Without Bruce adopting Jason, Jason never would’ve become Redhood. Not because Bruce was a bad parent, but because he wasn’t. Bruce’s love and care and his constant struggle at trying to be the best dad for Jason proved to him that not only does good exist in a world he thought it was impossible to, but it was within reach and that he deserved it. And that directly correlates if not caused the feeling of betrayal Jason feels after finding out he didn’t get, what in his mind, was justice and therefore what led to him being redhood.
Bruce’s love for Jason caused Jason’s hate for Bruce.
dudebros won't let bruce and jason be sad and it kinda ticks me off
so recently i read the boy wonder by juni ba and it got me thinking about jason and also the way that Some Dc Fans (aka dudebros) are doing to jason exactly what they do to bruce. which is completely ignoring the character's emotional development in order to view as a "lone badass who is the Only One actually doing anything" and what's interesting is how both of these interpretations don't actually allow the characters to be Sad. they can be angry but they can't be Sad.
more under the cut this got Long
with bruce a very "dudebro" interpretation of his character is basically "Super Cop who doesn't care about personal relationships and is only focus on Justice and who really enjoys knocking people's heads in" and while i also occasionally laugh at jokes about how cartoonishly violent the arkham games can be i feel like it's important to remember that Anger is the only emotion bruce feels. the man grieves! sadness and guilt are Central to his character and they shouldn't be ignored just to turn bruce into a cold calculated machine who's incapable of feeling any other emotion than rage.
and similarly i feel like jason gets reduced to just being "the angry one" by fans (and dc too but. Alas topic for a different post) but not in a necessarily demeaning way. the dudebro interpretation is like. a punisher fantasy where its one "one angry man using his Righteous anger to actually deal with criminals bc everyone else who wont cross the no killing line" and idk if this is just me but this very much gives. SuperCop. its the fantasy of "killing bad people = a better world" which sucks because i feel like it removes a Lot of nuance from jason's character.
jason as a character to me is very interesting because his anger and his grief is Very understandable. but that anger and that grief not automatically make him Right. and i feel like reducing him to "batman but better because he kills people and also he's angry" by just focusing on his anger and his version of justice in comparison to bruce's a lot of complexity gets brushed aside. it's the Exact same problem with bruce where the dudebro interpretations focuses only on the anger and the justice while leaving no room for grief.
and that brings me back to issue #2 of the boy wonder because its like. Finally someone understands that while yes theres a lot of anger in jasons story theres also a lot of sadness.
there are So Many panels that i could point to in order to explain what makes juni ba's jason so great but i feel like these are the most Obvious examples because it really makes you understand that yes jason is angry and he Deserves to be but he's also Sad. theres a reason why damian tells him (quoting dick) "you haven't been abandoned" because he's responding to the loneliness that jason is feeling.
even in panels like this where jason is surrounded by people the framing still feels very isolated. he's in the world but not really apart of it. and that is so important! i understand Why theres such a focus on jason's anger in the same way that i understand why there's such a focus on anger and vengeance when it comes to bruce. both are important parts of their character but they aren't the Only parts.
some final thoughts: i find it Very Interesting how both jason and bruce's dudebro interpretations are Very Similar to each other. the only difference i feel like exists is one side is Neutral of the whole killing people thing and the other side is "yeah killing criminals is Great and batman's an idiot for not doing it" which. i have a Lot of thoughts about punitive justice and how sometimes justifications for jason's action can start veering into some very Strange and very Concerning directions but alas. post for another day.
anyways that is all im sorry if this post is incomprehensible/any typos im writing this at 4am in the morning and i Very Much should be asleep.
I think most Catwoman stans use her as a self insert and that's why they get so mad when someone other than selina is bruce's love interest. For them it's like a personal betrayal. They don't understand batman's appeal as a loverboy.
absofuckinglutly
some anon said to me that Catwoman is supposed to be Bruce’s “femme fatale,” and I genuinely had to pause bc the level of misunderstanding there is wild
and that’s where the problem really is: they don’t understand Selina or Bruce. they project this image of Bruce that’s eerily similar to how certain male Batman fans see him : this hyper-masculine, “alpha,” pro-cop, emotionally closed-off figure. THATS NOT HIM.
