one of the things i like about Batman is that it's fundamentally about being orphaned, and being an orphan — how this guy stays tethered to the world in his own weird, abstract, extrajudicial way when he feels that his link to it has been violently severed

Batman does this by permanently recapitulating his own trauma: solving crimes for other people, protecting them. But that's actually just the beginning; he also recapitulates his own experience of orphanness by essentially raising several orphans
Dick is an orphan in the traditional sense: dead parents. Batman sees it happen. Jason, less so: missing dad, known mom who eventually dies. Tim, even less so: parents are around a while, and involved, before both dying. Carrie, even less than that: negligent parents.
Steph: evil father, who openly works against her. And then there's Damian, whose parents are both alive and yet both have identities that totally obliterate their role as his parents. He doesn't relate to them as a mother and father; he can't, and neither can they.
In all these different cases, Batman tries all these different ways of making orphanness for them not what it was for him: Either by trying to teach them the (arguably poor) coping skills early that he learned over a very long time, or by literally legally adopting them, etc.
It never quite works, not in any final way. It's a primal wound, in each case: Someone who should be there is, in some key way, absent, and all the money in the world and adventure in the universe can't change that. Couldn't change it for himself, can't change it for them.
And in the end, these narrative loops where Batman takes in some kind of orphan always return to the same place: Even he world's greatest detective can't find something that simply isn't there. And that act of futile searching is what, for his world, defines orphanness.
I have a hunch that a lot of kids out there got to learn from these stories that there are a lot of ways to be an orphan. Negligence, abuse, abandonment, etc. — it's not /you/, /you're/ not the reason you can't find what you're looking for. It's just not there.
And it isn't sugarcoated in any way; it's hard, it hurts, it's lonely and disorienting. The negative space is always black. But it's not about you, not a defect in you. You can still do things. You can look for other things, and you can find them. You can be a hero.

done~

More from Culture

I'm going to do two history threads on Ethiopia, one on its ancient history, one on its modern story (1800 to today). 🇪🇹

I'll begin with the ancient history ... and it goes way back. Because modern humans - and before that, the ancestors of humans - almost certainly originated in Ethiopia. 🇪🇹 (sub-thread):


The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹


Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹


References to the Queen of Sheba are everywhere in Ethiopia. The national airline's frequent flier miles are even called "ShebaMiles". 🇪🇹

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