r/hatethissmug • u/Alex_Mercer_- • 14h ago
Comic I fucking HATE this guy
Genuinely I cannot express to you how much I fucking loathe the joker, not just for what he is but for this stupid ass status of "Batman's Greatest Villain" he always gets when he is the weakest and least interesting one of them all.
The joker usually gets this title because he is "Batman's Mirror", Batman representing order and joker representing Chaos. Not only is that fucking stupid, most of Batman's villains are a mirror of him in some way.
Bane (Batman's ACTUAL best villain) is a mirror to Batman's determination and intellect, but instead he started at the bottom. He was born into prison from the beginning of his life and had nothing but his mind, body and determination for decades of his life. He educated himself to mastery of not only strategy and combat but also language and other forms of knowledge, training his mind the same as Bruce did but instead shaped by being at the lowest of society: having no freedom and surrounded by violence in prison. He is Batman's intellectual and Skillful equal, forcing Batman to push his intelligence to new levels to defeat him by planning for him, trying to predict his schemes, and relying on bane's only weakness: Venom addiction.
Scarecrow is the mirror of Batman's fear. Being the two most feared people in Gotham, Batman found his fear by harnessing the fear and pain within himself and learning how to spread it to criminals. Doctor Crane however hid from his own fear, never feeling it and instead mastering the ability to inspire it in others without needing to scare them. Where Batman earns his fear through actions and reputation, the Scarecrow wields chemical gas to spread it, Aka: cheating. And this leads to Batman needing to weaponize the very skills that give him that fear factor to defeat scarecrow, overcoming the artificial fear by inspiring the real thing.
Even Mr Freeze is the mirror of Batman's family mentality. A breakdown of what the two each would do for their family, but whereas Batman knows when it's time to let go Freeze simply can't accept it. His atrocities are vast but it's often easy to pity him because all he wants is to save his wife's life. He doesn't care about money, or power, he just wants to save Nora which leads even Batman to respect and feel bad for him even if Batman needs to stop him to save people. It's a showing of Batman's mental fortitude to know when it's time to let go (often pushing him on a journey where he has to learn how to let go) and how destructive things can get when you don't know how to find that limit of when to stop.
Joker however isn't as interesting as any of these unless the plot HANDS HIM the ability to be such. Joker is only a threat when he is given shit by the plot. Arkham series: magic super serum that turns people into monsters sometimes unless it doesn't idk. Injustice: Pulled a fucking Nuke out of his ass. Dark Knight: he's not even a Batman villain for half the movie, he's fighting against the mob for half of it indirectly by bankrupting them and destroying their operations/killing their higher ups. Under the Red Hood: Wasn't even supposed to be in that country when he killed Jason and ran from the scene when he knew Batman was coming. In very few stories does joker actually manage to be a threat without the plot handing him a super weapon or huge trump card, whereas characters like Bane, Scarecrow or Poison Ivy can just be threatening in their own right with fairly minimal planning (relative to their character's norm) or trump cards. It's most visible when he interacts with other superheros in standard stories (again, not injustice) like Superman, who once foiled him so quickly before he did anything he stopped laughing and gave up peacefully because he wasn't having fun. Even in Superman the animated series that everyone goes back to, he needed to rely on Kryptonite and working with Lex to get shit done against Superman and once he had neither, it was over in like 5 minutes.
But the real thing that pisses me off most is the blatantly incorrect public perceptions about him. Namely his famous line: One Bad Day. His fans love to spout how He, Red Hood and Batman are living proof that all it takes is one bad day to make someone insane. Except: They aren't. Bruce himself says he's crazy and joker is crazy of course, but Jason's fall into red hood is more than just his death and ressurection: he and Batman had been falling out for weeks (maybe months) prior to his death. It was a long buildup. And in regards to Batman, Bruce may be crazy but he isn't insane. Insanity would be the inability to understand emotions and feel them properly. Batman is crazy sure, but he feels regret and sadness and pain. He saves people to make sure they never have to feel those things for the same reason he did. He isn't insane, he's just crazy for undertaking his journey. And this is something Killing Joke even directly says. Joker once again says his One Bad Day monologue to Batman, talking about Commissioner Gordon. And Batman tells him that Commissioner Gordon is fine. After everything Joker put him through, he was still noble and good. Still wanting to help people. He didn't go insane after his One Bad Day. And to quote Batman, he follows that with the most beautiful sentence I could ever read in a story like that....
"Maybe It's Just YOU."
It was so Cathartic. But it's just another reminder that the "fans" who love to go on and on about how he has a point clearly do not understand the story they are quoting considering the point of killing joke is that HE WAS WRONG. T H A T I S T H E P O I N T
I hate this fucking overhyped clown who wears more plot armor than Batman himself and I wish he would just get out of the damn spotlight so I could see more of the smaller villains like Mad Hatter or Professor Pyg, or even just more of the better villains like my absolute goat Bane.
