Literature / Batman: Arkham Knight

This is not the story that was leaked to the press.
This is how it happened.
This is how the Batman died.

Batman: Arkham Knight is the official novelization of the video game of the same name. It is written by veteran comic author Marv Wolfman and chronicles many of the events of the game, streamlining the main story into one cohesive narrative. As in the game, we pick up after the events of Batman: Arkham City, with the Joker being cremated. Though Commissioner Gordon worries about the inevitable mob war, no such war comes for nine whole months. Unfortunately, on Halloween, the Scarecrow makes a resurgence alongside an unknown foe called the Arkham Knight, and both of them are ready to give Batman the hardest fight of his life.

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This book contains examples of:

• Aborted Arc: One of the first chapters follows Louie Ross, a member of Penguin's gang who was put in charge of whacking some members of a rival gang. He encounters Two-Face along the way, gets his life saved by Harvey, and drives off into the night; despite all the set-up and backstory he receives, he simply disappears after that.
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: In the book, Alfred is aware from the beginning that the fear toxin is causing Batman to become Joker and desperately tries to get him to come home as early as the ACE Chemicals explosion. In the game, while Alfred continually expresses worry about the amount of fear toxin he's exposed to, there's no indication that he ever realizes that it's transforming Bruce into the Joker.
• Adaptational Badass: In the game, Officer Owens succumbs to the fear toxin immediately, pulls out his gun, and likely begins firing into the diner, potentially killing innocent people. Here, Owens stays calm long enough to call for backup first, never pulls out his gun, remains coherent despite the fear, and manages to escape the diner into the street without killing anyone.
• Adaptational Context Change:
  • The scene from the opening cinematic of Two-Face and Penguin killing a police officer is changed from a seemingly random murder to Harvey killing the officer while protecting one of Penguin's goons.
  • In the game, there's nothing to suggest that the scene in which Batman showed Gordon the Joker infected didn't actually happen. In the book, it's stated to have been a hallucination feeding off of his guilt of keeping Gordon Locked Out of the Loop.
  • Through a screen, Batman actually witnesses Barbara's kidnapping rather than only seeing the evidence of it, and the Knight chooses to not deactivate the security cameras during the event so Batman can see that he's completely aware of all of the Clock Tower's defenses and is simply choosing not to deactivate them.
  • The Knight reveals to Batman that he knows his true identity right away rather than keeping it to himself until near the end of the game, meaning that the rivalry between the two is even more personal than it was in the game.
  • Because not all of the civilians were evacuated, some of Batman's tactics throughout the book change; in particular, when he needs to find Ivy's buried plant, he simply has Lucius bring out a WayneTech construction crew to dig it up rather than creating the sonar device he made in the game.
  • The Batmobile is outright destroyed during the Cloudburst's activation rather than simply deactivated, necessitating the use of Lucius's spare earlier in the night.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Some context changing during Batman and Poison Ivy's first conversation means that Batman no longer threatens to burn every plant in Gotham to get Ivy to cooperate; instead, he points out that Scarecrow's bomb will kill them.
• Adaptational Personality Change: The Arkham Knight is far more Faux Affably Evil and showboaty than he was in the game, taking grand theatrical bows as he makes his exits and even referring to the ACE Chemicals worker by name while still treating him like a bug under his heel. Presumably, he's taking more traits from the Joker due to the torture he endured from him.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Scarecrow in the game seemed to have no plan for Poison Ivy beyond capturing her, but here, he threatens to dissect her and destroy every forest in Gotham unless she tells him why she's immune. All of his actions also have a far worse impact because, unlike in the game, there are civilians still in the city; there's even a segment where it's revealed that some civilians tried to form a resistance against the Militia, and Scarecrow had the resisting blocks razed to the ground.
  • The Arkham Knight is far more sadistic here than he is in the game. This is best captured during the scene where the Knight shoots Batman: in the game, it's largely just to show that he knows all of Batman's tactics and he leaves as soon as he's shot, but here, he shoots him in the shoulder just to gloat about how much better he is, beats the wound to force it to stay open, and then beats the crap out of him before taunting him with his parents' murder.
  • In the game, Joker's killing of Jason was a straight-up execution, simply shooting him in the chest once the time came. Here, he copied his comic counterpart and brutally beat him to death with his crowbar. Additionally, Jason reveals that the torture actually lasted three years instead of just slightly over one.
