Feel free to vent.

[Heavy Arms]

Bruce way being a philanthropist (esp. for orphanages) does tend to get mentioned in a lot of incarnations of Batman.

The problem is the message that all Batman media basically ends up having to make: Bruce Wayne, a person of ridiculous wealth, who can hire a hoard of consultants if he didn't want to do it himself, can't fix Gotham's problems with all that money. Like, you have to be epically bad with money... as a billionaire... to not have turned Gotham into a paradise with the kind of donations he supposedly throws around.

To put this into some perspective. One group of experts estimated that getting every person in the US that's current unhoused or under-housed into a safe, secure, private domicile with fully functional facilities and utilities, would cost about 20 billion dollars. That's the whole damned country (also let us note the real world nonsense of our federal budget and how little it would cost us to not have a homeless problem)... Bruce can't manage it in one city?

It might not be sexy, but there's a point where the "not sexy" argument falls apart because Batman can fight supervillains that aren't created by systemic issues and can't be stopped by traditional methods. There's always going to be outliers for him to fight. Superman manages. But the need to make Gotham a shithole of a city overrides that. It turns the idea that Bruce is a philanthropist of extreme generosity into a joke because there's no way money cannot of fixed all of Gotham's "we don't have enough money for this," problems already.

Edit: I'm going to assume the edit spam bots struck again and I didn't make up a post about Bruce Wayne's philanthropic endeavors and responded to it in a delusional bit of oddity.

[Cauthon]

Isn't there one incarnation of Gotham where it's just always cursed to be a mess? Court of Owls, or something like that?

edit: Google is telling me it's probably "Dark Knight, Dark City"

[ArcaneArts]

Isn't there one incarnation of Gotham where it's just always cursed to be a mess? Court of Owls, or something like that?

edit: Google is telling me it's probably "Dark Knight, Dark City"

God, that sounds like an awful setting conceit.

[Cauthon]

God, that sounds like an awful setting conceit.

Eh, it can be. As a self-contained or limited setting, it can give the city a distinct personality and make the city into its own character. Poorly done, or overused, it descends very quickly into "too bleak, stopped caring" territory.

[AnubisXy]

[QUOTE=Heavy Arms;n1510313Edit: I'm going to assume the edit spam bots struck again and I didn't make up a post about Bruce Wayne's philanthropic endeavors and responded to it in a delusional bit of oddity.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, I noticed a typo and went back to fix it and my post got locked out as spam.

Anyway, yeah, I think there's definitely a some thematic and plot conceits in regard to Batman that create a certain amount of logical inconsistency when you look at the setting. That's not really a surprise - many settings, and especially comic book settings, quickly begin falling apart under close scrutiny. Bruce Wayne is supposed to be doing a lot to lift Gotham up but if he fixed all the problems, Batman would no longer resemble itself. The main idea of Batman is that he's mostly in Gotham and is mostly a street level crime fighter and investigator.

I think though that it's important to note that Bruce Wayne isn't holding back from helping Gotham so that he has an excuse to go around beating people up. It's just that, The Author basically says, "Despite his best efforts, and he makes a lot of them, Batman and Bruce Wayne can't fix Gotham, even by extensively attacking the problem from both sides, which he does."

[AnubisXy]

Just to vent, with that recent shooting in Texas. Greg Abbot sent out a tweet claiming that the victims were illegal immigrants. In fact, they were actually legal permanent residents and that was just bullshit coming out of him. Like always.

[Lysander]

Frank Miller was a good writer at one time and I did enjoy his work along with his Sin City stuff. But after 9/11 he literally became to dark & depressing in his storytelling and his All-Star Batman & Robin were awful in how he made Batman unlikeable to the exetreme and his sequels to Dark Knight Returns showed that.

[Lysander]

God, that sounds like an awful setting conceit.

It is a bad idea that I destested when it first came out and I like it even less now.

[Lysander]

We have an upcoming provincal election and neither candiate is appealing to say the least.

[ArcaneArts]

Eh, it can be. As a self-contained or limited setting, it can give the city a distinct personality and make the city into its own character. Poorly done, or overused, it descends very quickly into "too bleak, stopped caring" territory.

