I'm gonna keep this scan around cluttering my hard drive, just so I can make a long list of all the supernatural things wrong with Gotham. Because it is ridonkulous.
There’s a post that makes the rounds on tumblr now and then that does the whole “Why doesn’t Bruce actually try to make Gotham better?” thing, and one of the add ons to it has a whole list of ways that Gotham is cursed/screwed no matter how much anyone tries to fix it. Off the top of my head I can just think of: the guy in the scans above, the court of owls always making things worse, the Barbatos demon or whatever his name is, the fact that Gotham is really close to weird places like Slaughter Swamp, and I’m pretty sure in one of the Arkham miniseries that there is like a portal to Hell in the asylum that they have issues with keeping closed occasionally.
It would be hilarious if Bruce decided "You know what, Hub City, Bludhaven, they don't have any curses on them and they're pretty messed up. I'm going to move there for a while." And a year later, Hub City was, like, Disneyworld.
As I recall, the funny thing is that Barbatos wasn't much of a God of Evil in his debut story... okay, yeah, he strung along the Riddler to do some pretty monstrous things, but ultimately he was just an extraterrestrial trapped on Earth by idiot human cultists that wanted to go home.
I think it was Morrison later on who gave him legit God of Evil credentials.
It would be even funnier if Barbatos really wasn’t that bad but then being stuck in Gotham for a while is what made him go super duper evil. Like, dang, even the evil entities get MORE evil after a few years in the city.
The thing about " supernatural/genre fiction aspects of Gotham make it fundamentally bad/unable to be better " is that " greater aspects of this area of the world mean that I can write it off as bad and consider all involved ontologically evil/deserving of their fate " is also a real-world attitude.
Its the same sort of shitty dodge as "well actually Bruce does loads of charity work". Its just a post facto justification to explain why Batman should never change his methods and make anyone who questions them instantly wrong.
Retconning a superhero into having done things better sends the message that the better things are worth doing, even if it does come across as a rear-guard action against criticism, sometimes.
Saying a hero's city is cursed by evil influences that are never dispelled removes the possibility of anyone making anything better. At least Dr. Gotham here met his end after a couple of years; some of the other "cursed Gotham" influences are supposedly still hanging around. On some level, we readers know that Gotham's never going to get better permanently until the last Batman story is told, but that's part of the disbelief we have to suspend, or else the whole thing becomes pointless. If you say "Gotham is damned thanks to the demon Barbatos...BarBATos, get it?" and the next story isn't Bruce calling in all the supernatural people who owe him favors for a citywide exorcism, then I don't know what we're even doing here, in terms of genre fiction or social commentary.
So, yeah. I didn't want to be the guy who took the OP joke too seriously, but "cursed Gotham" does kiiiinda get on my nerves.
I don't know if you've seen it, but there's a Tumblr post going around proposing that Gotham isn't a place for normal people to live, at least not permanently, and that Bruce/the Batfam are (should be?) working to make sure everyone survives long enough to migrate to somewhere better.
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So yeah, it’s a pretty fun place.
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I think it was Morrison later on who gave him legit God of Evil credentials.
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Retconning a superhero into having done things better sends the message that the better things are worth doing, even if it does come across as a rear-guard action against criticism, sometimes.
Saying a hero's city is cursed by evil influences that are never dispelled removes the possibility of anyone making anything better. At least Dr. Gotham here met his end after a couple of years; some of the other "cursed Gotham" influences are supposedly still hanging around. On some level, we readers know that Gotham's never going to get better permanently until the last Batman story is told, but that's part of the disbelief we have to suspend, or else the whole thing becomes pointless. If you say "Gotham is damned thanks to the demon Barbatos...BarBATos, get it?" and the next story isn't Bruce calling in all the supernatural people who owe him favors for a citywide exorcism, then I don't know what we're even doing here, in terms of genre fiction or social commentary.
So, yeah. I didn't want to be the guy who took the OP joke too seriously, but "cursed Gotham" does kiiiinda get on my nerves.
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Gotham can just be slightly fantastical New York, it doesn't need to be a Hellmouth for Batman to work.
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