• Adaptational Wimp:
  • The fear toxin itself takes a severe downgrade in threat level; in the game it's a running point that gas masks are useless against it, but here, both Batman and Gordon are able to tank it directly as long as they're wearing masks or rebreathers, and Batman is only affected because of a crack in the suit.
  • Batman himself is nowhere near as powerful as he is in the game, with some of the book's equivalents for the game's easiest fights being genuinely challenging for him. In particular, his first fight against the Arkham Knight in the book is a ruthless Curb-Stomp Battle, while in the game Batman only loses because he's caught off-guard.
  • The first militia soldier Batman encounters in the game is bold enough to try to inject Batman with fear toxin before he gives up any information. Here, the soldier is so desperate for Batman's help following the vehicle crash that he gives the information willingly.
  • The APC driver Batman interrogates for Barbara's location in the game requires the cruelest torture method in the series - revving the Batmobile's engine on top of his head - to get him to talk. Here, he talks the second Batman's in his line of sight.
• Adaptation Distillation: Batman ends up collecting the voice synthesizer with Stagg's voice already on it before he goes to the airship. It ends up taking the role of the remote hacking device throughout the airship portion.
• Adaptation Expansion:
  • Gordon's home life gets a deeper look in the prologue, revealing that his wife and son have left both him and the city entirely. It's part of the reason he's so determined to protect Barbara - she stayed for him, so he feels personally responsible for anything that happens to her.
  • In the game, the evacuation went off seemingly without a hitch. Here, rioters attack the power stations and cut the power, the train station gets sabotaged, several of Gordon's unit desert entirely, and arsonists start coming out of the woodwork before the evacuation is complete. The result is that Gordon admits that they probably won't be able to evacuate everyone, and by the time Batman is springing into action, they've only evacuated 75% of the city.
  • The argument between Batman and Gordon in the Clock Tower is far longer, with both of them experiencing the flashback to Barbara's crippling rather than just Batman. It also includes Jim learning that Barbara used to be Batgirl on top of her currently being Oracle.
  • The hunt for Penguin's first weapons cache takes longer and has Batman and Nightwing genuinely working together rather than Nightwing just showing up for the group fight scene.
  • Johnny Charisma's song is turned into a full-fledged hallucinatory musical number, complete with Harley Quinn dancing with him and stagehands that Batman sees as his parents being murdered in the middle of it.
• Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole:
  • In the game, Nightwing sits out of the fight against Scarecrow because he's been put in charge of monitoring Penguin's operation with the aim of capturing him eventually - as a result, he helps Batman throughout the side mission instead. Here, Penguin is captured after the first gun cache and brought to GCPD by Nightwing himself, but he apparently disappears after this and Batman makes no attempt to ever contact him for help or an update. Similarly, Robin sits out of the game because he's working on the cure for the Joker infected, but here he's not doing that and there's no explanation given for why he's sitting it out.
  • Harley is surprised to learn that Henry is one of the Joker infected, but in the game, Henry was the one who told her where to find Batman's hideout, meaning that there's no explanation for how Harley found out about the Batcave in the movie studios. It is indicated that she didn't know about the Joker infected (which lines up with the new story), but there's still no reason for her to find the cave without Henry and, more damningly, no reason for her to attack it in the first place without the infected to liberate.
  • After the Knight unmasks himself, Jason quotes his canon line and, after saying he knows about Tim, asks if Batman waited a month or a week to replace him. The problem is that while this works in the game's timeline (where Batman replaced him while still searching for him), the book states that Batman waited a full year after Jason's "death" to replace him, and if Jason does know all about Tim like he claims, then he would already know that.
  • The book adds the extra detail that Scarecrow is not just aware that the fear toxin is bringing out the Joker from within Batman, but that he purposefully designed it with that goal in mind because the Joker told him about his plan to poison Batman before he died. This not only raises the question of how on Earth this is supposed to be scientifically possible, but also where this is supposed to fit in the timeline, since Joker and Scarecrow never cooperated before in the series, the time between Joker poisoning Batman and Joker dying was only about nine hours, and that Scarecrow had been pretending to be dead for months before and up to the events in Arkham City.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul:
  • Batman regularly interacts with his Joker hallucination rather than pretending it's not happening like in the game.
  • It's stated near the end that Bruce and Vicki Vale dated at one point; while this is common in the comics, there's no confirmation it ever happened in the Arkham series.
