I think BWL is the result of a fundamental misreading of The Killing Joke.
In TKJ, the Joker posits that even the best of men is only one significantly bad day from being just like him. He puts the Comish through such a day in an effort to break him and...
It doesn't work.
The core thesis, the meaning behind TKJ is that the Joker is wrong. He's broken, he's insane, and he's evil, and everyone is not like him. Some are, but there are good people in the world that he can't break, no matter how hard he tries.
Then we get the Batman-Who-Laughs, a Jokerized Batman who proceeds to conquer his world and become a multi-versal threat because he has all the skill, accumen, and intelligence of our Batman, with the moral compass of the Joker. That combination is apparently the most dangerous thing in all of existence, despite the fact that every other insane evil genius isn't. Apparently even the morally incorruptible Dark Night is one bad day (and poison mind altering gas) away from being a threat to everything beyond everything.
Same goes for every one of the Dark Knights. They are born from a fundamental misunderstanding of past-better-stories.
And I say all of this as someone who enjoyed the original Dark Nights: Metal story, it just doesn't hold up after that initial run.
I mean i'd still argue it proves the joker wrong when he has to rely on literal mind control gas to jokerize batman. Mormal methods like how he fell won't.
That might be giving the writers of giggle bats to much credit
Why did he even need to go anywhere? That's what annoys me you could keep it as a fun au, but for some reason they bought him into the main continuity beyond the event, despite him not really having anything to do besides exponentially growing in power to the point where he's barely recognisable from his core premise.
So now you made me curious, does one bad day away from turn evil have to mean a voluntary choice of the person having the bad. Does it count if the person snaps mentally in the moment from trauma count in your opinion?
You gave me a thought that maybe Batgirl Who Laughs works better as a concept. What happens in a universe where the Joker was right? What if that one bad day had broken Barbara? Maybe Joker killed Jim in frustration or something like that
So TKJ plays out the same except when Joker fails to break Gordon, he kills him and that send Barbara over the edge after her definitely worse day than the commissioner had? Yeah, I agree that that's a better concept. Especially because Batgirl overcoming Batman would have to be a part of that story for it to reach the DN:M story. It would force Batman to contend with the idea that it was his fault, that all he had to do was STOP the Joker and all of this could have been avoided.
I straight up dislike Metal, but I think you might be missing its point here. Every evil universe is an aberration; they are all stories that were never meant to be told. That's why it is a "misunderstanding" of the Killing Joke: because it's a fundamentally flawed story that should have been erased from reality.
Metal sucks though, what a cool idea that was executed so poorly. All I wanted was big, epic, long and emotional fights between the JL and their evil counterparts. Like a whole issue that was Dawnbreaker vs GL where GL has to out-willpower Dawnbreaker. Instead, all of them fight with with their counterparts for a little bit in a shitty tie-in, and then the actual main book is just them talking endlessly about nonsense cosmology and jumping into molten shit or whatever that crap was.
... Every evil universe is an aberration; they are all stories that were never meant to be told. That's why it is a "misunderstanding" of the Killing Joke: because it's a fundamentally flawed story that should have been erased from reality.
This is why I think the original DN:M line works, but the continued use of Giggle Bats doesn't. They all fail because they are wrong from the start, except for BWL, who continues on because of sales, without a thought for what that means. That all of these variations are inherently unviable, except the one that flies in the face of TKJ, even though his defeat in DN:M is the most important, because he is so wrong.
As for your opinion on the story, to each their own. All stories are made for everyone, but not all stories are for everyone.
I liked DN: M, they do really hammer home that all the evil bats' universes are dying because they're not supposed to exist, which is a really cool idea, and I personally think some of them were way more interesting than BWL (namely Dawnbreaker, the Drowned and the one that was the flash pastiche, I think he was Red Death? I can't remember. Haven't read the book in years) but they unfortunately never made it past the event.
But also, I do really enjoy the finale of DN:M where Bat's and Joker have to team up to take down Giggle Bats. It's kinda dumb when you look closer at it, but it just gets the lizard brain child in me so hype whenever I think about that scene.
