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Originally Posted by Nowhere Man
I don't like Gotham for a number of reasons, mostly because it's completely unnecessary bloat to the Batman franchise that seriously undercuts Batman's importance to his own mythos-- the whole point of most of the Bat-villains is that they showed up to fill in the vacuum that Batman left when he got rid of all the regular crime. Joker shows up to be the 'better class of criminal' that would have to arise to counter Batman, Riddler shows up because he needs to prove that he's smarter than Batman, Catwoman shows up because she's inspired to dress up and get into trouble because of Batman, et cetera. They're all supposed to be a reaction to him, not the other way around.
Same with Jim Gordon-- he's always been the 'one good cop in a city gone wrong,' sure, but one of the major points has always been that he didn't believe he could make any difference until Batman shows up. In Gotham, he's practically Dirty Harry. Again, he's already heroic long before Batman shows up to inspire anyone, which makes Bruce even less important.
Prequels in general are a terrible idea because they make the world smaller by asserting that connections between characters in the original work existed even before that (i.e. Darth Vader built C-3P0 and Yoda was war-buddies with Chewbacca, or kid proto-Joker was in the same circus that Dick Grayson's family is from), or otherwise make the original less important and thus less interesting. It's the same reason I hated Smallville, with all of Superman's villains and sidekicks running around and forming the Justice League before Clark even so much as thought about wearing a cape. And at least then, it took them several years to get to that point; Gotham has half of the Bat villains up and running in the first season.
That, and a lot of the episode-to-episode plots are stupid and clumsy, and the portrayal of characters like Barbara is just horrendous. I generally like Fish Mooney (who I think should be put into the comics and made canon proper) and I don't mind creepy young Penguin, but the rest of it feels like I'm watching badly put-together fan fiction.
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Personally don't mind the way Gotham does it's thing. I like the role Jim plays, and Penguin is awesome as hell. It does conflict a little with the Batman lore, sure, but if you look at it more as a separate universe most of that becomes irrelevant. I will say that showing the Joker (or who we assume to be the Joker) was just stupid. He's the one villain I can't stand them giving backstory to in anything. His whole allure is that you don't really know who or what he is or what his motives are. Cheapens it when you see him as a punk kid with mommy issues honestly.
On the topic of the thread. Honestly I'm intrigued. Bit disappointed that it's not in the CW-verse since I love those shows but I'll still give it a shot and see if it is any good.