Chapter 2496: The Battle for the Cape (Part 63)

Bruce's smile gradually faded, and the expression on his face became unpredictable. But soon, Shiler shattered any objections that might have been derived from his previous evaluation with one sentence.

"It is precisely through this boring play that I recognized you, because only you could write such trash."

Bruce narrowed his eyes slightly and stared at Shiler without blinking. Shiler shook his head gently and said, "The worst part of this play is that you want to show yourself off at every moment."

Shiler looked up at Bruce. At that moment, Bruce felt that the skin he was wearing was completely torn open. The gaze revealed by those gray eyes had a strong sense of penetration. He even felt that he could read his brain waves out of thin air.

"I made a disguise." Shiler suddenly began to narrate in the first person. "I wanted to disguise myself as someone I thought was far inferior to myself. In order to belittle him, I had to come up with an extremely childish and clumsy script that seemed to be what he would come up with."

"Because he is not as good as me, his ability is within my ability range, so I can imitate his ability perfectly without any effort. This way, I can perfectly disguise myself as him, contribute these clumsy and childish things to the world, and let everyone discover his true face."

"But it won't work." Shiler's tone suddenly revealed a hint of distress. He said, "Just letting everyone know he's not good enough is not enough; I also have to let everyone know that someone is better than him. I have to let others know how powerful and wise I am."

"But if I want to show my power and wisdom, how can I highlight his clumsiness and childishness? He has to be weak, and I have to be strong. I have to show his weakness and my strength."

"This script is the product of the tug-of-war between these two thoughts." Shiler looked at Bruce and said, "You want to show the childishness of a certain thought to explain how childish Bruce is, and you have to find a way to come up with a thought to show that it is more brilliant than this childish thought, to explain how brilliant you are."

"And reflected in the play, this childish thought is that there should be responsible superheroes in this world, and they should rush to justice beyond their ability."

"You want to show the childishness of this thought, so you naturally have to point out the loopholes in it, which is that superheroes ignore the feelings of ordinary people for the sake of justice. They rush up recklessly, just sacrificing the safety of some people in exchange for others."

"For this reason, you arranged the conflict between Jason and Tang Pusen, letting them suddenly appear in one place, and it just happened that the plot of breaking the teddy bear happened during the conflict."

"Then there was the plot of Spider-Man chasing the Talon killer, which led to a traffic jam and a truck overturning and crushing your important gift, which led to your fate being changed."

"From these two plots, it can be seen that what you want to write is the story of a young hero who begins to reflect after discovering that he has hurt ordinary people, and finally awakens."

"This story is indeed somewhat clumsy and childish as you said, and not deep enough. Look at these two stories; Tang Pusen and you are just playing the role of a stereotypical tool man, completely without your own character arc, just paving the way for the hero's growth."

"The design of these two plots is that the psychology of wanting to reflect the true level of Bruce took the upper hand. You think he can only write stories of this level, so it looks like him."

"But soon, the psychology of reflecting your own wisdom took the upper hand. In terms of ideological discussion, you think you can come up with a more reasonable idea to convince everyone. In terms of plot, you also think you can compile a better and deeper plot to show that your level is more than one level higher than Bruce's."

"So there was the Gordon line. This is completely a stage built by your narcissism for yourself. It is something written when your psychology of wanting to show yourself took the upper hand."

"So, in this line, you began to explore the issue of ability and responsibility. You are an ordinary person without ability, so you naturally don't have such great responsibility."

"And relatively speaking, it is the Superman line. When Superman loses his ability, he also doesn't take on much responsibility. In the end, he saves the world, and it is only because he restores his powerful ability."

"You agree that ability is linked to responsibility, and use these two lines to reflect your point of view, but your point of view is not that the greater the ability, the greater the responsibility, but that there is no responsibility without ability, and even that one should not be responsible, and should not think about being responsible."

"Just like you let Gordon be paralyzed in bed. He no longer has any ability to uphold justice, but he always wants to take on the responsibility he cannot afford, so he is so painful."

"You understand this as the root of his pain, and the purpose is to warn the audience: look, this is the end of a person without ability who wants to take on responsibility. In essence, it is saying that playing the hero can't do anything except make yourself painful. It's better to recognize reality and give up early."

"You think this is much deeper than 'the greater the ability, the greater the responsibility'. This is not childish. This is the ideology that adults should uphold."

"Then you think that in terms of the degree to which the plot catches the eye, you must also show that you are stronger than Bruce, so old cases, spy shadows, physical pain, mental torture, shootings, investigations, reversals..."

