Book Review: The villains get analyzed by a real-life psychologist in "Batman and Psychology" (2012)

[about_faces]

Preamble: While I will be discussing this book to the best of my abilities, I know that there's nothing quite like seeing a work that's being critiques yourself rather than just hearing the critic's description. As such, if you're interested in checking this book out for yourself, I have found three separate extensive previews of this book: two

Comments

[psychopathicus]

The same as they generally do, I guess - find something in Alice or Looking Glass that they haven't used yet, and then do so. Frankly, I'm amazed that they haven't done something based on The Hunting of the Snark yet - at least that'd be fresh territory of a sort.
Yeah, I've never really seen Pam's motivations as "a desire to exert power and control over others". True, she does have kind of a thing for seducing Batman, but that's more of a recurring personal challenge than a motivation, per se. If I had to pigeonhole her overall motives, I'd call them a misguided form of altruistic activism, kind of a sexy female Lorax-figure who not only speaks for the trees, she avenges them. It's not that she's above the occasional act of purely selfish manipulation, but her main goal? Eh-eh. Her main goal is keeping her beloved plants safe and lashing out against those who would hurt them - which is why her becoming a sort of mother-figure for the runaways makes sense, as do her continuing efforts to get Harley out from under the Joker's toxic influence. She likes being a protector and advocate of the helpless and mistreated; it's just that she has different definitions of that than most, and doesn't always know where to draw the line.
No worries, man; read 'em when you get the chance.