In the second season of Batwoman, Ryan Wilder is a vastly different caped hero than the people of Gotham have had before. While Batman and Kate Kane's Batwoman had an immeasurable impact on Gotham, their backgrounds are almost identical - both coming from well-off backgrounds with ties to the city's elite.
Specific traumas shaped Bruce Wayne and Kate Kane’s Bat flights and their views of Gotham. Their traumatic childhood tragedies disrupted their otherwise luxurious lives - Bruce's parent having been murdered in a dark city alley, and Kate losing her sister and mother in a Joker-related accident. To ease their misplaced guilt, they saw themselves as instruments to root out corruption and crime that the police and the Crows couldn't reach.
Ryan, on the other hand, sees Gotham from an entirely different position - from street-level. She grew up far from the advantages that Bruce and Kate had. Her mother died in childbirth, putting her in the foster system. The only person who loved her was murdered and she became, in her words, just a series of numbers in a system that ultimately, wrongly put her in prison. Ryan Wilder has seen first-hand that Gotham takes away people's choices or gives them no good ones, especially as the crime she didn’t commit continues to prevent her from finding employment. Even when she steps in to stop a robbery, she's mistaken for the perpetrator instead of the hero.
Most Batman movies and TV shows, like Gotham, focus on the major villains and perceived major crimes, those where the rich, other villains, or even the city itself are at risk. Bruce Wayne’s Batman focused on battles with supervillains like Joker, Penguin, and Bane, and tended to spend extraordinarily little if any time interacting with the regular people of Gotham. Kate was perhaps more sympathetic than Bruce towards Gotham's true problems, as Ryan discovered with Kate’s beneficial low-income housing projects and plans for her bar. Kate used her privilege and power to help others, but couldn't empathize with them on the level Ryan can. Kate's Batwoman mission began with stopping Alice. Ryan’s Batwoman mission is to help the people of her city she knows the system won’t or can’t, with a side order of handling Gotham’s more sinister troublemakers.
As Batwoman, Ryan could use growing up on the streets of Gotham to her advantage, as she explains to Luke and Mary that thanks to growing up surrounded by criminals, she knows how they think and act. Ryan has an awareness of the everyday people that shapes her decisions as well, demonstrated when she quickly dismissed Luke's suggestion to lead the toxic bats to an abandoned subway station; she knew the area was a homeless encampment. Ryan knows Gotham’s streets are not just a place to snatch bad guys, but also the places where people live and try to survive. Wilder's Batwoman can offer more to Gotham’s abandoned people.
The hope Ryan Wilder’s Batwoman gives the people of Gotham is that much stronger because she is truly a hero who understands what people need, and thus arguably a better Batwoman. Ryan understands on a level her predecessors couldn’t that Gotham needs a symbol that shows there can be justice and protection outside the unfair system; she understands the power of giving the people of Gotham that hope, because she is the people of Gotham.