Hello and welcome to Wasted Plotential, the show where we discuss the wasted potential
of our favourite plotlines.
For this episode, we're going to be taking the segment from my big Injustice critique
where I suggested an alternative take on the concept to make it a bit less generic and...
well, shit, let's be honest - and fleshing it out a bit more, using some extra details
I've come up with since and used in a short story I wrote based on the concept.
Definitely check the critique out so you fully understand where I'm coming from here.
So, Injustice: Gods Among Us - a DC Comics fighting game by the team behind Mortal Kombat.
The story focuses on a universe where The Joker nukes Metropolis and uses Scarecrow's
fear toxin to trick Superman into murdering his pregnant wife.
Superman kills The Joker and establishes a totalitarian state where criminals are executed.
Just about the entire Justice League agrees with Superman for very poorly-defined reasons,
except for Batman, because he has to be the one in the right at all times; meaning he
often has to battle the entire evil/incorrect/mind controlled League and come out on top.
He forms the Insurgency, which in the game is just him, Harley Quinn, the late Green
Arrow, and secretly Lex Luthor.
Because another scenario we've not had enough of, apparently, is Batman vs Superman, specifically
with Superman as the bad guy.
The story proper takes place five years later, where most of Batman's allies are dead, he's
in hiding, and he and Lex scheme to summon the Justice League of another universe to
come and help.
The other League, consisting of characters who are actually written as true to the originals,
help take down Superman and the other evil heroes.
In the end, only two of the Regime characters show any remorse for their actions, which
doesn't include the utterly irredeemable Wonder Woman or Superman.
Wonder Woman is an absolute monster for reasons that wouldn't be "explained" for a good few
years (ahem), and Superman heat beams a twelve year old boy through the face.
The five years were then fleshed out in a comic series that is better in many ways,
but is still shackled by the constraints of the game's plot and tone, so it too is hot
garbage.
So, to summarise my core issues with this plot:
1.
Batman vs Superman is played out.
2.
Evil Superman is played out.
3.
Batman being the good guy against the rest of the League is played out.
4.
The other universe heroes arriving to resolve everything quickly after five years of conflict
is an unsatisfying resolution.
5.
Good Superman arriving in the final chapter to fight Evil Superman after being mostly
absent, while thematically appropriate, is point 4 within point 4.
6.
Way too many people die, especially at the hands of Superman.
If I had full control, I'd ignore the civil war thing entirely, and go with the Crime
Syndicate and alternate versions of the villains as heroes in a cross-dimensional battle.
But instead of delving into that, I'm going to keep the basic story of a hero going bad
and creating a rift in the superhero community, and change certain key details to show how
this could have been done better.
Let's begin.
The story starts with the destruction of Gotham instead of Metropolis.
It always bugged me that it was a Batman villain who ruined Superman's life instead of, you
know... a Superman villain?
God forbid anyone other than Batman characters has a reason to be here.
Joker is the trigger man, but he's backed by Ra's al Ghul; someone with actual resources
and connection that could actually acquire a nuke, unlike The Joker acting alone.
Batman loses a lot in the destruction of Gotham: his home, Alfred, Tim, Jim and the GCPD.
In his grief, Batman decides enough is enough.
He gathers Red Hood, Azrael, Huntress - his allies that are willing to kill - and he raids
Arkham Asylum, which was outside the blast radius.
I feel like Batman would make a lot more sense as the one to go bad, seeing how he's always
riding the line, and the subject of killing villains seems to come up a lot more often
with him than with Clark.
Plus, the all-powerful Superman has an easier time saving lives and ending situations non-lethally,
compared to Bruce, a normal human.
Therefore, it's much more reasonable for Bruce to be pushed over the edge than Clark.
Now, conventional wisdom advises that the villain have the upper hand until the hero
overcomes them in the final confrontation.
As such, having Clark be the villain makes more sense on paper, since (arguable) the
reason Batman vs Superman works as a concept is the underdog factor.