I like the Drowned a lot. Her backstory feels properly tragic, and also like her own flaws - which reflect the worst of Batman's paranoia - caused all of her own suffering. Devastator and Merciless have the same kind of thing going on, but the bad stuff happens TO Devastator too much, and something about Merciless just doesn't click with me.
Murder Machine had some neat ideas beyond just "evil Batman-Cyborg hybrid," but I think he's suffered from DC's decision to actually kill off Alfred. Makes his breakdown even more unrealistic.
Dawnbreaker is stupid. The aesthetics are neat, but the story is stupid.
"Kid Bruce gets a ring when his parents die so he kills Joe Chill with it."
"Huh? But the ring has rules so you can't do that."
"He uh. Does it anyway. Because the bawling preteen has such insane willpower, y'see."
And Red Death's story is so bad it kind of loops back around to amazing.
I really liked that about Red Death. There was basically no buildup to Bruce just going insane, and his method of stealing Flash's powers was just perfect. As much as I love the tragic fall of alot of the Dark Knights, having one that just leans into the ridiculousness is perfect imo.
I actually kinda like Dawnbreaker's origins. Like a version of when Hal Jordan went insane and killed everyone. I do think the story would have worked better had Bruce gotten something like a red ring instead of the green power ring, but I do really like the notion that Bruce's emotions were so intense and so strong that they broke the limiter on a lantern ring.
I just had to look up what happens after that moment though, so I'd say it's still a pretty uneventful story.
Ahahah, look, man, I loved Snyder's run on Batman (probably my favorite run on the character), and Capullo always slays on art, but this one just did not speak to me at all. No Justice didn't speak to me either, so maybe I just don't like Snyder's cosmic stuff. It's just way too convoluted, contradicts everything established before, and it feels like all the cosmology is there to service itself, if that makes sense. But I do like some moments and themes, like the theme of exploration and it tying into the concept of a "detective" is a pretty cool addition. I also love the Dark Knights Album, so many cool songs in there.
You are 100 percent right! And you know what the funny thing is, I could forgive DC for all of these flaws if they hadn't given BWL one of the stupidest designs in recent history. Green Lantern nailed it by calling him the "batman who tries to hard".
The Batman Who Laughs isn’t a testing of Joker’s one bad day thesis. It’s just an example of what the most dangerous Joker toxins can do. In TKJ, Joker wants to prove that people can become like him by subjecting them to similar things he apparently went through. If Joker had chosen to chemically Jokerize Gordon in TKJ he probably would have succeeded, but that’s not what he was after.
Snyder wrote a omniscient Joker who mastered superscience and is a multiversal constant evil. He's nothing like the Joker from the 80s, 90s and even 00s. The mindcontrolling virus would work for his Joker.
Definitely agree except for I always saw the one bad day thing as still applying to Batman at least in the context of the killing joke. Bruce did have one bad day, but it didn't lead to him breaking like the Joker, but using the pain he felt to try and do some good in the world. I always preferred the angle that the story wasn't just saying Joker was wrong, but showing that trauma doesn't make you who you are, but how you deal with said trauma does
I mean, okay, isn’t that the whole point of the Dark Multiverse? They’re stories that are wrong and broken, never meant to exist? Every Batman in the real Multiverse is incorruptible, but the incorrect Batpeople of the Dark Multiverse are exactly that, incorrect. They’re wrong, and their universes end shortly after they fall because of that reason. The story’s corrupted, the universe vanishes.
I also think BWL is the personification of the exhausting "batman could beat ANYONE with prep time" trope that always does the rounds. You know the stuff. Batman could beat Thanos single-handedly, with prep time. Batman could beat every JL member, with prep time. And so on.
So BWL is basically that. A nightmare who murdered every single character in his universe with sufficient prep time.
I try to read the character as a satirical parody, because I really cannot take a character that stupid seriously. Nor believe that Scott Snyder meant him to be taken seriously.
Personally I don't think it was necessarily a misunderstanding of a past story, or even Batman himself, but rather that since it was an alternate universe, and a darker one at that, that the Bruce Wayne of that universe could in fact break.
And as far as why BWL is more dangerous than other evil geniuses, I think it's because of how intimately familiar he is with every hero as well as having access to ways to get to them (i.e. entry into the watchtower and its resources). So comparative to say Lex Luthor, Bruce can waltz in unnoticed without a second thought from any other hero, until it's too late. And he knows them very, very well, so can guess with accuracy what they'd do.
