Edward Nygma. he’s smart, he’s polite like 70% of the time, he knows how to dress for his coloring, he’s killed relatively few people, please marry the nice riddle boy Bruce
Ivy. stylish, classy, committed to green energy. unfortunately way out of your league
Jervis Tetch. listen, I know you don’t get along but please let me have another British person in this family I feel so alone. plus witty, well-read, smarter than most of our current R&D department
Harvey Dent + Harv. Harv brings the ranking down but I think most of Gotham is already psychologically prepared for you to marry Harvey. you two are obvious. I actually still have a wedding planned from back in the day so we’d save time on that
Harley Quinn. Loud, terrifying, but also miraculously good at getting along with everyone she meets. together, she and Bruce Wayne would be an unstoppable force of social likability
Jonathan Crane. objectively a bad decision, likely to face backlash from the press. he has no social skills. however, he likes my cooking and you could probably just give him the keys to the Wayne library and it would be an effortlessly happy marriage. we could work with this
Waylon Jones. He seems… nice. A bit rough around the edges, but I’m sure we could eventually find a suit that fits him. shares your love of hiding out in deep, dank places even when there are objectively much nicer places to be had
Jack Napier. Ranked this low due to personal feeling and appearing on this list at all because I know you’re thinking it, Bruce. but please. no
Selina Kyle. Would steal our silver and be off the next morning. Rather certain that she’s a lesbian
I know you’re still thinking about the Joker but Bruce please consider the feelings of your butler slash father figure and reconsider
he calls me the Bat-ler and doesn’t appreciate any of my cooking and you can’t take him anywhere public
Talia. you know she’s just going to stab you again, Bruce
in superman adventures #19, there’s a villain named multi-face who can convincingly disguise himself as anyone, even tricking dna tests and x-ray vision. Superman initially can’t stop him
and the only reason he gets caught is because multiface decides to disguise himself as, of all people, CLARK KENT i’m screaming
why do villains always mess up so badly
Clark Kent attending Bruce Wayne’s yacht party where Bruce told Clark to wear his clothes and……
Ta-Da!
Sard borken
calling the people at the party Bruce’s “fake friends” as if he’s Bruce’s only real friend and he’s low key jealous
DC fans: Other heroes are just so unrelatable. Batman’s a human, so it’s easier to relate to him and his struggles.
Bruce Wayne: Is $85 enough to buy breakfast cereal or do I need more
Bruce Wayne: Clark, we have to meet and discuss the threat of– what do you mean you’re at “””work”””? Just leave.
Bruce Wayne: Dick, what do you mean your school didn’t have a yacht club? You must be mistaken
Bruce Wayne: Walmart, what is that, is that a town or a person
In Gotham Adventures #35, Bruce is made part of a jury for the court case of a man that was apprehended by Batman.
And he just fuckin. He Does That
What seems to keep his cover isn’t secrecy (though there’s plenty of it), but instead just how absolutely outrageous the idea is. Bruce Wayne??Batman??? Puh-lease. I mean, have you seen the guy? Sure he’s a nice guy, but he’s far too busy having people run WE for him and going on pleasure cruises to be Batman. I mean, really.
(Good thing nobody notices the cool symbolic silhouette deal he’s got going on there.) It’s likely become something akin to the ‘Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer’ joke, (check out this post) and Bruce often just feeds it, making it even easier to get away with. It’s fucking hilarious.
I swear Bruce gets away with it because everyone assumes he’s Gotham’s answer to Bobby Newport. Imagine Bobby Newport as Batman. And you kind of get it.
The best cover for Bruce Wayne would be dumb carefree playboy who is also Instagram Optimistic, everyday he’s posting a selfie of his smiling at his breakfast with a caption like “it’s a waffle day! #goodvibesingotham #grateful” or a picture of a sunrise with a caption that’s just “wow #blessed”
Bruce Wayne ending up as Gotham’s favoured son because he may be an idiot, but he’s a cheerful idiot, and he donates tons to charity and genuinely loves Gotham and actually, truthfully does put a lot back into the city. And his instagram is a bright ray of sunshine, and honestly there are a lot of people in the city who get surprisingly defensive of their Dumb Carefree Playboy because, okay, sure, every month or so Bruce Wayne falls off a yacht or sleeps with a reporter or whatever. The man clearly never met a healthy coping skill even once in his life.
But as far as news regarding Gotham’s prominent citizens go, Bruce’s ‘scandals’ are so normal that it’s downright refreshing. When a headline has ‘Bruce Wayne’ in the title, you know you’re either going to read some Celebrity Gossip level non-drama, or else something to do with a charity. Maybe he’s been kidnapped again, but that’s only happened a few times. Bruce Wayne news is like the Gotham equivalent to special reports about dogs who rescue their owners from drowning, or raccoons who’ve figured out how to get past the new self-locking garbage can lids.
And there’s something weirdly reassuring about following his twitter. Like, if Bruce Wayne is tweeting about a really neat old tree he just saw, things must at least be sort of alright.
(Meanwhile, Bruce’s social media persona is 100% him flanderizing Clark.)
what if Happy Bruce is kind of a little bit real.
like, it started out as a distraction to keep the media away from batman. but being so dour all the time is exhausting, and he has serious Issues and isn’t really working on them. having this one little outlet where he can just step away from the weight of the world and be happy for a second is a kind of therapy. he needs it.
then there comes a time when he can’t access the internet for a while. he’s trapped in some other dimension or something. but he keeps queueing up these posts, even the ones he knows he’ll have to delete because they’d give something away, because he just. doesn’t feel right if he doesn’t do it.
“roasted iguana for supper again. i think i’m getting good at this! #cooking #barbecue #alfredwouldbeproud”
A Statistics teacher in Gotham makes a graph comparing times when Bruce Wayne goes on long vacations with times Batman gets beaten up really badly by villains to illustrate to his class how correlation does not equal causation.
you can’t say “i know batman” and get away with it in gotham. “i saw batman last night”? plausible. he uses roofs and balconies more than actual solid ground so yeah, you probably did see him. “he was only five feet away from me at the central plaza when the bomb got defused”? so was half of the city because the joker decided christmas eve was the best time for an explosion. but, “i know batman”? are you sure? are you sure you know batman? does anyone really know batman? maybe batman doesn’t know batman, the layers of secrecy on that guy are thicker than that time the gotham river got filled with dense tart sauce but the authorities thought it was blood
meanwhile in metropolis, “i ate a burrito with superman” is probably met with “you didn’t bring him to your grandma’s for that sunday roast i know she rocks? what is wrong with you? i baked him cookies while he was telling me about his mom’s cooking. how could you treat him like that, jennifer, the guy saves us from brainiac every two weeks”
what i do is not up to you 