I've never read Alan Moore's The Killing Joke. Though it's often hailed as the greatest Batman story ever told, watching Barbara Gordon (a.k.a. Batgirl) be crippled and sexually assaulted by the Joker is pretty low on the list of things, I want to see. So, when news broke that Bruce Timm, who helped create the great Batman: The Animated Series, and comic book great, writer Brian Azzarello, were going to adapt the graphic novel for the screen, I had no intention of seeing it. And then the controversy started.

In case you're not a fellow comic book nerd, here's a recap. After the film screened at this year's San Diego Comic-Con, fans and critics alike took to the internet to voice their outrage over a brand new framing device added to the original story. In it, young Barbara has a bit of a crush on Batman. While he doesn't seem to feel the same way, after an intense argument over their superhero duties, they end up having sex. Timm and Azzarello meant for the moment to flesh out (no pun intended) Barbara's character and somewhat mitigate the story's essential flaw: that the worst thing that ever happens to Barbara Gordon happens solely to motivate a bunch of dudes. Instead, many felt it only compounded the issue.

Ben Travers over at IndieWire said it turned Barbara into a "cliché," "the female character that feigns complexity, but, when given an expanded role, is only viewed through a sexual lens." Jesse Schedeen at IGN took it a step further, saying the pairing simply didn't make sense within the story's context because of the characters' mentor-pupil dynamic. "That Batman would take advantage of that relationship," he said, "reflects very poorly on him as a superhero." While I disagree with Travers (I'll get to why later), Schedeen is exactly right. It speaks poorly of both Batgirl and Batman that they decide to act on their attraction. But that's the whole damn point. The inherent taboo of their coupling is what makes it so interesting and the news that The Killing Joke adaptation would explore it was the only reason I watched it.

Full disclosure, I've always thought there was sexual tension between Batman and Batgirl. After all, I too was once a young girl enthralled by the idea of Batman. It made perfect sense to me that Barbara's hero worship of Bruce could easily tip over into the territory of a schoolgirl crush. However, my personal feelings aside, it's not as if the idea came out of nowhere. There's history of sexual tension between Batman and Batgirl.

Most people probably think of former Robin, Dick Grayson, as the member of the Bat Family Batgirl has always flirted with, but in the 1966 ABC television show Batman, that wasn't the case at all. There, she shamelessly flirted with Batman and audiences ate it up even as Batman himself awkwardly dismissed her advances. She and Robin weren't paired up until later in the comics after the character was aged down to make her a more appropriate love interest for Dick. Admittedly, there's not much evidence in the comics to support the idea of Batman and Batgirl as a romantic couple. That is unless you count that time Bruce got Barbara pregnant in Batman Beyond 2.0.

That series was a continuation of the Batman Beyond cartoon, which was, in turn, a spin-off of the beloved Batman: The Animated Series . As in The Killing Joke, Bruce doesn't exactly handle his mistake with Barbara well and his coldness not only irreparably damages their relationship, but contributes to the circumstances that bring about her apparent miscarriage. Neither character comes out of that situation looking very good and despite what fangirl-ish thrills their coupling may provide, even I can admit that a romance between Batman and Batgirl is a bad idea. He's too emotionally closed off and/or damaged for a relationship and her desire to be a hero springs from light, not darkness. They could never work, but that doesn't mean I don't think they should make that mistake anyway. Our heroes don't have to be perfect. Yes, they exist to show us the best of humanity, but a hero that never makes a mistake is also difficult to understand or empathize with. Real people screw up and allowing Barbara and Bruce to act on an attraction they know they shouldn't humanize them. To me, the prologue and what it meant for the characters added a much-needed element of humanity to a story that is so fundamentally operatic and metaphorical.

However, not everyone saw it that way. Scott Mendelson over at Forbes argued that the prologue, "turns Barbara Gordon into a hormone-driven incompetent, a young woman who chooses to be Batgirl to get closer to Batman," but that view seems both ungenerous and a little sexist. Frankly, there seemed to be an undercurrent of sexism in a lot of the criticism leveled at The Killing Joke. Now, I don't mean to imply that those who didn't like the prologue were sexist or even that the added material is perfect. Frankly, a lot of it doesn't work. The tone is jarringly at odds with the rest of the story, the dialogue is sometimes embarrassingly clunky and Barbara's gay, male confidant is so stereotypically coded that he borders on problematic. However, the prologue works for what it is: a story about a flawed young woman told in the style of narratives traditionally meant to be read by young women. And that's the real issue.

So much of the criticism didn't seem to be based in self-righteous anger on Barbara's behalf, but about the fact that a traditionally female story was encroaching on a male genre. Romance plots are historically meant for women and as a result often seen as lesser in comparison to more serious, traditionally "male" narratives. The prologue may not work entirely, but it at least tries to reframe what happens as something that happens to Barbara Gordon, not as something that affects the men she knows. Even so, there's only so much Timm and Azzarello can do.

No prologue in the world could really make The Killing Joke, Barbara Gordon's story. It is the ultimate example of throwing a woman in a refrigerator—long before that was even a term. With a single gunshot, Alan Moore retired the character of Barbara Gordon while also motivating Batman, traumatizing Jim Gordon and letting the Joker do a bit of screwed up performance art. Though Barbara eventually overcame her paralysis and found a way to continue doing good as Oracle, that empowering turn of events happened years later. Erasing the story's main problem would require altering the fundamental story. All Timm and Azzarello can do is try to make what happens to her mean more in the story. They do that by giving her a stronger voice in her own story and making what happens to her mean even more to Batman.

While The Killing Joke is often cited as the greatest Batman story ever told the fact is, it's not really a Batman story at all. It's a Joker story. It's about his history and his reasons for doing what he does. Barbara, Jim and even Batman, are just tools in his morality play. Though Batman already has a personal interest in what happens to Barbara thanks to their crime-fighting the past, giving them a recent romantic (or at the very least, sexual) history deepens that connection. It adds an element of personal guilt for Bruce because he treated her so poorly in the weeks leading up to the Joker's actions. That said, there is a much easier way to achieve all that without throwing Batgirl and Batman into bed together: having the Joker somehow discover that Barbara is Batgirl and list that as another reason that he decided to hurt her. It would create the necessary guilt for Batman and make the self-punishment inherent in his pursuit of the Joker even more explicit.

However, that still doesn't erase the horrible treatment of Barbara Gordon that is so integral to The Killing Joke. Listen, I'm not going to tell you that the comic doesn't deserve its place in history. Its central moral question is a great one and there's a reason so many comic book writers (of Batman or otherwise) have copied it. However, perhaps it's time we saw it for what it actually is: a problematic anachronism. Nearly 20 years after writing the story, Moore himself famously criticized what he did to Barbara, calling it, "shallow and ill-conceived." Maybe it's time we too take a hard look at the story and let it fade into history.