When would YOU personally pin down the point where Batman became a "Mary Sue" in people's eyes? Is there a specific decade, a year, a comic run, a writer, etc. that you can point to?
When would YOU personally pin down the point where Batman became a "Mary Sue" in people's eyes...
I always thought Batman was a joke. Especially in those WB movies.
Who would win, Batman or James Bond?
pretty much any time he's in the Justice League and is treated as on-par or stronger than everyone else
in what?
Monopoly.
In comics, it was the Grant Morrison Justice League run, then Mark waid's Tower of Babel. In pop culture, the JLU cartoon.
Tower of babel.
/thread
Well Bruce Wayne is just better with business.
James Bond has luck on his side and he already landed on Park Place and Boardwalk.
For me personally it was "Epilogue", the final episode of JLU.
Batman will cheat to win, he will cheat somehow
Bond will know if he tries.
Man, I fucking hate "Batman has so much prep time he's figured out how to kill at the superheroes." I wish Batman was the one one normie human who was like "fuck you guys, I know superman, he's me friend, we should trust him."
I'm just so fucking tired of hero vs. hero bullshit.
in a world where mind control is a thing and youre freinds with 3 "gods"
i think its safe to have some plan if you really need to stop them.
Tower of Babel started all of this
TDKR, even though he never actually wins that fight and Superman didn’t want to fight at all.
That’s part of it but certainly not where it started.
that's a good point to pick but I mean
even 50 years ago he was bat-spray this and bat-computer that
It's so fucking tired.
i agree it is now, but when TOB was written i dont think it was touched on so much.
monopoly is neither a game of business nor a game of luck
the business side and the roll of the dice can both be mitigated by the deal making side re: you are free to make any deal with any other player (including the banker) at any time
if you want to sell $500 of property to your kid brother for $1 because he's losing and he agrees to that, you have a deal and no other player can do anything about it
if you want to swap your utility for his park avenue with hotels you can do that if he agrees to it and no other player can do anything about it
whether these things are fair is not the issue
they are part of the game's rules
that is why Monopoly between two players is never fun, because it's essentially just rolling dice with busy work
That’s part of it but certainly not where it started.
It canonized the concept of prep time. It gave people a canon story to explain how Batman can take anyone down. Before then, no one actually expected Batman to fight Justice League level powered threats
It happens as you absorb more and more DC media. First couple times he gets major win it's the hypest shit then it starts to seem a little ridiculous and comes at the expense of other characters. Eventually it becomes an eye rolling exercise and you feel like this guy is huge fraud. I used to love Batman but that was when I thought he was just a street fighting super sleuth not bends-reality-man.
When you take batman out of his usual villain rooster
Most batman villains don't even have superpowers
For me the point of stupid was Dark Nights Metal. Not only did he defeated all the Justice League in multiple ways in multiple worlds, but he took there powers and made his own super special bat Justice League. Also the Batman who laughs is bad and you should feel bad for liking him.
canon
canonized
Casuals don’t make this distinction and you’re only stressing it because you know TDKR is the real genesis of batgod in the zeitgeist.
I think the DCAU and The Tower of Babel were key turning points in the history of Batwank. Tower of Babel for comic book readers and the DCAU for normies. Those were the respective thresholds where prep time and power levels hit ridiculous levels of self-fellation.
Nah it was TDKR
Batman can't be a Mary Sue in his own story, because he's an established character. So you have to put the buzzwords down and more accurately articulate that he is just covered by an endless wall of plot armor which undercuts any tension or internal consistency in the stories they put him in.
TDKR
God, yes, you're completely right - I forgot about that.
TDKR was definitely the starting point of "um, Batman can beat you with prep-time". I would say it was later canonised and expanded upon by Tower of Babel, and the DCAU put it in the mainstream.
This is my answer. TDKR was a great story but, in comics fashion, it established itself as a reference point to be used to justify power creep. This happens with basically every cape hero: they manage an incredible, one-in-a-million feat in a memorable comic, which is then used as a defense of more envelope-pushing shenanigans later on. Tower of Babel doesn't exist save for the fact that TDKR effectively established that Batman+Prep Beats Superman. It's not TDKR's fault; its only crime was being a kickass comic in an industry obsessed with power levels. But if you want to look at the genesis of the meme, there it is.
superfags crying because batchad beat his supercuck like four decades ago: the thread
He should not be fighting anything other than street criminals. I imagine he would work best if he wasn't part of the DC universe because they're forced to include him in shit he's far out of his depth with.
morrison 100%
first JLA, then his batman run
Early 00s
DCAU was really edging into Batman is better than everyone territory with the Timm JLA series. But around the same time comics were doing the same thing with preptime being his superpower. Then other heroes started slowly mentioning how Batman was some kind of unstoppable force in their own comics.
The dark knight returns, it’s not even a debate.
TDKR started it
Tower of Babel expanded on it
The DCAU put it in the mainstream
Are we missing anything?
Batman was always dealing with crazy bullshit since the Golden Age. He was always depicted as Superman's equal and his skill at engineering was superhuman.
Half of everything is luck, James.
your buzzwords bad
my buzzwords good
anyway from the point of a Mary Sue being a character who is simply too good to be in the slightest bit credible or believable yes, he absolutely can be a Mary Sue, but the primary association comes from Batman being in very adolescent or outright childish media being too perfect to beat; but Frankel addressed that in the 80s and directly compared Superman to a Mary Sue (as Superman was indeed post-crisis but pre-death too perfect to beat)
in any case the reason Batman is not a Mary Sue is because Batman is not an idealized version of the reader's self or a self-insert character, he's a weird dream about a hot guy who's rich and takes care of you
he's bara
rules of the game literally allow you to sidestep the chance factor entirely and just be humane
durr it's luck durrrrr
You hear that whooshing sound going over that pin sized head of yours?
People always forget that he's fighting a Superman who was still in a weakened stat from the fucking nuke incident.
Did TDKR start this whole Batman vs. Superman shit in general? I might hate Frank Miller.
A Mary Sue is quite explicitly a new character who is inserted into a story and meant to endear themselves to the audience through the fawning adoration and respect from established protagonists and other characters. Most often by having the actual main character of the series falling madly in love with with the Sue character.
I might hate Frank Miller.
If you do, you're a tard. The post you replied to went over it.
It's not TDKR's fault; its only crime was being a kickass comic in an industry obsessed with power levels.
I'm gonna prove that Batman is a Mary Sue by citing fanart.
No. It was in the zeitgeist even in the fifties, its just that DC didn't indulge the audience on the subject becuase they were both The Good Guys and Friends.
In the period from the mid 00s to the mid 10s, Batman was just the
dude he could beat cancer with a pack of smokes
character. It was a combination of these things
Morrison JLA
Tower Of Babel
Morrison Batman
TDK exploding
Arkham becoming one of the biggest vidya franchises of the era
BatGod was born and didn't die until after Arkham was buried, the SnyderVerse died, and the BatComics became bloated and irrelevant. Mostly it was TDK becoming a phenomenon due to Ledger's passing, that every normalfag now thought it was cool to like Batman. So you had ComicVine Battleforum autism mixed with normalfag perceptions which made Batman, who was an already popular character, the go-to guy for having feats upon feats to satisfy them all.