• Adapted Out:
  • None of the side stories happen, meaning Catwoman, Riddler, Man-Bat, Hush, Deacon Backfire, Deathstroke, Professor Pyg, Firefly, the firefighters, Azrael, the League of Assassins, Mad Hatter, Mr. Freeze and Killer Croc don't appear at any point.
  • Mark Cheung is the only ACE Chemicals worker saved by Batman, with no indication of if Adam Brewer exists here.
• Artistic License – Law: Penguin argues that none of his arms dealing is illegal because the guns are all legally registered, the sales all happen above board, and he didn't specifically know what Scarecrow was going to do with them, so he can't be charged as an accessory. None of that matters when he admits in the same interview that he knew he was selling them to Scarecrow, who is a well-known criminal (and as one of the few who was never taken to Arkham City, he hasn't been pardoned for any of his crimes), and thus at minimum, he's getting charged for selling the guns to a known felon; when that's combined with what Scarecrow did with them, Plausible Deniability won't keep him out of prison.
• Badass Boast: In the penthouse, Scarecrow tries to threaten Poison Ivy into giving up the secret of her immunity by threatening to destroy every plant she loves. Ivy is not afraid of him in the slightest and makes it known:
  Poison Ivy: You have declared war on planet Earth. May she have pity on whatever has replaced your soul.
• Bait-and-Switch: Early in the riot, Louie Ross encounters Two-Face, who flips his coin. The coin lands and Harvey fires, only for Louie to realize that Harvey actually shot the cop walking up behind him.
• Bittersweet Ending: Just like in the game, Scarecrow is defeated, Gotham is safe once more, Jason has redeemed himself, and all of Batman's allies ultimately come out alive. Unfortunately, defeating Scarecrow required Bruce to unmask himself, at which point he blows up Wayne Manor with himself and Alfred still inside and leaves their fates unknown. As Gordon runs for mayor, Tim and Barbara get engaged, and some thugs are ambushed by a new "demon bat" creature protecting Gotham in Batman's stead.
• Compressed Adaptation:
  • The brief sequence in which Batman protects Gordon's cruiser from a Militia ambush is cut; instead, Gordon gets right in the Batmobile to go to the Clock Tower. Similarly, the first APC chase and the first bomb in the road are cut.
  • The fight against the excavator is cut; instead, Batman gets straight to the climactic battle against the Knight personally.
• Continuity Snarl: There are several references in the book that contradict the game's timeline.
  • There are several references that state Hugo Strange is still alive and active in crime, including Barbara telling Bruce that her father just arrested him and Zsasz when they attempted to blow up a train station. This is a massive contradiction to his death in Arkham City, especially because his death was a large reason why Gotham had to release all of Arkham City's prisoners following Protocol Ten.
  • This line from Barbara also contradicts Zsasz's presence in the game, as though Batman doesn't encounter him directly, a cameo shows him outside the Clock Tower during Barbara's kidnapping and a riddle confirms he's killing during the night rather than having been arrested during the riot.
  • The Falcone and Maroni families are treated as active threats who, before the book's events, came to a truce and no longer attack each other. Arkham City revealed in two stories unlocked by Riddles that Falcone's forces massacred Maroni's during a meeting before they fled to Blüdhaven, meaning neither of them are threats by the time of Knight.
  • It's implied multiple times that Arkham Asylum is still active, even though the only reason Arkham City was able to exist in the first place is that the Asylum shut down after the Joker's takeover damaged it to an irreparable point.
  • It's stated that following Jason Todd's death, Batman refused to take on another partner and kept that promise for over a year. In the games, it's stated that Tim approached Batman and Nightwing six months after Jason's death and would've been active by the time of Arkham Asylum. Notably, Jason repeats his line from the game and asks if Batman waited a month or a week to replace him, which doesn't hold up with the new timeline.
  • Later in the book, Scarecrow reveals that Joker informed him of Batman's infection, so he tailored the fear toxin specifically to bring out Batman's inner Joker. The issue is that the time between Joker infecting Batman and his death is a maximum of nine hours and all of Gotham thought that Scarecrow was dead during that time, so the timing of this event is beyond improbable.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The encounter between Batman and the Arkham Knight in the Miagani tunnels is a lengthy brawl rather than a surprise attack, but the result for Batman is the same. In the end, the Knight smashes him into the ground with barely a scratch on him, and while the Knight leaves with a theatrical bow, Batman has to spend several minutes recovering the strength to even stand up.
• Deader than Dead: After Joker's death, his body was cremated, and then his ashes were flushed down twelve different toilets just to make sure they could never be brought back together.