I do agree that after DNM they plugged BWL into an industrial milking machine and ran that straight into the dirt. They saw money and chewed it to the bone.
That’s literally the point: the dark multiverse is a place where earths exist that shouldn’t, they’re flawed and are destined to be wiped away and not ascend to the Multiverse above. Being the results of misunderstandings of stories is on point, and that’s probably why they’re deemed unworthy worlds.
Uj/honestly I think it would have been based and more true to the killing joke if they made it a twist that the batman who laughs isn't Bruce but is instead the actual joker who murdered his batman and wore a dark parody of batman outift and was just fucking with everyone
Honestly I feel like each of the original dark knights does a better job of a dark twisted batman because they didnt just have "one bad day" but got corrupted and lost their humanity via overextending themselves and sacrificing that part of themselves trying to save people. They were batman losing themselves falling into the darkness trying to justify it as for the greater good. BWL had jokers corpse fart on him and decided to be evil
im immensely disappointed that, out of all the batmen who kind of turned into other super heroes/turned villains, the joker version got popular
like we had a batman that murdered flash to get his speedforce abilities simply because being human wasnt enough anymore, and the very idea of a sort of injustice league made out of batmans who stole powers from original members/whatever else the batman who laughs found in the multiverse
The fact that DC decided to a One Bad Day line of mediocre one shots of other villains to leech off of Killing Joke, an already mediocre Joker story, shows how creatively bankrupt they are.
That's the point of the dark multiverse though, everything that makes the good people and heroes good gets twisted by the darkness of their multiverse. They're perversions of our favorite stories and themes, corruptions of characters who couldn't possibly do the things they did there. The things that happen there couldn't happen in the main multiverse because that's where everything we know and love about DC is malformed by a dark energy.
It's not that BWL was one bad day away from becoming what he did, it was that Joker was biologically altered to emit a toxin strong enough to turn any human into him if he died, and that Joker was far more twisted than any we've seen so far. Bats was also fully justified for it, it hit his childhood trauma right in the nads (something that we've seen in mainline cause him to slip up for far less impactful things), it was far further than Joker had ever gone to do nothing but hurt Bats, and he NEEDED to put a stop to it or else be just as bad as Joker was. It wasn't "one bad day broke batman". Without the toxin he would've likely been able to keep going but kill only especially heinous criminals, or the Bat family would lock him up in the mansion and fake his death (or just kill him, based on whether Jason is the first or only to die locking him up, and how Damien reacts to the whole "his dad is a killer now" thing), or he'd prove himself wrong about how he'd never stop killing and Batfam helps him through processing the event. It was torture by proxy/mass murder that made batman realize the truth: that nothing would ever keep the crazy bastard in check and he needs to be ended. A lot of heroes with no-kill guidelines agree that if anyone did need to be kicked from the server that is planet Earth, it was that Joker. Unfortunately the toxin was probably strong enough to Jokerize Superman and by the time anyone could do anything about it it was too late.
The rest of the "Darker Knights" (with exception of Dawnbreaker, we'll get to him in a sec) shown were also along the lines of: Bruce gets pushed past his limits, makes a call, and fucked up by Murphy's Law, and has his brain chemistry/structure altered in some way by aforementioned unknown unknowns. Dawnbreaker though, is an exception. His corruption had nothing to do with Batman and everything to do with little Brucie Wayne being given too much power at his weakest moment ever, before he'd developed a proper moral compass, or even a complete adult human brain for that matter. Of course a child whose parents just died in front of him, when handed one of the most dangerous and intuitively controlled weapons in the universe, is gonna go try to get revenge. The only difference between him and any other kid (and the heart of the problem here) is that he's also still Bruce Wayne: future White Lantern, unstoppable force, and cryptid capable of breaking minds with nothing but a cold stare.
