Batman, By Definition - Commentary
Jan. 25th, 2007 03:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shankieThe commentary meme strikes again: this is a request by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
damo_in_japan for Batman, By Definition.
Again, full annotated text, but no warnings to speak of, aside from a bit of violent imagery.
This was a story that basically an idea that stuck around with me for a year, then turned into a three-page dissection of Bruce's head through metaphor.
The idea of Bruce being a meta came about in Nashua, New Hampshire, at a pizza parlor last fall.
I was with my friends Care and Harlan, and Harlan having his own fair share of comic reading under his belt, were talking about what I’d just been doing. Which was interviewing customers and employees at The Comic Store for a research project on the demographics of comic readers and the place of comics and specific characters in modern culture. Cultural anthropology study in qualitative. The point is, we were talking about comic books.
We ordered calzones and started talking about Batman. Namely, the details of his injuries over the current (at the time) canon timeline. Namely the broken back followed by miraculous recovery, but there’s more examples, too. Harlan and I concluded that, should Bruce Wayne be real, there was no way he could still be walking, let alone at the peak of physical fitness.
Of course, it’s comic book logic. Bruce will always be Batman, he can overcome anything to stay there. But the suggestion was made that, according to the rules of DC, the only way Bruce could still be in such good shape was if he was just enough of a meta to completely heal internal injuries, and overcome all injuries just that more quickly, and with less hindrance. Of course, Bruce has had extensive training to overcome pain, and has such strength of will that he truly believes, and often is right, that he can will himself through any situation.
We concluded that we could be right, because if it was true, he might not even know. And he wouldn’t be putting it on the front page if he did. I got to thinking about the idea of what he would do if he did. It’s one of those things I thought about from time to time.
This fic was weird; when I wrote it, I wasn’t actually thinking anything at all. It’s something I do with my metaphysically-natured fiction; just let a series of images work their way through a scene. I didn’t go back and look at it until after I’d posted it, and other people had read it first, which always gives a re-read more perspective.
So this is basically going back and translating what those images were all trying to say, because there… really isn’t a thing I can say about the writing process. It just happened, and then it was over, and I had a scene wound with an idea.
He was familiar with the sight of his own blood. Pooling deep scarlet that would dry to an ugly brown black as anyone’s did, and it was that he kept very close. With many things held intimate to his mind, that he wouldn’t forget, that he would never lapse into reckless abandon or lest his mind wander to a place that would keep him from his dedication.
Blood, that tasted heavy sweet and like iron in his mouth, that he was also familiar with. How it would smudge on the ends of his fingers or the patterns it made in smears and splatters. He knew what blood was better than most, his own the best of all.
When I worked in bio, I could tell one preservative solution from another, and sometimes even guesstimate at how strong it was, just by faintly whiffing it. We all get familiar with what we’re surrounded with all the time. Someone who bakes a lot knows exactly how their oven behaves. Having it be blood is much more romantic, it’s a traditional image with all kinds of things attached to it, depending on the reader.
Personally, I like blood. I think it tastes good (medium rare or lower, please), can have a macabre kind of beauty to it. It doesn’t smell nice, though.
It was many years before he realized the lie of that.
Of all the DNA analysis he’d completed in his time, both casual to eliminate suspects, or acutely important to find a killer, unlock some secret of an ailing metahuman in need of extraordinary measures. Or even discover a meta for what they were.
DNA was easy to collect, simple to process, its secrets known to him.
Like the jewel of the violence of blood, he knew it, as well as the smell of cordite and the burn of a gunshot wound. His life was lived in violence, and it was that language he spoke, whispering to it like lovers in the dark to bring forth her hidden bounty, or an assault in the cover of night, swift and brutal, only to find his lover there again, draped over furniture or floors and beckoning that he unravel every inch.
My love of the word ‘cordite’ comes from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, specifically, “O’Malley’s Bar,” and the following; “My hair combed back like a raven’s wing / My muscles hard and tight / And curling from the business-end of my gun / Was a query-mark of cordite.” I’m unhealthy fixated on it for years now, but aside from that, every time I use that word, I get that image, and it’s an intense one in my head.
