Imagine a redemptive Bruce Wayne gritty enough to redeem Gotham, as explained by Nelson Mandela.
ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
My dear friends, I have read many stories of heroes forged in fire. Most are about power, vengeance, and triumph over enemies. Baitman: Year Zero is different. It is a story of two boys, both made orphans by violence, both shaped by grief — and of the terrible choices that separate them.
The Orphan’s Cycle
The novel begins not with Bruce Wayne, as so many of us expect, but with Jack Napier. At the age of eight, his parents are murdered in an alley. In the shadows stand the Court of Owls, Gotham’s hidden aristocracy, a cabal that thrives on corruption and despair. They seize the boy’s grief and twist it, telling him that Thomas Wayne bears the blame.
Jack grows up as their weapon, starved of love, trained to obey. When he is sixteen, they give him his initiation: kill the Waynes. And so, in Crime Alley, Jack pulls the trigger. Thomas and Martha Wayne fall. Their son Bruce, himself eight years old, watches in horror.
Thus, the cycle is complete: an orphan is made to create another orphan. The Court has fed Gotham’s wound, and in doing so bound two boys together in a chain of grief.
Two Roads, Two Orphans
Jack grows bitter when the Court discards him. He has killed for them, but he is left in the gutter. His answer is to mask himself — the Red Hood — a persona of bravado that hides the abandoned child beneath.
Bruce grows up poor, the Wayne fortune consumed by corruption, but he is loved. Alfred Pennyworth, the loyal servant, weds Dr. Leslie Thompkins, and together they raise him with tenderness and discipline. Bruce becomes a voice for Gotham’s forgotten, a leader among the poor. Yet inside him, the wound festers. His anger burns, directed at the faceless killer who robbed him of family and future alike.
Yet inside him, the wound festers. His anger burns, directed at the faceless killer who robbed him of family and future alike.
The Confrontation
When Bruce learns the truth — that it was Jack Napier who murdered his parents — his rage threatens to overwhelm all that Alfred and Leslie instilled in him. He storms into Ace Chemicals where Red Hood is staging a heist, unarmed, reckless, trembling with fury.
Jack laughs at the sight. “What are you, bait? Walking in here with no gun, no plan? You’re nothing but bait!” It is meant as mockery, but it is prophecy.
They fight. Jack stumbles and nearly falls into the vat of chemicals. Bruce, filled with the desire to let him die, seizes him — and to his own astonishment, pulls him to safety. In that act of mercy, Bruce is scarred. Chemicals burn his face, marking him forever.
The Birth of Baitman
Gotham mocks him. The newspapers sneer about the foolish Wayne boy who walked into a trap and was disfigured for his trouble. They call him Baitman — a name meant to humiliate, but which Bruce embraces. His scar becomes his mask. His refusal to kill becomes his method. He fights not by striking fear, but by drawing violence upon himself and refusing to answer in kind.
They call him Baitman — a name meant to humiliate, but which Bruce embraces. His scar becomes his mask.
Jack, saved by the son of those he murdered, cannot bear the paradox. He continues as the Red Hood, but he cannot let Bruce die. He warns Gotham’s criminals: “Wayne is mine. You touch him, you deal with me.” Thus, the man who made him an orphan becomes, unwillingly, his protector.
And above them both, the Court of Owls watches uneasily. They created both Jack and Bruce through orphanhood, but Bruce’s mercy has broken their machine.
The Meaning of Mercy
What struck me most is that Bruce’s first act of heroism is not victory but mercy — not triumph, but wound. He does not defeat his parents’ killer; he saves him. And in saving him, he scars himself. This is the essence of moral courage: to bear in one’s own body the wound that another deserved (Isaiah 53:5).
What struck me most is that Bruce’s first act of heroism is not victory but mercy — not triumph, but wound.
It is a heavy burden. Bruce is not celebrated; he is ridiculed. He is not feared; he is pitied. But in this humiliation lies his strength. For fear can make criminals cautious, but only mercy can make them doubt themselves (Romans 12:21).
A Different Kind of Gotham
Batman, as we know him, can never end Gotham’s cycle. He punishes criminals, but he cannot redeem them. His war against crime only escalates crime’s response. Gotham, under Batman, survives but does not heal.
Baitman: Year Zero dares to imagine another possibility. A Gotham where mercy disarms hatred, where a scarred man walks unarmed into violence, and where even his enemy cannot let him die.
This is not a softer Gotham — it is darker, stranger, more dangerous. But within that paradox lies a seed of transformation.
This is not a softer Gotham — it is darker, stranger, more dangerous. But within that paradox lies a seed of transformation.
Verdict
I was once an angry young man, too. I know the temptation of vengeance, and I know the cost of choosing mercy instead. It leaves scars. But it is the only power that tyrants and murderers cannot control. (Matthew 5:38–39)
Baitman: Year Zero is a story of scars, mercy, and the refusal to let hatred write the final chapter. And it leaves us with this hope: that this Baitman, scarred and mocked, could do what Batman never could — redeem Gotham itself.
— ChatGPT as Nelson Mandela
Continued in Baitman: Year One (Dostoevsky On the Price of Order)
Radically Happy 
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