Superman would turn Batman's head into paste, if he hit him even at a quarter-strength. You have to swallow a lot of bullshit every time Superman and Batman face off.
DC Cinematic Universe ( The James Gunn era)
- Thread starter Samurai8472
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Superman would turn Batman's head into paste, if he hit him even at a quarter-strength. You have to swallow a lot of bullshit every time Superman and Batman face off.
I'm really confused by how anybody can say Superman is more realistic than Batman.
Yes, obviously what he does wouldn't really work but he's a still just a human being who has a lot of money and fancy toys.
Humans are real, I mean everybody on this board is human, so that right there already makes him more realistic than Superman. And we have people in the real world are billionaires, and other than the occasional sci-fi gadget most of the stuff he uses is could at least exist in some form in the real world. Hell there was a Mythbusters episode where they build real world versions of a couple of them to test them.
Now maybe I missed something somewhere, but last time I looked we don't have Kryptonians in the world.
Yes, obviously what he does wouldn't really work but he's a still just a human being who has a lot of money and fancy toys.
Humans are real, I mean everybody on this board is human, so that right there already makes him more realistic than Superman. And we have people in the real world are billionaires, and other than the occasional sci-fi gadget most of the stuff he uses is could at least exist in some form in the real world. Hell there was a Mythbusters episode where they build real world versions of a couple of them to test them.
Now maybe I missed something somewhere, but last time I looked we don't have Kryptonians in the world.
They even lampshaded this in BvS, when Superman said to Batman: "If I wanted it, you'd be dead already." He has to pull his punches for Batman (or any ordinary human, really) to even have a chance of surviving.
Nnno, the conceit, at least since the late '80s, is that he has a bulletproof costume. (Frank Miller established that the bright yellow oval was a target so bad guys would aim for the most heavily armored part.) Also, part of the reason for the cape is that it obscures his silhouette so it's harder for the bad guys to hit his body.
In Batman '66, Batman and Robin had a bulletproof Bat-Shield, like a clear, unfolding version of a police riot shield.
Of course, no mere mortal could move fast enough to literally dodge a bullet. But it's hard for a shooter to hit a moving target, so as long as Batman and Robin didn't stand still but came in swinging (in either sense of the word), they would be difficult to hit. And they often used batarangs to knock guns out of bad guys' hands before the bad guys even saw them.
He doesn't have to dodge the bullet, just be somewhere the gun isn't pointing at the moment they pull the trigger.
Maybe I missed it, but I don't think anybody said that? Only that Batman isn't "realistic" either. They're both superheroes, one of the more unrealistic categories of fiction ever created. They're both outlandish nonsense characters in any real-world sense. One is arguably more outlandish than the other, but neither has a goddamned thing to do with life as it actually exists, and all the self-conscious grit in the world won't make it so.
Which is by no means to say they can't be wonderfully entertaining and effective characters anyway. But it's a puzzlement to me why anybody wants to demand or appropriate "realism" for them. How much sense does it make to say, "I value realism in fiction, so obviously superheroes are my genre of choice." WT actual F? Go watch a domestic drama or something if realism is your thing. Otherwise, embrace and accept the fantastical for what it is.
Batman's a long further down the suspension of disbelief scale than Superman, who's arguably further down than a wise-cracking raccoon from outer space, who's further down than Dr Strange visiting a dimension made of paint, and so on. When I personally demand realism from my superhero stories, I'm demanding that they stop at the wise-cracking raccoon.
No he's not. One of his friends is an alien who can shoot beams from his eyes and lift a building!
Batman is exactly the same amount of believable as Superman.
There's a wisecracking duck in the wings.
And there are wings on the wisecracking duck
I hate myself for doing this, since we both agreed already that Batman is not a realistic concept, but fuck it, let's open that other can of worms.
Yes, the comics (and at least some of the movies from the 1989 version on) have incorporated the bulletproof costume, and the comics at least named kevlar as the material used. And, yeah, kevlar is the material used in protective clothing like bulletproof vests, so fair enough, kevlar would block bullets - though they still would have an impact, like in the 1989 film where they still punch Batman to the ground, and not making them totally ineffective like in most comics or, famously, Matt Reeves' The Batman - but it is inflexible AF. Why do you think they stopped at bulletproof vests and don't make a whole suits for law enforcement and/or the military out of the stuff? People wouldn't be able to move around. And Batman moves around a lot more than your basic police officer.
