Lawful Evil Main

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

This is bat friendly street lighting, which not only looks sick as fuck but allows bats to pass through without disturbance, as they cannot see red.

Sure you obsess over finding the last rumoured surviving Ivory-billed Woodpecker, but are you still harassing migrating geese and destroying their eggs?

Sure you dream of seeing the long gone Great Auks, but are you still throwing trash at gulls?

If you only care about birds when they are charismatic and extinct, you don't care about birds.

Like Imagine

Red Hood: Be My Robin

Tim Drake: You know what, why not. Dick just fired me. He gave Robin to Damian.

Red Hood: Oh that sucks man i’m so sorry.

Red Hood: So… Red Robin?

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

yeah but you know that wasn’t the joke. the joke was way crueler than that.

you see, once damian finished the commission, which included full nudity in horrifically sexual positions and many speech bubbles implying pleasure, jason then paid to get it put on an electric billboard opposite the most popular mall in gotham. and he’s fucking smart about it, too. it’s an electric billboard on purpose, so he got to choose that it wouldn’t be on show 24/7. he paid for the commission to be visible for exactly five minutes once a week, at noon on a friday. every friday.

it starts off small.

the first few times the people of gotham think they’re going crazy, and by the time they realise it’s not a hallucination, well… the picture is gone. an ad for perfume has taken over, and no proof is left behind. it’s three weeks before a picture is taken and put on twitter, the user in a state of disbelief.

‘y’all wht the fuck is going on who did this im crying LMFAO’

before long a few other pictures surface online, ranging from theories of hackers, a drunken endeavor by brucie wayne himself, or mostly just shared disbelief that the city is not undergoing a shared schizophrenic episode. eventually tim comes across it online and shows bruce. bruce goes fucking mental.

but the thing is that the billboard wasn’t the joke either. jason thought much further ahead. once he got confirmation that bruce had indeed seen the image, he ramped up the ads. within a week the comic is on multiple billboards in all the most popular places in gotham, appearing for a few minutes at a time in between every other ad shown. almost constant.

he’s smart about it too. he knows bruce isn’t stupid enough not to be suspicious of his kids. he makes his awe of the situation well known within the family.

“Holy fucking shit that is AWESOME,” he crows with glee, looking over bruce’s shoulder at yet another posted image of the billboard. “I wish I’d thought of doing that. Can we- when you track down whoever did that, please give them my number. I need to buy them a beer.”

“Jaylad,” bruce murmurs calmly. “You know I love you, but get the fuck out of my house.”

but this was also not the joke. because although bruce’s pr manager at first encouraged him to ignore the image and let it blow over to avoid bringing more attention to the scandal, when it becomes clear the billboard fiasco is not going away any time soon, bruce decides to sue the anonymous party for defamation of character. after all, how is this any different from posting deepfake nudes of celebrities?

and this is where jason’s true scheme starts to come into effect. because if there’s one thing he learned during his little ‘prince of gotham’ stint? it was how to smoothly jump through loopholes and dodge the law without fail.

bruce’s lawyers open a case against the anonymous party who bought the ads. due to the severity of the situation and the nature of the comic being shown, the billboard company is served with two options: go down themselves for agreeing to publicly display what is essentially softcore furry porn, or release the name of their client. obviously, they snitch.

the name that is given to bruce’s lawyers is one that nobody recognises, because jason made it the fuck up. but, when they do research, and when bruce does his own background check with the batcomputer, they do discover that, supposedly, this man exists. jason’s gotten quite good with forging backstories, as it turns out.

the person paying for the billboards is apparently an italian billionaire, a trust-fund man who inherited everything from his parents and is known for gambling and partying as much as possible. bruce has never met this man before in his fucking life.

except, his lawyers point out, maybe he did and forgot? after all, brucie wayne is known for his clubbing and drinking habits. is it that far fetched to think that maybe while blacked out at an exclusive party somewhere he did actually meet this man? that they got off on the wrong foot and this is some kind of childish billionaire revenge? and well… brucie wayne is mostly a fake persona… but he was young once. and he didn’t always have to fake being drunk…. so maybe his lawyers have a point.

the main takeaway is that they actually have somebody to sue this time, so they get in contact with the italian billionaire and try to arrange a meet up. maybe he can be civil about it?

