Batman and Robin: The re-Novelization
Part 42
We rejoin Poison Ivy in her Turkish Bath hideout shortly after she pulled the plug on Freeze’s wife for almost no reason…
Poison Ivy’s plant magic had transformed the Blossom Street Turkish Baths into her own personal paradise, much the way suburban moms transformed drag performances to be family-friendly storytimes that were way less fun and mainstreamed drag in such a way that it lost a lot of its counter-cultural power. Jesus Christ, you already fucked up brewpubs by bringing your kids there all the time and trying to bend an adult-oriented place into a thing that suited you and your need to procreate. What’s next? Asking us to stop peeing in alleys because you want your kids to be able to climb on a specially designed plastic monstrosity in the best peeing alleys in town? Demanding a G-rated Terminator movie for little Bozeman and Lilith? A crappy, campy Batman movie? Er…
Dawn broke, and sunlight streamed in, illuminating the host of plants within. Vines and shrubs vied with flowers of all shapes and colors in a riot of luxuriant vegetation. No need to specify about the plants, just picture the living room of that chick you know who has a shitload of plants and some crystals, a woman who fundamentally misunderstands that the whole point of having a house with walls is to keep nature outside, where it belongs, separate from you and your TV and things that are designed to make you happy as opposed to plants, which are designed to stab and poison you and sometimes make you super high, a form of poisoning we humans actually enjoy because we’re too fucked-up and self-aware to deal with life 100% sober.
Ivy entered the small anteroom, which a production designer was tasked with somehow making more gay than it was when it was a part of a Turkish bath house, a room where guys were tugging each other off, and somehow he SUCCEEDED in out-gay-ing actual gay sex. That should definitely be a tagline on the poster for this film: Gayer than Gay Sex!
This anteroom is where Mr. Freeze sat with the Freezing Engine he’d managed to take from his hideout. He was zapping the walls with its frozen beam, turning the room into a miniature world of ice. Which you would think might be wasteful. I mean, his engine is diamond-powered. Seems like consuming diamonds to sort of aimlessly shoot ice around a room might not be the best use of resources.
“Make yourself right at home,” Ivy said as Freeze destroyed a bunch of plants, which was sort of Ivy’s whole issue, I thought, but maybe not?
Freeze glared at the sound of Ivy’s voice. “Where is my wife?”
Ivy looked suddenly upset. “There…was nothing I could do,” she said sincerely. “Batman deactivated her. She’s dead.”
“You lie!” The words burst from Freeze like an explosion. No, like a blizzard-force wind! Like an Austrian polar vortex!
He lunged at Ivy, but Bane stepped quickly between them. Bolstered by his cryo-suit’s power, Freeze hurled the Venom addict across the room. Bane rolled to his feet, ready to fight, but Ivy stilled him with a gesture. Specifically, the jackoff motion, which seemed to be one of the few ways in which Bane could communicate. You know how they say some people from arctic climates have hundreds of words for “Snow?” Bane somehow developed hundreds of different, nuanced versions of the jackoff motion to communicate various things. It is probably one of the most interesting things about Bane, and yet it’s vastly underexplored in the comics, other than in the Warren Ellis run, The Batman’s Grave. You’re not going to actually search that up and read it, right? Warren Ellis is a bad guy, I hear. Reading that would be, basically, like assaulting a person. So don’t double-check my work, just read on, secure in the knowledge that I definitely did not make up this whole jack-off-motion-as-speech thing.
“I’m sorry,” Ivy whispered. She held something up in her hand, and Freeze winced with pain as he saw it. Nora’s snowflake necklace. She was a HUGE Fight Club fan. The book, not the movie. The book came out in 1996, so it does not break the timeline here for Nora Freeze to love it. She really identified with its themes of male intimacy and lack of “the second father” as a figure in men’s lives. As do we all. As do we all…
Freeze reached to take the necklace. When he spoke, his voice was cold with hatred. “Their bones will turn to ice. Their blood will freeze in my hands.” He reached for a third thing he could take from not ice to a state closer to ice, but bones and blood really seemed like the high points. Maybe it didn’t always have to be threes, he thought. Maybe sometimes leaving an extra thing dangling out there in the ether was the way to go?
“Kill them? Of course.” Ivy hesitated a moment. Freeze was in an emotional state, perfect for her to goad into following her own scheme. Which we’re about to sort of discover/be reminded is killing all humans. “But why stop there?” she went on. “Why should only Batman and Robin die while the society that created them goes unpunished?”
“Oh, boy,” Freeze said. “Am I about to get another lecture about the Unabomber’s manifesto?”
Ivy stared him down. “It’s called Industrial Society and Its Future, and it’s a work of great value! You really should read it. Have you ever considered you only made that stupid Freezemobile drill car thingie because our industrialized society is inhumane and requires you to transport yourself further than humans were meant to go in such a short time?”
She calmed herself and lifted the frozen Gotham bauble off the iced table and absentmindedly turned it in her hand. Freeze stared at her, well aware that she was trying to manipulate him for her own, pretty confusing ends. But he’d planned to ice the city anyway; only now, there would be no ransom demand. Well, maybe a little ransom demand. He always thought it’d be cool if he could play guitar when his wife woke up. Chicks dig that. And if he could just afford a nice electric/acoustic, that would be the key to learning. Yes, it’s the financial barriers that are preventing him from being an artistic success. That’s usually the case. You can’t be good at guitar if you start with a moderately-priced instrument. That’d be like becoming a writer using a pencil and paper instead of a Freewrite, the number one distraction-free writing tool for people who have $499 dollars to spend.
