What do you think of the changes to Tommy's backstory in BE#26?
#spoilers for Batman Eternal 26, warnings for #child abuse, #abuse
I’m kind of in shock. Sat there with my hand over my mouth for a good couple of minutes as I read the rest of the issue.
New backstory: Tommy = Bruce’s best friend and was obsessed with him. He murdered his parents to be like Bruce, copied how he dressed, flirted with the same girls, even sometimes introduced himself to them as Bruce Wayne (lmao what the fuck Tommy).
Bruce gets mad, the truth comes out: Tommy thinks Bruce can have anything in the world he wants, yet Bruce doesn’t take advantage of that the way Tommy would if he were in his position, and it’s sooOOooOo unfair. Bruce (correctly) realizes that Tommy fuckin sucks and that obviously he doesn’t understand Bruce at all (because Bruce actually CAN’T have the one thing he wants - his parents to be alive again). Now Tommy wants to fuck up all of Bruce’s shit by taking every single thing away from him.
On the one hand, I think it’s a good creative choice, in the sense that they’ve made Tommy’s motivations to be Hush and do what he does much more streamlined, which was, in my opinion, the biggest problem with Hush in the preboot. And I don’t hate the above motivation, it’s actually a pretty interesting/creepy origin.
But on the other hand, they’ve erased almost all of the complexity that was there before:
isn’t a survivor of physical and emotional abuse anymore;
didn’t kill his parents as a means to escape those situations;
didn’t have the experience of his mother enabling his father’s abuse and not protecting him for selfish reasons;
didn’t come to envy Bruce for having freedom (in contrast to Tommy’s life with his controlling, manipulative, and mentally ill mother);
didn’t come to hate Bruce because of his mother constantly comparing Tommy to him;
didn’t come to hate Bruce through paranoid delusion that Bruce collaborated with his mother to ruin his life at age 10;
doesn’t have the same mental illnesses as before (paranoia and anger issues);
his friendship with Bruce isn’t genuine anymore: preboot Tommy viewed himself and Bruce as “a single soul dwelling in two bodies” and that doesn’t seem to be true at all anymore;
Tommy’s anger at Bruce no longer has the component of feeling betrayed by his best friend after making himself vulnerable and (platonically) loving him, only to have Bruce (in his mind) ruin his life.
I am REALLY mourning the last two points — this new Tommy never actually cared for Bruce in a genuine way. Like, new Tommy was obsessed with him and had positive (almost worshipful) feelings toward Bruce, sure — but it was only due to Tommy’s underlying envy of Bruce’s money/status and anger about not having it himself, NOT out of genuine love and affection for Bruce himself.
I guess I just don’t like that pretty much all the things that made Tommy interesting and at least slightly sympathetic — i.e. not just a white boy who feels entitled to being rich/powerful — have been erased.
So in summary, I not angry at DC about the changes, but I feel literally zero affection for this version of Tommy. :/
