Look. Don't get me wrong. I love the batjokes fandom literally everyone I've interacted with has been SO nice for such an insane ship it's a surprisingly chill fandom.

That being said... sometimes I feel Weird because a lot of the community (not all! but a large part) is like haha yeah my favorite fucked up toxic problematic ship love how twisted it is >:) batman wants to fuck that clown even though he literally killed his whole ass son it's so fucked I love it.

And that's fine! No problem with that. Power to you.

But I'm just over here like... what if they both got better together and processed their trauma and Joker made amends with everyone and everyone was happy and content as a family.

Like, the most compelling thing for ME in Batjokes is easily Bruce's refusal to view Joker the way most other people do. Even in arcs where he does dehumanize Joker, he at the very least makes an attempt to understand him. Everyone else is just like yeah, he's evil, he's just doing this shit because he enjoys it because he's a monster. But even when their relationship is at its worst, like in Joker War, Batman tries to understand where Joker is coming from. He doesn't just assume oh yeah Joker is just doing this because he's evil there's no logic behind his crimes he just enjoys it.

Bruce actually understands that Joker is trying to show him something, i.e., that he isn't being Batman right (in Joker's opinion). And even after Joker literally tears down his life, fucking reanimates his dead father figure to torment him and re-enacts his childhood trauma on the city, Bruce STILL ends up agreeing that he had a point!

Like to ME... Batjokes is about loving someone so transcendentally that you devote your entire existence to helping them. It's about having compassion for someone even after they commit horrific atrocities. It's about loving someone who everyone else hates and views as a monster. It's about someone loving the parts of someone that they consider terrible and unlovable. It's about being misunderstood your entire life and finally finding someone who gets it. It's about love for one person motivating you to stay alive in a world that's been nothing but cruel to you. It's about finding someone who makes everything awful that's ever happened to you seem worth it. But most importantly it's about the refusal to give up on someone who everyone else has long since declared a lost cause.