Considering every attempt at bringing Jason Todd back as a villain (Dixon’s AU attempt in ‘96, Loeb’s Hush attempt in ‘03, + Winick’s successful UTH attempt in ‘04-5) was predicated on retconning Jaybin into someone that he wasn’t, I actually don’t think you can remove Red Hood from the discussion of how DC write Jason as a child. You can prefer one over the other if you want, but Red Hood + all his problems only exist because DC needed to villainise Jason Todd somewhere along his character history to prove that Jaybin’s death was a net positive.
The second Robin receiving an embryonic Red Hood-ification in Cheer, Robin Lives + apparently Lemire’s Robin + Batman was the whole point of Jason coming back as a Bad Guy to begin with. And at a stroke, it returns us to Marv Wolfman + Dixon’s classist victim-blaming narrative. And to their intended goal — to blatantly overwrite Jason Todd’s actual character with stereotypes to preserve the Batman + Robin power fantasy.
so many fanfics- even and especially jason centric ones- revolve around this victim blaming idea that jason is just stupid and needs to see the truth aka bruce is god always right and he is always wrong and he shouldnt trust his own thoughts and intuition
there'll be a fic where jason thought bruce was a pedophile all through his days in the manor and the finale is 'jason just needed to accept that he was stupid to think that and say sorry to bruce' instead of 'an adult couldnt convince a child in his care that he wasnt going to rape him after three whole years and needs to change something in his behavior'
fic says jason comes back to gotham after bruce beat him into a coma and told him never to return and fears retaliation and the thesis is 'jason is stupid for thinking his ~family~ would ever hurt him brucie is so sorry he somehow made jason think hes not welcome here' instead of 'beating anyone near death is a severe crime and the psychological pain of that doesnt just go away when the abuser aggressor says oopsie'
fic has an injured jason not feeling safe in an unsecured home and every one of the batfamily makes him open the doors and windows and walk on a broken leg and prove they can break in without him knowing and this is heartwarming? them ignoring his emotional well being to show they care? making someone scared and hurt is good family behavior and jason is just too stupid to understand that
how does that make sense? why do we do this? what do i have to block out of my ao3 searches to not see it anymore? fics will have straight up cult like emotional manipulation played as heartwarming... this shit is so triggering to me as an abuse survivor
tag your fics victim blaming, horror, mind break, emotional manipulation, anything please i beg
jason todd would love lady macbeth
things you DO NOT need to be a man
a dick
he/him pronouns
XY chromosomes
things you DO need to be a man
the swiftness of a coursing river
the force of a great typhoon
the strength of a raging fire
the mysteriousness of the dark side of the moon
^this post was brought to you by LGBT^
Let's
Get down to
Business
To defeat the huns
I know I take Jason too seriously but there is just something about like. Being the ultimate image of a voiceless victim: a murdered child. Being something that everyone in the family was able to project their tragedy and beliefs onto, a glass case mirroring their thoughts.
And then to come back, furious and sharp and nothing like the silent grave. To have a voice again and be screaming.
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)
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
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.