people always talk about how batman’s tragic backstory is weak because we know nothing about his parents or his relationship with them,but like, none of that really matters. it’s not about what he lost or what he had, it’s about the EVENT.
it’s about the sudden change, it’s about fate, it’s about trauma. it’s not even about losing people he cares about really, it’s the fact that his life went from sheltered, from comfortable, from being emotionally stable, to everything it is now, in an instant, all because some guy with a gun turned the wrong corner.
and the thing is, the severity of what happened doesn’t matter either. plenty of people are orphans, plenty of people have lost someone they loved, but i think in batman’s case, what turned him INTO batman was not having the tools he needed to deal with it all. he came from a sheltered life, he’d probably never seen blood before, he’d probably never walked down a dark alley at night before, never seen a gun first hand before, never had to think about his life being any different than it was.
and then all of that changed in a split second and it broke him. and i think he beats himself up over how hard he took it, i think he’s mad at himself for being so distraught when so many people he knows have lost so much more than he had that night, and seem to be doing so much better than he is… and i think he’s mad that because of how he’s coping he’s continuing to lose people he loves..
all and all, i think his story is a great example of how everyone handles trauma, no matter how severe, differently.some people need more help, some people need more time,and for some people, it never goes away and it never fades, even if there are plenty of people around them who just want them to be OK.
Congratulations, jokin-around, your post inspired so many thoughts that it actually made me stop lurking and finally get my own tumblr.
Prepare for wall of text!
‘Cause if we’re gunna talk about how Batman is a study in trauma and reactions to it, we gotta mention Robin (specifically mark I). See, if we were to pretend that trauma can be objectively measured, Dick Grayson’s was worse than Bruce Wayne’s. Both witnessed the brutal murder of both their parents, but Dick had far more room to blame himself, plus he was then torn away from everything else he every knew. So why did Bruce turn into the Dark Knight and Dick into one of the most aggressively cheerful, compassionate, and empathetic heroes in the DCU?
Well, they are different people, but also?
Support systems.
Because Dick had Bruce, but Bruce had Alfred.
And I don’t want to denigrate Alfred. Alfred is amazing. He is smart, and tough, and loving. He holds the batfamily together with his bare hands, even though they sometimes react about as well as a sleeping cat being removed from a patch of sunlight.
He is also the butler.
And no matter how much Bruce and Alfred love each other like father and son, neither can escape the fact, because they have both lived their entire lives in a social structure defined by class differences and master/servant relationships, and it controls their actions in ways they probably don’t even recognize.
But there is a reason Alfred’s gestures of affection tend to take the form of food or support. There is a reason his criticisms tend to take the form of sarcasm or passive aggression. That reason is the Rule of Butlering, and the Rules of Butlering put up very thick walls that it would not occur to either Bruce or Alfred to cross.
Sidenote: The Alfred we know is probably less formal than the one Bruce grew up with due to the influence of Dick, and later Jason, who grew up outside of the high-society world. While Bruce and Alfred (and later Tim, probably) would have taken the Rules of Butlering for granted, Dick and Jason would have been less aware of them and more liable to notice when they were problematic. So they trampled all over those master/servant walls, sometimes accidentally and sometimes usually, in Jason’s case deliberately, until those walls became far thinner and far lower.
Point is, the Rules of Butlering meant that Alfred simply could not give Bruce a lot of what he needed.
On to Dick.
Bruce has been clear that he took Dick in to keep Dick from becoming Bruce. See, Bruce knows he his not an emotionally healthy man. Why he does not do more about this is a different post, since this is already a monster. And his whole ethos as Batman is about saving other people from what he went through. And while he may have set out simply to give Dick closure and then keep CPS from traumatizing him even worse, he ended up providing him the support structure he needed to heal.
Because trauma is not just about what happens to you. It’s also about what happens next.
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