FINAL ROUND.

lost days jason is just so good. I love him. He tries to be badass and cool and full of revenge and he just can’t. He keeps going on sidequests to help innocent people and kids. He’s like “talia I wanna kill the joker and Batman” and she’s like “of course, here’s a lot of money” and he comes back to have tea with her and bitch about the joker and Batman and also tell her about how he saved London from getting blown up. like obviously he got his stuff together by the time utrh rolls around (sorta), but man, lost days was a hard time for a very compassionate man trying to be ruthless

“Jason’s approach to justice is right wing” we need to force people to actually read.

Claiming Jason is more right wing than Bruce the actual fucking billionaire is crazy. 

the birthday is birthdaying today, most of the problems i’ve been stressing about for at least the past month have been resolved 🙏🙏🙏

jason todd would love lady macbeth

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.

Everything about the new Jason Todd robin issue sucks but I am taking slight joy in Alfred proving me right on him being Jason Todd's biggest hater

adding onto this, it’s so important to me that jason was chosen for his heart even when classist stereotypes would expect him to be naturally violent, cruel, and selfish.

he only becomes more aggressive and bitter the more time he spends as robin BECAUSE of robin. he saw all the injustice first hand in violent crime and the ineffective, corrupt system and he became frustrated. he wanted to kill two face because he killed his father; he wanted to attack the pimp because he directly saw him beating up a woman; he might have killed garzonas because he had to witness gloria’s dead body and garzonas would walk free to do that to other women, just out of america.

jason’s not naturally violent and cruel, it’s what he’s learned is the only way to protect other victims in a world that perpetuates suffering.

i know starlin is seen as the main post-crisis jaybin writer but jason writers PLEASE read collins

(pictures are from batman #409 and #411)

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

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