason's Robin tenure. Always the same borderline phrenological b.s. about him being "from the streets" and thus angry and violent. Don't get me wrong, I think there absolutely should be a retroactive push to foreshadow the red hood thing. I think the whole Philipe Garzonas incident is an incredibly important part of Jason's character. But if anything made him violent and angry it should be Bruce.

Jason may start out as a rowdy punk trying to club Batman with a tireiron but he should still be enthusiastic about being Robin. And his attempts to be, superficially, like Dick should rub Bruce the wrong way. Because Bruce and Dick just had their falling out. Bruce isn't trying to make another Dick. But Jason doesn't know that, so all his earnest attempts to be Robin should be met with a distinct low simmering frustration and disapproval from Bruce. And THAT should be the thing that drives him to become gradually more violent and resentful and extreme in his approach to crime fighting.

Because what Bruce says he wants from Jason and how he actually conveys approval should be out of step, so Jason's behavior should both be driven away from Robin's exemplar status but also towards Batman's own insecurity and rage. Sure, go ahead, make Jason "Bruce's biggest mistake," but mean it when you you say it. And show us the mistake Bruce is making

[littleeyesofpallas]

Riddler's been done up as a Jigsaw type before, obviously, when Saw was still culturally relevant, but you know what? They never took it far enough. They need to go back to the trapmaster nonsense but double down, and then push it even further. Eddie needs to go full King Louis XIV Palace of Versailles, crossed with H.H.Holmes's murder castle, crossed with Edgar Alan Poe's Masque of the Red Death(i know i know batman already did this once in the 90s), crossed with some kind of reverse Hunger Games nonsense.

Have him stealthily hijack public works and private construction projects for months in advance to turn entire neighborhoods and districts of Gotham into a massive deathtrap to cage Gotham's wealthy elite in a publicly broadcast reality/gameshow where the stupid puzzles and challenges are as much a part of the threat as the cabin fever and frayed nerves of a bunch of self absorbed, entitled, neurotic billionaires. Just have him declare open war on the Court of Owls, knowing they're among all Gotham's richest and oldest families but unable to identify specific agents even with all his love of mystery solving and just turn it into a giant game of Among Us with Gotham's elite trying to identify and offer up members of the court.

Rope a bunch of Gotham's super rich villains into it too --Maxie Zeus, Penguin, Wrath, Catman, Stagg, the old mob families-- even the fake ones like Nocturna, or Catwoman, or Killer Moth who all kinda masquerade as high society when they're really just low class crooks. And of course have Bruce stuck in the middle of the event unable to access his bat-gear and having to keep a low profile while not getting eliminated from the game himself, while the bat family runs support from the outside. And of course let the run of the mill gothamites just eat it up. Let the gangs start running betting pools like it's the horse tracks. Real colosseum, bread and circuses stuff

[littleeyesofpallas]

I've got kind of a slowly growing roster of my spins on Batman villains but surprisingly few on the actual heroes of Gotham. But if I were to do a major overhaul of something it'd be the Gordons.

One of the things Batman stuff never gets right is GCPD. The whole "crooked cop" thing is always so half assed and only ever expressed in dumb little vignettes and cliches with no actual sense of continuity. There's never any sense that the police in Gotham are actually a problem, and somehow they still get into shoot outs with super villains, and they still get generic copaganda moments in spite of everything.

And because the cops aren't portrayed as genuinely or realistically/believably bad, the idea that Gordon is supposed to be Gotham's One Good Cop ends up not actually meaning anything in practice. So, I'd love to have a version of events where Jim gets treated the way good cops do in real life, and gets bullied blackmailed and beaten into submission for trying to hold other cops accountable.

Jim should be the one in the wheelchair, beaten nearly to death by his fellow officers, and that should be what motivates Babs to take on the GCPD, first as a hacker breaking the story her father was silenced over, then as an informant sicking the Batman on corrupt cops, and as a vigilante herself. Her sense of justice fueled by the desire to do what her father couldn't, what the system would never allow.

And in turn James Jr. grows to resent his father's ethics as a weakness. None of that "he kUhRraAaaAzzY!!" bullshit, and ditch his links to the fucking joker. He's should be a Two-Face fanboy (my Two-Face) where he's convinced he can play the game better than his father; that he can make the corruption work for him. Just fullynembrace the rat race. (Honestly a bit like what they keep trying to do with Penguin in various iterations, as the loser underdog of the Gotham crime world, always ready to stab anyone/everyone in the back to get what he wants)

[littleeyesofpallas]

huh maybe i just didn't tag it, it was probably before i started collecting my batman headcanons under the #random headcanon tag, but I have always had a very specific noncanon vision for Ra's Al Ghul., one that i do understand a lot of people don't really like, but obviously that I consider pretty defensible, if not an improvement over the existing canon's mishandling of Ra's and the League in general.

