The Great Batman Debate

The Ministry of Testing has a great tradition at their conferences called “99 Second Talks” where anyone can get up and talk about anything for 99 seconds. It’s a great way to introduce new things, give speakers an opportunity to get on stage without a CFP, or work out ideas for future talks. I’ve never given a 99 Second Talk, so at TestBash 2025 I decided to give it a go.

I shared a story that if you don’t know me, you probably didn’t realise I went through something this summer that taught me a lot about overcoming adversity, resilience, and picking yourself up from defeat.

This summer I decided to take on my teenaged son in a structured debate about whether or not Batman was an antihero – my position being that Batman IS an antihero.

What started out as a fun conversation over a burger quickly escalated into a full blown debate with weeks of preparation, presentations created, and a LOT of trash talking leading up to the big day. I’ve always considered myself a fan of Batman, but my son has a knowledge of the character, his history, the comic books, and lore well beyond me. Despite the clear disadvantage I’ve always liked a fight and kinda debate quality engineering for a living, so I felt I had a punchers chance and threw down the gauntlet.

The judging panel, comprised of my long suffering wife and older son had to sit through our 20 min presentations and then 10 min Q&A after being briefed on the “canon” we agreed on which to base our arguments. We also agreed definitions of “hero” and “anti-hero” including three categories we had to make arguments “for” or “against”: how well they fit the definition, how well their motivation matched the description, and how it was evidenced through their actions.

Needless to say, I got my ass handed to me, completely destroyed, defeated on every point in our agreed terms – he mopped the floor with me.

I felt I had landed some punches and had done a lot of reading and research including a really good book on Batman and Ethics which explores the complexities and contradictions of Batman’s aversion to killing, the moral status of vigilantism and his use of torture in pursuit of justice. Ultimately though, I was way out of my depth and my arguments had some pretty big gaps coupled with some fundamental misunderstanding of the character and stories.

It was really fun in our nerdy family way and I was super impressed with my son’s presentation, research skills and flair for the dramatic in his talks – something he probably inherited honestly. It also reminded me of some home truths I’ve learned in the software testing business that everyone (not just in testing) should take to heart:

Have courage to challenge the experts – even in their field of expertise…
Preparation makes up the biggest part of success…
Failure is your greatest teacher – unless you fail you probably haven’t learned anything useful…
Winning an argument is rarely done by facts and data alone…

Anyway, it was a really fun experience and I can’t wait until our next debate on a less controversial topic: which Superman is better, Synderverse or James Gunn! LoL!