man, i could rage about TKJ and its assorted fallout forever
I just want to know - why is it always a panel lift? Seriously, why do we need to see her get shot every time? I get the perpetual replay, I do, it's just another way that she's like Bruce. But honest to God, people, remember for a second how to be fucking subtle. Falling pearls! A swinging, empty trapeze bar! A rocketship, alone in space! What do these things have in common? THEY'RE WAY MORE FUCKING POWERFUL THAN YOUR STUPID APING DESIRE TO BE BRIAN BOLLAND.
Yes, some of that is chronology - it's gotten much more okay to actually show lethal violence and the moment of impact on panel, you can do a woman getting shot now in a way you couldn't do a couple snapping their necks on impact with the ground sixty years ago. BUT. There is a reason those images have so much power! When something horrible and traumatic happens to you, that's what happens. Some random detail sticks with you, the sheen of moonlight on the gun or the way the radio kept playing after your car crumpled, something smaller and more concrete than the incident. The pearls have impact because they ring true. And on a literary level, they're special. Couples get mugged and shot in billions of stories every day. Two corpses could be anybody. But a falling string of broken pearls, that belongs to Batman. It's his, a symbol unique to him.
Give us Barbara's mug falling and shattering on the carpet. Give us the door swinging wide, seen from a floor-level perspective. Give us a symbol, give us something, anything other than her just being fucking shot over and over again. Give us what she saw, what she remembers, not what we saw in a story that was never about her.