Bruce is a romantic, a hopeless one at that. he wants what his mother and father had. and that’s the tragedy of his character. he wants connection, softness, love but he can’t allow himself to have it bc he’s convinced he’ll hurt the person he loves. if anything, that doesn’t make him cold or unlovable, it only makes him more human!!
but yh, i totally agree. they don’t really understand Batman’s appeal as a lover. like i said, Bruce isn’t meant to be this emotionally unavailable “alpha” fantasy; he’s compelling because he’s a lover boy at heart : romantic, soft, yearning, and deeply afraid of hurting the people he loves. ignoring that flattens his character just as much as reducing Selina to a one-note femme fatale.
I also genuinely enjoy several of Bruce’s other love interests : Silver St. Cloud, Julie Madison, Jezebel, among others. I like them for different reasons. I’m not a Batcat fan ( duh ) and I’ve already explained why ( at length, honestly … like I could make a whole podcast episode about it )
THAT SAID, I don’t actually think the perfect Batman love interest has been introduced yet. as much as I love Talia, I don’t realistically see them lasting long-term… maybe in an alternate universe, sure, but not in main continuity ( 😔 ) or maybe they could if they had the right writers …
the point is : I don’t think there’s been a love interest so far who allows Bruce to fully be himself and love deeply without it turning into a fundamental clash of values. every relationship eventually hits the same wall: she can’t accept what he does OR/AND he can’t accept what she does. and neither of them is wrong but it means settling down becomes impossible.
as someone who's suffered through abuse and as someone who's comfort character is batman or more accurately batman comics and media as a whole as i like numerous characters within the series i actually truly despise the plot lines that have bruce be truly cruel to his kids especially jason.
narratively its almost repulsive because when batman first began he wanted to do good. clean up his city help people it wasn't strictly a martyr complex it was a genuine need to do something good. to bring about change to give gotham something it's never had before which was hope. batman became that symbol of hope, justice, and fear (for criminals).
at his core bruce is a good dad thats at least how he began batman was a good dad, he took dick in because he felt a sort of kinship with dick because there experiences were similar and he wanted dick safe. and the circus was no longer safe due to what happened to dicks parents and bruce had the means to take dick in so he did. he gave dick hope by letting him be robin it gave dick a purpose. mind you should bruce be letting children fight criminals no but also (side note the writers created robin so kids could relate to robin so they could see themselves in robin) at the end of the day it gave dick purpose it made him feel in a way safer. he did everything he could to make sure dick had what he needed/wanted.
same thing with jason bruce saw this child steal his tires and laughed out loud for the first time in a long time okay and when he eventually took jason in he gave jason whatever he needed and was showing him that the world wasn't all bad hell i think at even one point jason said robin was magic and had another surogate mom via nocturna. the point is in these issues bruce never mistreated any of them not a single one now how did we go from kids that are taken good care of to what we have now.
i mean some would say it was the grief of losing jason but i'll raise you this in real life people lose people all the time its just part of life but the grief doesn't completely change who you are on a fundamental level we had a somewhat empathetic and caring batman to now a controlling logic fueled bruce who tries to control everything and everyone even to the detriment of his own kids.... like yes bruce was a mess right but the writing was lazy they should've explored more of bruce's grief and then let him heal but they don't they constantly have bruce regress into abusing his kids and being overly cold. and using them as living weapons at times. sometimes it even seems as though he doesn't even care for them at all and i think the moment that we should've seen bruce break out of that rage filled grief cold numbness bullshit was that quote jason says to him.
"i've never seen you hit joker that hard and you hate him".
that shouldve been the moment writers pivoted to have bruce truly begin to heal and better himself narratively it would've made for a richer story instead they constantly exploit jason grief, trauma and loss for shock value and as someone who's been through alot of trauma im tired of it because this has never been what batman should be and right now the only batman depiction we have thats close to the original is absolute batman's comic run written by Scott Snyder. And absolute batman is being put through the grinder with the shit he deals with.
also i wont ever forgive dc for how they handled jason's death because the original writer wanted to do a exploration of grief but whoever was higher up was like no lets do nothing but action sequences and destroy any character growth. also on that note free jason from his shackles to constantly dying and bruce constantly abusing him.
