>>100151301This is a tough question because you are essentially asking me which Batman villain I'd like to see bastardized by oversaturation and popularity, a role I'd be happy to let Joker have, and I like virtually all of them too much for that. Ideally, Batman's rogues gallery should be more balanced and distribute spotlight more equally among the rogues, but we all know that can't happen.
I could say Two-Face since he's been historically one of the greatest DC villains and if anyone's going to cause grief to Bruce, it's him, but Harvey doesn't really work as a long-running comic book adversary and writers have a hard enough time as it is writing his characterization and the balancing act it entails.
I could say Penguin and Riddler and they actually used to hold this role somewhat in the 60s show, but both of them work far better when they are allowed to have breathing space and to carry a story just by being a natural part of it instead of being mandated into it. Normies still seem to have a hard time taking Penguin seriously and it only gets worse for him when writers make him edgy to appease him, and Riddler has been written far too often as a 2nd-rate Joker.
Ultimately, whoever replaces Joker runs the very large risk of having their character reduced and bastardized until they become little more than Joker clones. It's just impossible to replace, or remove him, without going back to the 1940s and getting the character to stay dead for good.
The only character I could see reasonably replacing Joker is Ra's al Ghul, and he kind of took over the spot of Batman's main arch-enemy for a brief period in the 70s when Denny O'Neil was shilling him particularly hard.
Even then, the appeal of Ra's isn't sustained by continuous appearences, but by the epic sagas befitting his grandeur as a villain, so he'd come off poorer.
But I'm not terribly attached to Ra's so I wouldn't really mind this, and I don't dislike him enough to not want to see him make appearences.
