Under The Hood Is Not A Conflict Formed Out Of Violent Miscommunication; It’s A Tragedy Born Out Of

reposting from the author of Red Hood 2025’s bluesky. the book will not be copaganda. it won’t change the fact helena canonically hates cops and that jason very likely also hates cops.

i’m thinking of the ramifications of bruce throwing out all traces of jason’s existence in the manor. do you think he threw away the box of belongings from his parents? what about his adoption certificate? is all that remained of jason peter todd police records of a horrific accidental death overseas, of an overdosed mother and murdered criminal father, school records of a bright yet overlooked boy, and memorials of a dead boy and a dead robin?

the fact that jason verbalising the idea of bruce killing him over the joker is what finally makes jason break into tears causes me think that this is the moment he understood that it was truly possible for bruce to kill him

nothing shows a character is evil quite like a good cooking montage

in a. I don't wanna say better because let's be clear this would suck. but in a different world nightwing brothers in blood ended with the three of them forming the world's most toxic superhero team of nightwings for exactly four days before dick finds out about jason and cheyenne sleeping together and accuses jason of only doing it to piss him off. jason proceeds to talk mad shit about all of dick's former relationships. dick says he wishes bruce's aim was better. cheyenne wants to know what the hell dick meant by "don't worry, I'm not mad at you, it wasn't your fault." the three of them have an all out brawl the likes of which we haven't seen since dick's mob era. jason stabs dick. dick breaks three of jason's ribs. cheyenne electrocutes both of them so hard they pass out. she goes home and starts a toxic lesbian situationship with her assistant. dick and jason wake up and silently agree to go their separate ways and not tell bruce about this. dick goes back to gotham. jason already told bruce about it because he wanted to start drama. bruce makes a comment about picking his teams better because he's worried about dick's safety and dick hears "you are bad at what you do and you need better teams to back you up because you don't know what you're doing. by the way I hate the titans" and dick is like the FUCK did your just say about my friends and then they have a screaming match that escalates into a physical fight the likes of which we haven't seen since that time in fugitive where dick roundhouse kicked bruce in the jaw and punched out the glass of the good soldier case. this happens in the span of three issues maximum.

post-crisis jason loves creating situations that mirror his life and death. in under the hood and brothers in blood he imitates his life as robin, with him sending what looks like a rare book to the manor, making bruce meet him in crime alley where they first met, and stealing another one of dick’s vigilante identities after he’s stopped using it. you can maybe see these as a way to remind alfred, bruce, and dick respectively of who jason truly is- to make them uncomfortably aware of who they are fighting and how much he’s changed. the final confrontation in under the hood, the titans tower incident, and seeing red all recreate the circumstances of his death in differing ways that tries to prove his points to the people he puts in the senario. in uth he recreates the trio of himself, batman (or perhaps a parent with bruce substituting shelia), and the joker with a bomb and tries to get an answer from bruce on if jason’s life is valued more than his murderers, if a parents sense of self is more valuable than their child. in titans tower he catches a robin off guard and beats him until he’s unconscious, having every opportunity to kill him to show how jason wasn’t uniquely a ‘failure’ of the robin mantle or of batman and how although jason was good at combat, it still did not stop him from being uncared for and erased. in seeing red it’s to serve a more general point on child vigilantes and how the dangers they can become victim to are not up to their personal competence, but just a matter of luck and how their mentors refuse to see this and continue to endanger them (with the solution being killing as a means of prevention of these dangers). these parallels with the most extreme focusing on aditf comparisons can show that jason is constantly stuck on his death, trying to contrive meaning in it when it was ultimately meaningless. he’s a spirit that can not rest, constantly stuck in the less than an hour it took for his life to suddenly end and his worldview to completely change. he’s a lawyer trying to constantly prove his innocence in the part of his own victimhood and demand his own justice, trying to erase the blame that everyone puts on him, therefore forcing them to confront the cracks in the worldview that they demeaned him to avoid seeing. it’s only fitting he gets silenced with a blade to the throat and killed by a bomb detonated by the man that destroyed him the first time when his only weapons are his voice and death.

Batman and his robins but it’s ‘I’m Your Man’ by Mitski (other than steph maybe because bruce was just awful to her)

ophelia represents who hamlet truly is whereas laertes represents who he desperately aspires to be.

at the beginning of the play, laertes is able to return to normal life after the funeral/wedding with the approval of both a loving father and claudius, an obvious contrast to the mourning, trapped, and isolated hamlet. ophelia is then shown to be similarly trapped but due to patriarchal forces, with hamlet contributing to her conflict of family, freedom, and love.

when it comes to love caused madness and duty driven vengeance as responses to grief, hamlet chooses the former whilst desperately searching the will to commit the latter. and ophelia and laertes act as personifications of this conflict with the way they naturally embody these ideas respectively. madness is therefore the feminine weakness and vengeance the masculine triumph, right? but no, things only go downhill once hamlet’s desires for revenge cause him to become impulsive in the killing of polonius, and the play’s end can be seen as laertes’ fatal error in letting his rage cloud his judgement on claudius’ scheming. because at the end of the day, whilst ophelia may die before laertes, they all succumb to their ailments of grief.

hamlet was always doomed, not because he was foolish, but because he was trapped between two false representations of mourning, the madness of remembering and the indiscriminately destructive force of revenge. and thus he infects ophelia, laertes, and, in a very shakespearean manner, makes the whole of denmark “rotten”