#goddammnit bane deserves to be so much cooler than anyone ever makes him

[littleeyesofpallas]

I know canonically Santa Prisca is supposed to be a stupid bundle of racist cliches about drug cartels and the political unrest of Latin America, but my personal interpretation has always been for it to be an unicorporated territory of the US, like Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands. And rather than just being mexican alcatraz, make Peña Duros more of a direct Guantanamo Bay analog. That way it can be used as a critique of political loopholes of American territories, and the human trafficking problems in the American prison system.

The prison becomes a deposit in the ongoing American cup and ball game that is culpability for humanitarian crimes against the incarcerated; people get shuffled thru Pena Duros to keep abuses off official records of American prisons, and off "American soil." In this way Bane's upbringing can be accounted for as he sees a constant rotation of every kind of criminal come thru the prison and he can learn from them all in turn, mirroring Batman's apprenticeship, while also feeding him rumors from Gotham transfers about a certain crime fighting urban legend.

But a secondary business for an industrial prison is the buying and selling of prisoners; not only does Pena Duros become a very obvious auctionhouse for hitmen and slave labor, but by preying on the demands of privatized prisons in the US, sells its prisoners to fill cells in US prisons, artifically inflating prison populations to falsify government contract evaluations. And from this, gangs and governments use the ongoing prison trade to smuggle people and goods across the US boarder, both ways, with Pena Duros as the boarding station.

And in this way Pena Duros becomes the powerful multifaceted underworld enterprise that Bane is able to climb the ranks of and take over from the inside.

And then of course we can also toss in the patented supervillainy of weapons and tech smuggling and harboring fugitives and trading in political prisoners to rationalize why and how this prison complex was dabbling in super soldier serums (rather than just "mexicans sell drugs, wrassle man big, do steroids!") Pena Duros sold the human test subjects for venom, smuggled the chemicals in and the finish products out, harbored and traded scientists and whistle blowers, and in it all built their own working version of the drug... Just in time to test it on their own inmates, including one particular little boy born and raised inside the prison walls...

Bane himself I want to take more after Javert and Eugene Vidoq, as someone who turns his familiarty and mastery of criminal life into that of a enterprising jailer, so invested in having conquered and now weilding the power of a system that abused him and molded him into a monster that he can't ever let it be dismantled. (And on a perhaps more literal level, he literally can't let the prison not mass produce Venom, because no one else produces it, and he is so chemically dependent on it that he needs more of it than anything smaller than industrial scale production could supply him.)

But in any case, a proper Moriarty(Napoleonic empire of crime and all) to Batman's Holmes, as he was originally promised to be, yet not fully delivered on, not just on the personal mano a mano level, but organizationally: Bane's Pena Duros operation should be more than just another gang of faceless thugs, they should be highly and diversely specialized --recruited, trained, and when needed bought or pressganged to fill specific needs-- and comparable to the Batfam or Batman Inc.

And for that matter, he should also be giving Amander Waller's Task Force X a hell of a run for its money while he's at it. He and Waller should have a deeply familiar and bitter professional rivalry, yet both beholden a begrudging admiration.

Also as a tangent, I would rectify the egrigious mistake of calling his recently introduced protege "Vengeance" and not the infinitely more appropriate and obvious NEMESIS, as a distintly feminine synonym for "Bane."

#random headcanon #ive been in a real batcanon mood for some reason... #i dont know why i havent been fixating on any actual bat content lately #goddammnit bane deserves to be so much cooler than anyone ever makes him #batman #bane