Yes, Freewrite, who is sponsoring today’s post.
Freewrite is the keyboard that dares to ask you, “If you had $500 dollars to spend on figuring out a way to write without distractions, what would you do?”
Some might say they’d build a Faraday cage and write in there, and they’d probably have like $400 dollars left to do whatever with.
Some might buy some noise-cancelling headphones and a composition book and still be able to spend about $250, plus they’d be able to use the headphones in a lot of other scenarios.
But those people are stupid, and there’s a reason they don’t write awesome newsletters like this one: They’re too distracted by their devices that let them read awesome newsletters like this one, and they need a Freewrite to prevent that from happening!
Wait, you can’t read this newsletter on Freewrite? Why am I promoting a device that makes it so you won’t be distracted by what I’m writing here? Isn’t that the whole point of this whole thing, to distract people from their terrible lives—
Use the offer code “TurkishBathHouseButGayer” to get some amount off on a Freewrite. Not enough to actually make this a wise purchase, but, hey, SOME. Some is better than none.
In fact, if you buy like 5 Freewrites, you’ll save 5 times as much, and that’s just good sense. Good, context-less sense.
Now, let’s get back to the show. Keeping in mind that I don’t actually own a Freewrite, and if someone from Freewrite is reading this, send me one. I’ll review it honestly. I will honestly fellate that thing all the live long day. My ethics are on sale, baby.
Freeze said, “Yes, I shall repay the world for sentencing me to a life without the warmth of human comfort, which is something you’d think I didn’t want anyway, being ‘Freeze’ and all. I will blanket Gotham City in endless winter. First Gotham — then the world!”
Ivy smiled, satisfied. “Just what I had in mind. Everything dead on Earth except us. A chance for Mother Nature to start again.” She lifted a flower, contemplating its fragile petals. “Plants and flowers are the oldest species on the planet, yet they are defenseless against man.” She spoke directly into the flower: “Sorry, honey, but this is for science.” She crushed it in her hand and announced dramatically, “Behold the dawn of a new age!”
Bane made several fevered jackoff motions that I will attempt to translate:
Ivy, wasn’t your whole thing about plants surviving? How are they going to survive global climate change on this scale, and such sudden change? Surely if this kills all human life, it’ll destroy the plant ecosystem as well?
Why did you need to crush that flower? I don’t understand how punctuating your point was that important, and besides, you’re the only one who would see the death of a flower as some sort of dramatic act.
How did this plan get so complicated? I was just smashing down walls and stuff, and now you’ve killed Freeze’s wife to spur Freeze into doing something he was going to do anyway, and what he’s doing will probably also kill all plant life? And this is because you want to kill all humans?
Bane’s hand and wrist slowed. It was clear Ivy wasn’t going to answer him, though now he was becoming VERY suspicious that Ivy didn’t actually know much at all about plants. I mean, she was sort of a botanist, but maybe she had a more narrow focus than he thought.
Bane did a handwipe motion that stood in for a sigh, then rolled in a canister with PROJECT GILGAMESH stenciled on its side. Bane stood well back as Ivy opened it and pulled out a strange, otherworldly plant. It’s head moved around, as if it could see, the stalks at its center like hissing fangs.
“I have created a race of plants with the powers of the deadliest animals,” Ivy told Freeze. Despite his grief at his wife’s death, a time he’d memorialize with a tattoo across his abs, the date and the phrase “The Day I Lost Dat Ass 4Eva,” was impressed. “Once you have frozen humankind,” she went on, “my mutants will overrun the globe. The Earth will become a brave new world of only plants. And we shall rule them — for we will be the only two people left!”
Bane made several jackoff motions about this. Some regarded the fact that replacing the world’s natural plant life with human-manufactured plant life seemed to go against the entire philosophy at play here, and some of the motions were about the fact that Freeze and Ivy were talking about them being the last two, even though Bane was RIGHT THERE.
“Adam and Evil.” Freeze picked up the Gotham bauble and held it in his palm. His gauntlet glowed blue, and VERY faintly the song “YMCA” could be heard coming from it for some reason, and the tiny city was instantly frozen. Freeze’s hand closed, inexorably crushing the toy to shards of ice. “You will distract the Bat and Bird while I prepare to freeze Gotham,” he told Ivy.
“Can’t we just ice them along with the rest of the citizenry?”
Freeze scowled. “That is far too merciful. Batman will watch his beloved Gotham perish. Then I will kill him!”
“As a team,” Ivy said thoughtfully, “The Duncely Duo protect each other. But Robin is young. Impetuous. If I could get him alone…” She smiled as an idea struck her. “The way to a boy’s heart is through his ego. What strapping young hero could resist his very own signal?”
Bane gesticulated wildly, pantomiming ropes and ropes of ejaculate spraying the room: What do you mean? NO superheroes have a signal. Only Batman! Every young hero can resist having a signal, as can every old hero! None of this makes sense! Why has logic left the building entirely!? How am I a roided out monster and still the only one with any goddamn common sense ,here?!