thingsfall | Sixth Iteration: Bio Page

Name: Bruce Wayne
Canon: DC
Scrubs Color: light grey
Visible Age: 40s
Gender: male
Height: 6'3"
Physique: mesomorph/very muscular and fit
Complexion: medium
Hair: Dark brown, graying at the temples.
Eyes: hazel
Defining Marks: Dimpled chin, a tendency toward five o'clock shadow, and he's got scars from many past fights, though none visible when he's dressed.
Accent/Speech: Generic Northeastern US accent; he speaks with a deep, slightly raspy voice. He speaks slowly and clearly, is educated, and affable.
Bearing/Demeanor: He's physically imposing, tall and muscular, and he carries himself with confidence, like a man used to both responsibility and burdens, but who shies away from neither. He can come across as very serious but there's warmth and humor under that tough exterior.
Habits: Fighting crime, working out, reading books, punching criminals, gathering superheroes, building things, investigations, pretending to be more of an airheaded jackass than he really is.

Skills:

Peak Physical Conditioning: Bruce is incredibly physically fit, having trained himself over decades for superior strength and endurance. He is a master of many martial arts and fighting styles. His reflexes, balance, coordination, agility, and pain endurance have been trained to be much better than the average person's.

Peak Mental Conditioning: Bruce is an intelligent man, and very well educated in multiple sciences and social sciences. He's The World's Greatest Detective: shrewd, observant, thinks quickly on his feet, able to pick up on patterns and connections. He's also a good tactician, able to do things like pick up on an opponent's fighting style, or figure out how to make a particular area more defensible or better suited to trap someone else.

Emotional Intelligence: He is admittedly not always great at the self-regulation part of being emotionally intelligent. But he's motivated, he can be empathetic one-on-one, he has strong social skills, he's confident. He's a leader and coalition-builder, having been a successful businessman, and now in starting to assemble the Justice League. He has a decent sense of humor and he's good with people. He's also very protective of them.

Mechanical/engineering aptitude: Most of Batman's equipment was created by Bruce himself, as he couldn't exactly order what he needed off Amazon. He can draft things, he can recognize when something is broken and undertake repairs, he can see to upgrades. This is less likely to be of direct impact in the game's setting, with the lower level of technology, but he might be able to translate those skills into being able to fix things around the settlement, or to devise or adapt tools, or to figure out how to shore up a building, for instance.

Basic knowledge of human anatomy and first aid: Granted, he taught himself all about the human body so that he could determine the best places to punch it for maximum damage. But that knowledge, coupled with the number of times he's had to stitch himself up or attend to his own injuries, gives him a basic working knowledge of how to recognize and treat injuries. He's not going to be able to to do extensive surgery or long-term care on anyone, but if somebody twists an ankle or breaks an arm, he can help.

Bruce Wayne is a man shaped by a lifetime of trauma, loss, grief, guilt, and anger. He is also a man defined by his lifelong efforts to channel those influences into something good, something that benefits others, even if the effort has both caused him more of the same along the way, and led him to struggle with his own humanity at times.

When Bruce was eleven years old, his parents were senselessly and brutally murdered in front of him. His entire world was turned upside down in an instant; he felt helpless, powerless, in the face of such catastrophic loss. That night instilled in him a drive to fight crime, to protect other people, to spare another child from ever experiencing the kind of loss he went through.

He spent the next decade and a half training himself mentally and physically. He harnessed his anger and guilt and channeled them into physical conditioning, into learning martial arts, into studying many fields from psychology to forensics to criminology. Now that he had a focus, a goal, he had both an outlet for his pain and a means for soothing it.

He became skilled at presenting a public face to the world that helped shield him from discovery as the vigilante who worked in the city's shadows. No one would suspect the affable if somewhat out of touch playboy businessman spent his nights patrolling the city streets fighting criminals. This dichotomy often reflected Bruce's own inner turmoil: full of rage and grief about his losses while also feeling guilty for not having prevented them; knowing that he was powerless in the past and working to try to make it so that he never was again.

He is selfless, both publicly and privately. He shares his financial wealth with many good causes, supporting people in need. His wealth also allows him to train and arm himself as Batman. Aside from his money Bruce also risks his life on a nightly basis, to protect others, and is even willing to lay down his life.

Bruce is also a man heavily influenced by the idea of family. It's an ideal he lost with his parents' death, and one he has tried to build around himself along the way. First he had it with the Robins who were surrogate sons to him even as they worked at his side, but when Jason Todd was killed by the Joker a decade ago, it devastated him. Revisiting the loss of family and the feelings of guilt and powerlessness scraped a harder, darker edge onto his crusade against crime, and he became more brutal, more willing to hurt and even kill criminals to save his city. His humanity became somewhat eroded with that loss.

At the start of Batman v Superman, we see the latest iteration of Bruce's family: his people at the Wayne Financial Building in Metropolis, particularly Jack O'Dwyer, a company executive and longtime friend, and Wallace Keefe, who he would support financially after rescuing him from the building's rubble. Once again, Bruce was forced to stand by and watch as senseless violence and destruction went on around him, as he lost family, and his anger at his powerlessness became focused on Superman. He mounted a one-man crusade to stop Superman, incorrectly believing him to be a threat, completely willing to sacrifice himself in the process if it saved the human race (also an extension of his family, metaphorically, compared to Superman). Unfortunately in letting these emotions get the better of him on this scale, he was left open to Lex Luthor's manipulations, and didn't see the truth until he had nearly killed Superman.

It took Superman, a man not of this world, to restore Bruce's humanity. Once again he had suffered a loss, one he felt responsible for and guilty about. He felt that he had failed Superman in life, and was determined not to fail him in death. He is once again focusing those emotions that shape him into something that serves the greater good, in this case, the formation of the Justice League. He is once again building a family around himself, but this time, he does so with a much clearer head and more optimism.