The Joker is a domestic terrorist and pragmatist. He engages in practices that require a great deal of planning, cunning, and technical knowledge which he does not personally possess. And so– he relies on armies of henchmen whom he controls using fear, greed, and the concept of being unpredictable; disrupting social order. The Joker is here to appeal to your hatred of status quo. He weasels himself in to different social spheres, in comics and wherever you see a meme floating around, because he appeals to people by pointing out what makes them unhappy.

If you share a Joker meme, you’re helping him out. He’s become his own sort of virus.

Or, at least, this modern Joker has. The original Jerry Robinson/ Bob Kane Joker was buffoonish and lacked depth. He was a mobster with a gimmick. But we’ve built on that lack of depth to show how emptiness can become madness.

But the Joker is not unemotional. The Joker can’t be a by-the-book sociopath because the Joker does care. He doesn’t care about the topics that he panders to; the Joker doesn’t care about society or entropy or status quo. The Joker cares about curating his image. Without his image the Joker doesn’t exist. He doesn’t have a consistent backstory, name– his mystery lends to his terror, he is completely malleable to what he thinks will garner him the most validation for the persons that he has created.

And that makes him a narcissist.

Pop psychology is really up the ass of narcissism right now. I can’t go a few minutes without seeing someone accuse another person online of being a narcissist or some jilted lover tagging their ex in an article about narcissism or hearing some kid explain that he’s like this because his dad is such a narcissist. So I want to talk about what a narcissist really is.

First of all, it’s very easy to accuse and argue with someone that they are a narcissist because narcissism is ego syntonic—meaning that by the nature of narcissism, a narcissist cannot recognize if they are a narcissist or not. So it is easy to accuse someone of narcissism and then walk away, because no matter what they argue back it reinforces the accuser. It’s a fun little logic loop.

That’s one of the reasons that understanding true narcissism gets muddled by buzzfeed articles about your shitty ex.

The Joker relies on an image of ‘expect the unexpected’ but is extremely predictable. In fact, the greatest downfall of the Joker, the reason that he can be thwarted, is that he assumes his public image to be true. If he convinces enough people of who he is and what he stands for, he can convince himself. When he fails in something, he drags himself into intense depressions—Batman the Animated Series showed this well; Mark Hamill’s Joker, morose, sitting in his lair and taking his narcissistic injury out on Harley Quinn when a plan doesn’t meet his high standards.

A narcissistic injury is any event which a narcissist interprets as being disruptive to their sense of self. Their sense of self being wholly externalized, anything which upsets the image they contrive can cause harm. And it may be valid—by definition it does cause them significant pain and strife; but that does not mean that the injury is factual. More often than not it’s imagined. This does not stop the narcissist from retaliation, to the narcissist the perceived event is extremely real.

When a narcissist acts out against someone, they are convinced that they are acting in the right. Every action which they take is justified because it is in service of staving off the hurt of a narcissistic injury or in the support of the narcissist’s self image.

By the nature of existing, Batman represents a narcissistic injury to the Joker. There is no consistent backstory, there is no reason; but the Joker feels that there is. It is always the Joker who is insisting that he has been done wrong by society and that bringing harm to Batman will quell that injury. This can be because of what he perceives Batman to represent, it could be because Batman refuses to get the joke—whatever the injury is, it is worth killing Batman and anyone else over.

And confronted on that, the Joker is evasive. He doesn’t have a single tragic backstory to whip out and justify his actions. Heath Ledger’s Joker’s multiple stories about his scars was accurate. It’s possible that not even the Joker knows why he’s doing what he’s doing.

A character yelling ‘Actually, this was what I wanted all along!’ does not a Xanatos gambit make.

If anything, the Joker is compelling because he is pretty bad at it.

The only reason that the Joker succeeds in terrorizing Gotham is because it is extremely easy to terrorize Gotham. He is able to pull the attention of Harley Quinn, the reason he can convince the police in Gotham is that he appeals to their own unhappiness and their wish—the belief that exists in all society, that there is a reason behind everything. Joker falsely claims to be deeper than he is, that there is a secret plot, a master plan; there isn’t.

There’s a poignant part in The Killing Joke, as we try to piece together The Joker’s psyche as an audience, where Batman stagnates on the idea that he really knows nothing about The Joker.

Throughout the Batman Beyond story lines, particularly the Return of the Joker arc; as well as Jason’s Red Hood origin arc (and a few million other instances; almost especially the Killing Joke), these are stories not about The Joker but about Bruce Wayne. The Joker is only a mirror, a vessel, for talking about Bruce Wayne.

The Joker, or Captain Plot Armor, is a puddy character. He is meant to be molded to the needs and whims of whatever writer picks him up. This is how he sometimes becomes spliced with The Red Hood arc, Joe Chill, Carmine Falcone, various hitmen like the dude who killed Carl Beaumont for Valestra… He has the ultimate plot armor because he has true anonymity—something Bruce Wayne has never had.

And when you explore that, when you as a comic book writer try to give him a reason, you run into the same wall as all of the other Gothamites: there isn’t one.