That was even adressed in The Dark Knight when Lucius Fox designed the new suit for Batman, where he points out that, in order to make the suit more flexible, he had to subtract from the protective armor.
So, realistically, Batman could wear a protective suit, but would be hit by a hell of a lot more bullets, or he could, you know, dodge bullets. Not both, and both ways would eventually lead to a bullet getting through.
People make fun of how stiff Michael Keaton's Batman was, but at least this is consistent with the suit being lined with kevlar. Which means, in this regard, Tim Burton's Batman is more realistic than other, "more grounded" versions.
Not to mention that kevlar is also heavy, which adds to the whole exhaustion thing.
And even the comics and most movies weren't stupid enough to claim the mask being bulletproof, meaning of the multitude of bullets being shot at him, it would also be just a matter of time until one would hit him in the head.
Except for the DCEU, which was that stupid and specifically showed Batman's mask to be bulletproof, while trying to be "grounded and realistic". *sigh*
I said the conceit was that the suit was bulletproof. Again, fiction doesn't have to be exactly like reality. It's not a dissertation, it's recreation. The audience chooses to suspend disbelief to enjoy the illusion. Realism just means making it sound credible enough to make that suspension easier. You only have to answer the audience's questions well enough not to break their immersion as they're reading or watching the story, even if they see the holes in it afterward. Like the old joke, the key is sincerity -- if you can fake that, you've got it made.
Batman lives in a universe with technology far advanced beyond ours, a world where humans have built cyborgs and convincingly lifelike androids and time machines. It's not that hard to play along with the conceit that they have better bulletproof materials than we do. Just like they have far more compact and effective grappling guns and lines, gas grenades that can fit in a tiny utility belt pocket, etc.
Thread.
Hell, forum.
Folks, you have reached the end of genre discussion.
Everyone put their pants back on and go home.
Fantasy fiction is not a recreation of reality, either.
Skiffy fans buy nonsense by the yard because they want to believe. Remember Byrne wanting to make Supe's powers more realistic by declaring them to be "psionic?"
Psionic is among sf's most popular technogibberish terms. It translates as "magical mind powers."
Here's an alternative plausible explanation for Bat's bulletproof nature: he's a hundred times more observant than Sherlock Holmes and a master psychologist. By anticipating the intent and misdirecting the aim of his opponents he all but guarantees that they will miss.
No, it doesn't work. None of the explanations do.
Skiffy fans buy nonsense by the yard because they want to believe. Remember Byrne wanting to make Supe's powers more realistic by declaring them to be "psionic?"
Psionic is among sf's most popular technogibberish terms. It translates as "magical mind powers."
Here's an alternative plausible explanation for Bat's bulletproof nature: he's a hundred times more observant than Sherlock Holmes and a master psychologist. By anticipating the intent and misdirecting the aim of his opponents he all but guarantees that they will miss.
No, it doesn't work. None of the explanations do.
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Wrong. The one motivating factor for Bruce Wayne taking on the Batman role is as mentioned yesterday: he is forever in the grip of the worst childhood trauma imaginable--watching his parents murdered before his eyes. That is and always has been a motivator for individuals to become real world crime-fighters, whether one is wearing a police uniform, or in the superhero genre, a bat-themed bodysuit. It all starts there, which should be apparent to anyone who ever read a Batman comic.
One of the reasons Batman is one of history's most popular fictional characters is not limited to the Bat-theatrics, but an understanding (and for some, a personal understanding) of being powerless to stop loved ones from being murdered, so he or she vows to end as much of the problem as possible. There's nothing more realistic than that reason-to-be for the character, whether wearing a Bat-suit or not, despite the limp attempts to force the character into some silly category (usually as a defense of other characters and/or their goofy adaptations that cannot so easily escape the criticism).
"Fantastical" does not mean some extremist position where the content is completely removed from the reality humans experience every day. The Incredible Hulk TV series was a success because producer Kenneth Johnson purposely placed a fantasy element within the relatable human drama (and trauma) of Banner (think about why that Banner became the Hulk in that pilot), not create some silly, cartoon-by-another-name, dragging characters along for some silly ride--which no one would ever accept. While the TV series used its green monster for thrills, he was also allowed to serve as what the original comic book character was supposed to be: the uninhibited outgrowth of the turmoil in Banner. To this day, the series is praised for being the first live action superhero production to play it as realistically as possible with mature themes, and still deliver the thrills. Clearly, there are some live action superhero adaptations followed that path, and it works. If that's a problem for some, there's always the Super Friends.
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