#batnanigans

I realized while making up a template for this nonsense the other day that I'd done this before but with a much simpler format. So i went back to redo it and touch up a few odd ends... and I quickly remembered how awkward it got at the end, for as many of these felt like perfect and easy matches, the last couple wound up being a real stretch, either as interpretations of themes for the characters or facets of the entities.

Right i guess for tma fans this all is kinda self evident but for bat fans this might seem inscrutible at a glance...

The Magnus Archives is a horror podcast presented in the format of a series of audio tape recordings of a man charged with running the archives of a kind of eccentric research institute that, among other things, interviews people about their encounters with the supernatural.

A lot happens over the course of 5 seasons but the crux of the world building is a system of categorization of 14(/15) "Entities" presiding over domains of fear from which they draw power. They are able to manifest their influence on the world thru monsters to spread fear, enthrall humans compelled by their brand of fear, and even empower humans or elevate them into monstrous avatars of their distinct themes. And the climax of the series involves different Entities, their avatars, and their cults sort of competing to usher in an Eldritch nightmare apocalypse of their respective flavor before their rivals can.

Every Entity has both a literal, symbolic, and abstract theme about them. So The Eye is most literally about voyeurism and a fear of being watched or scene, but it extends to a fear of being surveilled, even by abstract and/or non visual means. And further extrapolated from that, a fear of being known. Opposite that The Dark is both the literal dark and not seeing, but also a fear of the unknown. And it also has a unique role as a kind of progenitor fear before all others, that all fears stem from ignorance. And it is of course also a distinct opposite to The Eye so there's that added dynamic. There's also The Hunt, which has literal themes of being hunted predatory animals, and of the act of being pursued, but also abstract elements of pursuit as well that can brush up against some aspects of The Eye and its pursuit of knowledge; i.e. being stalked by an observer can feel like being hunted and a monster that does both might fall under dual categories.

And of the 14 main Entities they all have these kinds of opposed or shared edges in nature with each other. It's got fun horoscope type vibes by spooky.

Anyway im not going to go into a whole thing but this dynamic feels like it just has a fun natural modularity to it that lets to pretty easily fit other IPs and their characters into a compatible lore.

It's all good fun, go watch it; they have their own site, a YouTube channel, and are on most podcast hosting services. They have a sequel/spinoff/AU series running called The Magnus Protocol.

I do like that the Magnus entities of fear really just make for a fun way to brainstorm new character interpretations, because while plenty of obvious gimmicks match up across other IPs, the abstract themes in Magnus really do have a certain natural sense to them that makes it a great refractory for drawing bigger themes out of them.

(Like for everything else that needed various degrees of nudging around to fit, Kiteman is just a joke because there are no real Vast aligned villains, yet he could benefit SO MUCH from being written like someone giving a Vast statement)

Bat canon is wonky at the very best of times, but there are a few anchoring events we are kind of expected to take for granted in any timeline that doesn't explicitly state otherwise:

Bruce starts Batman'ing at 25

Dick's parents die when he is 8, and in Year 2

It's not clear when Dick forms the Teen Titans, but the earliest it could be is 13, obviously.

When Barbara is introduced the Teen Titans already exist

When Barbara is introduced she works at the Gotham Libtary

Other than the 1966 TV show, this fact is extended to her having a MLIS; that's a 3 year degree, minimum.

90s continuity had her graduate high school at 16, this doesn't apply retroactively, but could be assumed of later iterations

part of her origin includes being inspired by Batman after overhearing a phonecall between Batman and Comissioner Gordon as a "teenager"

Dick drops the Robin moniker to go to college, implicitly around 17-18

Shortly after he dons the Nightwing moniker for the first time

(I'm not counting the nu52 timeline where she starts as a college undergrad because that one doesn't gel with any of the other versions and has to be its own standalone thing.)

Conveniently there is an overlap of constraints: if she is 13 in year one, the earliest she could overhear the phone conversation, and she graduates highschool early, then with 7 years of secondary education, the earliest she could debut at batgirl would be 22-23, which lines up with Dick being 16-17, nearly the latest time she can debut while he is still Robin. If she graduates HS at 18 she overshoots Dick's tenure as Robin entirely. This puts one cap on this.

But on the other hand, she can only get older than Dick if we try to nudge her timeline around. The other end of this is that if she overhears the phone call at 19, the latest she can, then she would have to spend a number of years between graduation and debut as Batgirl in order to give Dick time to form the Teen Titans at, at the earliest, 13yo. And that pushes her debut age to 25.

In either case, she is 6-12 years younger than Bruce, and conversely 12-6 year older than Dick. The split on Bruce:Dick:Babs ranging from 34:16:22 to 31:13:25. But, again, I don't think people who try to scrutinize the ""morality"" of fictional scenarios, least of all romantic age gaps, are in touch enough with reality to even warrant arguing with, but you see the problem with just the basic math, right?

