this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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Batman is definitely cool. That just can't be disputed. He definitely spends a fuck ton of money on the city. His main obstacle, is the writing. Gotham City has to be awful. It has to be, or there is no story. He can't kill villains regularly, because of plot. If the problems were capable of being fixed, then he'd be on of the best possible people to solve them.
The problems are capable of being fixed. The people of Gotham take to crime to survive because they have been squeezed by the ruling class and it’s the only way to protect what remains of their material conditions.
The Waynes and people like them, the owning class, prop up a system of inequality that forces these conditions to endure.
Bruce Wayne, the richest and most powerful of all, is hurt back (his parents killed) and instead of solving the systemic issues, he doles out individualized corporal punishment as a vigilante.
It’s the ultimate extension of “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”: Rich people will never acknowledge that the very system that provides them power is the ultimate root of all the issues they intend to solve via violence. Batman is himself the ultimate villain of the story.
I wish. He doesn't even dole out corporal punishment, at least as far as those words mean to the state that he continually props up.
I agree his biggest problem is the writing, because in reality, he'd be the best person to fix the problems (as you say)... outside of his freakish inability to kill irredeemable trash.
Though that's why he sucks so bad when reconciling everything back to reality. He absolves the rich of fixing problems because not even the "cool" insanely rich and very willing philanthropist Batman can fix a single city let alone a country, and heaven forbid killing irredeemable trash!
He's inadvertently a perfect example of how blind capitalism and boundless optimism are absolute braindead garbage perspectives.
Tell that to Bludhaven. Nightwing > Batman.
Nah, Batman is definitely cooler than Dick. Which makes sense, he's been doing it for several more years. I don't know too much about Bludhaven. But I'm pretty sure that it's categorically less fucked up. Nightwing doesn't have to be as effective as Batman imo.
Dick used his money to turn it from resembling Gotham to resembling Metropolis. Cool is irrelevant, Dick is ridiculously more efficient and solution focused than Bruce, who is just obsessed with punishment and subjugation of people who have done wrong, Dick is objectively a better superhero for his city, and is focused on solving problems rather than punishment, he’s also not an asshole or a fascist.
Batman brained a guy so bad he lost his mind and became Calander Man, he is not solution oriented.
Okay, that's fair enough. Does he kill people?
Sadly, no, the no kill rule stuck with him.
Don’t get me wrong, though, I love Batman, I just think Dick has had the benefit of more modern writing and more progressive writers for his solo gig, Batman’s failings are more of a side effect of the era when he was created and the specific writers that have handled his canon more than anything else. Dick ended up being a lot more morally akin to Spider-Man than Batman, his reason for doing what he does is specifically to help people and improve things, as opposed to punishing villains and those who have done wrong. I see him as less of a crime fighter/authority figure and more of a public servant.
I see. I honestly think that the no kill rule could work. It's just that Gotham is so corrupt, the infrastructure and social support so lacking, that villains have no shot at rehabilitation, and every chance of just breaking out and doing it again. Joker has broken out hundreds if not thousands of times in every single iteration. If he got a secure cell without corrupt guards and actual help after the first insane murder plot, he could probably get better. I think in some iterations, he has, at least temporarily, improved significantly. I agree with the outdatedness. He comes from a time when kids were hit to "fix" left handedness. He's going to use punching as a solution every time. It's like if people started punching and emotionally abusing high support needs autistic kids instead of actually helping them. Y'know, like they used to. And still do. Punching might stop the behavior in the immediate future, but it's going to get a hell of a lot worse than acting with empathy. Which, at least in the 90s animated series, he does tend to show a bit, with his always calling them by their names and the one time he comforted the woman that was stuck as a small child.
TAS was peak Batman, for me, they did a comic run in that universe all in the style of Bruce Timm that was really good. I get the no kill rule for certain characters, and for the sake of writing, original villains that people enjoy seeing on the page aren’t easy to pull off consistently. And most of my favorite characters, as far as villains go, are the one’s that definitely should be killed (Carnage, The Joker, Doc Ock, Bullseye, Zsasz, should all be killed on sight, but I fucking love when they show up. Also, you just can’t kill Carnage, ao there’s that.) so i get why it’s part of comics.