#batjokes meta

Wrong-side-of-Gotham-2014 scholar™. I write literary criticism essays, media meta, fics and occasionally i draw. Permanently queue'd blog, everything is properly tagged.

Here be fandom posts. The current most frequented fascinations are Gotham 2014 and Batman/Batjokes.

Fandom tags are shipname and showname. Fandom aesthetics are shipnamecore and shownamecore.

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Love Wins All.

Batman does what he does because he loves it. He loves helping people, he loves being Batman.

Joker does what he does because he hates. Sometimes he doesnt even know what he hates, but he does. Thats just what he does. He hates the world, he hates people. He just hates. Thats all he knows.

Batman wins since he fights because of love. Joker loses since he fights because of hate.

But you know what?

Joker loves being himself. He loves the game. And he wins by getting to be himself, by getting to play.

but he doesn't know how to love- no. He only knows how to hate- and so he hates, and loves it when he feels hated by Batman.

The thing is, though;

DC should make something out of this 💯

Hah. That'd be interesting. They've put Batman and Joker into an allegory for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the roles of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner... why not Waiting for Godot. But who's Godot for them? Simply death, simply an ending that just never arrives?

Though speaking of the loop Batman and Joker are trapped in, there's this chapter title from Morrison's Batman (1940) #663 -- Clown at Midnight:

And also, something from the recent Ourobouros story from DC's Zatannic Panic!:

Yes, that's definitely another example of Joker helping. There's a bunch of them, but this one is the most straightforward.

Though it's particularly poignant, also because it was Alfred who preserved Joker's head. Joker says that after the apocalypse happened and he'd presumably been torn to shreds with only his head remaining, it was Alfred who "took what was left of me, hung it in the desert to stare at nothing." Joker speculates that Alfred wanted to punish him for not going far enough in trying to warn Bruce, but he admits he doesn't really know the reason. And that might've been part of it, but that's not it. Because the thing is, before Bruce left on his journey in the very first issue, Alfred tells him "When you go, though, take something to remember us, won't you?" He goes on to name the penny, which Bruce ends up using later to escape the machine Omega was trying to use to brainwash him, but... Alfred hadn't just left Joker in a random spot in the desert; he left him right above the underground place him and the new Bruce were buried. He knew that if Bruce got out, he'd find Joker-- and Bruce ends up taking Joker's head with him.

And it's not just Alfred, it's the original Batman of that world too. Omega says that he'd orchestrated our Bruce (young and brand new) coming to him, so he could pass the torch. So he knew about Alfred's hide-out; he sent his mind-controlled Gotham rogues to get him and personally killed him, after all. If he knew the location all along, he must've known about Joker's head. And he did nothing. He left it there. When Bruce and Joker-in-Robin-suit attack Omega, Omega doesn't kill Joker the only way you would logically do it (destroy the head or disconnect it from the robotic suit)-- he leaves Joker alone with Bruce. And then Joker's reveals and pep talk is what gets Bruce to keep fighting. Like Bruce tells the dying Omega at the end, maybe Omega didn't allow this new Bruce to exist so that he'd follow in Omega's lead. Rather, he'd done it because he knew he needed to be stopped. He wanted a version of himself who believed again... so he left open the door one last time.

Well... The thing is, he doesn't have to find out. Bruce, as canonically depicted in multiple recent stories, has always known. From the very first meeting.

Batman (2016) #95

But way more explicit than this, there's the rewrite of Bruce and Joker's first ever meeting by Tom King in The Winning Card, told in Batman: Brave and the Bold. It's been referenced as current canon by the New History of the DCU #2, and directly by Zdarsky's Batman run in Joker: Zero Year. Basically, Zero Year happens right before The Winning Card.

