We might disagree forever, however this is my argument. What connects the Joker movie to the Batman universe are essentially three names: the Joker's himself, B

We might disagree forever, however this is my argument. What connects the Joker movie to the Batman universe are essentially three names: the Joker's himself, Bruce Wayne, and Gotham City. And names are labels: you can stick the label of a bottle of wine on a bottle of coke, but it remains a bottle of coke: it's sweet, fizzy, and won't make you drunk. If you take a Harry Potter novel and rename him as Batman, his enemy Voldemort as Joker and Hogwarts as Gotham School, it doesn't make it into a DC superhero story. If you take a fantasy novel and replace kingdoms with planets and castles and horses with starships, it doesn't make it into a science fiction story- despite Star Wars being labeled as one.