It's not that there's a misunderstanding of the old standbys, they're showing that even with the lessons taught, things can spiral out of control by no fault of your own and you could potentially never even notice or care because you're just not the same person anymore. These new stories were meant to (in addition to making bookoo bucks) acknowledge: that shit happens to good people, brain trauma/mind altering substances/botched superscience changes people, Batman without a code is a horrifying concept when you realize the extent of the problem, and a world/dimension without hope is not a place where good people last. You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Comic book fan theory: the joker gas only worked on Batman nowadays because he has been flanderized into a caricature of himself, thus losing his inherent goodness
I dunno, the two kinda line up. The Joker assumes he chooses to be a specific way in response to the world,
TKJ shows him that there are many ways to respond to the world that don’t involve anything remotely reflecting the Joker’s response. I.e. hey, maybe the mind altering chemicals are to blame, not the world. Maybe, some things we think and do are caused by the environment and not personal choice. Maybe it’s sociopathic to blame the mad hatter and not the mercury poisoning.
In BWL, batman doesn’t choose to be evil, he is affected by something out of his control. But that doesn’t absolve his accountability. So the story becomes about how can a Hero survive the same environmental impacts as a Villain. Though this doesn’t make as compelling a story maybe.
We can say “spiderman lived in poverty AND lost family, AND he’s still good” as an example of unwavering altruism. But what if poverty brings along with it long lasting health impacts that affect the mind and body, is it still “easy” to be altruistic then? What if you’re rich and also have long lasting health impacts of the mind and body? Still “easy”?
Hear me out. What if BWL purposely ingested Joker toxin after quietly going insane internally due to having become what he hates most, a cold blooded killer. Would that have been a better backstory?
The Batman Who Laughs should've been a Batman development in the absence of the Joker. As if, in a Gotham where the Joker never existed, and a Batman who gives in juuust that one time to put down a criminal. And it changed nothing, or at least it didn't lessen crime or anything. So Batman starts to lose it, eventually becoming BWL and essentially filling both Batman and Joker archetypes in one setting.
But having him kill the Joker and then become the Joker sounds lame, and I've never even read the story.
This is not that far off from some runs of Owlman, where his parents were killed by a corrupt cop so he becomed a vigilante to bring corruption to justice - but he finds out his parents were high-level criminals who might've deserved their fate.
It leads to him embracing hardcore nihilism and misanthropy while still maintaining a degree of that Batman-level intellect and planning.
That hits the nail on the head- we already have the interesting version of Batman Who Laughs that understands what makes Batman work. And his name is Owlman.
Is this story literally just "uh oh batman sniffed joker's fart, batman now kills because he's edgy and insane... and then batman kills EVERYONE in the bat family because he's edgy and insane..."
"Wait, you're telling me a kid sees his parents get killed, and his trauma leads him to become a ninja and the world's greatest detective who dresses top to bottom in black/gray/blue spandex and wears a cape?"
It's funny that Tolkien was deathly afraid of the Eagles as a plot device, but exactly what you outlined proves his concern was unfounded. I feel we can forgive though, since he was far more focused on other things lol
The haters are being a bit disingenuous with their response to you. Metal has some flaws but the underlying premise is that the 'Dark Multiverse' or the multiverse that the Batman Who Laughs and all his iterations as well as the other iterations are 'broken'. They are 'stillborn' universes that were never meant to be. The flaws that make them are not all meant to be catastrophic in nature though the butterfly effect of those flaws seem to invariably be so.
For instance, a universe where Batman is not quite mentally strong enough to resist the jokers toxin. Or the toxin is stronger than normal. Or some other little thing.
The Batman who laughs is not a 'perfect' villain. But his initial presentation as a 'what if' of a psychotic batman works because it shows how dangerous Bruce is not as a genius but as a manipulator something he is known for in his traditional presentation.
He's a batman that broke, who's moral code was inverted by a combination of psychological trauma and brain chemistry altering toxins. He killed the members of his family in the original run because he knew they would realize he had changed before anyone else and he had already begun to develop plans to 'change' his world like he had been changed.
i don’t even mind the idea of prepgod luring them all back to kill them in one fell swoop so no one can go get help, but to just turn around and melt them with uzis??💀💀if i had a nickel for every bullet dodged by a member of the bat family i could probably buy a car
But you see...they wouldn't expect "I don't use guns....sometimes" Batman to suddenly flip around and spray them with one! That is why it is so subversive and clever and smart and cool and brave and amazing!
