What’s your opinion on Batman’s no kill rule and the possible toll it might take on him?
(Also how his loved ones feel in regards to his slow mental deterioration, and by loved ones i mean Clark because c’monnn)
My opinion is that most people don't understand Batman's "no kill rule" and how fundamentally important it is to his character and to him as a person.
The typical answer most people get to this question is the fear of Bruce "that if I cross this line once then where do I stop?" Or "if I took a life of a murder then I change nothing but become a murder myself" and that are the reasons that he tries to convince him, to make himself believe in his rule.
But I think it's far more nuanced than that. See trauma is a very fickle thing, it's not something that only makes someone depressed or gets triggered by specific actions or words, it sticks to one's brain, especially if one goes through something traumatizing early in their life.
For example Bruce, he saw his parents getting murdered in front of him with his own eyes, he saw the life leaving their eyes and leaving behind nothing but shells of a body, he saw how someone's carelessness and disregard for mortal life and how it affected his own to the points of irrevocable ruins. And the thing is that it stuck with Bruce, permanently.
The thing is that trauma leads people to do things differently, it affects the person's entire life, it controls their moods, their mental attributes, their thought process, their everything. Especially in Bruce's case, who shaped how whole life because of what happened to his parents.
Bruce encountered something so deeply traumatic when he was just a kid, something that his mind didn't have the strength to witness or process in any remotely healthy way and it broke some part of him forever. Trauma is never shallow, and it's not visible easily. Even when the individual knows that they have trauma they don't sometimes see how deeply it affects them and their life.
So the answer is not Bruce will not kill people, the answer is that he can't, he physically cannot take a life. In Bruce's case, witnessing his parents death created this pathological obsession, this compulsion in his brain to preserve life at any costs.
Bruce couldn't kill someone even if he tried, the incident left such a harrowing trauma on his young brain that it put a mental block inside his subconscious against taking human life.
I believe that if Bruce were a non-traumatized person and a parent then there is a chance that Bruce would have killed the joker for killing Jason but he is not, he is a deeply traumatized individual,and preserving human life is not a matter of if for him, it's a matter of must.
And if there's a day when Bruce has to break this rule of his, he will kill himself along with it, he would not survive it. It's just not possible.
And for the question of how it will affect his loved ones the answer is simple, it will shake them and their foundation permanently. In Clark's case I don't think he'd be able to live with it. I always notoriously support Clark dumping Bruce in the pit after his death, but if Bruce comes out with all of his previous memories intact then even the pit wouldn't be enough, he will destroy himself again and again and continue doing so until Clark has to give up.