This night, there was no crusade luring him, no violence to heat his blood, and he contemplated a single vial in his fingers, black-red and thickly catching the light of his work lamp in a crimson glow. His blood.
Lots and lots of Gotham & Batman’s mission as a lover, with the previous imagery and the little entendre of “violence to heat his blood.” Taking the cliché of being married to your work to it’s logical extension to someone who’s work is so passionately driven.
He’d never subjected it to such analysis as so many others, and curiosity drove him to it on this quiet night, with nothing but the screeches of bats on their journey to hunt, flapping quiet chaos in the arches of his cave. Driven out before, but always, they returned.
If he held it in his hand long enough, it would begin to thicken and lose its macabre beauty, and he touched the needle mark in the crook of his elbow to think of how much blood had been wasted and spilled after so many years. In distant, alien worlds or fights that never felt as his own just as much as in the close corridors of Gotham, his lover’s boudoir and the seat of his soul.
The centrifuge hummed, the computers clicked quietly in their work, and he sharpened his batarangs to razor edges, waiting with a patience tested and forced into its strength. The glow of the monitors and the plastic edges of technology all took on the glow of a shrine to his humble offering, like a prayer to the faceless gods of vengeance made in contemplation.
It is a strange thing, to realize a fear long held, to suddenly be aware of it’s presence, striking viciously at sensibility and creating entropy everywhere it touched.
Batman doesn’t like unforeseen variables. Not being prepared for the big whack on the side of the head, and this would be a doozy. And, of course, somewhere inside Bruce’s analytical mind had considered why he was able to do what he did.
The lines and strings of decimaled numbers were familiar, and known to him, but not entirely in its humanity.
‘Decimaled’ is a word, right? My spellchecker says no, but I can’t help but disagree. I’ll make it a nonce word. Doo do doo…
The printed out sheets of long technical analysis and the monitors still glowing told him something that had to be a lie, and he repeated the process long after dawn would be breaking somewhere above his work.
He flicked off the monitor, and saw his reflection in the blankness of black in contrast, light lining his sharp features and accenting the deep circles under his tired eyes, and he saw it as a stranger, turning away and looking at the most recent pinprick in his arm, still with a hard bead of blood dry there, black and dead, but there for healing, a faint bruise of his molestation of the skin around it.
The bruising and needle-marks are all reminders that Bruce still gets hurt, isn’t some kind of super-power. It’s also a reminder of the most dramatic and personal example, to him, of a super-powered being.
There was still a watch he kept in his utility belt; the face no longer kept time, but it was the simple technology underneath he beckoned, as he hadn’t for many years, and waited.
When Superman arrived, he looked understandably curious. With so many ways to contact him, that Batman would choose the thing given long in the past, perhaps thinking it had been discarded or thought obsolete some time ago.
The detail about the signal watch is about the timeframe of the scene; specifying that it’s late in both their careers.
“Bruce, what is it?” He had a worried crease between his brows, his arms defensively crossed over his chest as he did, the red cape gliding down his back, but it was never like his own. It ended at his calves, an adornment without weights and Kevlar weaves, rippling in the memory of motion around legs wound strong of unearthly materials.
And behold, the physically amazing creature behaves remarkably human…
“How long have you known?” He threw a vial of his blood on the stone at Clark’s feet, where it splattered and shattered and bled like doubt in his mind.
“Bruce, I…”
“How long!?” he cried, standing angrily and throwing his cowl into the splatter of crimson on the ground, tearing off his heavy cape and wishing the symbol on his chest would tear away so easily. Designed to withstand more brutal assaults then his grip in it, the fabric held, and did no more than give some. “I’m not human. How could you keep that from me,” he said in defeat. “Everything I’ve done is a lie!”
If he had a modicum of unknown help, it’s a lie, and he doesn’t deserve to be Batman. The initial, dramatic emotional reaction; he hasn’t let himself get worked up, so he just explodes.
“I am not human. You are.”
“Semantics don’t change anything.”
I actually do remember fiddling with the word ‘semantics’ to make sure I was using it right. I decided I was.
