I don’t know what shocked me more. The fact that a Wikipedia page exists for it, or what I discovered while reading it. Honestly, it feels like a fever dream.
Anyway, here are some things I read which I found very memorable.
Don’t know why I was shocked that there have been academic studies about Batman.
Three lovely quotes by Batman writers, which will live in my head rent free till the end of time.
Bat-nipples are domtext, not subtext.
George Clooney made Batman gay.
Denying that Batman is silly and campy as a concept is denying his homoerotecism.
“It’s often unhealthy to hyper-analyze your sexuality to the point where how you experience it changes where you belong. This is why the idea that broader terms are somehow more restrictive is baffling. Continuously breaking labels down and creating terminology for each facet of one’s identity shrinks communities until it’s just one person convinced that they’re the only one who relates to their experiences. It isolates people and ignores the importance of individuality within a collective identity.”
From my experience what these people actually want is confirmation that their experiences were normal and correct and that it’s the world that has gone wrong. That’s why confronting them with the fact that actually how they were treated was literally abuse makes them so upset, they don’t want to acknowledge that they were (and often still are) victims of people and systems outside their control. They were raised with the mindset that to admit something hurt you was a weakness. They were raised to believe that suffering through hardship silently is a sign of good character and strength. They want to be praised for being so strong, not sympathised with for being so hurt, they just don’t know what to do with that massive shift in perspective
