The reason, I realise, why a lot of Batman fans you see online are jerks is simple:
They are self-selected.
See, assume that comic readers are heterogenous. There will be people who like Batman among other comics, and you weren't hear them propounding Batman's superiority. And there will be people who like Batman because they like to see how Batman handles the situations being thrown at him, and you won't hear much from them either.
And then there are the people who worship their idols.
Here's where it gets interesting. See, it's not hard to explain to yourself why Superman is godlike. Or Thor is godlike, only without the "like" part.
Next to that, saying "Batman is the world's greatest detective" doesn't cut it for these people.
So... they compensate. And the way they compensate is to keep insisting that Batman could kill any hero he chose. The one I remember the most is a guy in a forum saying that of course Batman could beat Wolverine, because he would somehow negate his healing factor.
Me: Somehow
Him: He's Batman!
Which, I think sums up the entire problem in one step.
And it leads to an unfortunate outcome: Those who do that are also the same people who, when Nolan's Batman mocks the wannabes by saying they can't be Batman because they're wearing hockey pads for armour. Translate that and it says You're not worthy to be Batman because you're not rich like me.
Compare that with the ending of the recent Spiderman movie, when he returns after a hiatus and sees a boy trying to do the right thing. He doesn't mock him; he takes great care to thank him for doing his job, and he gives him something else to do to get him out of the way. To Peter Parker, preserving the boy's pride is as important as stopping the villain. Or rather, to him, they are both the same thing.
People are important.
People are everything.
And when you realise that, you understand why I've always felt Nolan's Batman to be condescending. Because Nolan's Batman doesn't actually help people, and he doesn't actually care about them. He looks down on them, he despises them, and he mocks them, and all he wants is to find a world full of monsters, of pure and concentrated evil, because when he fights that, surely he must be the good guy, right?
No.
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