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Missed this, before. Anyhow, there's no real motivation for dressing up like a bat and hitting people and the heels and all. She's tied into the Crime Bible hoohaw and can, apparently, survive a very intense stabbing with enough energy to pull out the knife and toss it down to the hilt into somebody else, but that's partly because of bad art. No real development. However, for me, that is the potential. She's not at all tethered to the Batverse, really. Even less so than Montoya is, really, and the new Question really only had a police tie to the Bat-Family. It's not like she's been hiding with a hangover in the west wing of the Batcave.
I like the hero-families and the legacy types, but it's nice to see something similar and yet nearly completely removed. Montoya doesn't exist to be Vic/Charlie's follow-up, and Batwoman doesn't exist in the hopes of being Batman one day or sleeping with Robin (she may go after the Huntress, but that's just because fighting crime in Gotham makes you hot for the Huntress by law), and really, they don't even have - to memory - a Bat-beeper or something. Fresh starts along the lines of the Bulleteer.
Personally, I'd be very happy if Batwoman's motivation was because. It's a good motivation and we haven't seen much of it. No supertrauma in her past, no absurd totemic moment of clarity and intensity that reshaped her existence, just - it's a thing people do now, like torrenting music or laughing because the laughtrack on the sitcom tells you to, this putting on a costume and smacking badguys and bad thingies around.
Which is what I'd like something like Final Crisis to address and steer towards: heroes who just do good things, without the impetus of suffering and tragedy. Even All-Star Batgirl is set to establish some tragedies into her initial motivation (outside of shitty father stuff from her childhood, presumably) because we're not allowed to have simply decent, adventure-seeking people right now in the DCU. And we should. Ted Kord should never have had much of a motivation for what he did, except that he got to wear blue tights, fly a bug called The Bug, and sometimes he hit things until the world was better.
Final Crisis should be a bit literal, and stop the necessity of these absurd, heartwrenching, sadistic crises we've been led to believe establish a character's truth and essence. Suffering does not establish the true nature of a person, so much as putting them at the end, or after the end of their job does, and seeing how they react. Batwoman and The Question, together again (for the first time), kicking ass, asking questions, saving the Antimonitor from the Quintisquid Monitor-of-Tentacles. Batman in a crimeless Gotham. Superman at last all things to all people. Those would allow the characters to show themselves (for evidence, see Moore's send-off to Superman) in their reactions, those would tell us more about their core.
So a bit of that, then, and maybe later we can go back to crotch-impalings and dark moments of leather jackets, bright red Bat-armor, and Superman's knifehands and spinebreaking agony. |
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