I didn't have the time to elaborate on this point, so doing this now:

What I mean by this is that it's one of those things that feels like it's there to justify the continual loop of Bruce Wayne's efforts in Gotham (again, nothing happens that a creator didn't decide on) which both arbitrarily maintains Bruce-y Boy's vigil, adds a bad underline to any power-based critical reading of Batman, and also unfortunately supports some enemies points

In any story that deals with Batman in the larger context of the DC universe, Batman has allies who are some of the most potent sorcerers in the setting-Let John Constantine and Zatanna put their heads together and grab any number of other allies in the venture, they can probably unravel any curse that noxious. If they can't, then pretty much any villain arguing for the destruction of Gotham almost has the right idea, in that it would be better to engineer a disaster, arrange a city wide evacuation, wipe Gotham from the map, and beg forgiveness of those who couldn't-wouldn't-leave, because the alternative is to allow a cursed city to be a festering wound on all of it's citizens and it's larger regional and global neighbors. Neither of those things are done, though, because the entire point is to keep Batman doing his things. It's honestly easier, and less damning for the story, to just leave the buy-in for Batman unspoken.

That idea has all the same problematic stink that the One More Day Spiderman story has-it's a problem that has legitimate solutions outside what it ends on, and in stipulating why those solutions aren't viable, it becomes all the more clear what the hand of the author is doing (in that case, taking a hammer to Peter's and Mary Jane's relationship because the author didn't like it and wanted to legitimately retcon it), which then goes on to cheapen and alienate the experience.

Authors can run into the mistake of feeling the need to justify why their story happens outside of it's context. In this particular case, it can be viable to get realistic about Bruce Wayne's effect as a philanthropist, and what that does to him as he actually improves and makes the city better, possibly to a point where it's hard to justify being Batman (not because he needs to punch people, but just because it's been so much of a part of his trauma management method and his identity), or in really exploring an idea of how and why Bruce Wayne's efforts aren't enough, the ways in which he's rich, but not rich enough to actually make a change-but it can also be viable to accept the buy in that Batman just has an ongoing conflict where in he both needs to improve the city and take action against bad actors as Batman because the story is one consumers pick up with the understand that there will be value in watching the Bat go Biff, Wham, Pow and broodily solving the mysteries and that Bruce will have to reconcile with the city as a city and also what being Batman does to him as a person, with the limits of the problem just never being defined because we're here to see Batman play out his noir and Bruce Wayne be a human.

The idea that Gotham is cursed is a solvable problem not being solved because it's a way to answer a question that doesn't always need to be answered to create substantial media just because they don't want to actually handle any particular marxist literary theory read in the story. And, like. I don't need that.*

*Mind you, I say this like someone who seeks out Batman content, when I really don't.

Just to vent, with that recent shooting in Texas. Greg Abbot sent out a tweet claiming that the victims were illegal immigrants. In fact, they were actually legal permanent residents and that was just bullshit coming out of him. Like always.

Jesus fucking christ, of course he did. Fucking Texas, man. I can't believe I used to be proud of my home state.

[Cauthon]

I was mostly refering to the general idea of a city being cursed/doomed/fated to always be a hole, rather than Gotham specifically. There's interesting stories that can come from the sisyphean task of fight against a genus loci, be it a passive or active one. Granted, as you said, it's difficult to make that a background element and still have a good story and/or setting.

[ArcaneArts]

I was mostly refering to the general idea of a city being cursed/doomed/fated to always be a hole, rather than Gotham specifically. There's interesting stories that can come from the sisyphean task of fight against a genus loci, be it a passive or active one. Granted, as you said, it's difficult to make that a background element and still have a good story and/or setting.

Context matters, as it turns out!

[TempleBuilder]

Jesus fucking christ, of course he did. Fucking Texas, man. I can't believe I used to be proud of my home state.

Every place has its good and bad. One of many bad things about Texas is knowing Abbot is kinda awful, and still preferring him over Democrats. Seriously, I’ve heard certain people complain at length about him, and then go and vote for him again. It’s kinda depressing, actually.

[Lysander]

Every place has its good and bad. One of many bad things about Texas is knowing Abbot is kinda awful, and still preferring him over Democrats. Seriously, I’ve heard certain people complain at length about him, and then go and vote for him again. It’s kinda depressing, actually.

That is what happens when you don't have good alternative candiates to vote for. We got the same problem here in our neck of the woods. We got a Premier that spouts anything without thinking about the repurcussions and h she had to apologize for her statements.

[Heavy Arms]

While it feels like we're getting into politics here... why are you presuming that Texans weren't offered good alternative candidates? Abbot also isn't going to apologize, because he has no reason too (including any personal moral standing).