i love the ways that under the red hood shows that this is not just some petty revenge scheme for jason. this is not just about getting back at joker or at bruce. this is about enforcing a new definition of justice that prioritizes the suffering of victims over the possible redemption of evil people.
this is why takes that characterize jason as being motivated solely by personal vendettas are missing my favorite read of his character. i mean make no mistake, it is personal for him. but this fight was personal even before he died, and only more so since his resurrection. jason has always held a righteous anger toward systemic injustice, and heās consistently motivated by empathy for those that unjust systems leave behind. when he confronts garzonas in batman #424, for example, he is motivated by a palpable empathy for garzonasās victim, who ultimately kills herself after he gets out of jail and threatens her over the phone (at the police station, in front of bruce, jason, and gordon). heās also motivated by a righteous anger at the systems that allowed that to happen, including batmanās way of only abiding by legal procedures. jason understands his role as a vigilante to be one who circumvents the systems in place when they fail to bring justice to people, and thatās exactly what he does by taking the fight to garzonas (whether you think heās the one who pushed garzonas or not).
in utrh, jason also places his victimization at the hands of joker as part of a much larger pattern of systemic injusticeā and when the system doesnāt work, as weāve established, jason is more than willing to go around it. reform is not his gig because waiting for the system to do its job delays justice, sometimes with dire consequences (see again #424, and also everything thatās ever happened with joker since jason died). so when jason makes his appeals to bruce on the grounds of what happened to him specifically, it is also an appeal to finally take the larger problems at hand just as personally as he does, and to handle them his way. from #641:
jasonās primary aim is to establish a way of doing things that will eliminate those who do harm from the equation entirely, and in doing so he will remake batman and gotham in his image. whether that is something that jason, bruce, or anyone else could ever actually achieve is an entirely different question. but we still see these larger, system-oriented goals come out in his very personal final monologue when he tells bruce, āi thought iād be the last one you ever let him hurt.ā
the first time i read this, i misunderstood it as āi thought youād do anything to make sure he didnāt hurt me,ā but thatās not it. it's not about the fact that bruce didn't save him. it's about the fact that jason thought that when it finally hit home for bruce, when joker's chaos and violence and killing finally showed up at his front door, that bruce would stop trusting the system to take care of it, that he would stop prioritizing one personās possible redemption over the real suffering of everyone else. he thought that bruce would make sure jason was jokerās last victim, the ālast one he ever let him hurt,ā and what wounds jason to his core is that not even his death was enough to radicalize bruce to his way of doing things.
jasonās angry that joker is still alive, not just because thatās his killer, but because thatās a killer. but even this isnāt specific enough, because jason clearly doesnāt think that every killer or criminal is worthy of death:
in jason's idea of a just world, bruce doesnāt need to kill any of his other rogues, many of whom also have blood on their hands. he just needs to kill joker, he insists, because he keeps hurting people, because heās not sorry, because he has absolutely no desire to reform and thus no capability to do so, and, at the personal level, ābecause he took me away from you.ā again, the fact that even being robbed of jason was not enough to make bruce see what must be done is what drives him to this extreme. much like bruce thinks he can force joker to reform, jason thinks that he can force bruce to change his understanding of justice by cornering him, by forcing him to choose him or joker then and there. and somehow, it still turns out worse for jason than it ever has for joker (i will spare us all the image of The Incident).
tl;dr jason's personal vendettas are inseparable from his larger commitments to a completely different regime of justice that will prioritize the prevention of suffering rather than the reform of rogues. to make it only about his desire for revenge or proof of bruce's love obscures the empathy that drives him and flattens some of his characterās most interesting complexities.