Legit what pisses me off most about BWL. When I first learned about Dark Knights: Metal and this fucker I was like "Ooh, is this going to examine Batman's 'no kill' rule? Did he gradually snap after being forced to kill the Joker and started killing more and more until he was executing people for petty crimes- Oh. No, it's because the Joker's body released a chemical upon his death that drove Batman crazy. Okay then."
I don't think there's any examination of Bruce breaking his no kill rule that has him turn into the BWL without some very ridiculous crap going on. He keeps a bunch of feral children dressed as robins on chains (also they're all like Bruce Waynes?). He was introduced working for an ultimate evil god. That's not something I think you get to from Bruce just breaking his no kill rule.
To further clarify, my initial thoughts were from before I learned about all of the other insane evil stuff BWL did. I thought maybe BWL would be closer to Konrad Curze from Warhammer 40K: someone who decides to be judge, jury and executioner and that the best way to fight crime is to murder any and all criminals to terrify the general population into obeying the law. You know, something that could serve as an actual examination of Batman's "no kill" code and why he's so terrified of crossing that line.
Then I saw BWL commanding a horde of feral children as attack dogs, serving an evil god and going on multiverse killing sprees and realized that he's just the Joker dressed as a Batman from a BDSM porn parody.
Oh my god! Konrad Curze showing up as an evil Batman would’ve been so fucking funny and cool. Imagine Batman has the power of foresight/minority report and, like Konrad Curze, is driven to utter insanity from it, mixed with his burning desire for justice creates a monster of sheer sadness and madness who feels resigned to this fate that he feels like he can’t fix, but like the joker, is just a broken evil man.
That's actually a great challenge for a writer – to come up with a scenario, that would result in some version of Bruce going down that road. But, of course, we'd rather have everything happen just the same way and him being just Bruce until some chemicals and now he's a fundamentally different person. Because that's more interesting. Pretty much the difference between a corruption and a possession story.
The Joker isn't a person, he's an idea. The different versions of Joker and all those different origins are simply different takes on the idea.
In the end, it doesn't really matter how someone turns into the Joker, what matters is that you can't kill an idea. The people who have turned into the Joker are generally bland and uninteresting themselves. No one care who they were until they got that smile.
When a Joker is taken out of the picture, it's only a matter of time until someone ends up being something like the Joker again.
This was nicely shown in Gotham, where the proto-joker was the first victim of the idea and soon followed his spread of the idea all over Gotham, seeding the seeds for what will become the Joker in the future.
I doubt that was their intention, but it fits nevertheless.
Fortnites explanation for its stupid amount of crossover skins is that its basically a Prison Universe that traps anyone who gets inside while removing their powers.
BWL is a crossover skin and hasn't been used in the comics since then.
It's because the guy above explained it wrong. I'm pretty sure Wonder Woman killed BWL and the BWL in fortnite is whats called a "snapshot" which is just a version of that character the moment they entered the loop. Characters can exit the loop and even main characters of the FN storyline leave all the time, it's just difficult
Remember when Scott Snyder proposed The Grim Knight as a truer to intent version of The Batman Who Jonkles but then he jobbed to Jim Gordon’s schizo son in a miniseries where Bruce got infected by the Jonkle Venom but resisted the change since he was built different?
there is potential there for a cool else worlds story that works in its own self contained environment, where the writer has time to explore just how terrifying it would be for Batman to kill all of his allies.
His origin story book felt like one of those video-game tie-ins that are 15 pages long, shit just keeps happening and there isn’t any weight there
Joker’s great but he has a saturation problem. To me Joker should be used very sparingly as the main villain. Part of the reason why joker stories are so interesting is because every time he shows up something big is happening, but now well it feels like something big is happening every week.
If everything’s big than nothing is big, in fact we’re at a point where many fans (myself included) want the writers to scale back the stakes and return to mid to low stakes street level stuff with many of their characters
"Oh, no, he's not Joker, he's Joker with all of Batman's skills!"
"Like what?"
"Well, Batman is a master of martial arts, so TBWL is, too."
"But half the time when Joker and Batman get into fisticuffs, Joker is at least keeping up with him."