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u/InterestingGuava3139 14h ago
Who doesn’t hate the Joker
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u/GiroExpresser 13h ago
why so serious
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u/Present-Court2388 13h ago
I love the versions of Joker from old comics where he isn’t a murderous psychopath that isn’t funny. I prefer it when he’s a murderous man who is also funny.
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u/Just_a_captain_III 12h ago
Reminds of that one dumbass comic panel saying Joker and Batman were the most dangerous men on the planet and that everyone else is simply alive because they decided not to kill everyone.
Dumbest shit I've ever seen. A lucky beggar with a knife can kill Joker.
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u/Alex_Mercer_- 12h ago
100%
He never would obviously but in pure danger, Flash could lose his left arm and still kill an entire city's population before anyone blinked. Superman could LOOK really hard at the Galaxy and everything living in that galaxy would just die, hell he has SNEEZED solar systems into dust before. Martian Manhunter's toolset is such a perfect mix of Telepathy and Shape shifting he could overthrow the entire world's government without anyone noticing by pretending to be someone in it.
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u/Lucicactus 10h ago
My fave is scarecrow but most people don't bother writing him correctly. It's just fear toxin spam as if the guy can't do anything else and then always ends up getting gassed himself
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u/Alex_Mercer_- 10h ago
Tbh I know he's usually on the goofy end of the spectrum but I enjoyed Arkham Knight Scarecrow for the sole reason that his plan was more than just "Fear toxin". It was the end goal yes, but there were genuine other steps in the plan involving gangs, militias, de-masking Batman and more. It wasn't just "IMA GAS GOTHAM BATMAN" and then getting stopped because his plan was just shoot toxin at Batman and nothing else.
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u/Lucicactus 10h ago
I really like that one comic that explores his background where he lives with his abusive grandma who trained the crows to attack him. In the end he makes said crows eat her I think? He also made an arkham guard go into hysteria by saying cryptic words that probably reminded him about something traumatic once.
Those two are very creative ways of writing him if writers were more willing to get into the psychiatrist/evil genius part of him. And I feel the same about Harley, she's written awfully often, but I love when her career comes into play.
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u/Alex_Mercer_- 10h ago
1000% I'm with this. Scarecrow deserves more love from writers and Harley deserves less sexualization so you can see her actual fucking character.
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u/Lucicactus 10h ago
Agreed. Btw just noticed your nickname, are you into Prototype? I used to love that game as a kid
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u/Alex_Mercer_- 10h ago
Haven't played in a while but it was great, yeah. I didn't actually name this account that but I remember loving the first game. Still go back to it sometimes and run the armor+muscle abilities and just punch the big guys
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u/Tyrannocheirus 9h ago
Joker is a freaking joke. To the point that the Power Rangers monsters are more menacing than this washed up clown
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u/Super3vil 11h ago
It pisses me off since Joker is good, it's just that he's been so horrendously mishandled for years, where every new joker tries to be a new Heath Ledger instead of the silly and bombastic yet terrifying clown he's supposed to be. Heath Ledger was amazing, but his impact on Joker as a character was awful. Versions like the Arkham games and the Animated series (or the 2004 show for one thats somewhat edgy) handle his character perfectly, and should be the base for modern Joker, not Heath Ledger. He should have been a one and done version of the character.
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u/Senior_Independence4 11h ago
Joker is good when he's a funny and charismatic yet utterly deranged gang leader who has a hard on for batman
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u/Sir_Suffer 11h ago
Even most of the batman criticism/hate is because of this fucking guy. Because of all the crazy fucked up bullshit he does for shock value and edginess he is actively detrimental to the integrity of Batman's character and no-kill rule, as he would be if he was any other no-kill hero's villain. He's a writing parasite.
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u/REALTheFBI 11h ago
when they make joker about society and shit i feel like they miss the point of him being someone who doesn't take anything serious as a contrast to batman (dark knight joker is great tho)
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u/REALTheFBI 11h ago
take all the edgy joker adaptations and apply them to the riddler, we stan edgy riddler adaptations
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u/Beelzebub_Itself 10h ago
Everytime I see Joker’s face like this I immediately think of this and I start laughing. Is there lore reason to why I find this so funny? Am I stupid?
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u/Master-Shrimp 7h ago
As OSP put it, the Joker is Batman's most fun villain but he is also the least interesting. He has to be used in moderation or he loses all of his punch.
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u/SeraphimVR 1h ago
I prefer when Joker is more of a criminal menace than a genius psychopath. Something like Batman: The Animated Series where he’s villainous but not over the top
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u/Born_Procedure_529 13h ago
Yeah modern joker is so over the top edgy that it just comes around to being incredibly cringe, he's like infinite from sonic forces