I don't get why they don't just make these villains self-interested megalomaniacs like the old days. Focus the drama on the protagonist instead.

Perhaps they realized that, late into production, the audience would sympathize. So they added him blowing up the city to make him irredeemable.

And then they have him blow up half the city for no reason to make him evil.

Same story with Killmonger in the first Black Panther film.

What if The Riddler was the Zodiac killer, but also a weird incel guy?

You can definitely tell they they went ... whoops and tacked on the last 30 minutes of the movie to make him seem like the bad guy. The entire film goes into a severe tonal shift.

Fucking looooooove Batman and so badly want there to be a movie where the villain captures Batman and opens his eyes to how wealth dynamic of Gotham is the real driving force behind all the crime.

Bruce learns that the Batman persona was just a veil for him to be recognized as an anonymous hero versus a Nepo baby who is so disconnected from reality that he thinks that building structures and donating them to the poor, destroying infrastructure, beating up the disenfranchised, and terrorizing the commoners of Gotham at their lowest points is benefiting anyone other than Gotham's upper echelons.

So then Batman instead loots all the billionaires, destroys businesses with poor workers' rights, murders a few corrupt figureheads, and then reveals himself to be Bruce Wayne whose cowl was only masking his privilege. Finally, he sells his properties, donates his businesses to the people actually running them, and puts all of his money into trusts that pays every citizen of Gotham a living wage.

The final scene of the movie shows a happy Bruce Wayne, no longer conflicted by his family legacy, clocking in for his shift as a security guard. He hears a commotion and finds a supervisor assaulting their employee and talking about "crunch time until the product meets the investors' standards." Bruce interrupts and starts monologuing while fiddling with a batarang: "You know, I used to use these as a non-lethal deterrent when I was more like you. Back when I punched down on the citizens of Gotham. But now I only punch up. And my weapons got a lot sharper!" Then he murders the fuck out of the boss. Cut to black.

They need to play Batman like a straight cop next time. Literally just a brutal private security elite, killing anyone and destroying proof of Bill Clinton's crimes aboard the Lolita Express.

Rizzler

https://redsails.org/the-swerve/

Also he has a Discord group for some reason

I keep saying to any liberals that claim the Joker is about White Male Rage^TM^ is that if it was, then Arthur would have recruited those wall street bros and now here, the Riddler would give white collar criminals a high five.