Clark sighed and began pacing, worrying at his hips as if wishing there were pockets there to stuff his hands into, rubbing the bridge of his nose at a pair of spectacles that weren’t sitting there. “Since Starro.”
Being the first adventure the Justice League of America had together… basically, he’s known from day one.
“You never told me.”
“If you didn’t already know, I… I didn’t know how. You held it so close to you… were so proud that you could be so powerful without falling back on superpowers. Thought it was just a crutch for everyone else. What was I supposed to say?”
Clark trying to protect Bruce. Being unsure of himself. I suppose that it would have made a good light/dark contrast thing to play up Clark as the perfect, invulnerable alien, and he is on the outside, but everything he says and does has this trace of vulnerability to it. It produces a very different, kind of swishy bunch of gradients instead.
They regarded one another, and for the first time in distant memory, Bruce was the first to look away.
He was a meta. He was like everyone else now, another human blessed with some chance of genetics to rise above the others, but a gift more insidious in its subtlety. It was likely standard testing would never see how the RNA translated little changes to the human template. Bruce wasn’t entirely sure what the metagenes were doing in his body; but he could make several educated assumptions, hating how so many things began to make better logical sense than before.
It’s something when Batman isn’t sure about something; and, beyond this, I really don’t think he wants to know the specifics.
It wasn’t much. It was enough.
“You never said anything.”
“Not a word, to anyone. God as my witness.”
Bruce stood in his raiment, feeling very much like a king that had stolen his crown and cheated into his kingdom, standing proudly in it all the same.
Bruce has changed from a lover to a ruler. The blow is very emotional, and emotions are exactly what’s sacrificed in the immediate aftermath.
“I’m not interested in what any god would have to say on this matter, or any.” He’d stood before enough to know the truth of it acutely, and gripped the cape in his hands before he reattached it to his shoulders, let it drape around him like strength.
Clark looked vastly relieved. “So… you aren’t going to just… quit, then?”
Clark’s been worrying about this for a long time, enough to work himself up into the worst-case scenario assumption. Poor thing. Bruce is a hard friend to keep.
”No.”
“But I thought…”
“My work is more important than I am,” he replied dismissively. “It is just another obstacle to be overcome.”
It didn’t feel true until he was alone again, breathing in the musty age of his throne room, if that was the metaphor he chose to use.
And the road to healing begins. ::starts the hand-holding love circle:: But seriously, Bruce is already dealing with it, and questioning the new metaphor. It’s sticking around, and he’s definitely going to be that angsty angry Batman, but that never lasts forever.
It felt appropriate, as he returned to his purveyances of the world, and noted the latest Biaylan uprising would require attention.
He'd lied to himself before, and he could do it again.
When you’re carrying that much baggage, I think a little self-deception is perfectly acceptable.
So… yeah.
I got that off my chest, and I don’t think about the Batman meta idea like I used to; frankly, I think it’s interesting to toy with, but Bruce is human and that is what makes him him and this rips his roots out a little too much for comfort. So I don’t think I’ll ever do a thing with the idea again, directly; maybe let the concept sneak in somewhere smaller and elsewhere, but, that’s all she wrote.
damo_in_japan for Batman, By Definition.Again, full annotated text, but no warnings to speak of, aside from a bit of violent imagery.
This was a story that basically an idea that stuck around with me for a year, then turned into a three-page dissection of Bruce's head through metaphor.
The idea of Bruce being a meta came about in Nashua, New Hampshire, at a pizza parlor last fall.
I was with my friends Care and Harlan, and Harlan having his own fair share of comic reading under his belt, were talking about what I’d just been doing. Which was interviewing customers and employees at The Comic Store for a research project on the demographics of comic readers and the place of comics and specific characters in modern culture. Cultural anthropology study in qualitative. The point is, we were talking about comic books.
We ordered calzones and started talking about Batman. Namely, the details of his injuries over the current (at the time) canon timeline. Namely the broken back followed by miraculous recovery, but there’s more examples, too. Harlan and I concluded that, should Bruce Wayne be real, there was no way he could still be walking, let alone at the peak of physical fitness.
