This thread's purpose is to discuss politics in works of fiction/media. Please do not use this thread to talk about politics or media in isolation from each other.
I was thinking of asking what people thought were the most interesting post-election Trump related media.
The Good Fight on CBS Access devoted their entire second season to dealing with the subject.
Edited by MacronNotes on Mar 13th 2023 at 3:23:38 PM
Lost in Space
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
All of this makes it even more absurd that Bruce refuses to kill. He's slamming into the classic definition of insanity: doing a thing over and over and expecting a different result.
If the story wants to be about a pile of psychotic people (including Batman) battling each other for eternity, great, but don't expect me to stay invested.
Anyway, this perfectly illustrates my point about Doylism.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 18th 2024 at 3:28:38 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
reconsidering
its just odd to me that people keep responding to this criticism with watsonian explanations. It fully does not make sense from that perspective, but that's fine— it doesn't have to. it's fiction. We can just agree it's silly and move on, like how we agree it's silly that the krytonian symbol for "House of El" looks like an S. It would be weird if people started pulling out long winded explanations of the history of the krytonian alphabet instead of just admitting that its actually an "S" for superman
as far as the claims that batman uses his wealth to fund charity... that always felt like a handwave. I mean, thats pretty clearly just added in to deflect criticism, such as that glorifying billionare vigilantes beating up muggers promotes the idea that crime is primarily about personal morality and not situational. Its never actually the point, or the focus, and it makes no impact on the story (im sure at some point, in some comic, it has been a plot point.)
and Lego batman doesnt even pay his taxes!
Edited by Tremmor19 on Apr 18th 2024 at 4:04:50 AM
I'll say in fairness, if you request that Batman use his wealth to fund charity and social programs, dismissing it as just a handwave when it happens is kind of Moving The Goal Posts.
"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"
reconsidering
at the same time, if you had a cop show that spent all of its time on cool chases and shootouts and tackling violent criminals to the ground, but occasionally assured us that they had a crack investigative team offscreen that made sure they only tackled guilty people, it wouldn't remove the issue. it's still a valid topic to discuss the way "fighting crime" is portrayed
Edited by Tremmor19 on Apr 18th 2024 at 3:55:08 PM
This doesn't bother me much, weirder coincedence happen in real languages.
A better example for the MST3K Mantra is the classic "why does the Hulk keep his pants (and only his pants) when he transform?"
Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt
Lost in Space
That's not the core problem, at least for me. It's more a question of why, if Bruce Wayne is in fact funding all of these philanthropic programs, they don't actually help to fix the city's problems.
The reason it's a Hand Wave is not "big deal, he's still Batman". It's a hand-wave because the story still needs to be about him fighting weirdos while dressed in a bat suit. He can't solve the causes of crime in Gotham because then he wouldn't have anyone to punch.
The obvious comeback is, "It would be even worse if he weren't doing these things," and if you actually make that argument, you're part of the problem. Here's your trophy for Completely Missing The Point to a professional level.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 18th 2024 at 4:05:36 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
reconsidering
because marvel won't let us have nice things
Lost in Space
Thor got a glimpse of that in Thor: Ragnarok and he needed Brain Bleach, so... maybe we can keep the pants.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 18th 2024 at 4:05:00 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Because change take time, and not enough time has passed since Bruce Wayne started his crusade.
Due to Comic-Book Time, it has only been a couple of years since Batman started at any point in the comics, no matter how much time has passed in Real Life.
And as such, the fruits of his crime fighting or charity donations don't show up yet, but presumably they will, in the "future".
............
In some adaptations, like The Dark Knight Trilogy where time is allowed to pass and the story is given an ending, we do end up seeing Gotham becoming a better place, with the mob crushed, corruption in the police quelled, and people living in relative peace thanks to Batman's efforts.
Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt
reconsidering
personally my headcanon is that gotham is cursed. Like, living there just kinda slowly degrades your mental stability— with some people being more susceptible than others. explains the insane crime rates, and why arkham is the way it is, and also some of the architecture choices. the batclan are obviously also being effected by this, they just think they're responding rationally to high crime rates
Lost in Space
Sort of like how Kamala Khan is always a teenager. Yes, we all know how Comic-Book Time works, but you've just given a Watsonian excuse that you immediately contradicted by invoking a Doylist explanation.
Anyway, the DCEU is not a great example for consistent in-universe narratives because it has rebooted Batman at least three hundred times to preserve his status quo.
Feels like we need to nuke it and start over.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 18th 2024 at 4:19:33 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Like reflections in the glass!
Theremin arguments get rather tedious after a while.
Edited by MorningStar1337 on Apr 18th 2024 at 1:18:31 AM
I don't see the contradiction?
" Not enough time in-universe for change to take effect," is the Watsonian explanation.
"Comic-Book Time" is the Doylist one, but it doesn't contradict the above.
.........
