How is kindness a bad thing? I thought that was universally agreed to be a good message to have in a piece of media. I guess the excuse is they don’t want media to have messages at all but like, how would you even have a movie where the hero has no values that they stand for?
TAS was peak Batman, for me, they did a comic run in that universe all in the style of Bruce Timm that was really good. I get the no kill rule for certain characters, and for the sake of writing, original villains that people enjoy seeing on the page aren’t easy to pull off consistently. And most of my favorite characters, as far as villains go, are the one’s that definitely should be killed (Carnage, The Joker, Doc Ock, Bullseye, Zsasz, should all be killed on sight, but I fucking love when they show up. Also, you just can’t kill Carnage, ao there’s that.) so i get why it’s part of comics.