Batman

Is the whole 'Thomas Wayne was dirty' trope the new 'Professor X did something bad and then mindwiped everyone'?

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He wasn't even dirty in The Batman. Alfred even spells it out of the audience, he was a naive idealist who trusted the wrong man in an effort to protect his wife's dignity and was likely murdered for trying to come clean about it.

the waynes have always been evil havent you heard about thomas wayne jr just awful what they did to him

He didn't do shit in Joker. All of it was a lie his mom told Arthur. At worse he as an elitist prick, but that didn't mean he deserved to die. Arthur was just butthurt and angry he didn't want to be his dad and instead told him to fuck off and leave his son alone (which he had every right to).

>How could I not know this mob boss I asked to rough up some reporter ended up killing him instead?

You’d be amazed how retarded some rich people are

Emphasis on idealist. He had also saved Falcone's life before that and wanted them to be square.

He can’t be so bad since he has the potential to become Batman. Martha is a crazy hooker

It comes from some stories in, I wanna say the 80's or early 90's, where it turned out that Thomas was a party boy who got in deep with the Mob before he met Martha, who pulled him away from the bad actors in his life, and then said bad actors paid Joe Chill to whack them both.
Also he had some kind of Evil Twin.

>I love your smile - TW
Not even Arthur knows what happened.

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Seriously why can’t they just be really nice people. It makes Batmans whole crusade feel all the more better than if they got their hands dirty, oh well Thomas was dirty, maybe he had it coming.

Except that the trope doesn't exist. He didn't even do anything in Joker. Punching a screeching, sperging weirdo who keeps following you around and even tried to visit you at you home where he put his filthy fingers inside your son's months and assaulted your butler doesn't make you a bad person.

Thomas was nicer to him than he should've been. Any person would've beaten him right there to pulp.

>Martha Wayne was actually crazy and Thomas had been trying to hide it from the public.

This feels like something I've heard before but where did it first show up?

Earth 1 Batman

It's been a thing for a while. I know Batman Earth One used it, which is what The Batman was inspired by, and Morrison also played around with it in his run with Dr. Hurt.

It’s one of those variances of an adaptation. Like whether Joker was a crook or victim of circumstances before he was transformed. Or if Lex Luthor and Clark Kent knew each other in their youth. It may be a hard pill to swallow but frankly a morally ambiguous Thomas Wayne is a lot more realistic by today’s standards. The trope of old money Rockefeller types who are lauded as city nobility is a product of an America that doesn’t exist anymore. If you want to sell the idea that Bruce is trying to fix the erosion of Gotham, having to address his own family name as part of that adds an extra layer of depth. But the thing about the Thomas Wayne of ‘Joker’ is that he wasn’t even corrupt, just inconsiderate and out of touch. Nothing he does in the story is morally condemnable, from his perspective he’s perfectly rational, but that’s to what makes it so compelling.

I think that's the sort of middle ground that works well. Having Thomas revealed to be a big piece of shit kind of feels like an edgy subversion for the sake of shock value in the way that it would be to suddenly reveal that Uncle Ben was a terrible person - a big part of their role in the story is as a role model for the protagonist, and dismantling that ends up dismantling the protagonist as a result. It might tell a good story, but it's not going to appeal to a lot of fans of the classic material.
I think the Telltale game is an example of how to do it properly; Thomas and Martha aren't bad people. They're involved with bad people. They're still by and large doing good for the community, but they are arguably doing it in a morally compromising way. It's an interesting contrast with Bruce who is fundamentally against participating in that kind of corruption, but... he's committing violent acts as a vigilante, he's not exactly a saint himself, and examining these characters moral failings while still maintaining their overall integrity is a way to, in my mind, have your cake and eat it too

It harms the character (talking about Batman2022 here) because it makes Bruce Wayne a beneficiary of the very institutionalized corruption he's trying to undo.

It's similar to the Joker killing Batman's parents in Batman 1989 movie. It's movie or story short hand to connect events. People are obsessed with that kind of connection, revelation, even though it often ends up making the story universe feel small. The universe can be painfully random sometime as opposed to coincidence or something like fate.

I think it's also a product or decades of writers fitting more and more into characters histories. Eventually it starts cheapening things.

Nah fuck that shit.

The point of the Waynes not being completely innocent is that it challenges Batman's worldview, and, in the end, moves his crusade away from being purely motivated by his parents

Except there’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone has parents, it just resonates with people more that way. I guess nothing can be good in this world. Maybe that’s why there’s so much evil Superman. Nothing can be truly good.

>havent you heard about thomas wayne jr just awful what they did to him
Talon is just some crazy schizo that was gas lighted into thinking he was Bruce's brother.

Batman is truly good.

goes back to Earth 3 in the 60s.
Bruce Wayne has always had an evil brother who went insane and got locked up in Arkham.
Invalid in the main universe, Owlman in Earth 3.