Of course, it’s comic book logic. Bruce will always be Batman, he can overcome anything to stay there. But the suggestion was made that, according to the rules of DC, the only way Bruce could still be in such good shape was if he was just enough of a meta to completely heal internal injuries, and overcome all injuries just that more quickly, and with less hindrance. Of course, Bruce has had extensive training to overcome pain, and has such strength of will that he truly believes, and often is right, that he can will himself through any situation.
We concluded that we could be right, because if it was true, he might not even know. And he wouldn’t be putting it on the front page if he did. I got to thinking about the idea of what he would do if he did. It’s one of those things I thought about from time to time.
This fic was weird; when I wrote it, I wasn’t actually thinking anything at all. It’s something I do with my metaphysically-natured fiction; just let a series of images work their way through a scene. I didn’t go back and look at it until after I’d posted it, and other people had read it first, which always gives a re-read more perspective.
So this is basically going back and translating what those images were all trying to say, because there… really isn’t a thing I can say about the writing process. It just happened, and then it was over, and I had a scene wound with an idea.
He was familiar with the sight of his own blood. Pooling deep scarlet that would dry to an ugly brown black as anyone’s did, and it was that he kept very close. With many things held intimate to his mind, that he wouldn’t forget, that he would never lapse into reckless abandon or lest his mind wander to a place that would keep him from his dedication.
Blood, that tasted heavy sweet and like iron in his mouth, that he was also familiar with. How it would smudge on the ends of his fingers or the patterns it made in smears and splatters. He knew what blood was better than most, his own the best of all.
When I worked in bio, I could tell one preservative solution from another, and sometimes even guesstimate at how strong it was, just by faintly whiffing it. We all get familiar with what we’re surrounded with all the time. Someone who bakes a lot knows exactly how their oven behaves. Having it be blood is much more romantic, it’s a traditional image with all kinds of things attached to it, depending on the reader.
Personally, I like blood. I think it tastes good (medium rare or lower, please), can have a macabre kind of beauty to it. It doesn’t smell nice, though.
It was many years before he realized the lie of that.
Of all the DNA analysis he’d completed in his time, both casual to eliminate suspects, or acutely important to find a killer, unlock some secret of an ailing metahuman in need of extraordinary measures. Or even discover a meta for what they were.
DNA was easy to collect, simple to process, its secrets known to him.
Like the jewel of the violence of blood, he knew it, as well as the smell of cordite and the burn of a gunshot wound. His life was lived in violence, and it was that language he spoke, whispering to it like lovers in the dark to bring forth her hidden bounty, or an assault in the cover of night, swift and brutal, only to find his lover there again, draped over furniture or floors and beckoning that he unravel every inch.
My love of the word ‘cordite’ comes from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, specifically, “O’Malley’s Bar,” and the following; “My hair combed back like a raven’s wing / My muscles hard and tight / And curling from the business-end of my gun / Was a query-mark of cordite.” I’m unhealthy fixated on it for years now, but aside from that, every time I use that word, I get that image, and it’s an intense one in my head.
This night, there was no crusade luring him, no violence to heat his blood, and he contemplated a single vial in his fingers, black-red and thickly catching the light of his work lamp in a crimson glow. His blood.
Lots and lots of Gotham & Batman’s mission as a lover, with the previous imagery and the little entendre of “violence to heat his blood.” Taking the cliché of being married to your work to it’s logical extension to someone who’s work is so passionately driven.
He’d never subjected it to such analysis as so many others, and curiosity drove him to it on this quiet night, with nothing but the screeches of bats on their journey to hunt, flapping quiet chaos in the arches of his cave. Driven out before, but always, they returned.
If he held it in his hand long enough, it would begin to thicken and lose its macabre beauty, and he touched the needle mark in the crook of his elbow to think of how much blood had been wasted and spilled after so many years. In distant, alien worlds or fights that never felt as his own just as much as in the close corridors of Gotham, his lover’s boudoir and the seat of his soul.
