BANE
It’s possible that the Batman “identity” was born the night Bruce Wayne’s parents were murdered in front of him, but it is also true that Bruce still had to make the conscious choice to become the hero called Batman. Plenty of things also had to happen for Batman to occur. His family had to be extremely wealthy. His parents had to have instilled in him a sense of justice. He had to live in Gotham City and be invisibly tied to it by blood and identity. He had to be a genius with the genetic potential to become a super-athlete. If Bruce Wayne had been ordinary and middle class, he would have been swept into the foster care system, or taken in by a relative, and if he were lucky, he’d achieve something comparable to a normal, healthy life. But this was not so.
Bane, by contrast, represents a man who was forced to become a living weapon to merely survive. He might be one of the only characters in the PLDCU to rival Batman in sheer drive or tenacity. His will to power is unimaginably strong. Bruce Wayne’s formative trauma occurred when he was eight years old, after already experiencing part of a healthy childhood and having loving parents. Bane was born in a military prison, more than likely a child of rape. He was raised in an environment populated by the most violent elements of humanity. He was never a normal human being. While Bruce used his vast resources to pick and choose the finest teachers the world over to become the ultimate fighting/detecting machine, Bane is the complete opposite. From birth, like a shark, he had to learn the hard way to claw and swindle and intimidate and kill for what he needed to just live another 24 hours. Peña Duro functioned as a Darwinian laboratory, and over time Bane became the smartest and strongest rat. By the time he was 17, when his army of prisoners rioted and murdered every guard and official on base, merely to cover his escape, he had been forged into an actual alpha of the species, an apex predator.
Batman had to seek the way to become dangerous. Bane was turned into a weapon by his own existence.
Naturally, this creates an interesting worldview within Bane. He applies “survival of the fittest” to every aspect of life. To Bruce, money and power are a means to help others and right wrongs. To Bane, they are simply methods to feel secure. Both men are driven by a desire to never feel helpless again. Everything to Bane is hierarchy. There are two reasons why he cripples Batman instead of killing him:
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He realizes Batman is a creature like him but he doesn’t consider him an equal. He can’t, because of his very nature. Bane cannot acknowledge an equal because that is a defeat! Because of this hubris, he is incapable of predicting that Batman would be driven enough to actually come back stronger.
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To humiliate him. He realizes that death isn’t defeat for Batman, and that the knowledge that he still lives and that his mission of vengeance goes unfulfilled is a fate worse than death. Lions and wolves don’t kill their rivals either, they leave them alive to establish hierarchy (this might be false but Bane is a weird guy who believes in weird stuff, shoot me).
The PLDCU Bane cripples Batman and kills Jason Todd in front of him. This is a change necessary to give more weight to Bane and boost him back up to true archvillain territory.
“I have broken both of your arms. Your legs. Three of your lower vertebrae are shattered. Your neck is broken. I have fractured your skull, your collarbone. You will never fight again. And yet you live. This is by my design. I have established your place in the hierarchy. The pain you feel is nothing compared to what I will inflict upon your city. You will know helplessness. Now you shall watch while I kill your son.”
— Bane
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The frustrating thing about liking Bane is that he is the ultimate victim of Potential Man syndrome. In his debut appearances he holds his own against Batman in single combat, aura farms with his Doc Savage-esque goon squad, blows up Arkham Asylum and releases all of Batman’s foes, figures out Batman’s identity, breaks into the Batcave, nearly kills Alfred, and paralyzes a fatigued Batman by breaking his back over his knee in an iconic but underwhelming splash page. Since then, he has done absolutely nothing of interest in canon. He should be drinking buddies with Kraven the Hunter at the “Peaked Once in the Eighties” dive bar. Lately, Bane is usually a henchman to a more prominent villain. This is a poor use of him and more a testament to his striking design rather than any real understanding of what the character means. He is thought of more as a super-powered hulking brute and not the sort of thriller-novel meticulous ruthless gangster I think he should be. That said, Absolute Batman has the coolest and scariest Bane seen in a long time, but he belongs in that world, not this one.
