It is like---midway through the "Rise of Villains" arc when it starts getting to be consistently fun. So much of the first season stuff - like the Dollmaker arc, are pretty much completely dropped save for Fish having a weird eye. Court of Owls becomes a more driving force but they're fun enough.

That said, first season did at least try to make their own things prior to Batman. The Goat Man of Gotham was a fun idea; and the Balloon Man killer was appropriately fucked up in its casual absurd cruelty. Goddamn it. I might rewatch now. This is where my ADHD meds are leaning me now.

But I don't want to sit through 60 hours of season one quality nonsense to get back to that fun. I could gush about it though. Riddler as being potentially just a pragmatic psychopath and only 'gay' as a means to an end is a completely valid read of the character who is such a control freak.

But the episodes are an hour fucking long - and there were too many of them from the getgo. I loved what it became, but it'd be too goddamn much for me to want to check it out again. The Joker stuff actually became really fun and fucking weird proper in a way that was uniquely its own thing.

The first season (and a good portion of the second) are very rough and long to get through. But Penguin and Riddler are by far the best parts of the show for the gamut of the run. The Solomon Grundy and Executioner are up there too, with Hugo Strange and Azrael too. It gets good goofy camp.

Peewee Herman was his dad in both!

With a lot of time to process it, I really feel like Robin Lord Taylor is underrated for how good he was in Gotham. He had a lot more time to be involved in material; but a sad nebbish gay man who wants power to protect his mother, broken into being a campy menace. Shame it was in Gotham though.

Only human to desire protection and mutualism; especially when you were told that is what all should be allotted - even as it was stripped from you at too young an age. Guts for garters and all that I guess. Only way out is through. Things circle for too long and you're gone down the drain innit?

As if some horrid thing, be it mind or devil or something stranger still - picked you and grabbed you by the chins and said: "Bring about the crescendo, I tire of these trite motifs." All of which is quite applicable to current circumstances in my life.. But getting it all operatic-like? Curious.

Something to be said for when one is being chastised by all the fire and brimstone sophistry of something rent by truly godless hands; where the wound is not that a fiendish screed seeks to unmake you - but rather that it sees you, knows you, and hates you for want of your entrapping patterns.