See my beef is that the League of Assassins is just a cluster fuck of problems to begin with, both stylistically and internal continuity wise... For one, Ra's as written is just kind of an idiot and it's ridiculous to have to reconcile the idea that he is in fact this unquestioned ruler of this ancient order of assassins that's been operating for over a thousand years. On the one hand we can sort of blame the pit madness for some of it, but it's also clear that for all his scheming and seemingly improbable resources, he has literally never actually accomplished any of his organization's goals.

Secondary to this is that the league itself is just this massive stupid fucking hodgepodge of bad racist cliches. Why the fuck are they ninjas? Why do they use katanas and wear the stupid americanized ninja pajamas? Why do they keep showing up in like Buddhst temples deep in the mountains of Tibet? Also, in a bunch of his earliest appearances, why is he just a guy in a three piece suit and a cape? Also why would the leader of an ancient organization like the league of assassins have such a stupid, blatantly fake, and "i looked at an english to arabic dictionary once" name like Ra's Al-Ghul. (obvious answer is that it should be a title not a name, but then his stupid kids all take it as a surname)

My answer to all this(other than just ignoring a few of the dumber details) is that Ra's is not an ancient leader of the League of Assassins at all, he's a "modern" era usurper. A dark inversion of the white savior narrative and all it's inherent problems, a kind of supervillain Lawrence of Arabia(yeah yeah i know Tom King already did this with Adam Strange, but I've had this kicking around in my head for longer, shush) where he was sent to the Middle East as a British soldier in WWI to fight the Ottomans and much in the style of Lawrence parallel to him, rallied the locals to help in his efforts. While there he'd gain a certain appreciation and indeed a love of the local culture, but never fully forget his role as a foreign power come to exploit those people to his country's own ends. In that way his personal turning point becomes that he is unwittingly allied with the actual League of Assassins, and as the war begins to wind down, and he is forced to reckon with the idea of going home to England a nobody, or staying a war hero in the middle east, he goes full Heart of Darkness, and instead uses his military position and resources to seize control of the League for himself.

In this version of events, Talia would make the most sense as a daughter of the last of the actual blood line of rulers of the original League of Assassins, her mother being the daughter of the man Ra's overthrew. This impels her to her eventual take over, and her loyalty to the League over her father specifically. It also motivates her interest in raising Damian as an heir, as he has a more legitimate claim to the League via her than Ra's ever did or than Bruce would as Ra's' handpicked heir.

It would also give room for the original League to have been a force of relative good, developing their assassination and government destabilization tactics like their real world counterparts, the Order of Assassins, as the defensive measures of a smaller kingdom against the overwhelming forces of the neighboring rivals but more pressingly The Crusades. This creates a kind of golden age of righteous fury, where the League were noble just defenders of the middle east, and their destabilization tactics a safeguard against corruption rather than the comic's preferred route of 1970s era orientalist boogeymen where "OoOoooOo uncivilized brown people want to destroy americka!" Because the megalomaniacal world conquest horseshit is Ra's' doing, and a direct off shoot of Western imperialism, not something inherent to the League's actual founding history or culture.(and more importantly not just a recycled and displaced Fu Man Chu)

It does also conveniently make a slightly more sensible motive to the league's particular brand of generic super villainy: Where as their historical purpose would be to balance out power in their local region, that same balance left them open to destabilization at the hands of men like "Ra's" and Lawrence. So Ra's' plan is just to destabilize countries in places other than the middle east in the same way, to prime them for conquest. This makes his global network of assassins make more sense as they're all the in-progress cells of his would-be warlords gone "native" trying to blend in.

This all just making Ra's basically a giant Islamophilic orientalist weeaboo cosplaying this ridiculous caricature of an illustrious ancient warlord, aligning him and his delusions more with the writers who made him in the 70s, rather than the misguided fantasy they were tapping into. All the while his daughter sitting there in the background plotting revenge for a family she never even got to know, Lady Snowblood style.

