Why is the thought experiment "what if Superman became a tyrant?" Is it because he's got farther to fall to become that than someone like Batman, who probably already has thoughts on the back of his mind to adopt authoritarian methods if it means a world free of villainy?
Are there any stories that look at what if Bruce snapped?
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They wanted to turn the Justice League into tyrants, but it can't work if Superman doesn't do it first because he's the face of the Justice League.
That and DC has been running out of ideas for decades.
I always have a problem with that being the case because Superman is supposed to be the one with the most respect for humanity, being an outsider with gifts greater than man's.
Kingdom Come feels like the most realistic endgame of Superman losing faith in humanity. He just gives up and believes he's unwanted if the tides of heroism are changing. Superman being the one to decide "enough is enough," makes sense from an objective point of view if you take all his characterization out of the equation but there's so much soul that you need to remove to come to that conclusion that it stops feeling like Superman afterwards. Instead it's grafting the ideals of "what if the most powerful man on Earth decided to take matters into his own hands," onto him with no respect for his upbringing.
Meanwhile Batman has lived with the reality that crime and evil is destructive and the efforts of the common man only serve to either impede or even nurture those efforts. No one's out there trying to actually STOP it but him and becoming increasingly jaded to the point that he loses sight of the people he's protecting and instead simply wants to end villainy has some narrative backing.
The problem is that Batman never actually tries to tackle these issues because they are societal and that requires a lot of talk and non fighting focus. For that to be entertaining requires an exceptional writing and writers of that caliber aren't nurtured in today's entertainment industry.
Superman and Batman aren't really that different in how writers have them tackle it, raw power, Superman with his powers, Batman with some robots or something the plot gifts him, might makes right because it's simple and easy.
>Are there any stories that look at what if Bruce snapped?
Guess you've never heard of the Batman Who Laughs. Sorry I brought it to your attention.
on the surface of it the batman who laughs looks like some child autist's wet dream
The idea is good, the execution was horrible
I was going to mention Nemesis but I forgot there is an even stupider "Evil Batman" story.
>let’s have bats off screen all of the leaguers he has no real way of beating
Sounds about right
>Are there any stories that look at what if Bruce snapped?
The Dark Multiverse stuff is all I can think of.
IDK if I really buy that Batman is capable of taking over the world. In a lot of stories it seems like kind of a stretch that even Superman's able to.
batman is already sort of evil-coded if you will
the contrast is already set between his aesthetics/methods and his moral fortitude
theres a more compelling contrast between supes aesthetics and his evil of he were to be evil
also he represents america and people think america is evil now
There was a Batman/Superman story where Batman got Superman's power and just decided to fight crime 24/7 and he got more and more violent and brutal the longer he went without stopping.
I think in Kingdom Come it's implied that Gotham City is basically a police state with giant bat robots patrolling the streets at all times.
It's not just "implied," Clark outright calls Gotham a "practically a police state" in one panel.
Pay no mind to the Batbots of Gotham
They're just protecting the people
from themselves
The bat robots arrest Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids if I recall.
Kingdom Come, but that's mostly in the background and not really brought up again once the story gets going.
>Why is the thought experiment "what if Superman became a tyrant?"
Something something juxtaposition with his character being the epitome of good. But also because someone with his brokeass powerset being a tyrant is horrific
People use Superman for "What if heroes went bad" stories for a variety of reasons, but ultimately I think it boils down to the fact that it's an incredibly easy subversion with a lot of narrative potential to take a paragon of goodness and turn them into a monster in your story.
Also, you have to consider that Superman works as a character on the entire basis you buy into the fact that he is unilaterally good and morally uncomprimising, and I think some readers have issue with accepting that conceit. People in real life are messy, and more and more people have been burned by those with all the power abusing that power for their own gains to screw over the little guy, so it's reasonable that some people would be suspicious of Superman as a character and want to recontextualize him in a more "realistic" way. Odds are, a person born with Clark's powers in real life wouldn't be that good of a person, or at the very least wouldn't be so unflinching good.
Personally, I like that Superman is a near mythological paragon of justice and wholesomeness, seeing him as more something to aspire to be, but other people wanting to do takes on the character that flip that script on its head are more than valid to do so.
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Reminder that Superman is very dangerous.
Reminder that he controls himself because he know that people and those he loves will be harmed if he ever loses control of himself or his actions.
Even at his own enemies he holds himself back because he believe that there is good and they can be redeemed.
And really there are tons of works that show this as well. Like I could actually see a work where someone like Parasite isn't like purely evil but someone frustrated by the fact that he literally cannot reach out for help.
Though in the case of Manchester he ended up killing himself.
Insurance rates in Metropolis must be insane.
There are lots of good people in the world and I'm not saying this as one of them. It's just it's easier for those that exploit to get ahead and what's also very important, you're more likely to remembee the person that fricked you over than the person that helped
Evil Superman doesn't seem to need as much plot armor to take over as other heroes. Evil Batman is just pure plot armor to the point that you'd have to be Batarded to stomach it. Honestly if any of them turned bad the League or their own supporting cast would take them down and hold them while they try to figure out what's wrong.
Its not plot armor, evil batman has prep time!
Superman is the embodiment of america. People dont like evil superman because it means they would have to think of america as evil. And this is bad according to my boss
There's a notable number of stories of Bruce going crazy, but they're usually done in Elseworld tales or the result of outside interference because self-discipline is a huge aspect and moral conflict of Batman. Heck, Grant Morrison reinvented the idea of the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh both to show what an unhinged Batman is like and to hold him as an example of Batman's constant preparation by explaining it was an intentionally cultivated persona as the very last defense to ensure Batman himself could never be fully indoctrinated by evil. It's not as common as Superman going full dominator because Superman himself is basically the subversion of the ubermensch mythos, where he goes above humanity's own expectations of what a superhuman would do in conquering the weaker humanity and instead abides by his own values to protect the earth as a whole and lets humanity judge whether he's right or wrong. All evil superman does is just revert him back to the idea of humanity's successor deciding his first step is to conquer it to forcibly make more like himself.
But if you mean "What if Batman decided to go full cowl on the city after realizing cape isn't working", think there's only a couple. I know Zdarsky's Batman is currently trying and failing to go about that, since he's trying to recontextualize Zurr-En-Arrh as a split personality Bruce unknowingly gave power to during a multiversal hopping trip, so this isn't so much Bruce snapping as it is him being replaced by Frank Miller's interpretation of Batman for the duration of the arc.
>Are there any stories that look at what if Bruce snapped?
The closest we get to that is Thomas Wayne in Flashpoint.
It’s a pity, I’d love to see a what-if where Bruce Wayne goes the criminal empire route, using his vast resources to try to control crime rather than fight it directly. Becoming a rival of the Gotham crime families and non-wacky versions of some of his rogues, and ultimately becoming a ruthless Kingpin/Luthor/etc kind of personality.
because it's a way to completely ignore how the economy affects society.
none of these stories ever have superman talking about marxism. it's just using superman as an ax to grind about authoritarianism in general but never criticize particular forms of authoritarianism