jason, using a vpn and answering these emails from damian’s room as they hang out, proceeds to enact the main part of the actual joke. taking bruce for the longest fucking legal walk physically possible.

first this man agrees to meet with bruce. then he reschedules. then he’s ill. then his lawyers can’t make it, and the man won’t speak without a lawyer present. bruce loses patience and tries to simply sue, except jason uses all law knowledge in his arsenal to somehow dodge every single attempt.

he ghosts bruce and his lawyers. misses court dates and then claims ‘technically it was never proved that he was served’ because bruce’s lawyers could only contact him online and every time they sent something about the case jason just started using a different fucking email. fed up, bruce goes to italy and actually tries to meet the man in person. he finds a mansion at the billionaire’s listed address because jason acquired one as a gift from talia on his 17th birthday, and bruce meets with a maid who tells him that her employer is out for work meetings and she has no idea when he’ll be back.

bruce stays in italy for a month just fucking. waiting for the guy to come home. every time he checks in with the maid it’s a new story. ‘his work trip got extended’ ‘he’s on vacation’ ‘his plane was damaged and he’s stranded abroad’. eventually, starting to become broken inside, bruce returns to gotham. where the billboard awaits.

let me make it clear that jason is going all out for this. he’s pulling all nighters doing harvard-level law research just so he can stay ahead. six months in and damian gives him a mock bar exam ‘just to see how he’d do’ and jason aces it. he has essentially become a lawyer for this. the legal back and forth goes on for literally over ten months. ten months during which those billboards stay up, constantly cycling the comic for everybody to see.

eventually, the grand climax of jason’s whole bit comes to a head, and he emails bruce to arrange an in person meeting in a neutral location for them to discuss terms of a settlement. bruce is dead inside. he hasn’t slept in weeks, and he sees the comic out of the corner of his eye at all times. his lawyers are starting to push that he sue for long-term mental damage as well as defamation. but at this point what does he have to lose? so he agrees to meet up.

he goes to the meeting room, at the top of a building a six hours drive from gotham. he and his lawyers wait twenty minutes, with no hope in their hearts that this meeting won’t be a waste of time. finally, against all odds, they’re told the man they’re here to meet is in the building, and is coming up to meet them. bruce can’t believe his fucking ears. they watch the elevator like a hawk, ready to finally face the man whose been torturing them for the past fucking year.

the elevator opens. bruce—bruce fucking bluescreens.

“…What in hells name are you doing here?” Ra’s Al Ghul, wearing an Italian branded suit, walks towards him. “You aren’t supposed to be here!”

“…What the fuck. What are you- why are you dressed like that?!” Bruce’s lawyers look lost. He can’t find it within himself to care.

Ra’s glared at him, offended. “Because unlike you, detective, I know when not to make a scene. I’m undercover. Where’s Jason?”

“Jason?” Bruce is baffled. “Why would Jason be- why are you undercover?!?!”

A huff. “I’m undercover as some pathetic Italian rich man; I don’t know, Jason made me the alias for our shared mission. Actually, I think he based him off of you.”

“Jason. Jason made the Italian billionaire.” His voice goes blank. Empty. Devastated. “You’re the Italian billionaire.”

“Yes.” Ra’s hissed. “Jason and I have been exchanging information for the past year; if you aren’t careful you’ll ruin our entire operation!”

“What operation?!”

“He found evidence of a league uprising stemming in Gotham; I’ve been funding him and providing support while he investigates for ten months, and now we both need to meet undercover here so we can finally nail down a decent plan to rid the world of those traitorous parasites.”

And Bruce…

Something inside of Bruce fizzles out. Resignation. Acceptance. A healthy sense of defeat. Regret of adoption, probably. His mind shuts down and he prepares to retire right then and there, as clearly it is time for him to do. Blankly, he proceeds to tell Ra’s, “I don’t think Jason has been honest about what he’s been doing with your funding. I don’t think he’s been honest about these uprisings, either. I don’t think there are any uprisings. I just think he hates us both and wants to establish dominance.”

~

Still at Wayne Manor, video game controller in one hand and beer bottle in another, Jason and Damian watch the live security feed while another screen holds a paused donkey kong match. Damian takes a cookie from a nearby plate and nibbles on it.

“You know I have to hand it to you, Akhi. Getting disowned from both families at the same time? That’s impressive.”