You don’t need to have super strength, super speed or have been a gift from the gods to be a super hero, just ask Batman. He is a hero born from despair and vengeance. Wielding his humanity like a weapon forged from the very fires of hell that haunt his soul, against pure unbridled chaos on Gotham’s streets.
Humanity is a super power of immense mental, emotional and spiritual influence. A Yin and Yang complexity that toils through every fiber of Bruce Wayne’s existence, in and out of the bat suit.
He’s harnessed his humanity, his good sense of right and wrong, to bring Gotham’s most dangerous criminals to justice. In return making Gotham a safer, more habitable home for its citizens, but the chase and the vengeance is a drug. At times he’s let the reigns slip. Now that sense of social right and and wrong has been tainted with self-righteousness and need.
Batman’s humanity, is his own demise; a self-made virus corrupting it’s host and those he comes into close contact with, especially the ones he calls his family.
As the saying goes, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men,” John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902), Batman has self corrupted.
His thirst for vengeance has blinded him. His influence over his protégés has manipulated their sense of loyalties and love. But, does that make Batman a bad man? No. It makes him human and humans are messy. Batman’s strife open the door for redemption, his humanity gives him the power of choice to walk through the doorway or not.
As Scott Snyder so eloquently has Bruce Wayne say in Batman: Zero Year (2003),
“Maybe that’s what Batman is about. Not winning, but failing, and getting back up. Knowing he’ll fail, fail a thousand times, but still won’t give up.”
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