Sorry, Bruce Wayne, but I DON'T Think That Criminals Are a Superstitious and Cowardly Lot
If there’s one Batman trope beloved above all others it’s Bruce Wayne’s fierce conviction that criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot. They’re so weak that all it takes is a powerful man in an expensive bat-themed suit with a fortune in cutting-edge weaponry to scare them shitless.
I’m fairly superstitious myself, and like to think that I am familiar with a lot of superstitions yet I have never heard any involving superheroes dressed like nocturnal animals.
On the contrary, it’s just plain common sense to want to avoid a figure like that if you’re a criminal. If I were someone who commits crimes I would go out of my way to avoid crime-fighters of any sort, but particularly crazy motherfuckers dressed up like any manner of beastl.
If I’m a hooligan or a scoundrel, I don’t want to encounter a rich, obsessed lunatic dressed up like a bat trying to stop me from committing crimes. That has nothing to do with superstition.
At the risk of channelling Bill Maher, I would also like to point out the inconvenient truth that criminals may not be great guys or gals, but they’re not cowards either.
Think of it this way. Two people enter a bank. One person goes to the bank to deposit a ten dollar check that their grandmother gave them for their Bar Mitzvah. That’s not a lot of money, to be honest. Grandma is apparently something of a cheapskate.
The other person enters the bank with a machine gun so that they can rob it. I would argue that it actually takes a LOT of courage to rob a bank. Think of all the things that could go wrong. You could get shot. You could get killed. You could get arrested. You could go to prison for the rest of your life.
In order to go through with your plan to rob the bank you need to either forget about the incredible danger you’re in or work through that fear and do it anyway.
I’m not saying that criminals are good people, necessarily, although some have valid reasons to break the law, like capitalism fucking sucking and not wanting to starve to death.
But I am saying that it’s a crazy generalization to say that criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot and not true either.
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