The minute anyone says that Jason had a part in his death because he went after the Joker, I have to automatically assume that you either haven't read A Death in the Family or have absorbed the information from a post.
Here are a couple of true statements that you would know if you read ADITF:
Jason didn't know the Joker was in the warehouse.
Jason didn't go into the warehouse to save his mother from the Joker, she told him to come with her so they can talk about what the Joker wants with her.
Jason was told that the Joker wasn't in the warehouse, that he had left a while ago.
Jason was given faulty information and his only sin was believing his mother.
And here are the panels:
Jason sees the Joker going into Sheila's tent and gets worried for her safety.
He says, "this is a job for BATMAN and Robin" not JUST Robin. He wanted Bruce's help.
Bruce tells Jason not to handle the Joker alone and to wait for him.
You could say that this is the page where he disobeyed Bruce, but all he does is want to talk to Sheila about the predicament she's in. Again, he doesn't look for or go after the Joker.
Sheila moves them into the warehouse so they can talk privately.
HE IS EXPLICITLY TOLD BY HIS MOTHER THAT THE JOKER HAD LEFT A LONG TIME AGO. And that turns out to be a lie.
So all of this happens without Bruce's knowledge and what does he think in minutes of coming back?
(Sorry for the blurry picture)
"I warned you not to take the Joker on by yourself." He didn't.
"I begged you to wait Jason, but of course you didn't."
"You never listen. Why. WHY?" He has multiple times.
Bruce has no idea what happened, but automatically assumes that it was Jason's fault. Even when Sheila tells him with her dying breath what happened, he still calls Jason reckless.
She tells him how much of a hero he was in his last moments, and instead of telling people that, Bruce basically tells anyone that he meets that Jason was disobedient. He has essentially erased what happened in the warehouse - the part that he knew - and replaced it with a completely different narrative that makes Jason his scapegoat.
people keep claiming that bruce is anti-killing people because he believes they deserve second chances and can get better and change and so on and so forth. to which i say he is very very bad at showing it.
obviously disclaimers apply: i do not like bruce wayne very much, i do not read batman-centric comics for batman's sake. i understand that my perception of him is not very flattering, and that as a character with such a long history, he's been written in all sorts of ways over the years.
so yes, i am sure there are comics out there where he is pro-rehabilitation, and where he really shows it. i am sure they exist. however, comics where he Does Not Do That definitely exist, and there are a lot of them. so i have created a not-at-all comprehensive list to place below.
batman (1940) annual 11 second story - love bird
"robin, lesson for the day: leopards don't change their spots; and penguins don't change their plumage--" - bruce wayne
penguin is released from prison on parole. bruce tries to stop this from happening as a character witness: the only reason he does not want penguin free is because he is "a master thief" and "a con man."
thing is, penguin has changed. the business he's doing turns out to be a legitimate umbrella factory. the employees are other ex-cons trying to go on the "straight and narrow," except being in this close proximity is a violation of parole. penguin goes back to jail, precisely because bruce did not believe he could be rehabilitated.
batman (1940) issue #652 - face the face part 4 of 8
"i find it interesting that the moment you return--i'm under suspicion! i do your work. i do right and not with the coin toss potential that i might do wrong. and yet in your eyes i'm still a villain." - harvey dent
during the one year later timeskip, bruce leaves gotham. he has harvey take care of gotham in his stead. harvey does a good job at this for nearly a year. when batman comes back, it coincides with the killing of several gotham villains, with evidence that points towards harvey. bruce immediately assumes that harvey is at fault, and opens the confrontation with an accusation.
harvey does not take this well, and this incident leads to two-face resurfacing and turns harvey back to doing crime/being a villain. he gave up on doing the right thing because bruce, when all the cards were on the table, did not believe that harvey had actually changed.
(harvey was framed, for the record.)
final night (1996) issue #4 / day of judgment (1999) issue #3 / the spectre (2001) issue #3
i'm not going to summarize hal jordan's entire parallax/redemption/spectre arc, but something very consistent between all of them is that bruce does not believe hal has changed. every time, bruce consistently assumes that hal is still acting with the mindset he had as parallax.
by the time we hit the spectre scenes, hal has already sacrificed himself to save the world twice! bruce is consistently the guy who doubts hal the most, who doesn't believe that hal is capable of changing. in fact, he dismisses everything hal does as parallax as a power grab/opportunity to play god, instead of what it is: a desire to fix everything twisted by grief.
batgirl (2000) issue #4
"a fake. of course. i must've lost more blood than i thought. thank you, alfred. of course it's a fake. it has to be." - bruce wayne
this panel is specifically in reference to bruce finding a video of the man cass kills as a child, when she does not understand the consequences of what she's doing. alfred suggests the video could be faked and bruce immediately decides that this is an immutable truth of the world.
bruce genuinely could not fathom a reality where cass has killed someone before. <- this does not say promising things about his attitudes towards people who have killed before.
red hood and the outlaws (2016) issue #25 - starting or ending
""we had a deal. you could operate in gotham city--you could stay free--if you didn't kill anyone." - bruce wayne
i think we all know about this one. jason shoots the penguin in the face on live tv and bruce chases him down, beats the shit out of him, and kicks him out of gotham. etc.
the key context here, though, is that jason literally pulls the same thing issue one in this volume! he shoots the mayor in the head as a fakeout to save said mayor from a mind-control virus. bruce finds this out, and this is where this entire "operating in gotham city" deal starts.
jason has done the exact same thing before without actually killing his victim. jason has done this exact thing for good reason. and yet bruce immediately assumes the worst and beats jason up about it! badly!
why is he like this?
i actually do have an answer for this. or implications of one.
it is projecting. he is projecting. he does not believe that he will ever be a good person again if he kills someone, and he projects this onto everyone else who has ever done bad things. it is the moral ocd.
obviously this does not make him evil but it does mean perhaps we should not trust him to be the perfect arbiter of what is ethical and good.
& if bruce supports rehabilitation he could do a little better at showing it.
ok so, all the robins were good robins you're just assholes who haven't read jason's pre-crisis or post-crisis robin era comics and think you know better than his fans who have alright, hope this helps
how do so many people have jason as a favorite character and also secretly want him dead. ill see a post abt something he did and the whole comment section is full of "i love him but," and "hes cool but like." guys i think you just dont even want it fr. thats just not your goat so stop saying he is. not saying they have to defend every aspect of his character, but half of the time i actually cant tell if they want him to have a good day or perish horribly bc he got what was coming. "haha yeah he should get beat up for that." i thought him committing that crime was valid and i like when he smiles and flips get his name out of your mouth😭
catherine todd anon here, the logistics don’t matter much to me i just want catherine to see the young man her son grew up to be and to be just as loving and accepting and trustworthy as he remembers + both of them hugging and crying + ask her if her son is hard to love i fucking dare you + she always said jason was smarter than her and willis but she is so so impressed by him
making my heart combust over here augh. she's so proud to see he's the same caring boy as ever..... just as smart just as helpful & worried at the weight he's obviously carrying with how bone-tired he looks. thats her baby 😭 i bet theyre both clinging like theyll collapse otherwise, knowing this is something fleeting.
& jason... oof. finally getting to experience love & acceptance & trustworthiness without having to doubt anything would render him incoherent. its something he quite literally died for!!! after all that loneliness too, nearly no support system whatsoever. seeing that she immediately holds him & cries for him & says shes proud of who he is.... [distraught sobs in the distance]
the [ask her if her son is hard to love i fucking dare you] is frying me so bad tho sjfsrfj she will Get You. as it should be.
jason seems like the type to end up in the hospital after an incident with bruce and send a picture captioned "rage bait successful👍" to everyone he knows
The pervading concept that Bruce is "letting" Jason operate or holding back on him at all is so funny to me. How do you come to this conclusion. He has killed Jason visibly on panel multiple times. Like more than the Joker. There is no evidence to support Bruce LETTING Jason have or do anything. Every inch Jason takes is clawed from Bruce's white knuckled grip. Jason didn't luck his way into running Gothams underground, he's a tactical genius who played Bruce like a fucking fiddle using an updated version of Bruce's own plan and methods because Jason is competent and intelligent. The only reason Bruce wasn't blown up in his car is because Jason misses his dad. The only leverage he has to control Jason is Jason's desperate desire to be loved. Which he has used at least 3 times in recent memory to harm or kill Jason actually!!
Notably, for the sake of this conversation, it doesn't really matter if you think Bruce's behavior towards Jason is in character. Their relationship is inherently antagonistic and they are both aggressors towards each other, no matter how you slice it. What matters is that in canon, the text itself, is very clear in saying that Bruce would rather murder Jason himself than allow him to continue operating as Red Hood or acting on his own moral code. This is a consistent message from the narrative. You don't have to agree with the narrative, but that doesn't change what it is. To say that Bruce lets Jason get away with anything, that he holds back on Jason at all, that he has ever given Jason an inch that Jason didn't fight for - is in direct opposition to the text. Too many people state this reworking of the characters as a fact, that of course Bruce must be allowing Jason to operate, because how could someone like Jason get anything over Batman?? When in fact the ONLY way Bruce has managed to stop Jason from doing anything he wants to do IS murder or severe bodily harm.
Batman owed Steph his secret identity the second he told her abusive, criminal father what HER secret identity was.
Batman owed her his secret identity when he told her Tim's identity while continuing to refuse to share his own.
