Psrinklers - Psrinker

under the hood is not a conflict formed out of violent miscommunication; it’s a tragedy born out of irreconcilable differences between father and son, catalysed by the most traumatic event conceivable.

whilst, yes, batman initially believes jason was fighting him because he failed to save him then later on believes that jason is asking him to kill joker in that moment instead of making him watch the joker to be killed, the resolved miscommunication fixes nothing. you can even say it gets worse because now it’s not something that can be understood as an unavoidable hurt of the past or an easier justification of his moral line, it’s the one thing that is somewhat reasonable to ask but that batman is unable to provide- killing the joker himself or allowing jason to take the joker’s life without trying to prevent it.

jason knowing that batman attempted to kill the joker in his grief or that nightwing did succeed temporarily changes nothing because nothing changed. the joker is not dead and the fact remains that if batman and nightwing wanted him truly dead, he would be and the deaths of so many would have been prevented.

jason knows he was loved, in fact he actively mocks it because that love was not enough to save him or avenge him like he points out the same for nightwing when bludhaven explodes. but he doesn’t need just love, he needs to be prioritised by his father and batman can never let go of his morals to do so. in batman #425, batman implies that the death of so many as a result of garzonas’ fathers vengeance is jason’s fault, showing that it’s only a natural consequence for a father to avenge his son, with the only one at fault for the blood feud being the son’s murderer. jason has every right to have expected batman to kill based off this and batman just can’t do it. therefore batman hides behind his mission to rationalise his guilt to his son, causing jason to replicate his language of vigilantism and costumed conflict, using his own goal to appeal to him.

both jason and bruce are simultaneously correct on their moral stances on murder (not taking into consideration the extremes and perhaps diversion from the core of their moral philosophies), it’s been a subject debated and questioned for an inconceivably long period of human history and will continue to be done be done because there is no definitive ‘right’ in ethics. they’re both highly intelligent, motivated, and thoughtful characters who definitely considered all possibilities and landed on their moral code.

moreover, even if one of them was more ‘correct’ than the other and should move towards the other moral view, they can’t; both have made their stances on the issue as a foundational to their lives. batman can’t let go of his belief in hope and the sanctity of human life and jason can’t let go of needing vengeance to be able to continue on in his second chance at life and the question of how many more lives is he willing to risk for sustaining an individuals right to life.

also, on a meta level, their conflict is that of conventions of the superhero genre combatting criticism of it. batman does as any hero is expected to and treats jason as the antagonist he is with his murder spree whilst also responding to the final trolley dilemma by trying to find a ‘third option’ of keeping both jason and the joker alive. but jason mocks and criticises batman’s approach to vigilantism and the given tropes he embodies and we are somewhat encouraged to root for him in part of his calling out of batman’s extremes such as when he cries out for the death of captain nazi. jason pushes batman into a moral corner and he is killed by him because of it, shutting down jason’s genre awareness and serving as a final, damning critique of batman. both batman and jason todd’s defiance can not co exist because to do so would erase the valid criticism jason makes without meriting it or would cause batman to betray his own respectable mythos.

it’s a tragedy of father and son torn apart by their conflicting and extreme opposing moral principles that cannot be altered without work being put in that dc is unwilling to do. they both need to fight because they love each other and feel the need to bring the other to their side, but in their futile efforts “everybody still loses.”

just imagining telemachus growing up only remembering his father as an idea of a man who is fighting in a war to get back to him. until he’s around 11 and the war is over and his father isn’t back.

the idea of him and penelope slowly becoming resigned to grief but holding out hope because odysseus is the strongest man either of them can think of.

the idea of penelope seeing telemachus, looking so much like her lost husband, become more and more cruel to her out of his insecurity and resentment.

and her knowing that the more telemachus grows up the closer the day is where she promised to remarry. the day she will be forced to forget the memory of odysseus and leave their palace and their son, all to be a prize for a man not much older than telemachus.

the realisation once all is restored that penelope delaying her marriage may have delayed fate because it’s probable athena only made odysseus leave ogygia because penelope’s shroud trick was exposed and she would have had to remarry soon.

lost days jason being picked up by the scruff of his neck after batman accidentally catches him planting the bomb on the batmobile. jason immediately goes to attack but because he’s not trained to kill as well as he is later on he’s disarmed quite easily. jason looking so young, not having killed anyone yet, and not being in control of the situation through careful planning meaning bruce is more likely to accept him but jason’s emotions are completely raw to where his actions are just fully calculated fury and hurt. also this is before wargames and stephanie’s death so that would make bruce have less emotionally vulnerable because his lack of fresh grief and guilt.

if you make that female character less goth as a sign of her ~healing~ or ~improving her life~ I will kill you

make her MORE gloriously dark and over-the-top. she's growing into herself. she's getting comfortable being who she wants to be. do you see the vision. I am crying and throwing things

strange niche of characters who would read frankenstein and cry because they related to the creature

Abandon all hope ye who enter here - warning you should heed before becoming a JT fan

under the clarity of i have still not slept and it’s half past 4 in the morning, i can safely say that i was wrong:

jason would have a plan for being caught, in fact he would have a whole speech prepared complete with citations. this doesn’t mean that at this point he wouldn’t crumple like damp paper as soon as bruce tries to bring him home, either going with him or running away, but he’d give a valiant effort. (maybe, secretly, he was hoping or even relying on being caught here, making him all the more at a loss when faced with the detonator in the actual comic.)

lost days jason being picked up by the scruff of his neck after batman accidentally catches him planting the bomb on the batmobile. jason immediately goes to attack but because he’s not trained to kill as well as he is later on he’s disarmed quite easily. jason looking so young, not having killed anyone yet, and not being in control of the situation through careful planning meaning bruce is more likely to accept him but jason’s emotions are completely raw to where his actions are just fully calculated fury and hurt. also this is before wargames and stephanie’s death so that would make bruce have less emotionally vulnerable because his lack of fresh grief and guilt.

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.

iliad characters as florida man headlines bc me and the diomedestruthers were chatting about it;

odysseus:

achilles:

hector:

the ajaxes:

paris:

nestor:

menelaus:

calchas:

agamemnon:

diomedes:

neoptolemus: