I wanted to wait to do this so I could remove this character right as another wa s being proposed, but since the one who is doing him is having issues with watching the film due to streaming service issues, I felt it would be better to do it now as I have other things planned and unfortunately was unable to put this on hold.
It's barely been over a month since the Penguin ended, and with that, I wanted to bring up one character from this Batman interpretation. This will mostly be mentioning the Riddler: Year One prequel novel that we deemed canon, so in case anyone is wondering where this came from, it's from there.
Had it just been the film, I would have been completely okay with this character being here, but with the comic, things changed, and I more now see him as another case similar to Vincent Volaju.
Will explain it here now, and with permission from The Pro-Wrestler, let's get started.
What's the work?[]
The Batman is a 2022 live-action film made by Matt Reeves. It follows a young Bruce Wayne, who had recently became Batman, as he slowly grows from an apathetic young man who sees fighting crime as a way of getting revenge for his parents' deaths, to a symbol of hope to all of Gotham. The main villain of the film is the one will be talking about today, and as I said, will be mentioning a lot of his prequel comic "Riddler: Year One".
Who is the Riddler?[]
The Riddler is a man named Edward Nashton, an orphan who spent all his life in misery, and having grown tired of the corruption and lies spread throught his city, decided to bring an end to Gotham's state and rebuild it on his own believes.
To do this, Riddler tried to flood the city and kill the presidental candidate Bella Reál. This ends up failing due to the help of Batman and his allies, and the Riddler is left in Arkham with a new friend whom he is planning on working together with. Only time will tell on how that's front is going to lead up to.
Why he doesn't count?[]
This is only the begining of the bad stuff the man who would end up being known as the Riddler would go through.
So, in the film itself, Riddler has no issues being here, he is a vile lunatic who flooded Gotham and tried to kill thousands to remake it into what he thought was best, with only his alluded past and his insanity stopping him from getting a red lock.
In the Penguin, he's worse as it's shown the miserable state of what Gotham is after the Riddler's flood and one of the main characters is a young man whose family was taken from him by the flood.
So, why am I making this? Well, while the Penguin was still going, we found that there is a comic, Riddler: Year One, where Falcone is revealed to feed people who failed him to gators routinely, which was a big point that we plan on using to show how he is probably heinous enough to pass the standards.
This got me curious and convinced me to read it. Of course, we aren't talking about Falcone, we are talking about the titular character. In the comic, we see that he's in a miserable job where he has to deal with people who see him as nothing, and he slowly finds out about the corruption in Gotham, and begins to find his own way to deal with it after being inspired by Batman.
We also get flashbacks to his past, and that's one of the biggest things I wanted to mention here. In the film, the Riddler mentions his past to Batman on how infants in his orphanage died from hipothermia in the winters, how rats at night would eat the skin out of his toes, and how 50 children would sometimes be put in a single room.
Here, it reveals everything was true and much worse. Edward lost his mother at a very young age, he was bullied by other orphans, at one point even making him throw rocks at a turtle until it died which made him extremely uncomfotable and in tears, and how he was drugged everytime he woke up at night from the pain of the rats eating his skin.
Then there's Thomas Wayne, Edward met him and promised that he would give him and other orphans proper education and said he would give millions to the orphanage, and said to Edward that he mattered. Only for Thomas to die, the money being stolen from the orphanage, and Edward ended up with nothing, told to him that Thomas had lied about the renewal to become president and didn't actually mean it.
In the present, Edward is treated like shit by his coworkers and boss, and at one point is in such a bad mental state that he pours his hand in acid. Overall, he had a pretty terrible childhood and adult life, and it's very little wonder why he hates Gotham's government so much.
Had it just been this, then maybe there would be some talk about it not being too much to cut him, but the comic gives him two other notable redeeming features. One, his mother. As a toddler, when he found she died, he express his sadness by writing "Mama?" In box numbers, and in the present, he still talks fondly of her in his thoughts, being disgusted by how she could have been treated in Arkham, and saying that he would return "home" as he did his plan to remake Gotham was happening, which he obviously meant Arkham.
Then there's a moment of kindness and decency from Riddler where he gives a woman whose father was killed by Falcone's men a ticket to leave Gotham with her child before he started his plan to flood Gotham, out of sympathy for what she was going through.
Overall, the comic shows how broken Riddler is and how messed up all his life, from his years at the orphanage to his adult life, was, and in addition gives him some positive atributes to humanize him.
With this, I think he has too much to keep his status, and hence why I don't think he qualified anymord.
Final Verdict?[]
Cut, a case of tie-in material and reveals that add to his character and expands upon it. Great comic, though, if you love the film, you probably will like it, I sure did. Also, just saying it here:
14-5-1-18 16-21-18-5 5-22-9-12 9-19 14-15-20 2-1-4-7-5 15-6 8-15-14-15-18.