jerseydevious:

to be totally honest? in my opinion, bruce’s character was mostly mishandled throughout the 2000s, save for the animated series. for a while, batman’s characterization was just constantly and constantly bland, boring, assholish – it was a trend that people had decided that batman needed to be Batgod, Capable Of All. that’s also when the “prep time” meme was most popular, and the TDK trilogy was coming out with its mr. gritty realism batman, and the collective decision was that batman had become too badass for emotions. the empathy and compassion that had been central to his character for such a long time was scrapped. his dedication to gotham was recolored as a personal, narcissistic obsession, rather than any real desire to help people. 

one of my favorite batman stories, and in my opinion one of the greatest batman stories, is in ‘tec #500, and it’s called to kill a legend. in it, phantom stranger shows up and gives bruce the chance to save his parents in another universe, and bruce, of course, takes it. but the little bruce wayne of that universe doesn’t grow up to be a bored playboy – he becomes batman anyway. that, to me, is the nexus of batman; bruce recognizing that this world needs heroes, and that if there isn’t any – and, in that world, there aren’t even literary heroes, so people from that earth fundamentally can’t fathom what a hero is – you have to make them. batman is a dark hero, but he’s not an anti-hero; his vengeance isn’t who gets punched, it’s the people he saves, and the families they go home to. that’s why i argue that any bruce wayne characterization worth its salt would become batman irregardless of the loss of his parents. maybe it shouldn’t be that the death of the waynes is the cornerstone of any stable timeline, and maybe it should be that the birth of batman is.

i don’t recognize that batman throughout the 2000s – i see a character that’s been stripped entirely of this interesting cross-section between idealism and darkness, and demoted to Loner Asshole Who Punches People To Satisfy His Rage Issues.