(as always be kind and respectful in the comments section if i see one hateful rude disrespectful or nasty thing in the comments section i will block, report, and delete your comment as well as turn comments off lets keep this a safe place for all batman enjoyers also this is my take on it so no fighting the comments section or ill just delete the post altogether.)
The thing that really gets me about the wasted potential of Jason and Bruce's relationship post Lazarus pit is that the animosity between could really be used as a vessel to talk about the self hatred that both of them feel.
We know that Bruce sees himself in all of the kids he takes in, probably most obviously in the male Robins. The fact that he feels the need to care for and/or mentor every orphan and young vigilante he comes across show his compulsions to save Gotham on the microscopic level and his desire to save himself as a child. Bruce already had concerns about the level of violence Jason had shown and when he comes back as a murderous crime lord not only does Bruce have to contend with the ideas that he got his son killed and that he wasn't there for him when he was brought back to life and trained by the League of Assassins, he also sees his son as what he would become if he allowed himself to kill.
Admittedly I haven't thought as much about this from Jason's perspective but there is the obvious angle that Jason sees himself as a failure and replaceable. Seeing Bruce with a new Robin and feeling the anger that Bruce has for him would only increase that. He was never enough. It was cruel for Bruce to take him in and train him because he was never going to be enough.
I think many writers choose to flatten their relationship somewhat into just anger and hatred. I mean there's plenty of stories that explore a bit of the complex mixing of love and hate there but I just feel like no story I've seen has explored the relationship to its full potential. Of course there's a ton of comic storylines I'm not familiar with so maybe someone has
I just saw a photo of "What persona. Dick Grayson isn't a mask. Not like Bruce Wayne is" from Detective Comics #725 and I find it interesting that Dick and the rest of the bats, with the exception of Bruce, don't wear "masks" per se. They are who they are with or without the domino mask/helmet. The only time I can really think of Dick faking things is when he pretended to be an incompetent BPD cop. How was he able to avoid creating and living, half the time, through a "persona" like "Brucie"?
Oooh, this is a lovely, meaty question. There’s a lot more analysis of Bruce than I planned because let’s be real, it’s kinda weirder for a guy to run around with half a dozen personas than for someone else to run around as himself. I hope you still find it interesting, but if you want to skip straight to the more Dick-centric stuff, head under the readmore.
A simple but significant factor is that Dick thrives on the company of people in a way that Bruce does not. I suspect if you talk honestly to many introverts, you will find they too have an extroverted ‘mask’ they put on to the larger world, though probably not quite so extreme.
Another factor is that the civilian social circles Dick and Bruce travel in are vastly different. Though they each have a reason for being in those circles, that difference itself enables Dick to escape much of the scrutiny that Bruce’s public identity undergoes, because he doesn’t frequently associate with the much more media-hounded elite.
An interesting thing here is that the large difference in social circles between their civilian lives is actually caused by their own personal similarities: they are 100% committed work-a-holics. It’s just that they have differing civilian approaches to their goals.
I want to start with Bruce because as you point out, his use of persona is distinct among the bats and his reasons for using them in part explain why Dick and the other bats do not.
Bruce is a child of privilege, he has always lived a lifestyle of privilege, regardless of the tragedies that have occurred during it, and his default view of the world, through no fault of his own, is natively that of the extreme upper class. This drastically influences his perspective and approach to change, and changing the world is his perpetual goal, the reason he put on the suit in the first place.
Bruce works a top-down society approach toward systemic change, and he works it all the time. This is actually my favorite but woefully under-emphasized part of him: he is not just someone who punches people on the street ‘for justice’, he uses his company, his money, and his social position toward substantial systemic change. This post does a wonderful job covering the ways he does this through his corporations and personal wealth, as does this one. I cannot recommend either enough because I constantly want to push even the most casual Batman fans to understand: Bruce Wayne is not just a violent punchy puncher man. He is a traumatized person genuinely trying to use all his resources including himself to make the world safer.