The centrifuge hummed, the computers clicked quietly in their work, and he sharpened his batarangs to razor edges, waiting with a patience tested and forced into its strength. The glow of the monitors and the plastic edges of technology all took on the glow of a shrine to his humble offering, like a prayer to the faceless gods of vengeance made in contemplation.
It is a strange thing, to realize a fear long held, to suddenly be aware of it’s presence, striking viciously at sensibility and creating entropy everywhere it touched.
Batman doesn’t like unforeseen variables. Not being prepared for the big whack on the side of the head, and this would be a doozy. And, of course, somewhere inside Bruce’s analytical mind had considered why he was able to do what he did.
The lines and strings of decimaled numbers were familiar, and known to him, but not entirely in its humanity.
‘Decimaled’ is a word, right? My spellchecker says no, but I can’t help but disagree. I’ll make it a nonce word. Doo do doo…
The printed out sheets of long technical analysis and the monitors still glowing told him something that had to be a lie, and he repeated the process long after dawn would be breaking somewhere above his work.
He flicked off the monitor, and saw his reflection in the blankness of black in contrast, light lining his sharp features and accenting the deep circles under his tired eyes, and he saw it as a stranger, turning away and looking at the most recent pinprick in his arm, still with a hard bead of blood dry there, black and dead, but there for healing, a faint bruise of his molestation of the skin around it.
The bruising and needle-marks are all reminders that Bruce still gets hurt, isn’t some kind of super-power. It’s also a reminder of the most dramatic and personal example, to him, of a super-powered being.
There was still a watch he kept in his utility belt; the face no longer kept time, but it was the simple technology underneath he beckoned, as he hadn’t for many years, and waited.
When Superman arrived, he looked understandably curious. With so many ways to contact him, that Batman would choose the thing given long in the past, perhaps thinking it had been discarded or thought obsolete some time ago.
The detail about the signal watch is about the timeframe of the scene; specifying that it’s late in both their careers.
“Bruce, what is it?” He had a worried crease between his brows, his arms defensively crossed over his chest as he did, the red cape gliding down his back, but it was never like his own. It ended at his calves, an adornment without weights and Kevlar weaves, rippling in the memory of motion around legs wound strong of unearthly materials.
And behold, the physically amazing creature behaves remarkably human…
“How long have you known?” He threw a vial of his blood on the stone at Clark’s feet, where it splattered and shattered and bled like doubt in his mind.
“Bruce, I…”
“How long!?” he cried, standing angrily and throwing his cowl into the splatter of crimson on the ground, tearing off his heavy cape and wishing the symbol on his chest would tear away so easily. Designed to withstand more brutal assaults then his grip in it, the fabric held, and did no more than give some. “I’m not human. How could you keep that from me,” he said in defeat. “Everything I’ve done is a lie!”
If he had a modicum of unknown help, it’s a lie, and he doesn’t deserve to be Batman. The initial, dramatic emotional reaction; he hasn’t let himself get worked up, so he just explodes.
“I am not human. You are.”
“Semantics don’t change anything.”
I actually do remember fiddling with the word ‘semantics’ to make sure I was using it right. I decided I was.
Clark sighed and began pacing, worrying at his hips as if wishing there were pockets there to stuff his hands into, rubbing the bridge of his nose at a pair of spectacles that weren’t sitting there. “Since Starro.”
Being the first adventure the Justice League of America had together… basically, he’s known from day one.
“You never told me.”
“If you didn’t already know, I… I didn’t know how. You held it so close to you… were so proud that you could be so powerful without falling back on superpowers. Thought it was just a crutch for everyone else. What was I supposed to say?”
Clark trying to protect Bruce. Being unsure of himself. I suppose that it would have made a good light/dark contrast thing to play up Clark as the perfect, invulnerable alien, and he is on the outside, but everything he says and does has this trace of vulnerability to it. It produces a very different, kind of swishy bunch of gradients instead.
They regarded one another, and for the first time in distant memory, Bruce was the first to look away.
He was a meta. He was like everyone else now, another human blessed with some chance of genetics to rise above the others, but a gift more insidious in its subtlety. It was likely standard testing would never see how the RNA translated little changes to the human template. Bruce wasn’t entirely sure what the metagenes were doing in his body; but he could make several educated assumptions, hating how so many things began to make better logical sense than before.