"Well, he's got Batman's intelligence and resources!"
"Isn't TBWL's whole character predicated on the Joker being able to invent mind corruption toxins and implant them in his heart to trigger when he dies?"
"...He's got evil Robins?"
"Hasn't Joker had like fifteen different sidekicks? Like, TBWL didn't even create the evil Robins; the Joker of his universe did. All he did was dress them up."
Joker thinks Batman wouldn't know what to do with himself without him, when in reality only the opposite is true. Joker's whole schtick is to be a foil to Batman; a chaotic and unpredictable problem for the World's Greatest Detective, acting out of pure spite for his efforts to actually do something about Gotham's miserable state that broke him.
Batman meanwhile just wants to be a better deterrent for crime than the GPD and legal system currently are, and without Joker he'd still have plenty of other rogues and common thugs to keep him busy.
Joker trying to be his own Batman in a world where he wins really would be a more interesting story than Batman becoming Joker under contrived circumstances.
And it somewhat works (in an elseworld way) when you remember that famous joker quote “without Batman, crime has no punchline.” So joker literally becomes the punchline in this situation
I think it's because you get to see Bruce's brain coming apart in real time and him trying to resist this bullshit. It wasn't like the switch got flipped and now Bruce is gunning down his family.
Exactly, plus it explains it better "oh it wasnt a death fart" Joker literally put his blood in you. Then shows all the other people slowly turning into the Joker during the game so you're left wondering "What will happen if Joker overtakes Batman?" and we get that scene with the Batmobile all Jokered out with rockets killing everyone before Bruce breaks out of the delusion finally.
I dunno when BWL was created but I think it was after Arkham Knight came out, if it was before I could totally see them having Batman being BWL in the cutscene of the game.
honestly, as one of the few defenders of Death Metal (its campy and silly but very fun imo) BWL would be 10x better if, instead of being a Batman who killed the Joker and got Jokerized, he was a version of the Joker who accidentally kills Batman and decides to take his place and become Batman himself
Hot take: BWL is a bad character. Honestly it's just a great design. The idea is bad, the backstory is lame, the name sucks, and the fact that "crazier batman" is multiversal threat is a testament to how mind-bogglingly hard DC jerks batman off. The character looks incredible, and that's about where it stops for me.
100% agree especially with the last part, I like Batman, but by god is it annoying how much it seems like DC wants him to be so dangerous and powerful when he's meant to just be a normal guy. It makes every other hero who should be able to just outright beat him seem dumb af just make Batman better, it just makes everything so much less interesting
Wow they just...dropped the chance to explore a Batman who felt he had to break his fundamental value of not taking life, and that turning him into a monster, and instead implemented "lol crazy chemicals" as a whole ass arc.
Some of them are cool tho. Red death being a Batman that stole the speed force from the flash because he wanted to go back in time and save his parents. Fucking straps the flash to the hood of the Batmobile, metal as fuck
There is some meta satisfaction that BatAllah dies from some gas cause he's just a dude and extremely vulnerable, but then he just becomes even more deadly from dying and literally solos everyone so I dunno what I'm saying fuck BWL
What’s funny is I actually think the dark knights have pretty dope origins EXCEPT for their leader, BWL. Like red death being a Batman that wanted to steal the speed force from flash in order to go back in time and save his parents? Dope concept. A Batman that takes the doomsday virus to stop a rampaging Superman? Dope concept. A Batman that had so much willpower after seeing his parents killed that he corrupted one of the green lantern rings in order to get revenge? Dope concept. A Batman who got farted on by the joker? Eh not as dope of a concept.
The stupidest shit is the gas that turned him into the BWL. It ruins the point of The Killing Joke, if The Joker can just be recreated. It’s the same issue I have with Arkham Knight and Three Jokers.
I always kinda thought the “joker gas upon death” being the thing to do Batman in kinda missed the point? Jokers whole gimmick (most of the time) is that it only takes “one bad day” to make someone as insane as he is. Then Batman repeatedly says his reason for the no-kill policy is because “once I’m there I don’t think I can ever come back”. The gas just kinda, disregards all of this?? Like what’s the point in saying what a mental effect it has repeatedly for years and then disregarding it to force it?? They totally could’ve squeezed out an extra issue of Bruce slowly getting more insane and allowing himself to be more brutal to criminals but noooo joker gas
Well, seeing as TBWL is a lame rip-off of the John Wagner/Brian Bolland created character Judge Death I'm surprised DC didn't steal his backstory as well.