Batman, a mere mortal, vs Superman, who is unto a god; you know, David and Goliath and
all that.
But the reason Batman even has a chance against Superman is his preparedness, especially in
a setting with an established League where Bruce has countermeasures in place for them
all.
Also, Superman hold back because, if he lets loose, Batman is fucked.
A rogue Superman is scary and dangerous, but a rogue Batman already has plans in place
to stop all the big hitters before anyone knows what's happening, so I see Superman
as being the real underdog in a fight between the two.
Anyway, some villains manage to escape Arkham, including Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy.
Those two specifically go to the League and tell them that Batman's gone crazy and is
killing everyone in the asylum.
The heroes don't believe them until the point is made that Arkham escapees wouldn't go running
to the League unless they had a damn good reason.
Plus, Catwoman arrives to back up their claim.
Superman says he'll go meet with Batman and find out what's going on, confident he can
deal with it.
He and Bruce meet in the Batcave, which just about managed to survive the blast.
When confronted, Bruce shows Clark security footage of the assault on Arkham, displaying
various minor villains like Professor Pyg and The Ventriloquist being killed, capped
off with Batman cutting The Joker's throat open with a batarang.
He explains that yes, he has decided that super criminals need to be executed.
Clark tries to talk him down, but Bruce says that it's easy for him to say that, when he
can end most conflicts before they escalate that far; but Bruce is just a man and he was
the best Gotham had to defend it.
The debate goes on until Bruce realises there's no getting through to Clark, so he exposes
the kryptonite knuckles in his gauntlets and clocks him one, knocking him out.
Bruce imprisons Superman in a red sun prison cell, but not for "reeducation".
See, if the game's version of Clark genuinely believed he was doing the right thing, he
wouldn't view non-compliant heroes as obstacles to be eliminated.
He would instead see them as uninformed allies who insist on viewing the world in a naive
black and white manner.
Bruce here has that viewpoint.
Throughout the game, instead of cutting back to Evil Superman twirling his fucking moustache,
we instead see Bruce as he pays regular visits to Clark to try to talk him into joining his
side.
Clark persists in holding onto his morals and urging Bruce to rediscover his.
It becomes very clear that Bruce gets no enjoyment out of this, and is actually incredibly guilt-ridden
about the whole thing.
The big problem with these big dumb superhero vs superhero stories is that they have an
awful tendency to display wilful ignorance of the fact that these people are friends,
and have been so for over a decade.
Batman and Superman would surely want their best friend to join them; they wouldn't immediately
start punching one another because real humans don't do that!
When Superman fails to check in and Flash and other heroes scope things out, it becomes
clear that Batman has indeed gone rogue.
Wonder Woman, still holding onto hope, gathers the League to confront Bruce and try to talk
him down or, failing that, take him in.
Bruce has a lot of reinforcements, including mercenaries like Deathstroke and Deadshot,
and a few of the less evil villains, leaving the confrontation at a stalemate.
And then Bruce makes his intentions clear in a TV broadcast, declaring his new crusade
to the world.
My reason for choosing to have Wonder Woman as the main hero is partly just to avoid having
yet more Batman vs Superman, but also because, historically, she's always been weirdly under-utilised.
In fact, did you know she has never headlined a video game before?
Not even an obscure Gameboy game from the mid-00's.
For Number 3 of the Trinity, that's weak.
But more than that, I wanted to highlight the kind of person she's supposed to be.
Of all the characters utilised in the Injustice franchise, none of them have been more horrible
misrepresented than Wonder Woman.
The honest, kind and compassionate woman who prefers to give her enemies a chance at redemption
over locking them away, is now a blood-thirsty sociopath, who blatantly lies to people's
faces, disrespects the memories of her dead friends, and regularly tries to murder her
opponents.
Oh, and let's not forget that the Regime version is the only character to lose three fights
in the game.
Everyone else gets two at most, shared across both incarnations.
And her Prime counterpart isn't much better either.
