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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 121 points 1 week ago

Batman was a CEO of a company.

[-] [email protected] 69 points 1 week ago

not to mention he's a psycho himself. instead of using his seemingly infinite wealth to engage in any real systemic change, he puts on a fucking bat costume and prances at night to beat the shit out of low level goons while letting the biggest maniacs and the ones leading these gangs run away every time.

[-] [email protected] 40 points 1 week ago

instead of using his seemingly infinite wealth to engage in any real systemic change, he puts on a fucking bat costume and prances at night to beat the shit out of low level goons

Some of the better Batman comics introduce him as skilled detective, rather than a superhero whose power is infinite money.

Like any good crime thriller, his work starts with some innocuous crime or tragedy that gets swiftly covered up by corrupt police. Batman steps in as a noir vigilante, listening to the witnesses everyone else ignored and tracing the crime back to the low-level thugs who serve as pawns in a much bigger game. He extorts them for information in order to move on to bigger fish - the crime boss who runs the docks or the sleazy businessman who thought he could pay to make a problem go away - and uncovers a deeper systematic corruption. He runs into various freaks and geeks - your two-faced DA or your web-fingered club owner - who facilitate the city-spanning crime. And, in the climax, he discovers the whole system is rotten, even to the point where his own Wayne Enterprises is complicit in these cruelties.

He discovers the limits of vigilantism, its not just a question of biting into a few bad apples, but tearing the rotten tree out of the earth root-and-branch. And he realizes its too much for one man to change. So he goes back to that first original witness/victim, and he brings him back to his cave. And he sets himself to training this survivor of a broken system how to fight crime like he does.

The best Batman stories aren't the ones where he punches a Clown Prince out of a factory window. Its ones in which he pulls another scared child out of the wreckage of his parents' home and gives him a second chance at life.

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[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Well he did have his parents murdered in front of him as a child.

That shit twists people.

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

instead of using his seemingly infinite wealth to engage in any real systemic change

Do we know this? I don't follow the comics at all but do they ever go into the things Bruce Wayne does as CEO of Wayne Enterprises? I can't fathom we have gone decades without someone touching on this.

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[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

They don't fight their own kind.

[-] [email protected] 107 points 1 week ago

Batman WAS the CEO of companies

[-] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago

And there's no solidarity like class solidarity. Remember Ellen Degeneres hanging out with Bush? Bruce Wayne would've been in that skybox too.

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[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

self punch then?

[-] [email protected] 94 points 1 week ago

Yes the billionaire that spent a shit ton on money on gadgets to beat up poor people would definitely be a champion of the people

[-] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

He also beats up rich people, like the Penguin. The Joker and Riddler and all those guys get their crazy gadgets and hordes of minions somehow. They must be rich af

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[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

That's what happens if you take all your knowledge from memes. Good luck.

[-] [email protected] 81 points 1 week ago
[-] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago

Are we going to pretend that Wayne Enterprises isn't likely 1 of those 100?

[-] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago

I think that's kinda the point of the comic...

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[-] [email protected] 69 points 1 week ago

No he won't, batman fulfills every billionaires fantasy of dressing up in a costume and beating up poor people.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

Yes. Not one really questions why Gotham has such a high crime rate, but where there's poverty there's crime. I think we need a working man's batman.

Someone whose super power isn't having infinite resources.

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[-] [email protected] 58 points 1 week ago

You're aware he is a CEO of a company?

[-] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

I thought Lucius Fox was the CEO. Bruce Wayne is chair of the board.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

Depends on the particular telling I think. DC has IIRC gone both ways with that.

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[-] [email protected] 40 points 1 week ago

Like Lex Luthor, who hes fought on several occasions? Or more like the Court of Owls, one of his recurring set of villains?

[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago
[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Penguin is a mobster first and wealthy second, as a result of being a successful mobster.

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[-] [email protected] 39 points 1 week ago

Batman is a CEO, right?

He just goes after the ones he can beat without much backlash from the public/system.

Imagine if he takes down a CEO. He'd not be able to play batman. Gordon and batman sympathisers would be affected, so Batman's human connection in the police would be lost. He can hack stuff, but might not always be enough.

He can do other stuff, but he can only do it gradually and much more tactfully.

