After extracting a vial of the deadly coronavirus from his infamous utility belt, the Bat-Man hurls the tiny deathballs with deadly accuracy toward a crowd of innocent bystanders.

“Everybody knows the Batman origin story,” says Santee deepfaker Mike Troller. “Young rich kid Bruce Wayne sees his parents murdered before his eyes. After he grows up and becomes a wealthy playboy, he travels to the Far East and learns its peoples’ dark arts of combat, deception, and fear. Then he comes back to America to fight crime, fashioning his appearance after a bat because ‘criminals are a cowardly, superstitious lot’ who will be frightened at the sight of him.”

In Troller’s redubbed, retooled version of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, the brave hero Bane, equipped with a specially designed respirator mask that protects him from Bat-Man’s plague attack, does battle with the Cowled Crusader against Humanity.

But, asks Troller, what if that’s not the real story, but rather, “a deceptive narrative put forth by the Chinese propaganda machine, the same one that tried to pin coronavirus on the US military, and when that didn’t work, on the Italians? What if Bruce Wayne picked up a little bit more than fighting skills while he was in the Far East? What if he developed a taste for pangolin? What if he’s called Batman because he likes to eat bats? And what if he’s not the great defender of the weak, but Patient Zero for the plague that will wipe them out? It’d be more in keeping with the behavior of most billionaires, for starters. Fondness for the exotic, hatred for the poor, a willingness to indulge one’s predilections no matter the cost to others. Basically, I’m suggesting that the Joker was right all along: he and Batman are two sides of the same coin, one laughing maniacally at the horror of the human condition, the other grimly enforcing it. Let’s face it: childhood trauma doesn’t create heroes. It makes monsters.”