Now, is The Winning Card good? Much like Tom King's writing, it's... uh... it's something. There's a lot of elements I like and also a whole bunch of things I hate. But what I did enjoy a lot was how (in the spirit of The Man Who Laughed which was previously canon) Bruce was a complete freak about Joker and pretty much kickstarted Joker's obsession with him. Joker kicks Bruce's ass and, stubborn bastard who hates to lose that he is, Bruce fixates on beating Joker's ass back. And in their final confrontation...

"I'm willing to keep going... if you are." [looks into the camera]

And then Bruce proceeds to tell the world's worst joke (ugh, bat-tery), and it's so bad it's got Joker judging him. He nearly stabs Joker with the knife Joker stabbed him with previously, because King has a kink for stabbing as penetration (I am not kidding, check out Batman/Catwoman 2021 #9). Afterwards, Alfred has this insight to share:

The story explicitly frames Joker's incessant telling of jokes as a way to try to connect. "Do you get it?", he keeps asking. Joker's dialogue is always inside these beautiful vintage frames, not speech bubbles; he's not potrayed as human. He's not a person, he's death. But Bruce is the only one who even recognizes what Joker is doing as an attempt to connect, and is the only who tries to understand. He tries to speak to Joker in his own language, and at the end, Joker responds like a normal person (in speech bubbles) only to Bruce.

Oh I've read it, it's a favorite short story of mine! Referenced it in multiple fics. It's indeed a great illustration of how their relationship is an escalating and neverending cycle, but since Bruce is my blorbo, I love it also because it shows how Bruce's obsession with Joker shifted and mutated over the years:

Not that now, two decades later, Bruce has stopped trying to make sense of Joker's actions. It's a compulsion he can't break, despite having so much evidence against it ever being possible: that he'd know Joker, and hence be able to predict or control him or fix him. Except now, he's more self-aware about it, and outwardly acts as if he's given up-- though his actions contradict him, obviously.

I also love it because of the ending, and specifically because this is one of the few comics Joker sincerely uses Bruce's given name, without any mockery:

It's clear with this that Joker avoided Bruce's real birthday on purpose, all those other times. And again, he doesn't say "Batman", he says "Bruce", implying that the murder and the violence Joker packaged as a gift all those other years, on wrong birthdays as if he never knew the real one, was for Batman. On Bruce Wayne's birthday, the true one, Joker gifts himself-- the person.

[cough] What an interesting hypothetical. Almost like I know a friend and fellow writer with whom I have discussed this extensively, and who might be writing a fic akin to it. (Frac if you see this, it is a SIGN--)

But seriously, it's a hypothetical I love and one that's been hinted at by DC itself? Twice. The first time is in Batman: Going Sane, in which Joker turns into a completely different guy (pretty much having self induced amnesia) after he thinks he killed Batman. He's got a wife and a job and everything. Except Batman is not actually dead, he's been recovering with a nice kind woman too (sigh) and it's fascinating how he's sort of begging himself not to notice where Joker might have gone, so that he wouldn't be forced to follow:

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #67

Then there's the question of what exactly happened between Batman (2011) #48-49 and Dark Days: The Forge. Amnesiac Joker goes from sitting on a bench begging Bruce not to revive Batman, because Joker will have to follow (sound familiar?) to being in Batman's super-secret underground prison. And we never find out how it happened. Bruce just says "I needed him." There's a distinct possibility that, instead of letting Joker be a regular guy, Batman tracked him down as part of the Nth metal investigation... and in the process likely triggered the amnesiac man into becoming Joker again, because that's who he actually needed Joker to be in order to get answers. While even as an amnesiac Joker felt "the call", he fought it. And there's not really any explanation as to how Joker went from looking normal to white bleached skin and green hair again:

Batman (2011) #51

Dark Days: The Casting

And there's also Batman: Joker Time and Batman: Secrets, two rare stories that deal with the idea of Joker potentially rehabilitating... and Batman not even conceiving of it being a possibility. He stalks Joker even more intensely than before (which is a feat). It's interesting when you contrast this behavior against Bruce's offer to help Joker in The Killing Joke... it's almost like he trusts no one else but himself to try and rehabilitate Joker.