[-] CaptDust 7 points 1 week ago

He did take down Lau in the dark knight tho.

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[-] [email protected] 39 points 1 week ago

You've got Batman mixed up with the Punisher, OP.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago
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[-] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago

I think more Superman.

He is just a working class guy, both his wife and his own job are probably getting replaced by AI, his mother pension keeps getting lower and his dad died because he couldn't afford proper healthcare.

Also his arch nemesis is already a Billionaire.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Martha and Pa both got hooked on Oxy in the 00s, nothing Superman can do about it. He tries writing a big expose as Clark Kent but the Planet kills the story because Perdue buys a lot of ad space with them.

Public got too weird about Supergirl, forcing her to retire as incels kept jumping off of buildings so they could grope her when she saved them.

[-] explodicle 18 points 1 week ago

Watch The Boys

[-] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

If Batman was real today, he'd be Donald Trump.

That's what these (alleged) "super heroes" really are... idealized, ubermensch-esque metaphors for the actual power wielded by the rich and privileged.

In fact, I'd say that Batman is the ultimate Objectivist wet dream - he perfectly personifies the fascist (as Batman) and the capitalist (as Bruce Wayne) in one person. Even Ayn Rand's creepazoid ancap sugar-daddy "heroes" didn't manage that.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

I would like you to explain how Captain America and Superman are reactionary.

Captain America is an artificial warrior created by a Jewish scientist to fight the Nazis, and Superman is a baby sent away in a basket to be raised by not-dead parents who chose to use his privilege to help people.

Zack Snyder is an Objectivist and that's why his Superman movies stink. He doesn't understand the core themes of superheroes, he only understands the spectacle and surface theatrics.

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[-] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

CEOs of companies existed in 1939, and did before. 1939 would have been the time of the great depression, World War 2, fascism, and Batman didn't go after them, he went after the people who needed work and took the last chance they had.

Bruce Wayne is just a form of Bill Gates. Donates millions to charity, good causes, hospitals, fighting diseases, but he still has lots of more money than when he did before all this "charity". The difference is that Gates doesn't put on a mask and go punch the poor of Seattle.

If Batman was real, he'd be a dickhead, worse than Musk or Bezos.

EDIT: Why mine and no one elses? This dude is annoying.

[-] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago

Yeah because when I think of the working class I think lunatics dressed like clowns arming chemical weapon dispersing explosives on the orders of a guy who caught a chemical burn induced skin condition and decided everyone was gonna die suffocating over it.

Batman is a detective, a detective! 99% of what he does has nothing to do with fighting, you just don't hate read the detective work because Batman going out of his way to find the murderer of some nobody with nobody to care enough to ask it be done doesn't feed this bizarre obsession some folks have with making Batman the worst thing ever because he has money as a plot convenience to explain where all his insane tech comes from.

Also, he does constantly do work addressing wealth inequality by backing community efforts to relieve the effects of poverty and by championing community leaders standing up to corruption. Why doesn't it work? Because there's a literal criminal conspiracy of the wealthiest of Gotham dating back centuries that most recent versions of Batman has been at war with since near the outset of his investigative career. Again, read any of the comic books published in the last like 20 years and this would all be entry level stuff.

Also, Gotham's gangs are not normal gangs, like I exampled above, but also consider the sheer level of advanced education or ability to outsmart most folks who have one Gotham's criminal leaders have. Even Joker is heavily implied to have retained advanced chemical engineering training from before he went psycho.

If the idea that even one rich person has genuinely good intentions and does genuine work addressing the causes of criminal activity at every level is that hard for people to grasp, maybe just put the comics down and find another topic because man are you all gonna struggle with basically everything else you're gonna find in the genre.

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[-] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

No he won’t. Batman wasn’t the good guy

[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

"They're the same picture."

[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Yeah I was thinking about this in regards to superhero relevance.

A relevant Spider-Man story today would be one in which Spider-Man is saving people from the NYPD. Webbing up cops doing stop and frisk, terrorizing a racist cop, fucking with the mayor who shut down libraries on Sundays.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

So, seppuku then?

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Inb4 the flood of people who get all their batman knowledge from the Nolan trilogy and the stupid one liners they added to Injustice to try and whataboutism him against superman literally murdering people and installing a fascist autocracy.

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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
351 points (79.5% liked)

Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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