Batman owed her the knowledge of his undercover aliases & this was even called out in canon itself when he agreed to letting her be Robin. That's not even his secret identity.
I don't think it makes any goddamned sense to have Robin not know your identity but I digress. There are reasons he should have given her his secret identity, but knowing his secret identity wouldn't have saved her, knowing about his secret mob oc persona whose identity he stole years ago would.
people are like why do you talk about classism so much in jason’s writing in comics and in fandom but they don’t realise the lit nerd jason fanon (though partially rooted in canon) is in part actually push back about how the fandom thought jason was dumb because he dropped out, that he wasn’t interested in higher education, that the potential jobs fandom gave him was always blue collared ones “just because”. things used to be much worse and i think there’s a pretty drastic shift in how jason is perceived and characterised in the past 10 years or so, and possibly why i don’t care if fans lean too much into him being a lit enthusiast. because well, i’ve seen the alternative and i don’t want to go back there
I agree for the most part, but I do feel there's something insidious about how people use his literacy (or not) when discussing his humanity or worth as a person and character. Like we're not really escaping the classism by applying an attribute to him that people tend to associate with upper class intellectualism. The judgements that are aimed towards blue collar folk are the problem, not the fact that blue collar folk exist. It's not actually reckoning with bias, instead it just removes him from the general population of the group they're biased against.
Because what does that say to poor people who aren't that educated or don't have college aspirations? It just reinforces that people don't take them seriously.
look i hear you but i think you are missing my point and therefore bears repeating: what i am saying is that the current fanon interpretation is annoying but is actually rooted in canon.
comparatively, the previous landscape of having fanon jason be illiterate and generally full of anti-intellectualism was solely derived from him being a homeless kid drop-out from crime alley. because it was from an era where even less people actually interacted with the source material and went off his background.
i am not discussing his “worth as a person and a character”… i am discussing how fandom is now engaging with the source material more than they used to and going beyond projecting their headcanons that are rooted in classism and contradictory to him as a character.
if you want to discuss if jason being portrayed as a nerd is leaning too far that it does a 360 and becomes classist, sure? but this is not the point that i’m making nor is this a post that is inviting discussion on that and i’d appreciate if you make your own post on that topic.
people are like why do you talk about classism so much in jason’s writing in comics and in fandom but they don’t realise the lit nerd jason fanon (though partially rooted in canon) is in part actually push back about how the fandom thought jason was dumb because he dropped out, that he wasn’t interested in higher education, that the potential jobs fandom gave him was always blue collared ones “just because”. things used to be much worse and i think there’s a pretty drastic shift in how jason is perceived and characterised in the past 10 years or so, and possibly why i don’t care if fans lean too much into him being a lit enthusiast. because well, i’ve seen the alternative and i don’t want to go back there
Why do people have this obsession that you have to forgive to move on.
I see this all the time with Jason, but in real life too. Why should he have to forgive Bruce to move on with his life. Why should he have to let go of every shitty thing Bruce did to him. Why is that paramount to his happiness?
Because it fucking isn’t.
What he needs is distance and time and to never be a Batfam member again. Because staying with the Batfam is beating a dead horse. It’s like trying on clothes that don’t fit and are too small and were never really yours in the first place, because you didn’t even like them. It’s trying to fit back into a family that’s made itself into a family in your absence. Trying to fit into a family that has boxed up your stuff and taken down the photos, to the point that there’s no evidence you ever existed at all. The only memory of you is a person that never existed in the first place at all.
There is no world in which Jason has to forgive Bruce, none.
I don't really understand where people get the whole "Jason begged Bruce to break his moral code to kill the Joker" interpretation from. I imagine maybe it's more from the movie adaptation than the comic? Because I feel like the comic is fairly clear in that Jason is willing to do it himself. It's not just about the Joker dying or Bruce being the one to kill him; it's about Bruce seeing that Jason has to be the one to go to that extent.
When he tosses the gun to Bruce, Jason offers the ultimatum of: I'm going to kill Joker. You can stop me by shooting him yourself or shooting me before I'm able to.
The point of the confrontation isn't that Jason wants to force Bruce to kill the Joker. It's that he wants Bruce to undeniably feel the repercussions of his decisions/moral code. That's why Jason didn't kill the Joker when he had the chance in Lost Days, and why he didn't kill Bruce with the car bomb. It's why he painted the message "JASON TODD WAS HERE" upon his return. Jason is the consequence. Jason having to resort to becoming Red Hood is the consequence. He wants Bruce to see it, to acknowledge and confront the failings of his code directly.
The ultimatum of Under The Red Hood was Jason giving Bruce a final out. To allow him to take responsibility for the role of his previous inaction in this outcome. How you feel about the conclusion is completely subjective, but objectively speaking the ultimatum was never Jason demanding Bruce kill or change who he is on a fundamental level.
