I will forever be mad that Morrison's Talia al Ghul wasn't a new character or something.
I absolutely love the idea of a eugenicist cult leader mother of Batman's creepy designer son concept.
I love it because Batman is, when written well imo, in conversation with the concept of policing and societally accommodating disability, particularly mental illness, while having a psychosocial disability of his own. Y'know,
Writers have diagnosed Batman with a billion things over the years, most obviously PTSD, but they don't even feel that's enough. I've seen Batman diagnosed by writers with everything from obsessive-compulsive disorder to autism. All of his villains have similar disabilities. His world is known for Arkham Asylum far more so than Blackgate Penitentiary. It's all draped in the aesthetics of social dysfunction and gothic "madness."
Slotting not just a eugenicist, but a kind of pro-natalist, designer baby eugenicist into that as not only a villain, but a villain who has used the bat-cum to bioengineer a perfect baby, who she now shunts onto Batman to raise not as a son but as an heir, as a designed being with a specific purpose in mind, held to impossible standards and for whom failure is not so much a reality of childhood but a defect in a design, is such an excellent concept.
It's all very... Elon Musk and his test tube children, y'know? It's all very, the wretched vibes of the modern "we must outbreed the lesser people" pro-natalist test tube baby movement Elon Musk is discretely a part of.
This is a very real, real-life villain movement that actually exists, has existed for decades, and is extremely solid material to pull from if you want to focus on a disability context for these characters lol.
But it's not Talia al Ghul and the fact that it was never Talia al Ghul meant that DC was simply never going to follow through with this concept once the book was out of Morrison's hands.
It's sort of an impossible situation if you want to tell that story (and you should want to because it's a good story) because women in Batman comics, even femme fatales, often aren't provided that level of depth and complexity. Or weren't at the time. Like yes, okay, Pamela wants to do plants on people because she's mad about the brozone layer or whatever, but they wouldn't really backfill her humanity until Gail Simone got hands on her. Who are you going to use? Nocturna? No. Lady Shiva? Actually fuck off.
But if you use an OC, idk, you don't have that spicy drama of the fact that it's Talia, she's back, and she's acting batshit crazy and out of character.
Maybe this all would've worked if Talia wasn't glocked upside the dome at the end. They could've played it off as her going nuts with a combination of Nyssa torturing and Lazarus Pitting her, decades of cult programming and the horror of getting cult brainwashed into fempregging herself. I dunno.
idk. I have this ongoing frustration that I love what Morrison was going for disability-wise, but the path taken was very silly.
Oh also all the bizarre anti-Asian racism in Morrison's run kinda sours all the conversation about eugenics and disability stuff. What the fuck was going on with The Great Ten? Why was this Chinese lady's power having a lot of babies during the One Child Policy criticism era? Why were all their superhero names bad wuxia title translations? Why the fuck did Morrison thing they were the one who could reintroduce Egg Fu and pull that off in a non-offensive way?
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