Issue 5: The Pursuit of Perfection
Batman: Hush, Fanfiction, and Society
Letter From the Editor
Dearest Reader,
I can’t help but feel pressure to make the perfect decision in everything that I do: the perfect haircut, the perfect website, the perfect photos, and the perfect issues for this magazine. Did you know that I almost deleted everything I’ve written for this magazine several times in just the span of a week? I’ve redone my website more times than I can count, hyperanalyzed every interaction I’ve ever had with my friends, and even scrutinized the way that I walk.
Logically, perfection is impossible and that’s the allure of it. It will always be a beacon to strive for, something attractively unattainable. Only the most ambitious and anxious aim to conquer perfection, which leads to failure almost every time. I’ve been thinking a lot about my personal pursuit of perfection and how I’ve let it take over almost every aspect of my life.
But I implore you to consider that perfection is a concept made to keep you paralyzed in fear, unable to make a single decision. I’ve reached this state before, being unable to leave the house because of an irrational fear that I was going to throw up and ruin my “perfect” encounter with society that day. The only way to cure perfection is to not give it the time of day, which I want to do for this latter half of March.
In this issue, we’re going to discuss the impossibility of perfection in regards to Thomas Elliot aka Hush from Batman, the courage of fanfiction, and some media where perfection goes to die.
Overanalyzing Fiction
March’s analysis is of Thomas Elliot aka Hush from Batman, the Impossibility of Perfection, and the Batman Part 2.
Thomas Elliot is a renowned surgeon who has based his entire existence off of the Waynes. He grew up alongside Bruce and they remained friends despite both of them losing parents. The only difference is that they both have starkly contrasting opinions of wealth, family, and themselves. Thomas Elliot is really awesome. He uses his training as a surgeon to physically change his appearance to match Bruce’s. I only wish that his face was slightly different from Bruce’s to show that no matter how talented an individual is, they can never replicate another human being. This is where Tommy’s real intrigue comes in: he can never be truly perfect.
In Batman: Hush, it’s revealed that Tommy tried to kill both of his parents in order to receive their money and failed. Meanwhile, Bruce’s parents get gunned down in an alleyway and Bruce is “lucky” to inherit his fortune at a very young age. Already, Tommy is flawed in comparison to Bruce. No matter how much he will try to reach Bruce’s level of influence, fortune, renown, he will always be upstaged. That is the terrifying aspect of Hush: the fact that he will stop at nothing to reach perfection. Unfortunately for Bruce, he is perfection in Tommy’s eyes and becomes this idol for Tommy to base his personality on. We can break this down through social psychology and the concept of human mimicry to increase their competence in the eyes of others. When you want to connect with someone, you can’t help but replicate speech patterns and body language. Tommy does this on an absurd level, focusing on becoming Bruce Wayne entirely.
It is said that Tommy’s anger towards Bruce is because of Thomas Wayne saving his mother after Tommy attempted to kill him, but I think there is so much more to him than that. I really dislike when comics attempt to squish down complex characters in order to make it more palatable to an audience in general. In my opinion, Tommy’s anger towards Bruce is because of this perfection that Bruce has so nonchalantly achieved. While Bruce and the reader see him as a flawed individual who fights the same criminals every single night in some vain attempt to redeem his parents, Tommy sees the pinnacle of perfection. That is what makes him so interesting, is his core belief that he is lesser than Bruce Wayne and therefore needs to kill him in order to assert some kind of dominance.
Now to get to the rumors of Thomas Elliot being the main villain of the Batman Part 2. I hope with every fiber of my being that they hold off on Tommy. In my opinion, Batman: Hush needs the other characters like Clayface, Nightwing, Oracle, Jason Todd, Tim Drake, and Poison Ivy to be central to the story. The reader is supposed to feel like this is an epic part of Bruce’s life that includes all kinds of people from his past, and I don’t think that Matt Reeves’s universe has been set up to be that vast yet. In addition, the Riddler is a huge part of the original Hush story, with his knowledge of Batman’s identity being the central twist of the story. Personally, I don’t see Dano’s Riddler being at the center of a scheme this vast. In the Riddler: Year One, Edward is depicted as a shy person who only became the Riddler out of necessity and anger towards the systematic oppression that affected people like himself. He does harbor resentment towards Bruce Wayne that could translate over towards a Hush storyline, but it’s a stretch.
