Batman: Under the Red Hood, a question, no answer?

I didn't write the message below. It was written but the poster whose pseudo is Action Jeans, on 2013 october the 22nd, on the Red Letter Media message board I read. It sums up admirably my own thoughts about the innocence, not only necessary, but mostly indispensable, which goes with the most known superheroes. Our conclusions are opposed, since he seems to regret  the existence of the subject matter, when I agree wholheartedly with it. The tone is more brutal than what I would use myself, but the thoughs are the same:

"Batman: Under the Red Hood

I finally watched this all the way through on Netflix. It was pretty good. Yet another storyline about Batman being entangled by his own inexplicable code of conduct.

I think that looking at the Batman franchise as a whole is a great case study for how a simple contrived plot device, introduced early in a character's development, can permanently hobble the writing process for every story that comes after. There's no getting around it. Even if you don't want to write a story specifically about how Batman going to any ridiculous extreme to avoid killing anyone, ever, totally and needlessly fucks up everything he has ever tried to accomplish, you still have to write everything with this idea in mind. Because it has gone from being a convenient way of keeping villains alive for recurring appearances in a serialized format to being a sticking point in the plausibility of every attempt to make a more serious and "grown up" Batman for the current fanbase.

It works fine for a campy 60s television Batman. It poses no problems for a Superfriends cartoon series or a "Brave and the Bold" type Batman. Even the relatively darker tone created for the groundbreaking cartoon series from the 90s managed to work within the established framework. It was still essentially a kid's show with some really silly aspects that kept it from getting too far up its own ass. Tim Burton's incarnation sidestepped the issue entirely by ignoring it.

It really only becomes an issue when fans, outgrowing the kids stuff but not being quite ready to put their toys away, start demanding darker, more realistic themes from a franchise that was never really built to satisfy those demands. Rather than turning to more adult crime fiction, fans (and artists) began expecting a guy in a cape to start becoming more adult crime fiction.

So that's where stuff like Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns and Christopher Nolan's Batman movies come into the picture. Things like the Arkham Asylum games. Villains become more ruthless. Criminals more willing to kill. Bad guys get deadlier and the consequences all become more grave. As a result, Batman has to become more and more capable of doing absolutely anything. He has to be the best fighter, the perfect tactician, the smartest scientist, most clever inventor, the fittest athlete, most agile gymnast. More prepared for any contingency than a whole troop of Eagle Scouts. He has to know everything and always be 20 steps ahead to compensate for a universe that is so hostile and brutal that just being a really tough guy with good detective skills and cool gimmick just isn't gonna cut it anymore.

And the more gritty and realistic this world becomes, the more ridiculous and out of place Batman and his goofy outfit seem residing in it. Especially when Batman is hamstrung by a corny, indefensible prerequisite that has become a sacred cow for fans and the elephant in the room for writers. It's wedged into the character like an iron spike in a tree. All work has to stop until they figure out how to get the lumber for a story out of this tree that keeps breaking the chainsaws. Eventually, it's easier to give up and make it about the spike. instead of the tree. Every story has to be about that fucking spike, now.

Anyway, back to Under the Red Hood: this was as decent a story about the immovable character spike as I have seen. It got so close to the root of the problem with this character that I almost believed they were going to finally get past it. The speech that Jason Todd gives about how much of a self-righteous asshole Batman really is was so dead on that I really found myself getting invested in that scene. But Batman's response to it is so flaccid. So unforgivably weak sauce. He's got no decent justification for not killing Joker within the confines of the story and he can't say "because the Joker is a very popular character and our eternal dynamic is a cash cow for DC" without demolishing the fourth wall and dropping whatever tenuous suspension of disbelief is left.

Man, fuck Batman."