Why are people so intent on this meme?
Bruce Wayne is literally the kind of .1%er that can only live in fiction: an actual good one, that uses his wealth ethically in all the ways no one with that degree of wealth would ever do in the real world.
Not unlike how Batman is the ideal fantasy vigilante taking the law into their own hands (i.e. uncorruptible, unbiased, and uncompromising in his ethics), Bruce Wayne is the ideal fantasy billionaire that isn’t a drain on humanity.
Neither are realistic, neither exist in real life, and that’s the whole damn point. It’s aspirational and escapist.
It’s the reason why Lex Luthor is a villain and Bruce Wayne isn’t.
People are exactly as intent on imagining Batman as a real world evil billionaire, as they are on imagining Elon Musk as a comic book superhero billionaire.
A lot of people consuming superhero media are kids who don’t know how the world works. They’re learning about the real world from paying attention to the mundane parts of comics and movies. I learned what an insurance agent is from watching The Incredibles. Most kids these days know what a Walkman is because of GOTG.
Kids know Batman isn’t real because they don’t see anyone talking about real batman in real life. But they hear grownups saying billionaires have their best interests at heart, so they don’t question Bruce Wayne.
If your argument is we can have any unreasonable myth we want in comics, why not have Aryan Man, the genetically perfect superhero created by white supremacist eugenics? Batman is a problematic myth on par with Aryan Man.
uncorruptible and uncompromising in his ethics.
Yet that’s the source of so much suffering because the system is incapable of confining super villains. Yeah comic code rogues gallery etc.
How do you know he uses his wealth ethically? When you’re a billionaire, your money is not sitting in a bank. Your money is out there working for you, growing.
If you have a billion then the very act of keeping it all means you are making someone else life harder.
The many examples of him doing so in the source material?
Sure, every billionaire does some philanthropy. But most of their money is out there being invested in high profit industries like war and oil.
Just off the top of my head. During the cataclysm arc when Gotham was destroyed by an earthquake and the government and all the other corporations pulled out Bruce was going to fund everyone to start businesses by himself in order to rebuild . For an entire city. That’s not just “some philanthropy”. He wouldn’t have had the resources to do that if his corporation was not highly profitable.
How is his Corp profitable then, huh?
It’s not like they put the balance sheets in the comics but generally it’s due to being widely diversified and into cutting-edge technologies and Lucias Fox being a good manager.
He was trying to save his love by freezing everything and she wanted plants to become the dominant lifeform on the planet. So yes, we’re rooting for the billionaire that has a better adjusted moral compass than those two yahoos.
Thats just billionaire propaganda.
The whole movie changes if it’s a puff piece commissioned by Bruce Wayne after the fact…
I would watch a Batman movie that’s framed as propaganda by Bruce Wayne. At least it would be better than the trainwreck that was Batman & Robin.
I never understood this… Poison ivy isn’t a misunderstood anti-hero, she’s a villain. She’s not a villain because she wants to save the world from pollution or climate change.
She’s a villain because she’s a mass-murderer and terrorist.
Does killing the billionaire solve anything though? The system will just put some other stooge in his position instead. Systemic change is the only way to solve this.
Ask France if it works.
Didn’t the revolution spiral out of hand, allowing Napoleon to seize power and crown himself emperor, leading to a series of wars that killed millions of people?
Look, it might have got a little out of hand but ask yourself:
Does the HRE or the French Monarchy still exist?
Not since the Third Republic. But directly after Napoleon, power went back to the monarchy for like 50 years, so I’m not sure how much credit the guillotine deserves.
A 50 year relapse to eradicate an infection that lasted for 1300 years ain’t bad.
The reality is the French Revolution is why most of Europe is democratic now, it demonstrated more than anything else until the Russian Revolution that the “commoners” could not only win a war against the entrenched nobility, but that those nobles should be very, very fuckin scared of the idea and maybe get on board with the idea of a constitutional monarchy if nothing else.
As I get older, the more I feel like Batman is billionaire propaganda. Like I get that it’s fiction. But they want us to root for the billionaire and that fucking annoys me.
My man, if every billionaire had the ethics and morals of batman we’d be a much better place.
Not everything in life is a conspiracy theory. Him being a billionaire is a cool concept precisely because most billionaires are assholes. Not to mention it’s the only way he could afford all his gadgets.
He could instead afford to do something significant about climate change, but no. “He’s a cool guy.”
Bruce Wayne already is.
He is the single biggest charity funder in the entirety of Gotham, he helps the homeless, gives criminals jobs so they can get their life straight, he is like the complete opposite of our billionaires.
Read this comic if you want to see the real Batman at the end:
https://mediachomp.com/harley-quinn-and-poison-ivy-save-a-little-girl/
When Batman was created no-one even knew the term climate change…
Again, it’s a fucking comic ffs
I felt they were using the fact that Batman is an orphan, and being a billionaire is an excuse to explain how he can fund his… hobby?
But I could see the billionaire propaganda aspect as well. I guess it depends on the author’s intent.
Basically. Batman being broke without a regular job is the Punisher minus the guns.
The wealth part does read differently in 2024 after 44 years of Reaganomics and screening for psychopathic tendencies when looking for CEO candidates.
I definitely doubt the average comic author is pro billionaire. I think having an absurdly rich protagonist is just interesting for plot, not just does it easily justify the funding, but it easily generates a lot of plot hooks.
Growing up, I absolutely loved Peter Parker as just being the average broke kid, but I was never excited by the plot that generated that was largely school drama or conversations in small apartments.
On the other hand, there are plenty of cool things that Bruce Wayne gets to do. Sometimes he blends in with high society functions and you get an almost James Bond style investigation and sometimes you capture that Dracula style recluse skulking in his enormous manor, and both of those are very evocative even before you consider how it funds his heroics.
The question is what were they thinking on 1939, any comics that came after Batman was popular are just stuck with the formula.
Nah it’s just an excuse for where his character gets his cool toys.
This is the subtext of the Nolan trilogy. Batman makes everything worse and literally everyone tells him that to his face, but he doesn’t listen due to belief in his own exceptionalism. The only good thing he ever does is at the end of the third movie he fucks off forever.
It’s right-wing propaganda in general.
Who’s the hero? One of the richest men in the city.
Who are his allies? The cops.
Who are the enemies?
- An immigrant who wears a mask
- A psychiatrist
- A psychologist
- A female environmentalist
- A male environmentalist
What happens when his enemies are defeated? They are sent to a mental hospital… a mental hospital that is falling apart and chronically underfunded. That leads to them escaping, giving Batman another excuse to go beat them up.
If Mr. Wayne is a billionaire and very influential in city politics, the way they always portray him, shouldn’t he be advocating tax increases on the wealthy, and using that money to fix up the city… or at the very minimum to fix up Gotham Asylum?
Who are his allies? The cops.
No, just one cop. Right? I’m not super familiar with all versions of Batman lore but I’m pretty sure it’s a typical plot point that only Commissioner Gordon likes Batman.
Commissioner Gordon is his buddy, and they work together. But, it’s not like he’s otherwise suspicious of the cops. Instead he thinks the problem is just a few corrupt cops but that the overall police institution is wonderful.
