The Gotham Club Crawl

thornfield13713:

Certainly!

So. My other favourite Roman. 

I’m going off three sources in particular here - Under the Red Hood, Birds of Prey and Batwoman. They don’t go together particularly well, but they’re my three favourite incarnations of the character, so that’s where I’m working from.

1. Roman is a relative latecomer to the Gotham criminal underworld, showing up about ten years after Superman’s first appearance, by which point the Gotham criminal underworld is pretty solidly dominated by the Rogues, and traditional organised crime by the Penguin. Sure, there are a few sad remnants of older, more traditional crime families still hanging around, but they are, very much, yesterday’s men. This is part of what Roman uses to build his power base, as he has a way of combining modern-style supervillainy with traditional mob activity that appeals a lot to disaffected former mobsters who want to feel like somebody again, but don’t fit in that well with the rising Cobblepot crime family.
2. Roman and Bruce were not, exactly, childhood friends. They were childhood acquaintances who tended to gravitate to one another at fancy parties they were both a bit too young for mostly out of self-defence. They don’t get on brilliantly as adults, partly because lies, masks and personas are something that really, really annoy Roman when he has to deal with people socially. Sure, he’s fine with over-the-top supervillain personas and physical masks, but people putting up a façade of being a totally different person to who they really are for social acceptability is one of those things that will immediately set off his temper, and that is volatile enough already. 
3. While not unintelligent, Roman’s education was rather hampered by his parents’ focus on appearances above all else, and their habit of writing off anything short of perfection as a bad job. Whenever Roman did badly academically, his parents would simply pay off the school to ‘amend’ his grades and berate him privately for failing them, and utterly refused to get him tutors or any other sort of help, for fear that it would embarrass the family if any of it got out. This pattern continued into business school, and is probably the main reason Roman’s company crashed and burned within a few years of his parents’ ‘tragic deaths’ in a fire.
4. One of his first criminal ventures was gladiatorial pit-fighting in his club, Sionis Underground. This started out as a way of recruiting capable minions for the fledgling False Face Society, but after a while it became pretty clear that it was also a good source of income, and one that Roman found personally entertaining, and so became a mainstay of his criminal empire. He’s not quite as well-known for it as Roulette, largely due to having his share of other ventures, but his pit-fights are well-known to include fights against dangerous creatures, metahumans, and to sometimes go to the death.
5. Despite his violent temper, there are three people Roman has never lashed out against physically, and never will. These people are: Victor Zsasz, his minion/pet serial killer/human comfort blanket; Ms Li, the woman who handles the business side of his criminal empire without whom he would be lost; his daughter Circe, whom he is determined to be better to than his parents were to him, even if he hasn’t got much of an idea of how to do it.

thornfield13713:

Ok! I have plenty of Earth-37 stuff, but in honour of our streaming together, let’s do some Batwoman.

1. I am, I think, keeping the Crows. They’re far too useful not to. However, they don’t achieve their truly ridiculous show-level of power until the Beyond era, when they’ve been bought up by someone other than the Kanes. In Jacob’s day, they’re just a private security firm mostly retained by those wealthy enough to afford what amounts to a private army. They’re also notable for having a policy of treating Gotham’s vigilantes and its supervillains more-or-less alike, inspired by Jacob Kane himself, who is not a fan of the Batfamily.
2. During the events of the Arkham City plot that will eventually happen in this ‘verse, Mary Hamilton ends up staying in her free clinic on the island of Old Gotham, refusing to be removed by police, Crows or TYGER, in order to provide medical care to the thousands trapped on the island with no other access to medical care.
3. I am definitely keeping Ryan Wilder, but she’s coming into the story in the Beyond era. She’s a few years older than Terry McGinnis, but they start at around the same time, and often clash over how to approach crime in Gotham, with Ryan taking a rather more systemic approach to the subject than Terry does, at least during the early part of his career while he’s still in high school.
4. Another thing I am definitely keeping - Circe Sionis. And this time, she is going to live to grow up, get out of Arkham after stabbing a CEO’s eyes out for assaulting her and decide to take over the family business of being gay and doing crime. She’s probably a bit older than her show Kate-impersonating-her incarnation, and may actually be the dominant force in what remains of Gotham’s traditional mob. 
5. Alice is getting her comics canon reformation to go with her show canon…everything else, the show did a great job with Alice and I love her. It makes for some very, very awkward times at family holidays, but she and her cousin-in-law Jeremiah end up bonding over being catty ex-supervillain in-laws whom literally no-one else at the table approves of.

Hoo boy! Let me think of what I haven’t already shared.

1. I think like you’ve decided for 37, I’m gonna blend show and comics by having both Catherine and Jacob fake the recovery of Beth’s remains. I’m not 100% decided on it yet, but it does seem true to Jacob’s in-show character to want to fast-forward through the grieving process by any means necessary rather than actually deal with the situation. After awhile, he might have even convinced himself that it really was Beth.
2. Considering the idea that Catherine and Jacob were both using each other in a way. Catherine was attracted to Jacob and bonding over the shared terrible secret of faking his missing daughter’s death was a foot in the door to marrying him. And marrying Catherine was another band-aid for Jacob to slap over his and Kate’s grief. I do think they grew to genuinely care for each other and might very well have ended up together if they’d allowed everything to move at its natural pace anyway, but one of the things that makes them compatible is their belief of the ends justifying most any means, even if doing the former would have been far more beneficial to their daughters (all three of them) in the long run.
3. Bette Kane and Mary Hamilton are separate characters and very close. Of all the older cousins that Bette looked up to, Mary was the one that had more than the time of day for her. How could she not when she knew herself what it was like to be kept at arm’s length and given empty promises by the people she cared about? Mary’s company and guidance kept Bette socially successful and safe as she came of age within Gotham’s high society and club scenes.
4. Luke Fox works more closely with Kate’s branch of the BatFamily than Bruce’s. (And this is an idea I had even before the show happened, so that was one of my favorite parts.) They were something of childhood friends, being close enough in age to each other and far enough in age from Bruce and his friends that they gravitated together at shared social functions. Over the course of their lives, Luke has probably had brief crushes on all three Kane sisters. They just have that effect.
5. I think I’ve mentioned before that Alice’s arrival on the Gotham Rogues’ scene results in the official formation of the Wonderland Gang from the discrete Carroll-themed villains of the city. The Mad Hatter is a notable exception, as he’s enough of a well-know and connected Rogue that Alice deliberately does not approach him until she already has a formidable reputation and respectably-sized crew to back her up, and by that point it’s merely a courtesy. Not unexpectedly, he’s not interested in membership but not opposed to the occasional alliance.

In response to this meme.