So Many Fanfics- Even And Especially Jason Centric Ones- Revolve Around This Victim Blaming Idea That

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.

HUGE shoutout to the WORLDS most DOOMED mentor mentee duo ever to live. Just two extremely emotional, lonely, jealous, closed-off, insanely determined vigilantes against the world and also against each other routinely.

Imagine you are Batman, and you are immensely similar to this teen girl, and because it increases the emotional vulnerability that you can be comfortable with when she doesn’t know anything about you, or because it’s convenient to have a team member who is isolated and can be easily fired and completely cut out when she gets too close or hurts you or when you don’t need her anymore, or maybe just because you’re lonely and you just got hurt emotionally by the people who know you the best and you like the idea of getting the benefits of company without that vulnerability again, you don’t tell her your name and you don’t let her see your face.

Imagine your primary team is finally back, imagine Alfred has come home, imagine you aren’t alone anymore, so you ghost her Completley, cut her off until she tracks you down to demand an explanation, where you then fire her with the excuse of her ‘lacking the skills and talent’, and are fine to leave it at that forever. Imagine you think about it some more and it’s the anniversary of your son’s death and you feel comfortable enough admitting aloud that that must’ve been part of why you fired her. She was reckless and wanted to prove herself too much, and all that other stuff that got your son killed as Robin. Steph is just too like him, too wrong and too much to be a vigilante.

But then Robin has to quit, and he’s leaving you behind and he’s going to go away, so you, maybe half consciously come up with a plan, and when Stephanie Brown turns up in your Batcave with a homemade costume and a frenzied look in her eyes you solidify that plan, maybe still unconsciously. Imagine using the same excuse, the same exact phrasing, of Steph’s apparent lack of ‘skills and talent’ that you used to fire her, in order to justify hiring her as Robin.

Imagine pushing away that graveyard conversation, imagine ignoring the very same comparison that you drew. Imagine, for the very first time, having to keep the cowl on when it’s just you and Robin in the Batcave. Imagine the gnawing sense of wrongness. Imagine keeping it on anyway. Because if you took it off, she would have something. Because if you took it off, it would count. Because if you took it off, you’d have to look her in the eyes, and she could look into yours, and you don’t know if you could do that and also convince yourself what you’re doing to her is okay. If it’s just Batman, it’s fine. It’s manageable. It’s business.

You get that cozy, comfortable distance once again. You get to pretend you didn’t stand at your sons grave and told someone you didn’t want Steph to die like he did, and then turned around and gave her the same costume he died in the second it was more useful to you. And that unease grows and grows and grows. And that yawning uncomfortableness expands and expands. And eventually you can’t ignore how wrong it all is, how gross this all is, so you start looking, and you start hoping, and sure enough, she makes a mistake. And you immediately feel this Huge sense of relief. Thank god.

And you fire her and it feels legitimate enough and you get to walk away, justified and rational and reasonable and fair. You get to do it again, you get to wash your hands clean of it all, and you know then, it was the right choice to keep the mask on, because now you can change the lock to the side entrance you showed her and now you can tell the computer to stop accepting the password you gave her and now she is gone. Just out of your sight. Just gone.

The body of a post is where Hamlet talks to Claudius. The tags is where Hamlet talks to the audience

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.

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?

(batman #422)

as much as this story is deeply flawed, this is an interesting take on batman’s no kill rule. batman is a figure practically leading a one man war against violent crime, and being someone who holds restraint with every fibre of his being he knows he needs a system to hold himself accountable if he loses himself along the way.

despite the system’s extreme flaws maybe, to bruce at least, there is no better way for batman to define his moral limits and judgements. he doesn’t hold good account with jim gordon because otherwise he would be arrested, he could easily evade arrest; but he does it to be under the spotlight of the best representation of a possible uncorrupt legal system. the justification that he is one kill away from being a serial killer shouldn’t be the truth necessarily but it’s the worst case senario that batman must account for- the potential flaws of letting himself define what he does meaning he becomes the extremes of violent crime he is fighting against.

it’s ultimately hypocritical because batman aligning himself with the law means he perpetuates a corrupt system that causes part of the violent crime he despises and when he goes above and beyond to solve a case such as his interrogations it imitates police brutality. however, in fiction, injuries and trauma caused by batman’s methods have less consequences than the inescapable reality of murder and the reliance on corruption lets infamous rogues out of prison yet again leads to more entertainment. this meaning batman’s hypocrisy is much more palatable and justifiable on paper.

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?

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

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.