{"id":6696,"date":"2021-09-22T19:09:27","date_gmt":"2021-09-23T02:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=6696"},"modified":"2021-11-29T21:29:00","modified_gmt":"2021-11-30T05:29:00","slug":"arkham-city-what-it-all-means","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/6696","title":{"rendered":"Arkham City: What It All Means"},"content":{"rendered":"

At its broadest strokes, the story of Arkham City<\/em> is about a supervillain committing crimes of a sort and scale normally only practiced by nations. He separates out a subset of the population that he holds in contempt, ghettoizes and deprives them of adequate food and warmth and legal recourse, and goads them into retaliating as a pretext for massacre. In his villain rant at the end, he talks about repeating the experiment in other cities, but he needn’t bother. At its core, it’s already a fairly widespread practice.<\/p>\n

And it’s fairly significant that the story pits Batman against this system. There’s always been a bit of a fascist streak to the character, surfaced most clearly in the works of Frank Miller, but it’s never simple. The mere fact that he wants to be tough on crime but doesn’t like guns makes him a political anomaly in America, and the story here emphasizes conflicts of that sort. Hugo Strange and Batman have the same goal: a city without crime. They only disagree on the acceptable means toward that end. Batman’s judgment is that the ends don’t justify the means, but he’s still perfectly willing to brutalize the same people as Strange, stopping only at actual killing. 1<\/sup><\/a>In the peculiar world of comics and videogames, anyway. Batman is routinely beating people so severely that they’re still lying on the ground unconscious a half an hour later. In real life, this would definitely kill some of them, and cause permanent brain damage to the rest.<\/span><\/span>