Just what is the appeal of Batman these days?

[Ramza00]

No True Scotsman the audience down

Batman isn't Scottish he is Gothic!



Can we get back to Batman again, please?



But to add what I said before, but let's expand it. Batman is a person living in a world of superheroes. Now what do I mean by Superhero? Well first lets define the term.

A Superhero is a person who has superhuman abilities, that are simply beyond what humans are capable. Contrast this with a human who has peak hero abilities. An example, so pretty much the limits of human biology for running is.

• 15 miles per hour for long distance running. Effectively you are olympic level if you can run a 4 minute mile for long distance running, 4 mins mile is 15 miles per hour. The fastest marathons (26.2 miles) races by humans are in the 12 mile per hour category which means they ran the 26.2 miles in 2 hours and 10 mins or less.
• 20 miles per hour for short distance running. 20 miles per hour means you will cover a 100 meters in 11.1 seconds. The fastest 100 meter ever was Usain Bolt with 9.58 seconds and thus 23.35 miles per hour.

Anything faster than these speeds are not peak human abilities, instead of super human. For example Captain America is Super Human in strength but more Peak Human in speed. (That said there are many comics where Captain America has speed feets of twice the numbers I listed above.)

As soon as you are start running at 30 miles per hour, or start flying on your own, and so on you are no longer peak human and are now superhuman.

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So what does Peak Human have to do with Batman? Batman is supposed to show the limits of what a mortal man can do. He is not realistic, as an individual, no human can do all of the things but if he is written as most people have written him he should only have abilities similar to what is possible if you were to find at least 1 human on the normal earth that is capable of doing these things, then Batman should be able to do that. He is the measuring stick of what is possible in a world that has lots of superhumans for that is the world of DC and even the world of Gotham. Batman is not a realistic individual but he is supposed to show what is possible for humanity in a composite individual.

Now Batman regularly does superhuman things with the age of gadgets, machines, and so on, but even these things are supposed to have limits. With a few thousand dollars you can get a car that can go 60 miles per hour, and a with a few billion dollars you can get a fast "bat" car that can go 100 miles per hour or 200 miles per hour but even then we are still dealing a world with limits.

The problems that Batman is supposed to face either with individual villains (super villains) or societies (cults, mob, super villain armies) are supposed to be threats greater than what Batman can handle.

1) With "group threats" (mob, cult, armies) what is supposed to happen is that not even one "perfect" man is not enough. It is supposed to illustrate we need collective action to solve these problems, you need a bat family, or a police force, or an army and so on.

2) With "super villain threats" Batman is a foil to show that even with super powers you can still defeat these "super humans" by fighting orthogonally and not in a direct way. And to remind people that powers are great but they are not universal panaceas to all the problems in the world.

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Batman is a byronic hero. He is the mirror which reminds society of al its flaws but it also is the person who reinvigorates society because only society can solve the problems of society a byronic hero can not.



The byronic hero can't fix all the problems, he just can't. He may be charismatic, he may be peak human or even sometimes super human, but he still has limits and this lifesyle is ultimately destructive.



But while the byronic hero is ultimately self destructive, it can remind people of things greater than the self which is the collective. And thus the byronic hero is both tragedy but also reinvigorates the traditional, the stale, the bleak society.

Now there are other types of heroes who challenge the impossible, but byronic type heroes such as Batman are often used for social commentary. Many of the more famous batman stories are in the end morality plays and that is why people love them, even if their type of morality is not the traditional form of morality. They tell a story, where people felt they learn something either about the individuals or the society these people inhabit and they feel it is some ways applicable to real life.

There is hope at the end of this darkness, we just have to wait for it and keep on hoping.

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Now there is another type of batman story that people love which has no "reversal at the end of the arc", that the end of the arc is just bleak, grimdark, edgelord, etc. Some people really love those stories but they are often usually less popular and usually side stories not connected to the main canon. Let a particular fandom loves these stories and are quite vocal about their love.