i hate to say it but all bruce does these days is whineeeee. which i feel like is antithetical to how i understand him as a character. like yes, he broods and he does obsess, but he doesn’t really whine unless some of the time if only alfred is there to witness it lol.

like, fr. i haven’t really been keeping up with comics, so maybe i’m off base with some of this, but here’s what it looks like from the outside

bruce’s relationship with dick is under-served or just basically ignored, when they do bring it out, it’s only for very quick angst fuel then right back to business like they don’t know each other at all

bruce accepting jason back into the family was rushed and handled by sub-par writing which didn’t support the emotional gravitas that said reunification should have involved. i’ve seen a lot of fics that did it way better than what they did. it feels shoe-horned. also, why is bruce tacitly rubber-stamping jason as batman-affiliated when he’s still using GUNS? like WHAT. how does that make any sense. do bruce’s emotional boundaries matter at all? does everything have to be jason’s way or the highway? bruce is notoriously stubborn. much as he loves jason, i can’t see him letting that slide IF this were to work. DON’T SKIP OVER THE IMPORTANT CHARACTER WORK. like, set up the foundations and then build on top of that. don’t just jump to the payoff and try to walk things back as you go! it’s lazy and shows where editorial mandate stymied good storytelling. and there are way more issues with it that i have than just that. of course i love to see bruce and jason caring about each other and getting along as much as the next fan but the way they chose to go about it raises SO many questions

tim who?

no tim has been flanderized so fucking bad. actually he’s been transformed more into the fandom-lite version of himself, which i do kind of hate. oh yeah, he’s with bernard now. WHOOP TEE DOO! the fans have been clamoring for that pairing for years i’m sure.

there have been an assortment of good-to-middling damian comics since the 2010s as at least some writers seem vaguely interested in that dynamic with bruce but for every 2 mildly tolerable issues they drop one that’s got fucking jack shit bonkers writing in it and relies on only the most tired of “U LIED TO ME” tropes. nothing will compare to the tomasi 2011 batman and robin run and that was like the single decent output of the new 52 and the best thing dc has released in years. i’m right

among the newer characters they’ve released, it’s sad that they never really seem to... stick? PLEASE INVEST IN SOMEONE. more duke! more harper! more LITERALLY ANYONE!

bring the fun back to comics. where’s the storytelling. decide whether you want to create a new shitty joker and/or riddler iteration, or a new army of jokers and/or riddlers and/or scarecrows. or just create a new poo poo shitty villain of the week who will age like milk. why not have one based on social media. that’s a new one that i’m sure no one will ever see coming.

STOP SOFT REBOOTING EVERY ISSUE. we know, you’re going to start the next new groundbreaking run, take everything back to basics so nobody is confused, bring on the new readers with this cool new jumping on point, simple just batman alfred and the joker with juuuust enough of a new “modern” twist to it to differentiate it from the thousands of other times you did this. great job dc. doing great. when you’re done with that let’s do another mass cataclysm event across 20 books. im sure people will want to collect all those variant covers.

and i love how there are SO many fics that do it so, so, so much better. jesus fuck. and fic writers aren’t even being PAID! we’re not even being PAID!!

so, yeah, i’m kind of done with comics for time being. i’ve been dabbling in anime and games again, getting back to roots, but so far, it’s mainly been independent web content free of advertisers, executives, editorial and other bullshit that’s caught my fancy lately. the artistic freedom is really needed to tell a good story now. the multiverse / soft reboot / re-configure the universe every year bullshit that marvel popularized has infiltrated, like, everything, as well as the netflix model of “let’s cancel immediately after season 1”. there is no buildup. there is no excitement. there is no story. mba’s and boardrooms do not understand “story”. they don’t know what creativity is. they know what numbers, profits, engagement look like, and they are optimizing for that curve. i do not know why they are shocked when that curve sinks lower and lower every year. i just simply do not understand.

im so mad. kevin conroy’s dead and we’ll never get something like b:tas ever again. media has been my life since i was a baby. so i have to find some kind of stories to try to enjoy even if i have to eke it out in the margins of society lol