Once the league starts up in your fic, does Batman become any less of a Mysterious Batsquatch in the public eye? Or do people just assume that the expensive, bat-shaped planes and submarines and whatnot are all piloted by Gotham’s favorite cryptid?
He does get less mysterious! I mean, it becomes more public knowledge that his deal is World’s Greatest Detective, and not Giant Shadow Monster. But there are still very popular Jekyll and Hyde theories, and vampire theories, and werebat theories. And shadow powers are never entirely ruled out by the general populace. Or by Barry.
okay but that transitional period must have been insane. like. imagine if interpol had a conference and they were like ‘we’re switching out all our k-9 service dogs for chupacabra’, and there was this really long pause before a reporter goes, ‘excuse me, WHAT.’ and then everyone loses their shit. oh, yes, chupacabra are real. they’re very nice actually once you get to know them. they are in fact bloodthirsty creatures of the night but perfectly willing to cooperate with international security measures. here is one now. we’ve trained him to wave politely for the cameras.
like, here’s superman and wonder woman, everyone knows they’re heroes, everyone knows they’re badasses. but there they are standing right next to THE BATMAN, gotham’s weirdest fucking phenomenon, like they didn’t somehow talk a grim shadow made of vengeance and vampire magic into a photo op.
tbh i like to imagine that he still manages to avoid all photo ops and it’s extremely frustrating for everyone who isn’t batman
like “well they SAY batman was working with the league, but there’s only this one single picture with a big black blur behind everyone else, so maybe he just showed up and they’re trying to cover their asses??”
carefully positioning himself according to the time of day where he knows the lighting will be shit because it is exactly where a photographer would ask bruce wayne to please not stand
theories that batman is LITERALLY superman’s shadow because supes is a very convenient camera shield
good luck trying to get an action shot, it’s nothing but cape. is this a picture of batman fighting a kraken, or is it the world’s gothest shower curtain caught in a hurricane?? it’s impossible to be sure but take a lot of pictures and slap CONFIRMED on them anyway
what if it’s like how sometimes people try to sell everyone on melanistic lions and tigers. what if people just start photoshopping the lighting on superman all the way down and going CONFIRMED. what if that’s the hot new meme. just take a random JLA photo and burn-tool the absolute living fuck out of wonder woman or the martian manhunter or a stop sign and be like IT’S BATMAN.
