I was reading through The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told and two stories caught my eye especially.
Night of The Stalker and My Beginning and Probable End.
Two stories that touched upon strong emotions of Bruce.
He actually cries at the end of NOTS. He's just overcome with sadness for a kid that's gone through the same pain he has. He hunts the criminals down to the end to bring them to justice. And he never breaks his thoughts of justice for a single thought of revenge. You'd think him being faced with the same events that he went through in his youth would've caused him to lose himself for the duration of the story.
But not once does he break.
He has no emotions of hatred, anger, revenge. Just a determination for justice and sadness for a child whose parents he couldn't save.
He breaks down because crime has created another child victim and Bruce swore nobody else would go through his pain and that promise was broken...
And he breaks down for the memory of his lost innocence and for his parents.
The child's pain and the child within himself's pain.
Justice and empathy are his driving forces.
But when he's a child like in MBAPE, anger and hate are his driving forces. He sees a school bully and beats him up. Not because he knows the kid is bad, but because he sees the brat extorting another kids lunch money. And that sends young Bruce into a violent frenzy where he's suspended from school for beating the crap out of the bully.
He's angry for seeing some punk kid thinking he can get away with doing what he wants. Seeing the brat coming close to putting other kids what Bruce went through on the night his parents were murdered.
But he was angry and overcome with seething rage. And as an adult, he justified his behaviour for his actions. However he did go on to explain that his anger and hatred towards criminals and crime was causing him to go off the rails with his life and it would've consumed him if he hadn't of done a bit of soul searching.
So, what I'm interested in seeing is, that change in Bruce. I don't want him to have the ideals and morals he has as an adult straight away. He's got to work away from his anger.
He has to graduate from a longing for revenge, to a longing for justice.
He has to have the red cloud pulled away from his eyes to see his own pain is just a small part of what goes on out there.
His feelings of anger towards criminals has to go and his feelings of empathy for innocents will be why he becomes Batman.
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