The following contains discussion of, and spoilers for, Revolutionary Girl Utena as well as certain general elements of the Batman mythos.

There are, of course, many different takes on the “what is actually wrong with Bruce Wayne’s brain?” question. 

But I am very invested in one particular idea that you see over and over in lots of different places, including Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum and a bunch of Neil Gaiman’s stuff: he’ll never acknowledge it, probably he’ll never even be able to see it, but Batman is way more invested in embodying a psychodramatic role than he is in effectively doing anything.  He is eternally sacrificing his humanity to become God’s Accuser, eternally atoning for his impotence in the face of his parents’ murder, eternally armoring himself in spookiness so that he Definitely Can’t Ever Be Vulnerable Again.  He’s the World’s Greatest Detective, because you have to be that thing in order to qualify as Batman, but it’s an end-in-itself and not a means.  He’s honestly happy, in his heart-of-hearts, to be playing an unending game of cops-and-robbers with the denizens of his rogues’ gallery; it allows him to continue inhabiting the myth rather than collapsing into a human, which is a prospect that terrifies him.  In the most cynical extrapolations of this idea, he’s unconsciously sabotaging his own crime-fighting project at every turn – ensuring that the villains will always be able to escape and try again, failing to use his money and power in any way that would actually clean up Gotham – because he wants to maintain the Batman’s habitat and prey supply. 

This is not a new or an original take, but it’s worth reminding everyone of how it works.

Akio Ohtori wants to inhabit the myth of the Prince the way that Bruce Wayne wants to inhabit the myth of the Batman.  On some very abstract level, he’s pulling the same kind of self-sabotaging shit, ensuring that the duel-cycle is never ended and the Rose Bride is never truly saved and the “Happily Ever After” card never goes up, so that he can keep on doing Prince things forever. 

But his situation is a lot worse than Batman’s situation.  Because of his environment or his own damaged character or both, he can’t actually live out the Prince role in the myth that he’s sustaining, despite all the sacrifices he’s making in order to sustain it.  He has to be the villain, not the hero.  He entombs the princess rather than saving her, he oversees the trials-of-spirit rather than conquering them.  He can’t be an innocent because he knows too much, he can’t be a hero of justice because his goals are too selfish, he can’t fight a monstrous overwhelming power because he is the local overwhelming power.  So he drags poor deluded souls like Utena and Nemuro through his mind games, all for the chance to dress up in a white jacket and have a swordfight at the end, which isn’t even a very good simulacrum of the thing he actually wants in the first place. 

You kinda feel sorry for him, notwithstanding the bit where he’s so terrible to everyone about everything. 

These thoughts, in conjunction, are interesting to me.

Because they suggest that Akio’s biggest and most blatant mistake was his decision to look inward.  He was determined to set up a fairy-tale pocket dimension, because he was overly attached to the fairy-tale aesthetics and metaphysics that he knew.  But those weren’t actually the most important things, by his own professed standards, and in order to get them he had to sacrifice what was the most important: his own role as Prince. 

The moment he stops doing that, and looks outward into the outside world –

– he can be Batman.

A poncy white-coated equestrian fencer Batman, sure, the aesthetics are always infinitely fudgeable.  But the world will actually let him play Prince in the way that Ohtori won’t, in the sense that it contains maidens to save and bad guys to defeat. 

I now really want to see a post-series Utena fanfic in which Akio decides to become a superhero.  A superhero who is explicitly engaging in superheroics for the sake of his own story and self-image, whose general attitude towards the world is a vague disdainful annoyance that it fails to live up to his genre expectations.  A superhero who is “doing good” guided by the same basic sensibilities that led him to set up the Ohtori dueling system in the first place.

…a superhero who eventually crosses paths with his estranged sister and her girlfriend, presumably.

Yeah, yeah, I know, “go write the thing if you want it so much.”  Probably I won’t, I have too much else to do.  Free to a good home.