Detective Comics #725
Bruce has many personas he maintains, and he uses all of them according to what suits his need--Batman for places the law can’t go, Bruce Wayne the CEO pushing for systemic changes, Matches Malone for street information, and Brucie the society high roller for society information and social influencing. He is rarely ever not in a persona and simply ‘Bruce’.
His top-down perspective of enacting change are what dictated the usage and necessity of these personas. He has the means and capacity to basically disappear from society if he so chose--he in fact does so to train during his younger years so successfully they don’t even know how long he was actually gone.
The Batman Files
So he doesn’t need the personas. Not Bruce Wayne, CEO, or Brucie, or any of them really, to protect his identity. That tells us that Brucie is a deliberate choice he made at some point. He could have been a recluse billionaire Batman indefinitely. Even though he fully has the status and means to not maintain a job or a persona or, let’s be frank, a life outside the mask at all, it’s his own work-a-holicness that led to the creation of his public personas. He’s an obsessive strategist, so if Brucie is a choice, that leads us to why?
Bruce does many philanthropic things with his money, but he isn’t the only rich person around, especially not in a city as old and corrupt as Gotham. But he’s one of the very few ones doing good with it.
The comic you mentioned has a very beautiful moment where Bruce touches on that, and in full context you can feel how consumed he is by this goal of creating the Gotham his parents would have wanted. Batman mentions he never sees himself in that place, and the morbid interpretation is that the city kills him before he reaches it, but the hopeful interpretation is that in that shining city, Bruce Wayne and Batman and Brucie and all his masks will no longer be needed.
Detective Comics #725
Back in the old days they’d call it noblesse oblige: the inferred responsibility of privileged people to act with generosity and nobility toward those less privileged. Thomas and Martha Wayne ingrained this feeling of responsibility into Bruce by example, and as all things related to them, he obsesses over it. It urges him to fulfill expectations within segments of society he finds onorous for the betterment of society as a whole in order to carry out their unfinished works.
Enter Brucie.
Brucie serves a two-fold purpose. Since Bruce has chosen to maintain personas among society, it becomes a false face to justify any oddities Batman might bring into the life of Bruce Wayne by setting himself up as a eccentric, popular social scion. But that persona itself also allows him to manipulate the upper crust of society.
I have some insider perspective on the kind of society events Brucie attends. They’re all about the who’s who of making connections, name-dropping and networking, and unspoken class-based elitism. Charity events among the upper class have these things at the forefront and the cause is the background. You don’t get your hands dirty, you don’t go out and make change yourself, you pay money to be socially seen and sometimes it happens to go towards a philanthropic cause. If you want to raise money from the rich and keep people with deep pockets coming in the door, you have to have social currency yourself. This is where, and why, Brucie comes in. I believe Brucie ws crafted to maintain Batman’s cover but still attempt to carry on his parents’ legacy to grease the wheels of the rich in the directions he chooses: one of generosity towards those less privileged.
Superman/Batman #51
The inevitable flaw of Bruce’s approach to his personas and their philanthropy is that in a city rife with corruption, money distributed from the top has many opportunities to disappear well before it reaches the bottom. As in many of ways they are complements to each other, Dick’s approach balances that out, because his approach to helping his fellow man starts out at the street level...literally.
Nightwing #153 (Nightwing: The Great Leap)
Dick, we know, does not come from privilege. His mother was from a middle class family before she joined the circus, and despite being world famous athletes, most circus workers are lower to middle class. The people he grew up with, was comfortable with, were all working folk who expected everyone to pull their weight right alongside each other. He enacts this everyone-together approach in almost all aspects and phases of his life.
Batman #615
Even once he had settled into being Robin and adapted to living at the manor, he didn’t feel belonging to a culture of privilege, materialism, or high society. He preferred shotgun in the limo to chat with the driver to riding fancy in the back. Once he was able to start making his own decisions about where and how he lived, despite having both Bruce’s money and then later inheriting a substantial amount of his own, he chose mostly lower-class communal places.
Batman Black and White #6
Dick also doesn’t see the value of throwing money at a problem when there is an option to fix it with his own hands. We see this frequently, from building his own car instead of buying a finished one or outsourcing the work, to deciding the best way to clean out the BPD was to start at the bottom and work his way up (literally), to quitting college because his classes never got prioritized over crimesolving. Most of his day jobs ended for similar reasons.
