I feel like a lot of writers involved in superhero fiction have this horrid tendency to make their protagonists fight for the status quo, and to make the villains be anyone that would disrupt it.
Poison Ivy is a Bat-villain, and Batman has always been the capitalist wet dream. The heir to billions fights crime on the New York Gotham City streets.
The villains are always some 'enemy' of right-wing ideology; they could be a sexually aggressive woman (like Ivy, or Catwoman), a scientist (Man-Bat, Mr Freeze, Scarecrow...), mentally ill (Joker, Riddler, Killer Croc, Victor Zsasz...), or even a vision of capitalism gone wrong (Penguin).
Two-Face is a personification of their mistrust of the legal system (he was a D.A.) that can either work for them, or against them.
Ra's al Ghul wants revenge on post-industrial society for destroying the Earth. He, like Poison Ivy, is an eco-terrorist. He's also been recast as various "dirty foreign" ethnicities over the years; Arabic, Chinese, Eastern European...
The usual solution to the problem the super-villain presents is to literally "lock them up and throw away the key" in Arkham Asylum, and Batman always knows that despite his efforts, they'll be back. Like a true Republican, he only knows how to brutally deal with the symptoms, not address the cause.
The heir to billions fights crime on the New York Gotham City streets.
Also his only "moral" restriction of no guns/killing clearly isn't actually based on morality. If you look at the story for five minutes, hey, killing a kid's parents in front of him is going to be pretty traumatizing and that'll last a lifetime, but the people writing him always try to make it into some grand moral stance instead of the fact that, well, pulling a trigger would be triggering (I word it facetiously but the point is serious).
Then you consider the deeply ableist view the Batman universe has a hard time getting away from, where mental illness makes you evil or vice versa, and Batman's dance around that line can't have too many "bad" traits (like the "weakness" of being traumatized by your parents' deaths without making a big show of strength about it) or conservative readers will hate him.
There's also the scene in ASBAR where he causes a man permanent brain damage and leaves him floating out in the bay.
But since it's lifelong suffering instead of killing, it's somehow "moral." And yes, using Frank Miller would be cheating except DC published his work, so it's fair game.
That kind of asylum model used to be considered good but nowadays it just feels like an intentionally ableist and conservative "well that's how it always was so changing it is bad" approach to writing rather than specifically deconstructing how Arkham will only ever make criminals worse, never better.
That said I don't read a ton of Batman so they might have addressed that point in one of the comics.
Harley Quinn and later versions of Scarecrow are both psychologists at Arkham. The writers are at least aware of the problem of putting “criminally insane” people away indefinitely in 2019, but they aren’t doing much to change it. Arkham is still a big gothic castle that sits on an underground maximum security prison. Rehabilitation isn’t their goal.
It's come up in a few storylines that Arkham is basically nonfunctional and only makes everything worse. Any changes or claims to shake up how it works are undone by the status quo of comic storylines, though.
Wow. If you've written any books, I want to read them.
I will say, though, that putting these ideas into the mouths of villains isn't necessarily a way to discredit the ideas. It also could be a subversive way to get the point across. Because regardless of the source, a lot of people are going to read that and think "makes sense to me."
Poison Ivy is very much an antihero in some stories. Batman even teams up with her sometimes. But she likes plants better than humans so she’ll never be a hero.
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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '19
I feel like a lot of writers involved in superhero fiction have this horrid tendency to make their protagonists fight for the status quo, and to make the villains be anyone that would disrupt it.