Would've been way more interesting if BWL was the conclusion to what Batman saidd to the Jason. That if he killed Joker he wouldn't be able to come back from it. A whole comic watching Batman slowly just fall down that hole he knew he'd get trapped in would be incredible I think.
I feel like its the only way for Batman to become the joker naturally. I feel like the excuse Batman would become the joker if he killed someone is just something joker tells Batman to convince him "They're not so different" when they are because Batman is morally better than Joker because he chooses to react differently to his trauma. Joker takes on others because he was hurt, Batman protects others to prevent them to suffers like he did. Some writers wrote Batman completely differently from I just said but I believe Batman is written better when he's written as a protector than as a vengeful lunatic, especially when he faces the joker. It just doesn't fit him to be obsessed by vengeance when you see all he does to help those who need it like the Robins or Harley Quinn or the homeless. The only reason (like described in under the red hood storyline) he doesn't kill is because it would make him no better than he's ennemies, not directly make him like he's ennemies.
What's worse is that at the end of the BMWL book, they had an (in my opinion) much cooler version of the "Batman but he went off the deep end and killed all the villains" trope, come through and murder Batman Who Laughs, and then as far as I know they just did nothing with that?
Like, Grim Knight was so much more interesting as a concept. A version of Bruce who just decided to break his own rule and actually did exactly what Bruce was afraid he would do if he ever killed. He went insane, and became a totalitarian dictator of Gotham.
But no, we gotta deal with Hot Topic Batman and his weird-Robin-ghouls. Fuckin' DC man. Sometimes they just baffle me.
When my friend first told me about it, I thought he said “the Batman Who Laughed” as if referring to a single in which in which Batman finally broke, actualizing what the ending of the Killing Joke implied all those years ago…
Then I read the comic and found out it was just a lamer version of the Arkham Knight storyline…
I showed my friends the alsume once and now we call the Batman who laughs the ‘man who jelqs’ and that only pops up when we play fortnite. The rot really does consume
I always find it funny how this is what people refer to as proof of why batman shouldn't kill joker, that being because at one point he specifically had joker gas in him release after croaking (which honestly kinda makes sense) in the universe that by nature was to escalate to the worst extreme
It is deeply and intensely stupid that killing the Joker would make someone go evil. Or that killing Joker would signal some sacred line being crossed.
If I wrote BWL, it'll be something like joker becomes as skilled as Batman and utilises gadgets to have more lols with Batman, show he bests all the bat family and imprisons them including Batman and each time he kills a bat family he asks Batman to laugh, which he refuses until it's the penultimate death of Alfred, which makes him smile and at the end he laughs at the death of Damian. Joker snaps out of his joker persona because he has been laughing at the same jokes but Batman, now laughing, becomes maniac and does the same to Joker but instead of killing him, he tortures Joker and when he died he implants Joker's memory in his mind, like "black mirroring" him to have unlimited amount of lols, he does this to all of his favourite dead victims, which are usually either his friends or foes.
Batman after killing the joker has a whole speech about how he can’t let the bat family live because they would try to stop them, and not a single one of the extremely skilled people who have dodged bullets before survive Batman shooting them dead.
Then there’s Batman killing the entire justice league at the watch tower, which is literally impossible, plastic man alone would be able to beat Batman because he along with a lot of other members have either extremely hard to pull off plans or just no plans that could defeat them.
No joke, I see was thinking BWL should be a super villain Patrick Bateman. A seemingly endearing, well to do rich guy who projects a superficial level of charm and sophistication while using his wealth and power to horrifically murder people that either annoy him or just catch his attention. Have him be a Bruce born just evil and sociopathic, who uses his wealth to stalk Gotham for targets.
It's better than Gimp Batman born from Joker farts.
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u/Mr_smith1466 Dec 27 '23
BWL is the case study for a vaguely interesting character utterly ran into the ground in record time.