My reaction to The Killing Joke is just plain out wow! I felt so bad for the Joker. I felt bad how he was just a simple man struggling to provide for his family and then all of a sudden his whole world came crashing down when his wife suddenly perished. Not to mention he was in too deep with some illegal business that he couldn't depart of. Life seemed to always be cruel and unjust to The Joker. He left his good-paying job as a lab assistant to pursue his life long goal of being a comedian. It is because of this that he had been struggling to find work. It is because of this that he got involved with crime to make money for his family. It is because of this that he loses his family. It is because of this that he ended up falling into a tub of chemicals that bleached his skin white, turned his hair green and made him looney. It is because of this, because of this one bad day that turned this simple man mad.
The Killing Joke goes back and forth between flashbacks of the Joker before he went mad. The underlying theme of the graphic novel (at least what I got out of it) was that life is cruel and there is no such thing as a happy ending. How everything can be taken away from you in an instant and you end up losing your sanity. Prior to The Killing Joke we never looked at the Joker as a normal person with emotions and feelings of empathy. We see him killing people off for fun because he is just a crazy lunatic but underneath all that he is just like you and me. He had his hopes and dreams, a family, he had his life together. That is until one day where everything changed. Everything he loved in the world was taken from him and in an instant this simple man turned looney. Just like in the real world you could go out one night having a good time drinking with friends. Then the next thing you know you wake up in a hospital somewhere and the doctors tell you that you got into a serious accident. All your friends died in the crash except for you. To make it worse, you were the driver. Now you have to live with that guilt for the rest of your life. You just lost everything that night. This story of The Killing Joke though fictional is something that could easily reflect onto real life.
It is hard to bring The Killing Joke into another form of media as there is already an animated film adaptation of this work. However I think that if it were to be brought into another form of media it could possibly be brought to virtual reality. With virtual reality things are much more immersive for the viewer that simply cannot be achieved through reading text off of a page. With virtual reality you can literally put yourself in a character's shoes and experience their life and world around them. If I were to bring this story to vr (virtual reality) I would change it so that the perspective is more so on the side of the Joker. Batman himself would just be a secondary character that you interact with in the vr experience. The user would put on the vr headset and actually become the Joker. You would start off in the past, living the normal life of the Joker as you slowly drift towards insanity. Everything the Joker does, when he hears about his wife's death, to falling into a tub of chemicals, to shooting Barbara Gordon. What was he feeling internally? Through vr I feel that we could dive deeper into the phycological aspect of the Joker.
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