We have all heard the phrase:
'Batman will never have his childhood. Baby Doll will always have hers.'
Sounds great, doesn't it. Stuff hits hard. Rolls off the tongue nicely. Perfectly balanced as all things should be, as Thanos would say. Well what if I told you that this surmise is wrong and it's an incorrect analysis of both Batman and Baby Doll?
First off Batman did have a childhood. He had an extremely dark one. Batman will never be able to tell that he on a subconscious level blames his parents for their deaths. He will always believe what it is on a surface level. That he blames either the murderer or himself. Bruce will always remain blind as a bat to this truth. So not only did Batman have a dark childhood. It is Batman who is forever stuck in his childhood. He will always fight crime every night to try and be what his father couldn't be on that night, thus destroying his father and completing himself. Batman isn't a robot who binaurally tells right from wrong. His fate is forever bound to the night that his parents were murdered.
Baby Doll isn't angry because she will always be a child. She is angry because she can't always be a child. All she had to do to temporarily cure herself of that state of mind was to symbolically look at herself in a mirror to see the potential of what she might have been, had she not suffered from NCS.
Batman and Baby Doll are not polar opposites of the concept of childhood.
A more correct statement would be: 'Batma
