In a world in which heroes like Superman, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Cyborg, and Doctor Fate exist, your city has to be freaking cursed to keep getting all those cases of mental illness and corruption, keeping the city from really ever improving.
Organizations like the League of Assassins and the Court of Owls alone wouldn’t cut it. Detective heroes would unravel their plans. Tech heroes would root their data out. Magical heroes would counter their spells, fast and strong heroes would weed out the thugs, henchmen, and mercenaries.
Eventually, it would get more under control, like Metropolis, Star City, Central City, or Keystone City.
They would need something so ingrained in the city that nobody can really ever remove it to get to the high levels of madness and crime you get in Gotham.
So at some point, a writer had to give up, throw their hands up in the air, and go “then… then… it’s freaking cursed!”
And then you watch the God/King of Cities talk with the avatar Gotham (Stormwatch #3), and it’s a freaking gargoyle talking about “the madness in me”, while Paris and Metropolis are just human-like women.
I haven’t even read Batman, but I’ve seen this same thread pop up enough times to know that:
Gotham is literally cursed
Gotham is extremely corrupt. Tax money wouldn’t go where it needs to
Bruce Wayne bankrolls tons of social programs
It’s cursed because comic writers couldn’t come up with a better way to explain why the city can’t be fixed by the world’s smartest billionaire.
The city can’t be fixed because then there wouldn’t be any more stories for them to write.
Sure, but “cursed” is lazy and raises a lot of questions.
It’s a comic book, I don’t know what makes curses “lazy”. Also the much more important factor is the deep corruption.
I say it was a process of elimination.
In a world in which heroes like Superman, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Cyborg, and Doctor Fate exist, your city has to be freaking cursed to keep getting all those cases of mental illness and corruption, keeping the city from really ever improving.
Organizations like the League of Assassins and the Court of Owls alone wouldn’t cut it. Detective heroes would unravel their plans. Tech heroes would root their data out. Magical heroes would counter their spells, fast and strong heroes would weed out the thugs, henchmen, and mercenaries.
Eventually, it would get more under control, like Metropolis, Star City, Central City, or Keystone City.
They would need something so ingrained in the city that nobody can really ever remove it to get to the high levels of madness and crime you get in Gotham.
So at some point, a writer had to give up, throw their hands up in the air, and go “then… then… it’s freaking cursed!”
And then you watch the God/King of Cities talk with the avatar Gotham (Stormwatch #3), and it’s a freaking gargoyle talking about “the madness in me”, while Paris and Metropolis are just human-like women.
This ^^