It’s something when Batman isn’t sure about something; and, beyond this, I really don’t think he wants to know the specifics.
It wasn’t much. It was enough.
“You never said anything.”
“Not a word, to anyone. God as my witness.”
Bruce stood in his raiment, feeling very much like a king that had stolen his crown and cheated into his kingdom, standing proudly in it all the same.
Bruce has changed from a lover to a ruler. The blow is very emotional, and emotions are exactly what’s sacrificed in the immediate aftermath.
“I’m not interested in what any god would have to say on this matter, or any.” He’d stood before enough to know the truth of it acutely, and gripped the cape in his hands before he reattached it to his shoulders, let it drape around him like strength.
Clark looked vastly relieved. “So… you aren’t going to just… quit, then?”
Clark’s been worrying about this for a long time, enough to work himself up into the worst-case scenario assumption. Poor thing. Bruce is a hard friend to keep.
”No.”
“But I thought…”
“My work is more important than I am,” he replied dismissively. “It is just another obstacle to be overcome.”
It didn’t feel true until he was alone again, breathing in the musty age of his throne room, if that was the metaphor he chose to use.
And the road to healing begins. ::starts the hand-holding love circle:: But seriously, Bruce is already dealing with it, and questioning the new metaphor. It’s sticking around, and he’s definitely going to be that angsty angry Batman, but that never lasts forever.
It felt appropriate, as he returned to his purveyances of the world, and noted the latest Biaylan uprising would require attention.
He'd lied to himself before, and he could do it again.
When you’re carrying that much baggage, I think a little self-deception is perfectly acceptable.
So… yeah.
I got that off my chest, and I don’t think about the Batman meta idea like I used to; frankly, I think it’s interesting to toy with, but Bruce is human and that is what makes him him and this rips his roots out a little too much for comfort. So I don’t think I’ll ever do a thing with the idea again, directly; maybe let the concept sneak in somewhere smaller and elsewhere, but, that’s all she wrote.
no subject
on 2007-01-25 06:37 pm (UTC)Love your Clark here, so worried. Bruce is a hard friend to keep indeed! It is a little.. to close to home in a way, and too far from the Batman ideal, and you walk that line of doubt so well! I love this story, thanks for the commentary, it is really interesting! (and a chance to re-read the story, woo!)
no subject
on 2007-01-26 01:12 am (UTC)It's very meditative and relaxing, even if a lot of work like this ends up twisted into something barely recognizable. Ah, well. It just makes me that much happier when it works. :)
Clark was almost like, unexpected when I was reading it. Just how I'd handled him, but in a good way surprised. I'm glad you enjoyed it. :)
no subject
on 2007-01-26 12:46 am (UTC)It was a wonderful glimpse into the process of--well, if not of the writing itself then of the background that you brought to the writing.
I can feel the difficulty of working around the meta problem with Bats. But what you have done here is a good examination of the "what if?" I think you did a great job of keeping Bruce in character and show how the Batman we know would deal with this discovery.
But, yeah... I can understand leaving this one where it is. Some stories end and don't really need a second chapter--this one feels good, whole, complete.
no subject
on 2007-01-26 01:40 am (UTC)I'm glad I could keep him in character; that's the important bit, you know? So it's good to know I'm getting it right. I just love the inside of Bruce's head.
no subject
on 2007-01-27 03:15 am (UTC)It's a great exploration of what makes Bruce what he is. I loved the anger and the rage and acceptance (I have always felt he wouldn't let something like this stop the Mission). He and Clark have a wonderful, very canon rapport that7s a joy to read as well.
Love the pacing of the story and the way you racheted up the tension between Clark and Bruce. Really nice! How did I miss this! I'm so ashamed! :)
no subject
on 2007-01-27 04:30 am (UTC)Bruce has always seen his own life as less important than the Mission; it only makes sense to me that would include specifics of his body. He's so deep; there's always something else to pull out when you explore Batman's head.
I'm glad you enjoyed it. :)