Re: Arkham Asylum Sequel.
The Ross/Dini take on the Joker is pretty much canon to me. It doesn't make him a Die Hard villain(whose motives, by the way, were always money and revenge), it just means he's not a mentally ill person incapable of telling right from wrong or being compelled to commit crime by paranoid hallucinations or something. Prisons are filled with serial killers and sociopaths that aren't legally "insane", and the more you read about them the more you see how much more the B:TAS Joker is like them than truly mentally ill killers. Ledger Joker, and Nicholson to an extent, are a different story, as are stories where they talk about how he's got an undocumented disorder related to Tourette's which causes invasive sensory overload, leading him to constantly reinvent himself in completely amoral and unpredictable ways, but to me, that explanation has never really seemed feasible or realistic given how generally coherent he's written as.
Also, truly mentally ill people don't go around bragging about how crazy they are. The bottom line is that I really don't see there being much of a case for the DCAU/Arkham Asylum 1 Joker being legitimately insane, at least from a legal standpoint. I don't even know how he'd be diagnosed that way, other than a lot of expert bull****ting in the courtroom and the asylum itself. He's still the real deal, though(i.e. a brilliant criminal who revels in mayhem and flamboyance and doesn't care much about money or b****s or other goonish things), otherwise he wouldn't have exploits to insanity-plea his way out of.
Eh... I don't think Batman is something that lends itself well to genuine "realism". I feel like, any modern person with any faith in a Democratic system, even under a cursory examination of how Batman would function in the "real world" would find his operations at best worrying, at worse generally reprehensible. And that's not even getting into the general disdain for psychology that's inherent in the series. In the Batverse, psychologists all seem to run the gamut from incompetent to criminally nefarious. It works for the series but it's
certainly not realistic.
I guess it all depends on what you classify as insane. A lot of the problem is that there's a bunch of different writers all working on the same character, none of whom are psychiatrists/psychologists, so there's some severe discrepancy in how he acts. He's
clearly got most of the factors for some sort of antisocial personality disorder and while it might be hard to diagnose him specifically as specifically sociopathic or psychopathic might be impossible, he'd certainly be pegged into one of these categories. The combined lack of any adherence to social norms and the absence of the sort of tangible motivations that drive most rational people to commit crimes falls clearly into the realm of psychological disorder. And while personality disorder doesn't fall under the jurisdiction of an insanity plea (I think), he's clinically mentally ill, if not legally so. But that's really just splitting hairs, isn't it?
So, yeah. Not legally insane but I don't think there's a psychologist out there who wouldn't peg him as some sort of crazy. I've always attributed his sentencing at Arkham to the generally dour perspective the franchise has towards the justice system and the psychiatric world. In the real world, he'd be sentenced, no doubt about it. I doubt
anyone would walk away from the justice system after the stunts he's pulled, no matter how sick they are, regardless of any screams of foul from rights groups. But Batman lives in a crapsack world, so there you go.
In all honesty, while I loved the game overall, the story was my least favorite part of Arkham Asylum. It was servicable, but a lot of times it felt like a generic Die Hard plot with elements from Batman stories that had been done much better elsewhere.
Now this...this looks much better.
Agreed. I think we, as fans, tended to give the game a lot of slack just because it was one of the very first comic book games to really get the material right, and because, for a first generation game, it really accomplished a lot.
But the story kind of sucked. I think this next game could really fix every problem I had with the first though. It could be the video game equivalent to Dark Knight.
