And just being a smart-ass I thought, "Well sure they can't break you if you're already broken."
Which then got me thinking about the last batch of Tom King's Batman comics I read. In issues 70-74 Batman emerges from the "Knightmares" to take on Bane and his alternate universe father. In a flashback we see a conversation between the alternate universe Thomas Wayne and Bane, wherein Thomas Wayne goes through Bane's entire plan to break Batman, which was pretty much everything since issue #1.
It's pretty ridiculous that Bane really could have planned every little thing since the first issue. It would call for a level of foresight that would require someone who can literally see the future. And he encouraged Booster Gold to destroy all reality by going back in time to stop Batman's parents from being killed? That seems just a bit risky. I like most of King's stories but this is a bit of sloppy storytelling.
Anyway, the story borrows from The Dark Knight Rises as Batman and Bane fight but Batman is defeated. Bane "breaks" him but he's not crippled. Like The Dark Knight Rises he's just sore for a bit as his father takes him and the corpse of Martha Wayne through the desert to find a special Lazarus Pit to bring her back to life so they can all live happily ever after.
But instead Batman sneaks off one night and buries his mother in the desert and then takes down his dad. The implication is that Batman can't be broken because he's too stubborn to quit.
Bringing it back to my random smart-ass thought, really it seems to me you can't break Batman because he's already broken. To quote from Batman Begins, a guy who dresses up like a bat clearly has issues. Seeing his parents murdered already broke him, but instead of becoming a drug addict or juvenile delinquent or serial killer, he became a superhero. People respond to trauma differently and that's certainly a different way.
So, Bane's plan ultimately fails because Batman can't be broken like a normal person since he's obviously not. You can't break what's already broken; you can just make it more broken. Or something like that.
1 comment:
It's an interesting thing for me to think of the Batman as a psychopath and essentially, broken. I guess that's what he is. But growing up in the comic books I was reading, I loved him. He was a hero that I very much admired and thought was really cool. But we see this labeling of the Batman as broken and a psychopath more and more these days. Take Titans, for example. Dick Grayson is practically ruined by his association with a toxic Bruce Wayne.
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