Oh it also sort of helps rectify the goofy idea that Ra's otherwise would have had what like EIGHT HUNDRED years from the 70s, or over 900 from the current day as supreme ruler of the League of Assassins and only ever had like 3 kids? Where as if he's only been at it since WWI, then it makes WAY more sense that he's only got a handful of kids. (I have the same issue with the idea that Vandal Savage has been loitering around since the dawn of human history but his only notable kid is Scandal and she's like what in her 20s?)

Also unrelated to the rest of this but goddamnitall give them a bitter centuries long rivalry with the Order of St.Dumas. They're an islamic kingdom of assassins and a secret society of crusader knights ffs

[littleeyesofpallas]

ya know what DC really needs? a full blown fan-wank AU just to have, like off to the side to feed the fandom. give me a Twisted Wonderland style weird 2 steps removed from the actual franchise in question thing but with gotham villains. Don't make it clear what the time frame is; is batman just off screen doing his shit? is this like neo gotham beyond and half the villains havent been heard from in decades? is it a total AU that only operates off the vague implications of Batman as a franchise existing out in the aether? who knows. who cares. Just make an unexplained gotham villain school full of kids all bunched into classes nd dorm halls and cliques based on characters we don't have to actually see or interact with. Again, just full blown self insert fanfic fodder. Fill it with icons and logos and heraldic crests and shit to turn into an endless merch machine. Just do it, DC. It's free money

[littleeyesofpallas]

Funny enough for all the sporadic babble I do about Batman headcanons I don't think I've ever gotten into my Jason lore, maybe because it's long and obnoxiously unorganized. But thinking about his origins and early years thanks to Robin & Batman this week, Ive always really wished someone would address his relationship with women better, because it's such an interesting pattern to have developed entirely by accident.

I know no one gives a shit about pre-crisis Nocturna but I really do feel like in a round about way she contributes a really vital aspect to Jason's time as Robin. And in a sideways kinda way post-crisis replaces her dynamic as Jason's villainous surrogate mother with Ma Gunn's shtick. But I'd like suggest they can actually coexist:

Nocturna was already an orphan girl adopted by a wealthy socialite. Why not make that part of Ma Gunn's child criminal empire instead of running a dickensian pickpocket guild? She raises orphans to scam rich people out of their inheritance. Which could position Nocturna as a kind of big sister and role model to Jason, as well as position Bruce (and not Batman) as a mark for Gunn's operation.

In turn it gives Bruce a chance to win over Jason from a lifestyle of deception and implicit mistrust of others, as well as a conflict for Jason to have, not just between Bruce and the more obviously evil Ma Gunn, but between Bruce and the genuine caring relationship with Nocturna. And in turn Anton Knight and his whole weird thief/Batman imposter and siscon plot can motivate Jason to want to protect and avenge her as a vigilante, while also setting up his distictive trigger around violence against women that pays itself off later with both the Philipe Garzonas incident, but also in swapping Babs out for the flimsy adopted mom reveal/biological mom plot device in Death In The Family.

That is to say, forget suddenly finding out his drug addict mom isn't his mom, and the mom he didn't know is hostage in Iran, and the twist that she's been hired by joker... All of which adds up to a big fat nothing of a character moment... Make his motivation that (like in actual publication history --even tho it wasn't canon at the time) Killing Joke happened mere months before Death in the Family.... Jason should be charging off to fight Joker alone because he's out to avenge Barbara when Bruce wouldn't.

And piggybacking off of the fun little coincidences of publication timing, Jason's return lined up oddly well with War Games and Steph's initial brutal torture and death, which was only weakly retconned in the aftermath of the event. Clearly with both Redhood AND War Game's plot being about someone else executing Batman's secret plan to takeover Gotham's gang scene, the obvious condensed history should be that Steph's attempt to enact Bruce's plan was facilitated by Jason as part of his return and that Jason is the one who pretends to torture Steph(as Robin) but reveals it was fake both because he's trying to send a message to Bruce about letting Robins die AND because he would never actually hurt a woman ala this entire breadcrumb trail of disjointed Jason events.

But also to facilitate this give more attention, not to Jason and Bruce, like every other angst fic ever, but Jason and Babs fighting crime together, Jason and Donna as titans, Jason and Selina after the time Nocturna sued Bruce for custody of him but the died in a hotairballoon thing... Because those are all relationships we know he had at various points in time that, again, are never really tied together into a coherent perspective on Jason's part. And that's all without ever having to dip into drug addict mom or "real mom" nonsense.

Jason being consistently fucking sensitive to matters of relationships with women, criminals in particular, both maternal and female mentor figures, and violence against women should be a canon thing goddamnit