to ask whether bruce wayne is more ‘batman’ or ‘brucie’ is like. the framework for the right question. but people answer it too simply. no one is just one thing. there is no one sentence that can define 80+ years of writers and artists across thousands of issues and universes and titles and cartoons and a dozen movies. but if i had to answer it---it would be this. 

bruce wayne does not WANT to be bruce wayne. he wants to be something outside himself. he wants to be batman. with his whole heart and soul, he wants, he wants, he wants to be batman. he wants to strike fear into the hearts of criminals, he WANTS to be the hero that ‘fixes’ the impossible to fix gotham. he wants to be morally grey, and ruthless, a perfect, cold genius loner. who doesn’t want to be perfect? who doesn’t want to fix things, especially the things you build up in your head as your origin story, the source of all your trauma and pain and loneliness? what mentally ill person does not have a fixation---a persona or a hobby or a spiral of negative thoughts that they use to cope with the loneliness and pathology inside them---that they fixate on, at least occassionally, so fiercely they lose sight of the face that they’re supposed to show to the world?

bt u cant just stop being a human being. it doesn’t matter how much money you have, how traumatized you are. bruce is lucky---he has alfred, and then, mercifully, he has dick, who brings him back to his humanity, who reminds him that he has NEEDS above wants. food, water, sleep, companionship. bruce is at his best as a disabled character, crinkling grumpily around his chronic pain and the abuse and self-harm he’s put his own body through. despite being a billionaire---any working class blue collar person can relate to the hell that he puts himself through, to protect, to help, to stave off retirement to take care of his family and his children (the robins, but also everyone in gotham, every child and adult and criminal and civilian alike) a little longer.

but to be honest, more than any character with powers and invulnerability and thus the great power that begets great responsibility---bruce is literally painfully human, and has most of all a responsibility to himself and his family to do less and take care of himself and his emotional and physical needs first---not as batman, the symbol he wants to be, nor as ‘brucie’ the mask he uses to hide the disability that comes with batman and birthed batman---but as bruce wayne, the man, the father of robins and batgirls.

batman is a symbol, not a person. it’s a title. brucie is a nickname, and nicknames are used with particular people, to denote particular things. but under monikers and titles and symbols, we are all adult children trying to find out how to take care of ourselves without our parents. we are all desperately searching for meaning for our suffering, meaning that can make us ignore that vital task of the daily maintenance of being alive, and make it a little more bearable to remember ‘we have to live. we have to keep living. we have to choose to live, over and over again, in the most mundane and disgusting, boring ways, with every action we take to take care of ourselves and our relationships, and nothing else really matters, besides that we do the best that we can to be good, to be decent, to be kind, which is in many ways even harder.’ 

to define it in a sentence, if i have to, bruce wayne is a mentally ill, disabled, human person, like most of us are, in one way or another, and he, like all of us, want to be something more, a wish fulfillment fantasy that he stakes his whole life on, but bruce wayne, much to his own health and the health of his relationship’s unsteady decline, is much more successful at pretending to be an all-knowing negative coping skill god than most of us could ever hope to be.

his redemption for any flaw you percieve in him---any negative or abusive action he’s done in the comics---and there are a lot---can only come from first giving up on the fixation to be batman and to dwell in the shadows. to get better, bruce has to give up literal violence on his own body and other people’s bodies and focus on his other roles and responsibilities---what he actually owes to other people, instead of the predisposition towards violence and the revolving door of guilt he sees in his mind.

bruce wayne is bruce wayne, and once he extricates himself from brucie AND batman---he can begin to actually heal, and then, not fix---but deal---with what has actually been broken.