That might have something to do with Batman being a comic-book character. Also, Batman is crazy enough to think he has the right to use his wealth the way he wants, that law and order are good, and that the root cause of crime is criminals and therefore they should be stopped and punished.
Hey, it’s not his fault idiots these days think criminals are the “real victims,” that law and order are “oppressive,” or that it’s intolerable that a billionaire may do what they want with their money, not what other people demand.
True heroes, keeping the streets safe from poor thugs… as long as that happens, questionable tactics that go above the law are just fine… Things are always black and white and our jails are most certainly not filled with people who might actual be innocent… if we let Elo… I mean Batman just make these choices for us, since he’s clearly superior with all his money, things would be great… /s
I think a big reason people jump all over it. Is it’s mostly not a thing in the films. There’s references to it, particularly on the Nolan end. But it’s nowhere near as central.
Over the last 30 years the comics have also tended towards “growly Batman has no friends” and “Bruce Wayne is the real mask” stories with fits and starts in the other direction.
Frequently enough “Batman has lots of money” comes into it with shit like Batman literally having his own spy satellite these days.
It’s part and parcel of what grouchy nards like myself are calling for when we say we want “Detective Batman”. Those O’Neal and Adams runs of The World Greatest Detective (and also Kung Fu!) stories did a hell of a lot of this. Most things inspired by that take, or attempts to make Bruce Wayne an actual person again tend to center it.
It’s still fundamentally rooted in a pre-1960s view of philanthropy as just the best. It’s still a guy going out to punch low income, desperate people at night. And it’s still depicting extreme wealth as a good thing, and the wealthy as heroic.
But even as goes the Anger Batfascist take on the character “why doesn’t he give away all his money then?” is pretty weak criticism.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are basically doing that as we speak. It ain’t changed much.
Homecoming a bit as well. The MCU Vulture is a working class guy. Put out of business by Stark, who “disrupts” the super hero cleanup business. Vulture turns to pushing alien scrap on the black market to keep his head above water.
It was really his family’s wealth going back multiple generations. In his Bruce Wayne identity he plays the spendthrift playboy who tries to squander a family fortune on decadent living, while in his Batman identity he spends massive amounts of money to work out his personal psychodrama and hero complex.
Vigilantism != law and order. Bruce Wayne, due to his position of wealth and influence, is in a position to improve the latter and/or help make systemic changes to reduce the incidence of crime. He does neither, instead choosing the childish solution typical of the rugged individualist Libertarian.
Stupidest thing I’ve read all day (beating your earlier and now-deleted statement in the Musk topic). That’s like saying the root cause of baseball is baseball players.
Gotham is big on old-fashioned punitive snake-pit prisons (Blackgate) and institutions for the criminally insane (Arkham), and yet the problem of crime is never solved there. One wonders if Wayne Industries has a stake in Gotham’s prison-industrial complex.
The real reason that the villains are back on the street so quickly after Batman catches them?
Because he has no legal standing to arrest people, and tying them up for the police to find isn’t even a citizen’s arrest. He’ll never show up in court to testify against them, and even if he did, it would be thrown out, or they’d try to arrest him for contempt when he refused to take off his mask.
What happens when a stray gamma ray flips some bits in a way that error detecting doesn’t see, and the omniscient AI decides that all the supervillains are reformed, or that humanity needs to become slaves?
_006.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/510?cb=20111127160651)
