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.
so the diomedes server told me to post this... im not sorry
the minimal amount of context below the cut
courtesy of @ithacantrickster and @jewishdainix
oh and this is in context of Jorge mentioning Diomedes in his potential Trojan War musical themes
this especially hurts in aus where jason is found by the bats after he climbs out of his grave and before he’s taken by the league. there is nothing but the suit he died in to remind jason that he’s home and that his past life was truly real.
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?
“not all men” you’re right, Horatio would never
post exam season deep cleans >>>
having anti punitive justice morals sucks because you want to say "man that guy sucks he should get hit with hammers until he dies" but you also want to make it clear you don't think anyone should be put in charge of the 'hit people with hammers until they die" machine.
considering jason’s relationship with vengeance, its apparent that bruce just made it worse at every stage.
when bruce first found jason, he didn’t have any inclination towards vengeance because he didn’t know about the death of his father by the hands of two face, and he may never have found out if bruce had not investigated and put it in the batcomputer.
and jason’s first reaction to finding out about the death of his father was NOT to sneak out and find two face, it was to sleep all day and give an attitude to bruce. the reason why jason wasn’t open to talking to bruce about the death of willis was because bruce hid it from him!! for 6 months!! also when jason did go out and attempt to kill two face he did so with batman and as robin. bruce facilitated his vengeance by giving him the means to try through robin when jason probably wouldn’t otherwise. and by the end of #411 jason proves that he isn’t driven by revenge and won’t be in the future because he’s easily snapped out of it (it’s later shown to be not that simple in the detective comics but overall it’s not the main motivator for jason). you can give bruce credit here and say it’s because jason had robin and bruce’s influence but jason changed his mind after bruce said it was very difficult to ‘temper revenge into justice’ which i don’t think was the greatest inspiration speech.
there’s batman #425 where jason is blamed for the revenge of felipe garzonas father which implies that vengeance of the father is an unavoidable reaction to the death of a son (which yeah you can see that lesson was learnt by jason later on).
then comes death in the family which is not about vengeance but leads to jason wanting it in its aftermath. whilst death in the family is a contrived series of coincidences for quite a bit of its plot, bruce definitely caused the set up of it. if bruce wasn’t an insufficient parent jason wouldn’t have been so eager to find his mother or would have at least talked to bruce about it first. but because bruce took away robin without actually discussing it with jason first, jason obviously acted like he didn’t have anyone to emotionally support him, especially considering that bruce is shown to rely on batman and robin to parent his children and he just took that away. bruce continues to give more evidence in jason’s belief that he can’t be relied on by prioritising stopping the joker over helping jason when first finding him, he later fixes this by deciding to help and giving robin back but that was only after first deciding the joker was more important twice before.
and all of this leads to hush and under the hood where jason is forged by vengeance, even finding the only meaning in his life to be it as said in lost days. he lives and even dies by the hand of bruce for ‘vengeance.’
when seeing the purpose of batman and robin as a way to transform the desire for revenge into justice, it’s a devastating subversion to see what happened to jason because bruce needed to justify adopting the next child he saw who looked a little bit like the son he drove away by firing him.
We are in desperate need of Death in the Family rewrite, instead of trotting out a horribly racist and bizarrely paced, thematically confused story like it’s one of the greats just because it’s load bearing. This is what i’d want from it.
Bruce is again the POV character, but he is explicitly a biased and unreliable narrator. We don’t hear Jason’s narration outside of a few key moments, but we are shown what he’s doing in direct contrast with Bruce’s theorising about his spiralling. Bruce never explicitly asks. Him and Alfred make well meaning, overbearing decisions on his behalf.
Jason is struggling with Batman and Robin’s catastrophic mishandling of several sexual assault cases in a row. I haven’t decided if we’re alluding to Jason being a victim of this himself, that might be overselling it. Either way he is deeply affected by these, and he is the only one. There’s a sense of isolation and injustice around him. He thought bruce cared. He thought batman was a solution.
Jason leaves to find his birth mother, leaving only a note and no explanation. Bruce sees the robin suit is missing and is annoyed. He doesn’t investigate, prioritising the hunt for the joker.
The death and build up happens exclusively in Africa, in a country with its own local vigilante, who wants to know what this American is doing here. (I don’t know enough about DC’s African heroes to know who it should be, but it needs to be one who is already established and competent in his own right.) Batman is in a state of awkward overreach with a patronising tilt to the way he hoards knowledge in the pursuit of the joker in someone else’s backyard. They agree to a partnership that in practise is unequal in Batman’s favour. We are externalising the themes here, mirroring Bruce’s personal relationships with his professional ones.
Jason and bruce run into each other by accident once again. Both are surprised the other is there for a different mission. They opt to combine forces anyway, since they’re both here. Bruce is touched and naively optimistic about Jason’s search for his birth mother. He is projecting. For a moment it is blazingly obvious bruce identifies as a fellow orphan to his sons first, and a father second.
There are local victims, arguably of the joker but it’s not definitive. Their deaths aren’t just numbers. They are real people. The local vigilante is very angry. Jason sympathises heavily, but he too is an outsider here. He sits apart from the funerary rites, listening in, uninvited, unable to mourn, unable to move on. Batman calls him to continue working the case.
Bruce isn’t blind, Jason is struggling. He makes a plan to reach out to him if they don’t find his mom, which will of course negate the need for action.
They find Sheila.
It all falls apart in the same way as the original. Jason does not try to take on the joker, although that is how it’s interpreted after he’s dead. He is trying to rescue his mom. She gets clobbered over the head by a joker goon on the way out and bleeds out while the bomb’s timer is still ticking down. Jason dies, alone, trying to shield the body of his dead mom.
None of the post-death UN stuff. Stupid.
Bruce disguises the death for publicity’s sake. He changes Jason out of robins clothes and hides the joker’s presence there to protect batman’s identity.
Time skip. The African vigilante knows he has been lied to. His country’s legal system paid off, and justice perverted. He comes to Gotham in pursuit of both the Joker and Batman, looking for justice.
At this point Bruce is in deep grief, swinging wildly between rage and self hatred. He is shutting out everyone. He loses track of a human trafficking case in crime alley to focus on the joker and the other vigilante.
The ending is an echo and inverse of the climax of Under the Red Hood, but nobody has set it up, it’s just the way a messy fight between the three remaining players works out. Bruce must choose between inaction and saving the joker. He doesn’t choose. He is frozen, and we do not know if it’s a choice or if he shut down too much to act. He is not in control. Joker appears to have died.
Joker is found, injured but alive, and gets locked in Arkham. The vigilante goes home, disgusted, having gotten what little justice Gotham offers.
The human traffickers escaped in the background of the fight. It isn’t called out, just a detail in the artwork.
Batman goes back to work in an empty house haunted by the dead. Jason’s grave stands alone. Everything has changed. Nothing has changed. Batman won, and everybody loses.
odyssey has it 29 times illiad has it 32 times overall homer writes the word thighs a total of 61 times
the more you know.
there’s always a focus on jason remembering exactly how he broke out his grave but i think him remembering every step walking 12.5 miles, constantly calling a mixture of ‘bruce’, ‘batman’, and ‘dad’ to the response of nobody before he passes out into a coma and wakes up to no bruce is the more devastating (all with the injuries that killed him). then when reduced to his most instinctive course of action after being batman’s robin and bruce’s son fails him, he goes back to the streets.