Wonder Woman deserves a chance to display how capable she is, and how differently she
operates from her over-exposed compatriots.
More on her in the future.
As time passes, more and more heroes and villains are sucked into the conflict, some joining
Batman's "pragmatic" faction, like maybe military man Hal Jordan, or occasional killer Green
Arrow.
Others join Wonder Woman's side out of a desire to remain moral guides for the rest of the
world, fear of being killed by Batman, or revenge for those he's already killed.
Every confrontation between Diana and Bruce sees both, desperately urging one another
to see things from their perspective, Bruce bringing hypotheticals of Diana losing loved
ones and Diana bringing Bruce's original mission and the desires of those he did lose to the
table.
Fighting is always a last resort, though they notably resort to it quicker each time, until
Diana finds herself wondering if her only option is to kill Bruce and vice versa, a
concept neither one relishes; as opposed to Regime Superman immediately resorting to it
every fucking time.
Bruce's side kill a number of villains, and a few heroes are killed by accident, or by
the villains either side employs.
For the most part, Diana takes villains in to give them a chance to reform, which a fair
few do; while Bruce imprisons a bunch of heroes, so he can try to talk them around, which works
on some, like the impressionable Shazam.
There is also a rivalry between the three remaining Robins: Jason is on Bruce's side,
Dick is on Diana's side, and Damian is torn between the two; understanding that killing
is sometimes necessary, but disagreeing with Bruce going back on his principles so fiercely.
Naturally, this makes things harder for Bruce, as he has ideological battles with his sons
multiple times.
If Dick dies here, it's treated with the gravitas it deserves, instead of just being a throwaway
line that pays off embarrassingly in the comic.
Catwoman is also a prominent figure, playing the role Diana should have had in the game:
as someone attempting to get through to the fallen hero through her love and to make him
see that he's going down the wrong path.
Eventually, she reluctantly accepts that there really is no getting through to him, and she
defects to the other side to help take him down and get him the help he needs.
You know, instead of stoking the flame and looking like a goddamn Sith Lord.
During Act 2, the League goes after Ra's, thinking that bringing him to justice might
turn Bruce around on his position, showing him that the old ways do still work.
However, Bruce follows them.
Diana loses in a sword fight with Ra's and is almost killed.
Bruce swoops in and takes down Ra's himself, killing him - his view that lethal force is
the only option reaffirmed.
With this, both sides realise the final battle is drawing near.
Batman sends his forces to multiple cities to divide Diana's forces so he can fight her
one-on-one.
The alternate universe League helps release the remaining captive heroes in a raid on
Batman's base.
Thanks to this, they join the various battles and are able to turn the tide, allowing a
full team to go after Bruce.
When confronted, Bruce reveals his new armoured batsuit, designed specifically to take down
various Leaguers - lethally, if need be.
A few go down, leaving us with the final battle of Diana and a weakened Clark, possibly with
Prime Bruce to complete the Trinity.
They defeat him, but when they spare him, he doesn't drop a "You'll have to kill me."
Instead, he finally opens his eyes and is genuinely remorseful that he let things get
this far.
Bruce and his followers are incarcerated and Clark makes a point of visiting Bruce everyday;
even after everything Bruce did to him, after spending years in a red sun-saturated cell
because that, my friends, is Superman.
As I hope I've manged to illustrate here, Injustice is kind of a pastiche of previous
ideas that are over-used to the point of being clichés, and it would have been a much stronger
product if they had at least tried to put a few new spins on them.
Is it too much to ask for a DC fighting game to give me DC heroes and DC villains, instead
of these horrible misinterpretations whose personalities diverge from their original
cores too far too quickly to be believable, who fight each other at the drop of a hat,
and who are total wastes of the talents of the legendary, iconic actors who were brought
together to bring this cast to life?
The original characters do not suit this kind of story at all and that, I think, is where
the major problem lies.
Particularly when using established characters like this, you should let the characters and
their personalities determine the plot; not the other way around.
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