Nightwing #153 (Nightwing: The Great Leap)
Despite the showmanship training, he gravitates away from spotlight on the rich and wealthy, who are notoriously the kind of people who do not get their hands dirty or go out and take care of things themselves, and prefers to find or build communities around the kind of people who do.
Finally, Dick is an extrovert. He doesn’t need to act extroverted as Brucie does because he is extroverted. He likes people and likes being around people. Whether by conscious choice or not, he tends to put himself in situations where he is surrounded by people in nearly all aspects of his life. He chooses apartment buildings whose occupants frequently pass each other on the stairs; jobs that involve interacting with many co-workers, patrons, or students; and collects superhero teammates like Boy Scout badges. And all of these behaviors come very naturally to him.
He doesn’t need a mask or a role or a persona for those kind of interactions; his mask is pre-supplied as “neighbor” or “co-worker” or “teacher” by the situations he puts himself in. It helps make him an exemplary leader, because just by acting authentically to himself, he automatically builds up little communities around him any time he arrives somewhere.
Bruce, on the other hand, is an introvert. For him, interacting with people isn’t easy, automatic, or comfortable unless it has a purpose, but as a strategist, he knows the necessity of human interaction as a catalyst to achieving dynamic change. So he adapts personas to suit people’s expectations. Extroverts have more social currency; the life of the party can generate more resources than a brooding wallflower.
So, it boils down to just a few elements: Dick believes in living and interacting at the street level to accomplish the things that he wants to, and he is extroverted enough that the level of social interaction that entails is not a burden to him. He surrounds himself with the types of people he is more familiar or perhaps more comfortable with, which happens to keep him further out from the media’s eye than associating with the upper crust does. The lower profile is more incidental than intentional, but it lessens his need to have a cover story for every single bruise and lets him get away with even less of a ‘persona’.
Bruce, on the other hand, is introverted and follows a more classist view that systemic change needs to be effected from the top down. His personas are more of a self-assumed duty than a necessity, as a way of trying to carry out his parents’ legacy. Any of his children could have chosen to follow his path in business or the high society limelight, but the sense of obligation toward it is something personal to him that most of them don’t share.
There are some people who think Selina beating Talia in a sword fight was actually a good feat and not exaggeration Talia, a woman who was raised by assassins her whole life, and these are not just random assassins… She is Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter. I mean, come on guys.
The combat part was, too, ridiculous in my opinion. Selina calling her “the ex” and beating her meanwhile Talia not even fighting back properly? Not saying Selina can’t win in a combat fight but at least give Talia more credit. She can at least do some self defense. Tom King vs thinking without racism filling his mind.
I meaaaan… he’s prob an american w-r cr!minal, so yh, his writing reflects a lot of that. His worldview shows, and it shows hard. His version of Selina is white ( unless it was stated otherwise in the comic ? can't remember ) which fits a larger pattern in how he frames power and who gets to be centered as “right.” I usually don’t obsess over Selina’s race bc, historically, she was written as white, so it’s not as foundational an issue as it is with a character like Talia. but even setting that aside, the writing itself was just… bad. like genuinely bad
the constant “bat.” “cat.” “bat.” “cat.” exchange was painfully cringe like it was trying to sound iconic and romantic but instead came off as shallow and embarrassing?? It reduced both characters to caricatures instead of treating them like fully realized ppl with history and depth.
and that fight… omg, where do I even start??? it was clearly written to elevate Selina at Talia’s expense, turning Selina into this weird white-savior figure while completely flattening Talia’s competence. just this morning, I’ve seen someone on this app argue that the sword fight was actually “realistic” for Selina’s character (lmao)
Selina is an EXCELLENT street fighter. that’s her lane. she’s adaptable, clever, fast, dirty when she needs to be. she knows how to survive and how to hold her own in close combat BUT she is not an assassin. she wasn't trained from childhood by the League of Assassins, she wasn't raised inside one of the most deadly cults on the planet.
