Fanfic Rec: in the shadows by Kieron_ODuibhir

[gremdark]

I found this fic on Tumblr earlier, and it absolutely delights me.

In which Superman and the Justice League slowly come to the realization that Batman isn’t a real person, and Superman confronts him about it. The gimmick here is essentially that Bruce Wayne made Batman up, and now that Batman has outlived him, it’s up to him to figure out what to do with that. It’s tagged “a boy and his heroic nightmare entity”.

Read "in the shadows" on AO3 here. 12k, four chapters, complete.

As someone else put it in the tumblr notes, it's rare to see something new done with Batman. This is a refreshing take that nevertheless plays with many of the elements that make the character compelling.

This post was a (failed) experiment to see if I could make formatting play nicely from mobile. If you saw it before I edited it into submission on desktop, no you didn't. I've successfully HTMLed from mobile in the comments section on here before, so I think it'll have to be a combination of practice, doing more with desktop (which I should be better about anyway) and actually sitting down and learning to use markdown.

Comments

[lb_lee]

Oooooh, this is good and relevant to my interests! Adding to pluralstories, thanks for the rec!

EDIT: The more I think about this fic, the more masterful the interpretation of Batman is. What a great way to take all the things about him we're supposed to handwave away (his physics-defying cape, his not-quite-human performance, how he's kept this up for decades and decades), and come up with a great explanation for him! I don't even LIKE Batman and this fic did a great job!