Not for his character or anything, but because I don’t think I’ve seen anyone shoot themselves in the foot with a single character half as badly as DC did with Jason.
He was, during Under the Red Hood, one of the biggest gamechangers they could have thrown at Bruce Wayne’s Batman. Here was an intellectual equal to Batman and superior to the Joker and Gotham’s entire criminal underbelly. A tactical nuke primed to devastate Batman both emotionally and ideologically. Physically, ridiculously dangerous. exceptionally well-trained. a match for Batman in every way. He’s a character that Bruce can’t fight properly, and, worse, one that punches holes in Batman’s modus operandi in ways that instinctively makes sense to the audience.
Bruce’s son, his greatest failure, returned from the grave as an agent of vengeance. Batman, through a mirror darkly.
sounds super interesting, huh.
Unfortunately, characters like Jason are also the agents of introspection and change. He would have forced Bruce to reflect and, worse still, readers to start second-guessing Batman’s morality. How many people walk away from Under the Red Hood thinking “holy shit, they should have killed the Joker”? Most, right? Jason would have changed Gotham’s status quo irreversibly and, unfortunately, Gotham can’t really change. progress can’t be made, villains can’t die forever, Batman can’t be wrong.
Because it sells that way, obviously. The Joker will never die, no matter how heinous he is, not really. Not while he’s selling merch.
So once it turned out that Jason was also super popular, what could DC do? He would shake things up too much if allowed to stay on course. He’s too dangerous, too strong. and so… character assassination! Keep the aesthetics of the angry shooty red helmet daddy issues clowns-bad man while changing the internal workings - fans won’t notice, right?
Strip away his competence, reduce his skillset, make him an idiot, a lunatic, a brawny shoot-first-don’t-think meathead! He’s not a strategist, he’s stupid, he charges in headfirst. Change his approach to vigilantism. He was always a bad Robin - he was violent and petty and dangerous and he and Bruce never jived in the first place. Keep him out of Gotham as much as possible and when you can’t do that, either quietly pretend he’s on good terms with the batclan or have him and Bruce run around in circles.
And, most importantly, he has to be wrong. He has to be unreasonable. He needs to be the screwup that needs to be sanitised, put in his place, and come crawling back to Bruce so he can be safely assimilated into the family.
Circling around to Urban Legends, Jason and Bruce’s dynamic has completely flipped. Jason is the one that has to change for Bruce’s conditional love, rather than Jason setting the terms Bruce has to meet for Jason to trust him again. Jason is the one that has to learn a Very Important Lesson about the flaws in his morality and align himself with Bruce’s - bearing in mind that Jason developed his worldview after experiencing, firsthand, the flaws in Bruce’s.
Jason is no longer a mirror forcing Bruce to think and develop and grow. He’s one of two things - a stupid, unreasonable villain or Just Another Graduated Robin that Bruce has to control and keep in line just a touch more than the others. His post-reboot arc is him trying to move past his trauma and grow but losing it all and returning, battered and beaten, to Bruce’s side. He’s rapidly losing what made him interesting in the first place and fifteen years later Bruce still hasn’t learnt a damn thing.
jason could never be jason for an extended period of time. villains would die, gotham would change, batman would evolve, and DC is too scared to try (hell, they can’t even let bruce stay dead). a braver industry might have made something amazing out of him but unfortunately DC comics just ain’t it
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