I Really, Really Want An Incident Where Battison Has To Publicly Interact With Penguin As Bruce Wayne.

I really, really want an incident where Battison has to publicly interact with Penguin as Bruce Wayne.

Just imagine. It's maybe a year or so after the movie. Bruce has become more of a public presence in Gotham and has started a lot of charity and donation work, but is no less weird and socially uncomfortable. Penguin, meanwhile, has taken over Falcone's operations and has truly started to come into his own as the head of Gotham's criminal underworld. They're both at some sort of gala or memorial or something, where Penguin is schmoozing with the wealthy elite and Bruce is trying his best to sink into the floor. Everyone is tiptoeing around Penguin, nervously polite smiles and conversation, terrified of both him and his reputation.

And then he approaches Bruce.

Everyone's holding their breath, assuming Bruce is going to be TERRIFIED. This man is terrified by small talk, there's no WAY he's going to be able to handle a full conversation with Gotham's most feared mob boss. No one has any idea how this interaction is going to go, but they doubt it's going to be good.

Bruce is just staring at the floor. It's been almost two days since he last slept, he doesn't want to be here, and now goddamn PENGUIN is coming up to talk to him. Why. He does NOT want this and absolutely does NOT have the bandwidth for it right now. So he just. Walks away. Penguin walks up, opens his mouth to speak, and Bruce is just like "no" and shuffles off. This happens multiple times throughout the night. He never even lets Penguin get a full word out. Why would he? Wayne Enterprises is never going to do business with Oswald Cobblepot so he doesn't have to preserve that relationship. He spends the entire rest of the event shuffling around the room, pointedly ignoring Penguin's increasingly baffled attempts to talk to him

Bruce's cryptid status IMMEDIATELY skyrockets. Social anxiety of Local Disaster of a Man overrides self-preservation when talking to notorious mob boss. Everyone is DELIGHTED by this. Bruce Wayne keeps getting weirder by the day and the entire city of Gotham is living for it.

Okay I already ranted in the tags on another post about this, but I'm having enough Feelings about the scene in the hospital between Bruce and Alfred that it's getting its own post (I got the gifs of this from the wonderful post by @magnusedom which is, coincidentally, the post I was ranting in the tags on)

The entire scene is very emotional and features excellent acting from both Robert Pattinson and Andy Serkis, but I want to focus on Alfred's facial expressions at two particular points during the conversation:

First, when Bruce admits he doesn't care if he himself dies

This is Alfred's face directly after Bruce tells him this. The absolute HEARTBREAK- I get the sense that Alfred isn't necessarily surprised that Bruce feels this way, but suspecting something and knowing something are two very different things. Alfred has been a part of Bruce's life since he was born and raised him after his parents died. He's spent the past 20 years watching Bruce, someone he loves as a son, spiral and struggle with very clear mental health issues and the lingering effects of a very severe trauma. And more than that, Bruce has actively pushed Alfred away during this; while their relationship isn't necessarily overtly antagonistic, it's clearly very tense and fraught. Even knowing all that, Bruce is- probably for the first time- openly expressing what is AT BEST passive suicidal ideation and we see how crushing it is for Alfred to hear those words coming from Bruce himself.

And then we get this:

This is how Alfred looks at Bruce when Bruce admits that the thought of losing Alfred evokes a fear and emotional response on par with what he felt when he lost his parents. And again, given their tense relationship throughout the film up until this point, this is probably the first time Bruce has ever openly expressed this. Holy emotional confessions, Batman! The absolute love and affection and WARMTH in Alfred's expression is BEAUTIFUL, ESPECIALLY in the context of the fact that Bruce literally just admitted he doesn't care if he himself dies. Bruce is telling Alfred that, despite their disagreements and the tension in their relationship, he cares more about Alfred's life and safety than he does about his own. That's how important Alfred is to him. And we can see just how profoundly Bruce's confession impacts Alfred.

And then, after two confessions that we see profoundly emotionally impact Alfred, we get this absolutely BEAUTIFUL moment:

Bruce has just been more open and honest with Alfred than he's probably ever been in the past 20 years, about both his own pain and trauma and about how important Alfred is to him. After 20 years of reaching out only to be pushed away as Bruce struggled and spiralled, Alfred reaches out again. And, for the first time, Bruce reaches back. It's a massive and hugely important step forward in their relationship. Bruce's pain doesn't magically go away. He's still traumatized and depressed and full of so much anger and hurt and fear. But he's finally come to a place where he can accept Alfred's love and support and can admit to himself that he loves Alfred back, even if that opens him up to the potential pain and loss inherent in caring for someone. It's such an impactful moment with so much emotional depth and a huge turning point for Bruce's character, and I think Andy Serkis' acting is really an important part of what drives it home

The Fentons harnessed magic with science. They actually did that. Like. They looked at something that most people would have seen as purely magical/fantastical and went nope and tore it apart from a purely scientific point of view and it actually freaking worked. They managed to isolate ectoplasm as an actual compound and used it to power stuff and shit and went crazy on ghosts, people/entities that have actually, literally, died and really went “hey what if the difference between life and death is just one dimension”. like motherfucker I think you just invented a new philosophy actually. Like!!!?!? What the hell. It blew my mind.

Yeah, what IF death is just another form of existence. Bitch, what then. What the heck.

And then they built a portal to that dimension actually. They built a portal to hell in their basement. They just went “what if we could see the afterlife” and went for it. Granted, they didn’t actually believe in it in that sense.

But if you think of it that way, it kind of makes sense that they’re so crazy ALL THE FUCKING TIME because they stared the concept of death and existentialism and mortality in the face, something that drives most humans crazy just thinking about it, so much that we went and invented a bunch of religions and philosophies to deal with that emptiness, and they CRACKED THE CODE. They had actual scientific proof of all that.

HEY IF I FIGURED OUT THE ACTUAL MEANINGLESSNESS OF LIFE AND HOW WE’RE JUST JUMPING FROM ONE DIMENSION TO THE NEXT I WOULD ACTUALLY GO CRAZY TOO.

No wonder they didn’t want to believe ghosts are human(ish) and they can feel emotions and stuff. It’s a lot to deal with

Okay so I have no idea if it's actually true, but this article mentioned that the knife/batarang that makes the bat symbol on Battison's suit is made from pieces of the gun that killed his parents, and I am 100% choosing to believe it because it's giving me So Many Emotions about him using it to cut the live wire at the end.

Cutting the wire could have very easily killed Bruce, and we can see that he knows this. Even if the shock didn't kill him, he could have been killed by the fall or drowning in the water below. It was very much a move of self-sacrifice (even though he didn't ultimately die) in an attempt to save the people below. More than that, it was his first act in recognition that his quest for vengeance was simply continuing the vicious cycle that had victimized him. His first (in my opinion) true act as a hero as opposed to a vigilante. And the fact that he did it using something made of the pieces of the literal thing that killed his parents- a physical reminder of his trauma and (an admittedly poetic) weapon in his quest for vengeance- is an absolutely beautiful piece of storytelling. It's a fucking POIGNANT way to express the movie's ultimate thesis of breaking the cycles of violence and trauma. Matt Reeves you goddamn genius, how DARE you make me feel these emotions

i think about that period of time where dick had to step up and be damians mentor but didnt actually want to like twice a day

he fought a lot for a kid he had to learn to love the hard way

AU where Damian feels really bad for hurting Tim but won't admit it out loud, so he goes into over protective mode.