He's a backup protocol like in canon but he's not a part of Bruce's psyche that has been locked away
He's literally a backup Batman made by Bruce he's a robot that is essentially made to be Batman without Bruce Wayne
He's a cold unfeeling machine that puts the Batman crusade above all else and he doesn't hold Bruce's morals because he isn't Bruce Wayne he's Batman without Bruce Wayne
Pretty much Bruce made Zur-En-Arrh as a backup protocol who can successfully carry out the Batman mission if Bruce dies then The Zur-En-Arrh protocol will activate and Zur-En-Arrh will awake and take up the Batman mission
Another way The Zur-En-Arrh protocol will activate is if Bruce succumbs to Joker Toxin and becomes like The Batman Who Laughs Zur-En-Arrh will awake and make his primary objective to kill Bruce
Batman, explaining The Batman Who Laughs to his sidekicks: So, essentially, he's an amalgam of me and the Joker, however, because he's from the Dark Multiverse and thus actually an embodiment of the worst of my fears about myself, my capabilities, and the capabilities of the Joker, he's not actually bound by the same physical and mental limitations of either me or the Joker. In fact, he's not even bound by the same laws of physics as we are, and his continued presence in this universe--
Jason, who stopped listening .00002 seconds after hearing 'an amalgam of me and the Joker':
So I got in to bookbinding a few months ago and finally made a collection of all my batjokes stories. Since money is tight I told myself to stick to only supplies I already owned, so while these wouldn’t be my first choice of endpapers for this material, I still think the skulls are cute. The cover art was hand foiled with a foil quill pen and took a little under 3.5 hours.
Huge shoutout to everyone in the Renegade server for lending me their opinions and advice while I designed this little chonker 🙏🏻💜
“You can call him crazy, excitable, feral, overexcellent, etc. But never forget that Bruce once went insane after locking himself in a simulator that emulated Robin Dick Grayson’s joy.” hey in ur last post which was excellent btw u referenced this and i was just wondering which comic ur talking about bc i would love to read it ahahah thanks
og post in reference
yes!
It's from The Batman Who Laughs comic and I don't want to spoil anything but a quick backstory because it gets confusing. So Bruce is fighting the Batman Who Laughs because he came over to prime earth and Earth-22 Batman is just slaughtering people in the worst way possible.
My specific comment is in Issue 4 where he's like "I need to put myself in the shoes of my enemy so I can understand them." SO he creates this machine and he knows that Earth-22 Batman was driven mad due to happiness or something so he basically goes "who are the happiest people I know? Children. Dick was the happiest child, all of them were, but Dick specifically. So now I'm going to see the world through his eyes to understand Batman-22."
The wildest part is, that when Earth-22 and normal Batman Bruce face off, the evil Batman actually name calls Dick when talking to Bruce.