Rereading batman: the knight and oh god this series of panels is just devastating.
I love Lucie and how complicated her mentor-mentee relationship is with Bruce but this? Good lord. Like I doi think she genuinely means well, and context taken in, it makes sense. Bruce almost killed a man to boody pulp. But like, it's just so so so devastating for Zdarsky to put this line here because it introduces the idea of Batman as a curse, a someone who has violence inherently intertwined with his love for humanity. He has to channel that rage and need for vengeance into something concrete (Batman) to then become justice. And like this is a very very common theme and characterisation of Bruce but its introduced to Bruce so lovingly that it is just devastating. In a sense, because of this Bruce only is further determined to fight, because if his mentor said he's made up of violence, isn't that the only way for him to be bigger, to be the change he wants so badly in the world?
This is the point where he really can't go back, he can't go back to alfred, can't go back to Gotham, can't pretend it was just a rebellious stint like all those other times. He has to commit now, to his sabbatical that Lucie is so tenderly sending him away on and he can't go back.
Really it's Zdarsky thats tenderly sending Bruce off onto this journey, and I think it's done so in a tragically beautiful way. To really kick off Bruce's training years with a goodbye kiss and the gentle reminder that he is violence that has no yet been tamed is such a good writing choice. It's so inherently personal to Bruce because if it was some enemy of his or an antagonistic force saying it then Bruce might go to oppose that idea, to prove he's not as violent as they'd claim him to be. But it's Lucie saying that, Lucie, his first ever real mentor. Lucie, who he loves and knows loves him back. And because of that, Bruce will cling onto the sentiment, that he isn't anything more than violence and darkness and that he needs to be feared.
I think though that the more I look at it, the more I break. It is such a loving but hurtful statement from Lucie and it's so clear she's damning him to a violent life despite how much she loves him and I don't think there's anything more tragic than that.
