batman arkham origins is a very funny game because many of the 'villains' in the game agree that gotham is a corrupt hellhole - like all the cops are explicitly on the gangs' take - but batman must nonetheless beat up all of them because they have fundamental disagreements over The Right Way to improve it. Of course, none of their ideas are especially meaningful.
- Ra's just wants to enact mass genocide - it's unclear if he has any particular targets, even? Though in this game it's only through killing cops, funnily enough. Batman is grumpy about this but not grumpy enough to really pursue it.
- Riddler wants to leak everyone's secrets to the world. This is unacceptable because "someone might get hurt(?)", so batman explodes all his stuff.
- Anarky wants to bomb banks and the police station because he's a strawman anticapitalist(?) Batman finds this unacceptable and beats him up and sends him to jail.
What is batman's plan to improve gotham, then, that's better than these plans? Simple! Beat up criminals and send them to jail. Over and over and over. At one point he insists to Alfred that the fear of him doing this keeps criminals in line, even though seemingly every single criminal in gotham is out blowing up buildings and shipping drugs and guns and doing everything imaginable at the time he's saying that, which makes one wonder if it's actually effective. Several villains mock the idea when captured, but batman still adheres endlessly to it. He's a man with morals! He doesn't kill. He just maims and maims and maims and for some reason this never solves any of the crime and he will never, ever introspect about it. My guess is by the end of the game he will come to the revelation that Cops Are Good And Must Be Trusted and that's his solution (it will fix nothing)
You could argue these problems with batman's philosophy were true in all the other arkham games but in those I don't think it was ever really examined; its front-and-centerness in Origins is deeply fascinating to me because they so keep asking the question but so thoroughly don't seem to have an answer except to throw their hands up and say "batman!"
What a strange game.
I think funding schools and childcare programs might be the answer, but it also might be equipping shock gloves
