#tkj

Completely random, but sometimes I like to imagine the headlights turning off sounding more like a theatre spotlight.

The final dance is over, lights off, it’s over. The beam was there, the boundaries and clear division; all that’s left is some muddied game between two sick men, both about to blur into some horrid mess of humanity’s worst.

No dancing, no glamour or triumph, just a very sad end left in an unremarkable pool of blood.

similarly, geoff’s writing is always annoyingly full of conflicting and nonsensical themes. giving the above motif to joe chill doesn’t do anything a random mugging wouldn’t do (a twist of fate! victims of circumstance! if you wanted to lean on the parallels between bruce & joker then the randomness of their respective tragedies is the way to go) except shift the blame for what we’ve been taught to read as One Of The Worst Things To Ever Happen on the shoulders of people experiencing genuine systematic oppression. batman’s existence is uncomfortable to justify when you get into those kind of discussion, i get it! i do! but this is the verifiably cold take of a person who watched joker 2019 and thought arthur was the bad guy, not the billionaires and people in power making his life hell

conceptually making something out of the wayne murders isn’t bad per se (telltale did it wonderfully with the mob hit thing, a personal fav) but the above looks like a very unfortunate pattern in the context of geoff’s villains often being activists supposedly taking it too far by wanting to ensure universal healthcare and stopping homophobia & racism etc (the stargirl ISA), people rightfully fighting against what’s basically a universe-wide attempt at a fascist regime (sinestro vs the guardians) or mentally ill gay characters who’d never never been antagonists until geoff got his hands on them (todd rice/obsidian in jsa 1999, who geoff goes as far as to say might’ve been “born bad”). like, what’re you trying to say here, geoff? do you see how This looks?

another one of geoff’s Worst Offences in three jokers is also definitely how deep his misunderstanding (or hey! maybe hatred) of tkj seems to run. tkj was envisioned as the final batman story precisely because alan moore could not see joker’s cruelty rising above what he did to barbara, that was the unthinkable and it had been reached. end of story. and i agree! pushing joker’s edginess with every present day comic has made him absolutely unbearable but most of all, in the immediately relevant sense, geoff johns has clearly heard tkj is one of the most critically acclaimed batman stories in history and his takeaway was “oh its because joker shot barbara” rather than the actual reason (humanising joker). portraying pre-joker as an abusive husband and would-be father when moore clearly & intentionally avoids that

(”i don’t see him as a violent man so his fists aren’t bunched up or anything like that”, tkj script)

(”the anger is obviously directed at himself rather than at his wife”, tkj script)

and having bruce say he’s known joker’s identity since the moment they met because he’s ‘batman’ but has chosen to protect jeannie ‘cause she’s in some sort of witness protection type deal is, quite frankly, absolute bullshit. the tragedy of tkj is that The Man From Before was a completely average person, maybe even a good person with dreams and aspirations but so insignificant and invisible that he leaves no trace behind when he disappears. he’s not an everyman, he’s a nobody in the most real sense! a person that’s become untraceable through the hand life’s dealt him! the complete opposite of bruce and yet ending up at the same crossroads! why would pre-joker even go through all the trouble of getting involved with the red hood gang in the hopes of him & jeannie never worrying about money again if he didn’t care about her?

on that subject, is it really so hard to understand that joker is doing his whole plan in tkj not because he is a monster (no such thing) but because he sees himself as one and is trying to prove that anyone exposed to as much trauma as him would react the same way? joker’s thing is never about dying with batman or senselessly destroying lives or what have you but about proving it’s not just him. it’s a very base human desire of wanting to know you’re not the only one who’s ever gone through this

that’s why the miracle of bruce saying “maybe i’ve been there too” hits so hard when it’s meant to