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you awaken on a fainting couch, leftover confessions burning your tongue.
you awaken on an operating table, next to a voice counting down from ten.
you awaken encased in duct tape, with breathing holes for your nose and mouth.
these are the perversions i am here to cure. just a few more sessions, and then maybe we'll let you out into the open. if you are good, of course. and if you are bad... there are many procedures that can help with that, too.
professor hugo strange is a batman rogue who has inexplicably consumed my thoughts since 2020. he is a malevolent psychologist, sometimes also a surgeon/geneticist, who is obsessed with pushing past the limits of humanity. he is frequently nothing but archetype, and his concerns are predictable: he wants to be the one to master mind control, to revive the dead, to grasp the ungraspable. he is of course fascinated with batman, with the libidinal impulses and demons that created him, and he would very much like to be batman, to command greater fear, and because the cowl might grant him the permission to exorcise his own inner turmoil. he almost always knows, or correctly deducts, batman's secret identity.
this shrine is an apologia for hugo strange. from a cursory web search, it might be the only one around right now, though i'd like to be proven wrong. hugo does have a fanbase, but it's fairly niche for such a long-running rogue. he is woefully underutilised in canon, and it is very easy to write him badly or boringly. it's even easier when you are limited by the medium or audience and cannot write about the sexual turn of his character. he is the only psychoanalyst who could possibly make sense of gotham or batman, precisely as a result of his own seediness, corruption and abuse of his own authority. he holds within his core the reason why gotham is like this: because men like him benefit from having expendables to sacrifice, and will seize any opportunity to abuse others without consequence. as a psychologist peeling back the layers of repression and physicality in favour of the mind and 'soul', he represents the rotten core of gotham's apparent instruments of order and structure.
hugo goes all the way back to the golden age of comics, an intended 'moriarty' for batman who could also encapsulate all the anxieties of the 1940s. it's not really that era that speaks to me. modern-day iterations of hugo, usually intended for older audiences, are the primary focus here, although i will touch on his other versions where i feel they're especially notable or interesting.
of course, we can intellectualise it all we want, the same way hugo hates to confront his own urges. but the primary reason for this site's existence is plain lust. he is catnip for people like me because the majority of his plots involve power abuse, medical atrocities, and mind control. he was made for this hole, i say, pointing to myself.
welcome to arkham.