"You stuffed all these into the Gordon line. The case of your parents and Gordon being shot is intertwined. Gordon's one-sided contact with the policewoman due to suspicion, his physical pain of being paralyzed in bed and unable to take care of himself, his mental torture of seeing the killer do evil but being powerless, the shooting many years ago, the investigation many years later, the nephew who was thought to be a positive character, but finally became the mastermind behind all the tragedies."

"You think this is a non-childish plot. It has violence, blood, conflict, and reversal. It is much better than the growth story of a young hero."

"Back to the Superman line, the first half is still the output of the point of view when your psychology of reflecting Bruce's level took the upper hand. The spirit of breaking the inner demon of a young superhero should be the spirit of persisting to the end and never giving up. It should be the quality of following one's own compassion and sense of justice until the clouds clear and the moon appears."

"You think this spirit is childish and impossible to exist in reality, so you want to shoot it like this to reflect how superficial Bruce's understanding of this world is."

"But soon, the psychology of reflecting your own wisdom took the upper hand. Humans are all greedy for enjoyment. No one doesn't like a peaceful life. Superheroes are also human. How could they not give up? Why shouldn't they give up?"

"So you let time skip, delete the memories of Jason and Peter, and build a fake happy life environment for them to reflect: look, the young heroes who were once high-spirited, don't they also want to indulge in the peace and joy of ordinary people?"

"After the disaster, don't they also shrink back cowardly, prioritize their own families, and not save the world?"

"In terms of plot, you think that stories happening around campus life and Christmas are plots that only children like to watch. On the contrary, terrorist attacks, the coming of the end of the world, human insufficiency, and chaos are things that adults should watch."

"So you arranged a terrorist attack in the second half of this storyline—of course, it was definitely not caused by Jack originally, but I think you said that there would definitely be a big disaster."

"When completing this play, these two psychologies have been pulling back and forth. You want both, you want to show how childish the Bruce you play is, and you want to show how wise you, who play Bruce, are."

"So you created such a play with contradictory logic, unclear plots, changing scenes, time and space jumping, buried foreshadowing not dug, and extremely awkward reversals."

Shiler sneered and said, "But if this were just a bad movie, that would be fine. What's more pathetic is that this bad movie was directed by me, not you."

Bruce finally stood up. He glanced outside the door and stared at Shiler, saying, "I was just about to ask, what exactly did you do?"

"Is there a possibility?" Shiler also stood up. The two looked at each other across the desk. Shiler looked into Bruce's eyes and said, "Without me, you wouldn't even be able to direct this bad movie. Do you know how much effort I made to make this play presented completely? Do you know how much effort they made?"

Shiler turned to look at the villains standing in the room. They looked at Bruce's face in unison, and then sighed even more uniformly.

"What's going on?" Bruce just wanted an answer.

Shiler also sighed softly, walked out from behind the desk, and said, "Most people have indeed had lucid dreams. One day they suddenly realize they are dreaming, so they can become the master of the dream and control everything in the dream."

"But do you think you are the master of the Dream Kingdom? Do you really think you can be like the Dream King, or even bring souls from reality, and fabricate dreams without regard for logic?"

Bruce slowly frowned.

Constantine suddenly appeared in the room. He flicked the dust off his body with his fingers and said, "Of course you can't. Even if you have the ability to create a dream bubble, it runs according to the logic of the Dream Kingdom, not your logic."

Shiler walked in front of Bruce, looked up at him, and said, "And you think you perfectly fabricated this Dream World, while it was me and this group of criminals who replaced the characters in the Dream World, working tirelessly and conscientiously behind the scenes to frantically patch things up for you."

"And me," Constantine said, hugging his arms. "Using the only authority of the Dream World, I operated frantically for days and nights to maintain this logically broken world from collapsing."

"Then why on earth did you do this?" Bruce asked. "Since your plan to fabricate the Dream World didn't work from the beginning, why not let it take its course?"

"Of course, because if you don't finish this play, if you don't show your schizophrenic self-pulling in front of everyone, how would people know you're crazy?"

"And..." Shiler turned around, flashed a smile at Bruce, and said, "How would they know how you can be so mediocre, so boring, and so stupid as to have so much fun?"

He laughed, and all the madmen in the room laughed. The Joker laughed until he was out of breath, Harley Quinn laughed until she hit the wall, and even the usually serious Scarecrow and Mr. Freeze couldn't help but press their mouths tightly with their hands, their corners of the mouth harder to suppress than a gun.

With a bang, the door was pushed open. The Penguin, still wearing sunglasses and dressed in a mob boss outfit, walked in cursing.

"Damn it, you guys ran away right after the wrap, leaving me there. I was almost beaten to death by those little brats! You guys..."

The Penguin looked up and saw a bloody mouth full of sharp teeth—

Didn't laugh, couldn't laugh.