Re: Babs needs to walk again
Pantheraknight, I think you're absolutely right. There is no damned reason in the world why Batman gets to heal from his spinal injury but Barbara doesn't. There was no good reason for refrigerating Barbara like that in the first place, and even Alan Moore who wrote the bloody thing thinks it was a bad idea.
Barbara as Batgirl/woman is a key part of the Gotham setting and, when written right, a character who is a perfect foil for Batman. After all, she's a vigilante in "his" city that he can't stop, can't intimidate, and who might well be a better genius even than he himself. Her status as daughter to Jim Gordon gives her a perfect and perpetual "back off, or else" card to play if he ever gets too far in her face, and her career as Oracle more than proves she's got the mental chops to give him a run for his money. And she has the attitude to tie it all together, she's a young woman who's seen it all and is frightened of nothing. Batman can't intimidate her. She's already faced down the worst the Joker could throw at her and lived to tell the tale. Who else is going to scare her now? Nobody, that's who. Not nobody, not nohow. Add to that her ties with the other female heroines she's led in the Birds of Prey, and she's more than got what it takes to play the game in Batman's league whether he likes it or not.
Add to that the opportunity to finally give some closure to the awful crime she suffered in TKJ, and you have a winner. Not only will that gunshot and it's aftermath be turned into something she has conquered and come back from better than ever, she'll finally have the chance to settle the score with the Joker herself. In that story, Barbara was an accessory, her agency denied her as she was destroyed merely to get at the male characters in her life, who then made all the decisions and got all the character development out of what happened to her. Batman got to take down the Joker, Jim Gordon got to decide to let him live, all while Barbara got to lie in her hospital bed as a forgotten and discarded artifact of a story in which she was a mere tool to serve a plot designed to progress other characters.
Instead, picture a newly re-empowered Barbara hunting down the Joker, stripping him down, breaking him, and then unmasking, saying
"Remember me...? I haven't forgotten you. Do you remember this? This is the very same gun you shot me with. It wasn't easy to track down, but I think it was worth the effort for this moment, don't you?"
And when she's got him utterly convinced she's going to do what Batman never did and kill him, she informs him
"I'm not going to kill you. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But one day, you'll forget to look over your shoulder, and there I'll be. And you'll never see it coming. Call it a surprise. You like surprises, don't you?"
And she leaves him there, believing she means it whether she really does or not. Understanding a bit of the fear of random death he gives to others. She's left the gun behind, and he picks it up, driven by morbid curiosity, and he pulls the trigger...
"BANG!" says the flag from the barrel of the gun... and the Joker laughs, long and hard... he couldn't have done it any better himself. She got him. The joke's on him.
That evening of the scales, that undoing of her disempowerment and opportunity to settle with the Joker -herself- instead of others doing it for her, is alone worth having Barbara on her feet again. And I don't care who flames me for it.