• Deadpan Snarker: Batman is far more willing to drop some sarcasm every now and then than he is in the game.
  Batman: It's difficult to interrogate a suspect when he's unconscious.
• The Dreaded: Even nine months after his death, Gotham and Gordon in particular are still terrified of the Joker.
• Everyone Has Standards: For all that Gordon is genuinely glad that Joker is dead, he's uncomfortable when the morticians who cremated him hold an actual party for it and views it as an example of how Gotham's morality has regressed.
• Framing Device: Downplayed; the first line of the book adds "This is not the story that was leaked to the press" before Gordon says "This is how the Batman died", implying that the events of the game are merely a leaked story while the book is supposedly the "true" story.
• Handicapped Badass: Barbara gives as good as she gets during her kidnapping, taking out three of the Militia soldiers attacking her before the Knight knocks her out of her chair.
• Hypocrite: Scarecrow bases his entire ideology on the idea that only "bad" people are affected by his toxin and thus he's weeding them out from the "good", but when Batman is able to resist his toxin, he declares that life is meaningless without fear and goes straight to executing him.
• Internal Reveal: Just like in the game, Gordon learns that his daughter is Oracle after she's been kidnapped. Unlike the game, he also learns from Batman that she used to be Batgirl and took up the job after she was paralyzed.
• I Owe You My Life: At Thomas and Martha Wayne's funeral, Carmine Falcone, whose life was saved by Thomas as a boy, approached young Bruce and pledged him one no-questions-asked favor for him to redeem at any time as thanks to Thomas for saving him. Bruce only ever wanted him to quit crime entirely and, knowing Falcone would never do that, never took the favor.
• Irony: As Gordon is expressing his relief that Barbara is already out of the city, Barbara calls Batman on his comm.
• Mind Rape: The effects of the fear toxin become even more confusing to follow in a non-visual medium. As the night goes on, Batman starts having hallucinations within hallucinations, slowly driving him mad with desperation to stop Scarecrow before he fully succumbs to his Joker infection.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: It's shown that even before he went completely mad, Dr. Jonathan Crane was not exactly a moral psychologist - his strategy for helping people with their fears wasn't to cure their fear, it was just to redirect it to a less likely fear. He then got delusions of godhood from being able to essentially rebuild their response system from the ground up, turning him into the madman he's now known as.
• Mythology Gag: Batman states that before he killed Jason, the Joker had broadcasted to Gotham and put the act to a vote, which is exactly what the comic authors did to decide Jason's fate.
• Named by the Adaptation: The waitress in the diner is named Maggie, while Officer Owens is given the first name Scott.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Scarecrow talks in his head like he genuinely believes he's doing the right thing, but even within his inner thoughts, it's clear that all he cares about is causing as much fear as possible, and he almost froths at the mouth at the thought of the carnage that other superheroes like Superman could cause with his toxin.
• Pragmatic Villainy: The Penguin runs all of his businesses above board and as legally as possible, even when he's dealing arms with the Scarecrow. This obviously isn't out of any concern for the law itself, but because when he's inevitably caught by Batman, the GCPD can't actually charge him with anything and he gets to walk.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Gordon notes that during the evacuation, a lot of his cops deserted, leaving him with roughly 800 units to evacuate 6.3 million people.
• Secret Test of Character: To discern how affected Batman is by the fear toxin, Lucius asks him point blank if he'd be willing to put a bullet through his own head if it would save Barbara. Batman says he doesn't know, which Lucius considers a good thing — he couldn't answer "no" so he's definitely affected, but he also didn't say "yes" and indicate he's only being driven by pure emotion, so Batman is still in control.
• The Social Darwinist: Scarecrow believes that only "bad" people have any reason to be afraid and thus his toxin is essentially an attempt to create a new generation of pure, fear-free, "good" people.
  He was culling the weak. Within a generation only the strong, the pure, his believers, would live.
  And that, he decided, was good.
• Superhero Paradox: Though Gordon does support Batman and believes him to be the best man he's ever met, Gordon does privately admit that his presence is why the supervillains are as powerful as they are - as Batman got more powerful, they got stronger to compensate, and now the police has no chance of stopping them alone.
• Take That!: After the Knight unmasks himself, he asks if Batman is going to say something obvious like "Jason, but you're dead", which is exactly what Batman says in the game at this exact moment.

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Criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot. But what happens when they have nothing to be scared of?