Batman has been a strange shadow in my life since I was very little. I first enountered the character when was about 4-ish...I think. Somehow I got a single issue of a Batman comic. I think it was in a bunch of handmedown toys my dad brought home from some friend or something like that. It was in English so my family couldn't read me the speechbubbles. Honestly I'm not even sure it had all the pages anyway. I think some were missing. But I was captivated by the character and the overall look of the pictures I was staring at.

Because of that my dad found me a Batman figurine which immediately became my favourite toy. I took Batman everywhere with me. A hillarious sideeffect of this was that I stopped ignoring my knockoff barbies too (pretty sure they were all knockoffs..Romania in the early 90's, don't ask). I never liked those, or more specifically I never liked that I was supposed to like them and pretty much acted allergic to them. My family insisted I was supposed to like them, especially the older memebers of my extended family, so they kept getting them for me. One of them had shiny black hair and I decided she's Batman's girlfriend. She was a head taller than him. In retrospect I pretty much predicted my taste in women.

When the Batman cartoon aired on TV I was so excited to watch it. But my grandfather wateched it with me and promptly decided that it was for boys and it will feed into my 'not a girl' delusion and I wasn't allowed to watch it anymore. My Batman toy went suddenly missing. Then was miraculously found again after I was inconsolable about it. Eventually I was allowed to keep the toy but no TV shows.

When I was six and went to the first day of preschool one of the boys in my class had a Batman tshirt. I imediatelly fanboyed over it and tried to make friends with this boy. I was very excited to tell everyone that I made a batman friend. But all that the adults in my life understood about it was that I had a crush on this kid. They made all the stupid jokes people for some reason find okay to do about kids when the 'relationship' looks heteronormative "aww look they're gonna get married" and all that shit. That had three big consequences:

First, it made the kid do the 'eww cooties' or some version of it and actively avoid being around me.

Second, it made me feel so fucking gross, absolutely misunderstood, and terrible. I had no words for it then. But it was frustrating and it was making me phisiacally sick. I know now it was, among other things, dysphoria.

Third, it was so humiliating that I let go of Batman. Everyone now insisted that I'm holding on to that characteer because of that boy, not the other way around. I couldn't say something about it or point it out in a store or something without them bringing up the 'crush'.

When I got older and had more independence about what I was watching, or rather, I learned how to watch shit sneakily without getting yelled at, I watched a bit of Batman Beyond on Toonami, but didn't get to see full episodes cause I kept having to swithch to whatever my folks thought was girl appropiate whenever they passed by my room.

Later, when I got the internet and the freedom to watch whatever the hell I pleased, Batman became a wound I kept avoiding. I wanted to watch it, I knew when new movies were out, I envied those who watched them and were actively excited about them Joining in felt tainted somehow. I just couldn't do it. It felt like if I did I would get ridiculed by everyone in my life again. Would I? probably not. But the damage was done.

I never stopped feeling like that kid with the face pressed on the window of something that was out of reach. Even if technically it wans't anymore. And as the years went by and I kept catching glimpses of shows and comics and other people's enjoyment of it I still love it, maybe even more.

My family's obsession of not allowing me boyish things in order to cure my 'I'm a boy' issue never worked. It just made things weird for me. I'm in my mid 30s now, I'm out as a transman for quite a while, the phase they thought I was in at 4 years old is still going strong. And I still love Batman. But I can't say I'm a Batman fan in any capacity. I only watched a handful of disparate random TV episodes, never seen any of the movies, only ever looked at that one comic I couldn't read when I was four and I only know some lore from popculture general knowledge.

I really want to dive into it and properly get into it. I just don't know where to start. THere's so much stuff that I'm just confused at this point.

So I extend this to anyone in the Batman fandom who has suggestions about where I should dive in first.

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Send me a bird and let me know where should I start.