In order to make it work in any sense, the entire movie would have to heavily focus on Bruce Wayne and his relationship with society now that he’s established his relationship with being Batman. To reduce the redundancy of the Riddler, simply eradicate him from the story and make Tommy the main villain. I personally think that the magic of Batman: Hush lies in the fact that Bruce is forced to confront this later in his life as Batman, but I do think that it could be a changing point for him in the earlier years. While Tommy Elliot is the main villain, I would personally partner him with the Scarecrow (shocker!) as the B villain. I hate when Jonathan is shelved and given the lesser treatment like he had in Batman Begins, but I think if we’re going to delve into the psyche of Bruce, let’s get in there. We can also hypothesize Harvey Dent being a massive part of Part 2 (as of writing this, Sebastian Stan is highly expected for the role). As a man who can do what Batman does in the light almost as successfully, Batman sort of becomes irrelevant. This could lead to the emphasis on Bruce Wayne throughout the movie and could set up Tommy as a formidable final villain. Obviously I’m rooting for a Hush-Harvey-Scarecrow trio for this hypothetical Part 2, but who knows where the road will lead us.
Tommy Elliot fails at every turn, and his perseverance and intensification of his methods are what make him so interesting. His fruitless pursuit of perfection can be seen through his common mimicry of Bruce Wayne and his rampant jealousy that affects him long after cut brakes and shattering pearl necklaces. While I think he would be an interesting addition to the Batman: Part 2, he needs to be partnered with other villains and characters that can reflect the original Batman: Hush storyline without all the necessary background characters. All in all, Tommy Elliot is awesome, and a great addition to Batman’s rogues gallery.
Dining Room
This month’s dining room talk is about another pursuit of perfection, this time in the world of writing fanfiction.
I just read fanfiction for the first time in seven years.
I had published my first work on May 5th, 2019 and set forth the motions that would seemingly change my life forever. I was about to start at a new high school in a completely new area and be forced to make new friends. I didn’t know anything about myself, other than the fact that I loved reading and writing. Now, seven years later, I’m trying to relearn that part of myself and I started by reading fanfiction. Despite being a voracious author on Wattpad, I never indulged in the act of reading. I was far too wrapped up in my own work to focus on anyone else’s. I deeply regret that about myself, that I was so wrapped up in myself that I didn’t even support my other fellow writers who were putting their souls on the Internet for all to see. I feel as if that mirrors my life now; that I am so self-centered that I forget to look up and see what other amazing writers and artists are doing.
I feel a deep sense of urgency to pay attention to others’ work now, especially in the precarious era of Artificial Intelligence. But more importantly, I feel a deep sense of urgency to reconnect with my thirteen year old self. I told my mother that I had finished a book the other day, and all she did was tell me how much she misses when I used to read. For clarification, I didn’t just used to read, I used to read as if my life depended on it. Every flip of a page was like a heart beat, every chapter a breath. Now, every scroll seems to be the replacement.
I can document the exact time when I stopped reading: 2020. A year after I published my first fanfiction. The rise of TikTok made me insatiable for the next short video, the next “legendary reel pull,” the next “sound” that I could quote at a get-together to demonstrate how integrated I was to the ever-changing digital world. Ever since then, I feel as if I’m climbing up a mountain every time I try to read for fun. I skim the books given to me in school, I use the writing skills I gained from years of Wattpad experience to hide the fact that I didn’t want to read, and I blatantly lie in my papers.
Thirteen year old me would be ashamed.
So, to make up for lost time, I started reading fanfiction. To me, publishing any form of fanfiction is the greatest job anyone can have. To toil endlessly learning about the intricacies of a world that doesn’t belong to you and to psychologically insert yourself into the position of a character within that world is a talent that not many possess. Not all fanfiction writers can do it either, but that doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that this world created by another individual was so strongly received by someone that they spend days of their own time trying to mimic that world. It’s hard to pick a passion when the only thing you dream about every night is creating something that inspires someone as much as a fanfiction writer is inspired.
Recently, I’ve been pondering this old dream of mine: to create something that inspires someone so much that fan art, cosplay, and fanfiction is spawned from. It still keeps me up at night, the thought that I’ve given up on it somehow. I stare at my ceiling and wonder whether I will ever achieve this goal. Whether I will inspire a work of art like fanfiction out of someone. All I can do is scroll through Ao3 and hope that my kudos will inspire a fanfiction writer to keep going, unlike I did.
I will never forget the embarrassment on my friend’s face when she told me she wrote fanfiction. I was never quite able to verbalize in that moment how unashamed she should be, until now. Fanfiction is the ultimate fight against Artificial Intelligence and corporations. It is made for free without any expectation of monetary gain or fame. Courageous people, like my friend, post every day hoping to make someone feel seen. And yes, I’m even talking about the people who write smut. Courage is the lifeline of fanfiction and the world. Without the courage to take the first step or put ourselves out there, you isolate yourself from so many possibilities. You turn into how I feel now, trapped by the anxiety that courage spawns. My mother will often butcher a quote that goes: the ones who care don’t matter, and the ones who matter don’t care. So please, do not feel embarrassed to write fanfiction, do not feel embarrassed to write that essay for Substack, and go out and read some damn fanfiction.