“You’re going to bleed like a dead cat.”

At first, I thought this was just clunky dialogue, some poor writer struggling to come up with yet another cat-based reference for Batman: Arkham City’s thugs to bellow at Catwoman, as a break from the rather more disturbing threats and insults they so frequently offer. Many have commented that the game’s dialogue, especially incidental comments from thugs, is unimpressive. And troubling too. Puzzling, given how lavish the game is in so many other respects. Then I sat down and thought about it. What if there was something I was missing? What if that line, “you’re going to bleed like a dead cat” was rich in subtext and nuance I was just too ignorant and lazy to pick up on? And what if, in turn, that meant all the apparently wretched dialogue in the game had been misinterpreted? What if we’d made a terrible mistake? There was only one thing I could do – a careful, stage by stage analysis of the sentence in question. Only then could I truly uncover its mysteries. Some might ask why this game, of all games, should be subjected to such painstaking analysis. I have one word that perfectly addresses all such queries: “because.”(more…)