Starlin’s Batman, The One That Died With Jason, Would Have Walked Away As Jason Pulled The Trigger

basil: henry don't fuck this up for me ok? this guy is special DONT ruin him henry I am begging

henry: loud and clear 👌

dorian after having one conversation with henry:

consistently characterised jason todd you will forever exist only in my heart

the creature (frankenstein) and jason todd parallels:

associations with death and therefore transgression

negative influence of father figures

questions of nature vs. nurture

sympathetic killer and antagonist

a ‘rebirth’ that leads them into vengeance against the neglect of their father figures, along with giving them agency through education or cognisance after being deprived of the ability to realise their suffering- the delaceys and lazarus pit

being rejected of their one morally questionable wish towards their father figure

goes on a path of vengeance that leads to their deaths

lower class or representative of them that is given a ‘voice’

dismissed from their emotions because of their violence/intimidating stature

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

"I asked Grok" "I asked ChatGPT" I asked the Oracle and it told me you're going to kill your father and marry your mom

the day that people stop simplifying jason’s ideologies to the death penalty and punitive justice is the day i find peace

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.

making it so that tim is in jason’s shadow in any major way is a disservice to both of their characters

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.

for some reason dick & jason's relationship is often written as if jason was supposed to know plenty about dick even before they met for the first time, but in canon he knew close to nothing other than the fact that he was the previous robin (or rather, not even that, but i sort of refuse to believe that the topic did not come up even *once,* no matter how much bruce would like to avoid it). hence, i think upon hearing that dick used to be in a circus, jay should (completely seriously) ask him if he was a clown