The Batlord

I haven't read the actual comic book, only seen the animated adaptation, so this is only about that. If that scene in the comic is anywhere near as emotional as the movie then I have to read it. I'm serious about the crying thing. I don't mean straight-up bawling. I don't think I've done that in over a decade about anything. But that part puts a lump in my throat and brings an honest to god tear to my eye every time I think about it, which is more than I can say about most real life ****. I'm sure that as I write this the same thing will happen, just as it did when I watched the video a second ago.

If you haven't read the book or seen the movie, the Flash has the ability to run so fast that he can go back in time. He doesn't do this for the most part for obvious reasons, but this time he goes back in time to save his mother, who originally was murdered when he was a child. When he gets back to the present the entire world is different (some crap about ripples in the space-time continuum that affect even things that have nothing to do with what was changed): his mother is still alive, but there is no Justice League, Superman crashed in Metropolis instead of Smallville and is a prisoner of the government, Wonder Woman and the Amazons are waging a war with Aquaman and Atlantis that is devastating the Earth, Hal Jordan never got his ring, and many other things. But the most important one for this post is that instead of Bruce Wayne witnessing his parent's murder, his father and mother watched Joe Chill kill Bruce. This caused Thomas Wayne to become Batman and Martha Wayne to snap and become the Joker.

In order to restore the timeline to its rightful place, Barry Allen (or the Flash if you're stupid) seeks out Batman. When he finds Thomas Wayne things don't go so well though. I suppose the loss of a child is even more traumatizing than the death of a parent, as this world's Batman is far more nihilistic than "ours". He uses guns, isn't afraid to kill, doesn't seem to give much of a **** about what's going on in the world, outside of waging a war of vengeance against crime in Gotham, and just seems to be in general a broken man with nothing to live for. The only way that Flash even gets him to agree to help him is by telling him that restoring the time line will save his son. Then blah blah blah, epic awesome **** happens, watch/read it cause it rules, and an hour and a half later the timeline is restored. It's during the final battle that a critically-wounded Thomas Wayne gives Flash the letter to give to his son, which you saw if you watched the clip.

There's no way anyone with a soul can't be even a little bit touched by this. If Bruce Wayne is around forty as I've been given to understand, then it's been thirty years since he last saw his parents. Thirty years where he's likely thought about them and that moment every day of his life. This is an event that had such a profound effect on him that he gave up his childhood to travel the world alone while training his mind and body to a peak that quite possibly no man has ever reached in all of history, comic book or otherwise. Even after all of this time, this event so profoundly rules his mind and his heart that he's given his entire life to righting this wrong. I imagine he likely secretly pictures his parents' murderer in the face of every criminal he fights, a little boy just hoping to wake up and see his mother and father by his bed (*).

And now, after three decades (not to mention seven decades of real life time), his father is speaking to him. This isn't a letter he'd written years ago that Bruce had just discovered in an old trunk in the attic; these are words written by a living man who has felt the same loss, who has lived through the same private hell, whose words carry the same emotions that Bruce himself feels. This is a little boy's closure.

If this makes you feel nothing then I don't even know what to say to you. It says everything about the power of Batman's story that in a series dedicated to the Flash, Bruce Wayne's moment steals the show, even though Flash is pretty much going through exactly the same thing. And thank God they got Kevin Conroy back for that little "cameo". No voice actor who's played Batman since could have made that scene what it is.

* That right there is where I got choked up again. Actually needed a tissue.

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