Talia, on the other hand, is Ras al Ghul’s daughter for a reason. she’s been trained her entire life, she’s older, more disciplined, more experienced and canonically one of the most dangerous fighters in the DC universe. sword fighting is literally her domain and so putting Selina against her in a sword fight and having Selina win isn’t empowering.... it’s absurd.
what makes it worse is how the scene is framed. Talia is written like a cartoon villain, delivering dramatic monologues instead of actually fighting, while Selina gets smug, quippy one-liners. Talia barely even engages, as if the narrative itself is sabotaging her so Selina can look superior.... It’s lazy writing disguised as “character work.”
and the subtext is gross. Bruce calls Talia “the most dangerous woman alive” and instead of letting that stand, the narrative immediately undermines it by forcing Selina into a dominance display like the story is jealous on Selina’s behalf. It turns into a bizarre competition where Selina has to be positioned as the “better” “stronger” “more valid” woman and that’s not feminism, that’s insecurity!!!
Ra's Al Ghul would actually have a heart attack if he saw that fight... and frankly, so would anyone who understands either character beyond surface-level fandom fantasies......
Borderline Personality Disorder in The Batman (2022)
I wrote this in 2022 for a class so I don't fully agree with everything written as it was a while ago and I was trying to get a grade but it's an interesting character study
In the 2022 film The Batman both Bruce Wayne/The Batman and Edward Nashton/The Riddler display signs of borderline personality disorder. While both men fit the criteria for BPD in their own way, this section will predominantly focus on Edward Nashton. Nashton is a white male who appears to be in his late 20s to early 30s. He is shown to have no close personal connections and has little interaction with the outside world other than posting online videos to his approximately 500 followers, communications with the press following his elaborate murders, and a perceived, and in reality one sided, partnership with The Batman. What is known of Nashton’s political ideology is solely centered around the political corruption in the City of Gotham. He has no faith left in the political system or those who participate in it. Though he is a criminal in his own right, the same as his victims, he completely devalues their lives and sees them as nothing more than scum to be cleansed from Gotham and vessels to deliver his message through. He has dedicated his life to exposing the corruption of the Gotham elite due to how he feels they have failed him. Early in his life Nashton was orphaned, the exact circumstances are unknown, and he describes his time at the orphanage as unbearable, stating that he would often wake up to rats biting at him and that at least one of the infants would die every winter. This kind of trauma early in one’s life undoubtedly has profound effects on development and mental health. It is quite obvious from Nashton’s behavior in the film that BPD is not the only disorder caused by his past trauma; he likely has PTSD and displays a high amount of delusional thinking that may not be attributable to borderline personality disorder.
Nashton is fixated on both Bruce Wayne and The Batman, unaware that they are the same person. He despises Bruce Wayne due to the fact that while he was left suffering in an overcrowded, underfunded orphanage while all of Gotham mourned the loss of Thomas and Martha Wayne and sympathized with Bruce Wayne, alone in his ‘palace,’ as The Riddler calls it. Nashton does not feel that Bruce has suffered as he has and that Bruce must pay for the sins of his father. On the other hand, The Riddler idolizes The Batman for his mission to rid the City of Gotham from crime and corruption. He feels that they are one and the same. When Nashton finally meets The Batman, he is overjoyed that his mission is finally coming to fruition, but when The Batman rejects him, Nashton moves very quickly from panic and denial to total devaluation of The Batman and his abilities. Another,albeit lesser, example of Nashton’s idealization in relationships is his reaction to his fellow prisoner in Arkham Asylum. While Nashton is distressed at The Batman’s rejection, another prisoner begins to offer words of comfort to him. Nashton immediately latches on to this and begins to envision the man as a great friend and supporter without ever seeing him. This clearly illustrates the tendency for those with borderline personality disorder to focus on extremes (idealization or devaluation) in their interpersonal relationships. While Nashton does not display self damaging behavior in the typical sense, it can be argued that his fixation on The Batman, the way he destroys his home to enact his revenge, and his sacrificing himself to the Gotham Police Department (who are notoriously corrupt and not unlikely to desire revenge on Nashton after he murdered the police commissioner) after his plan is completed are all behaviors that are not in his own best interest and at times are damaging to his own wellbeing.