She's a grown ass woman by the time she starts Bat"girl"ing and people just have this obnoxious hangup about infantilizing her all the damn time for seemingly no real reason, fans and actual creators alike. Is it because the name has "girl" in it? Is it because of some residual thing from Bette Kane being an obvious parallel to Dick? Or just the fact that they date at all? Is it just the general history sexism in superhero comics as a genre?

Also I didn't mention it because it's kinda firmly outside of consideration for this, but she even has a golden age story where part of her origins being inspired to be a superhero includes meeting Superboy as a teenager. They even dated for a hot second.

See DC did this horseshit with A-Day, Arkham Day, but also a cute lame little pun on "just a day in gotham/arkham" where Arkham blew up and the staff all died, and Joker was framed for it, and the inmates all skittered off back into the shadows of the city.

Now for one this SHOULD have been an opportunity for a bat-title crossover event where the massive influx of villains calls for an all-hands-on-deck situation. It'd be a great chance to address the implicit idea that despite the rotating door of both Arkham Asylum Blackgate Penitentiary, at any given point most of Gotham's crazed villains should technically be behind bars, so that the bat-fam, and more importantly gotham's general population, aren't actually just dealing with constant back to back terror attacks ALL the time. making a giant break out like this a huge deal. Plus it's a great chance to play with chemistry as villains squabble over flash turf wars as the gotham rogues suddenly find themselves playing musical chairs, with like-gimmick villains butting heads with their informal tagteam partners --stuff like Scarface and Twoface and Blackmask all basically having the same gimmick, but if at least 2 of them are behind bars at any given time, they never actually have to come to blows over it.

But then they had a great little thing with Arkham City: Order Of the World and the latest reinvention of The Ten-Eyed Man, where his apparent clairvoyant madness allows him to see parallels in the layout of Arkham and Gotham itself, assigning certain roles, functions, and moods to areas of the city and how they play with the inmates' temperaments and madness.

Mix with that the wasted mask gimmick of the Orgham family goons, the Azmer vapor, the deadend plot about them rebuilding Arkham and rehabilitating the city's image... as well as long standing bits of lore about the city's own mind and spirit ala Tim's weird brush with his detective matrix vision thing, and there's this perfectly fertile ground to do something REALLY cool with the nature of Gotham itself.

If the Orghams are so obsessed with this power of masks and how they manifest power according to the roles they represent -vs- the Azmer's ability to draw out an innate monstrousness and madness(the opposite of a facade/persona) then it makes sense that by extension the thing that made Arkham Asylum this centerpiece of the city and lore and a place of power was that it was itself a mask. You take this thing, this repository for madness, and it embodies that role and magnifies it, personifies it, and perpetuates it. The Asylum itself makes its patients mad(der), and it projects this psychic facade over the city as a whole. So when the mask breaks, the city doesn't know who it is anymore, it doesn't know its role, and it becomes vulnerable to this repressed unseen self that the Azmer provokes. The task at hand thus becomes the need to forge a new mask, a new identity for the city, and there should be serious considerations made by various parties to control this process.

And to this end there are a few characters primed to deal with this situation. On the one hand is the aforementioned Tim Drake situation where he had his whole thing with the spirit of Gotham via The Veil. But also Vic Sage has had a stint as a kind of urban shaman, where communing with the spirit of Metropolis was a whole thing for him, and it would be fascinating to see that passed on to Renee as the second Question. (god knows she's not well utilized enough as is) And as GCPD's new commissioner she is herself burdened with this role of being the public face of a department that is itself a kind of mask for the city. And unique to this idea of the innate symbolic psychic power of masks, The Question being a faceless moniker should have a unique kind of leverage over this mask shenanigans.

But more over what I think would be most important, is that as the absence of the Asylum begins to manifest catastrophic psychic consequences on the city while this prolonged battle plays out, I think the most fun that could really be had is for John Constantine to step in with The House of Mystery as a stopgap, to bide time for the bat-fam to come to a more longterm solution, allowing the House of Mystery to serve as a temporary mask, to at least hold back the city's inner demons, but consequently begin morphing the psychic identity of the city. So by replacing the totem lovecraftian madness with one of a marginally different genre of pulp horror, the nature of Gotham's rogues and its crime changes.

And we could have had an entire series of tie-ins with gotham's rogues all shifting genre towards familiar pop culture and cult classic horror titles. Gotham suddenly shifting into a proper halloween town with various members of the bat-fam having to navigate horror plots to mitigate the growing pains of the sudden new identity, while Batman works towards the lasting solution.