Based Batman

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There’s a…joke?…about GamerGate in Batman: Arkham Knight, and maybe it’s just that it’s a Riddler-like conundrum that my puny, Batman-level intellect is incapable of understanding, but…I don’t get it. What exactly is the joke here?

Here’s how it reads:

“Y do u attack B@tman? He is BASED! U r a fa-”

Riddler deleted the email, and all the others like it, as prickly hot anger and shame squirmed through his insides. No point in denying it: #CrusaderGate had been a disastrous social media campaign.

He couldn’t understand it. It seemed the internet’s idiotic and easily roused rabble could froth itself into a full-fat cappuccino of frenzy over “white knights.” But offer it up a Dark one — on a plate! — and you get a soy latte’s worth of indignation at best! Didn’t they understand what Batman had done?

It’s not clearly pro-GamerGate. The text in the email Riddler deletes is written in such a way as to conjure images of losers who spend all their time leaving angry comments on the internet. But it’s hardly clearly anti-GamerGate, either. Riddler characterizes them as “the internet’s idiotic and easily roused rabble,” but Riddler is always wrong. Riddler, in his arrogance, thinks he’s smarter than Batman, and Batman proves him wrong again and again. Batman is BASED, like GamerGate’s leaders and ideological heroes, and indeed, Arkham Knight, in which you play as a grim white man who must employ brutal violence to maintain order and in which women are repeatedly objectified and victimized, is essentially the Platonic ideal of the “video game” as GamerGate wishes to defend and preserve it, a tremendously right-wing game (I actually heard one criminal boasting to another about how they have more rights than the victims in the legal system) that many who play it won’t see as political at all. What would it even mean for this game to openly criticize GamerGate, while so thoroughly in its narrative and ideology being the kind of game that contributed to the culture that gave rise to GamerGate in the first place?

So is this joke punching up? Punching down? It’s “whatever you want it to be,” I guess. The joke here seems to simply be, “Hey, remember that thing that happened that you may have strong feelings about? We’re aware of that thing and are referencing it!” 

It’s punching sideways. It’s flailing. It’s a punch in the dark.