Just like saying, "it is only episode 1 of the series, so is normal that The Hero won't defeat the Big Bad yet. This for the last episode"
It doesn't contradict the Watsonian answer, " The Hero and the Big Bad didn't meet yet, so is normal that the latter is not defeated yet."
It is just that in Batman case, you will never see a "last episode" in the comics
I am not sure what you mean? But nobody is forcing you to engage with an argument you find "tedious".
Edited by jawal on Apr 18th 2024 at 9:25:11 AM
Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt
reconsidering
- Feels like we need to nuke it and start over.
this is comic-book land. you want the people of gotham to also be radioactive mutants?
Edited by Tremmor19 on Apr 18th 2024 at 4:23:34 AM
Leader of the Holey Brotherhood
I actually wanted to be Resileaf
I do want to bring up that due to comic continuity, a given Gotham is not the same in a different comic, and same thing for Batman. Batman in the Nolan movies is not Batman in the Arkham games is not Batman in the animated series.
Even Alfred and Barbara Gordon?
Edited by jawal on Apr 18th 2024 at 9:27:38 AM
Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt
Lost in Space
Jawal, you have the causality backwards.
The reason for Comic-Book Time and all of these other things is not, "Hands tied, we have to reboot every five years in-universe. It's the law."
The reason is that Batman has to be a moody billionaire who fights insane poor people, and for that to work Gotham has to be a shithole. All of the efforts to dance around this are just silly.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 18th 2024 at 4:31:10 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
The thing is about saying that Gotham crime lords and their moneyed interest have the money to keep everything in place, but in stories where Batman and Wayne Enterprises is a Fiction 500 of outrageous proportions depending on the story, it brings to question how are they doing it from an economics perspective. Take any small rural town, no matter how corrupt, and have Jeff Bezos decide to change it into an Amazon warehouse, and I'd like to see a community try and stop it. Again, I'm speaking about problems that are specifically solvable by money. You can't pay your way to Joker being dealt with, but you can probably as Bruce Wayne pay the crime bosses to go straight, with the deep pockets he has (unless they're very big on John Milton), and any he can't, he can economically crush them. If Bruce Wayne, majority shareholder of Wayne Enterprises, able to match the economic power of 5 Californias, who as a single person can supply a chunk of the money to rebuild Gotham by himself, came in and said I want to do things this way, what Gotham processes are in place to stop him? It's like having the bodega trying to stop the local Walmart from bulldozing them. It makes sense in stories when Bruce is a millionaire. It makes sense when he's under the Forbes estimate of 9 billion even. It doesn't make sense when he can put a luxary WMD satellite into space secretly under his company's rounding errors. It doesn't make sense, when Bruce Wayne as a person could theoretically build his own city.
Edited by HeyMikey on Apr 18th 2024 at 1:37:43 AM
(Sigh)
You asked a question:Â
I give you an answer: "Not enough time has passed in-universe for change to take effect"
The Doilyst answer is of course, that Comic-Book Time needs to be applied in order for Gotham not to improve so that DC continue with selling comics where Batman fights masked criminals.
I give you both a Doylist and a Watsonian answer, and I don't feel they contradict each other.
...............
The reason is that Batman has to be a moody billionaire who fights insane poor people, and for that to work Gotham has to be a shithole.
How does that contradict anything I said??????????
Edited by jawal on Apr 18th 2024 at 9:38:35 AM
Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt
Lost in Space
Perhaps I misunderstood the intent of your posts, and if so, I apologize. What I am saying is that, from the point of view of allegory and/or applicability, it is not useful to correlate in-universe logic to real-world logic in this type of story.
We cannot draw parallels between Bruce Wayne's philanthropy and, say, Warren Buffett's, because in Buffett's case, time does actually elapse (and there are a few other differences).
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 18th 2024 at 4:48:18 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
No harm done.
......................
True, I said once that superheroes' comics is the genre that needs the highest level of suspension of disbelief after Looney Tunes or Tom and Jerry cartoons.
Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt
A Low Cost Confection
I’m just going to mention that Batman’s Rouges Gallery usually aren’t poor aside from some one-off stories like the beginning of Joker’s Millions.
Edited by CheapMarzipan on Apr 18th 2024 at 4:10:11 AM
I will say in a superhero story, you need to accept to some extent that lone masked vigilantes are a semi-effective crime control method, in the same way a mecha story requires you to accept that mecha are practical war machines.
That isn't to say you should always abandon a demand for realism in every sense, even in terms of criminology and law, but there is a bare minimum suspension of disbelief there.
"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"
Come to think of it, I could see someone making an analogy with The Joker and how "Mental Health" is often used as to deflect the need for gun control and getting a handle on extremist movements.
Personally, I interpret The Joker as being a somewhat aimless terrorist motivated by a crude ideology and a desire for revenge against society. He wants to expose hypocrisy, undermine the system, and then go down in a blaze of glory.
He's not really crazy per se, but he's more than happy to take advantage of society thinking he is.
The Ruling Class of Gotham is the Crime Lords, who have obvious motivations to keep the city crime-ridden.
"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"