Speculation on Arkham Knight's ending

More Arkham Knight spoilers ahead, you've been warned. This time thought I'll be talking about the game's ending, and whatever idea's I have about what it all meant. If you haven't played Arkham Knight, seriously, don't read on, I don't want you to be robbed of such an experience.

an explanation, this game has a 3 stage linear ending, ending 1 sees batman beating Joker and Scarecrow and saving everyone. Ending 2 see's batman returning to Wayne manor, surrounded by press, he enters the manor, and suddenly the building goes up in flames, leaving  Bruce and Alfred's fate unclear, but strongly suggesting that they are dead. The most bizarre and interpretive ending is ending 3, with 2 muggers in an alley way being attacked by god knows what, that I will include a picture of. here you go.

freaky much, I'd say so. I have a couple theories as to what it is. The first is it's whoever batman's successor is, Robin, Nightwing , Azreal or Jason Todd, changed his ways and gone back to crime fighting; this theory would be alright if it wasn't a giant flaming monster. Maybe then, it's one of the possible successors, using fear gas to scare the criminals. I think this makes more sense with Jason in particular, given his experience with Scarecrow and the gas and him not  abiding by the same moral principles as Batman. This theory is a bit obvious though, so let's go insane.

All the criminals in Gotham were exposed to the gas during the cloudburst. And Joker was able to carry on living inside batman's head even after his death due to the blood transfusion. So here's the theory; this monster is in fact a non corporeal Bruce Wayne, still alive as Batman, inside the criminals' heads. This theory obviously requires for Bruce and Alfred to be dead, however. Similar to how Joker was able to manifest himself in batman's mind, Batman is now able to manifest in the thugs' minds. At what point batman could have pulled this off I don't know, but what if he could somehow contaminate the fear gas in the same way Joker contaminated his blood, and be able to carry on living in the minds of others, plaguing and tormenting them, keeping Gotham safe from them, all from inside their own brains.

Maybe this is still in their heads, but it isn't Batman or the fear gas, here's another theory; this thing is a psychotic episode triggered by some kind of PTSD caused both by their fear of the batman and their exposure to the fear gas, this is  similar to  my non corporeal batman theory, but in this theory batman is dead completely and this is entirely the thugs' damaged psyche causing them to hallucinate the bat monster. A final theory involved Batman being alive. In nightfall Protocol, Bruce fakes his death, to convince everyone that he, and therefore batman, is dead. Now though people aren't afraid of the batman image, perhaps due to them knowing that it was Bruce Wayne the whole time, to compensate for this, batman has utilized scarecrows fear toxin for his own ends, now able to scare the shit out of thugs once again. the biggest problem with  this idea is batman using Scarecrow's gas would go against Batman's principles. But, after playing Arkham Knight, I think it's somewhat reasonable that batman would resort to more extreme measures if it meant keeping Gotham city safe, especially now his cover is blown.

I do love endings like this, like Bioshock, The Last of Us, Spec Ops The Line; leaving these unanswered questions that will definitely incite debate and speculation. Here are my speculations on what happened at the end of Arkham Knight, maybe you think one of these is right, maybe you have an idea of your own, but we'll never knew for sure, so speculation is what we have, isn't it fun.