I just think Fame is a Gun is a Dick Grayson song and that he drove everyone in his life insane by bopping along to it constantly for an entire summer. everyone has heard him sing aloud to this song at the top of his lungs even though he absolutely can't hit those high notes. out with the Titans. in the car with Tim. in the cave with Bruce and Damian. it's blasting while he works out in the gym and absolutely no one is missing the lyric parallels at this point. they get it! everyone is sick of it.
everyone except Jason. who hears him do it once and is like wait a second is this fucking song about us??
Dick: ...
Dick: you know I used to feel resentful about how closely you followed in my footsteps but I have literally never been prouder than in this moment
anyway they spend an afternoon creating a dance routine that really makes use of those OG Robin acrobatics. Tim and Damian have never been more embarrassed in their lives.
i DO believe that a good writer can make mischaracterization work. oh there's a character who doesn't normally cry? figure it out!! dissect the character. make the situation cryable for them. make that character cry ugly tears even if it goes against their very nature. YOU CAN MAKE IT WORK!!!
I need everyone to hear me out on this but cigarette smoke by Olivia Rodrigo is actually a canon Jason song
The cigarette smoke
Is a smell that I know
It clings to my clothes
And seeps into my bones
It's a real quiet house
With the shower left on
Five beers in the fridge
And the second car's gone
First four lines self-explanatory, last four lines about how he tries to return home post-resurrection but no one is there waiting for him anymore. It's a house haunted by the people who used to live there (the shower's still on), not just him but Bruce too (the second car's gone).
When taken in conjunction with the first four lines, we're possibly creating a parallel between that and essentially being left alone in his childhood (five beers in the fridge); he knows this smell (feeling), it's in his bones (in his DNA, can't escape it), it's the same thing happening again.
I regret you
And how long I stayed
I resent you
For not being brave, oh
Pre-chorus which could have all SORTS of interesting implications depending on Jason's headspace but my immediate read is a n52/rebirth, RHATO-era Jason who is trying to move on and regrets how long he focused obsessively on Bruce in the UTRH-era when it was never going to give him what he needed.
Tell me something honest
So the memories turn dark
You said that I made loving look easy
'Til I made it hard
Give me back my time and I will
Give you back your heart
I thought that we played the perfect couple
'Til you didn't want the part
Chorus which takes us back to the Robin daysāor, that is, looking back on the Robin days from a post-resurrection standpoint and just aching. Tell me something that can get rid of those memories so that I don't have to hurt over how good it used to be anymore. Tell me the truth of how it was never really real at all (what was that thing he said to Damian that one time? Your father pretended to love me like a son?) so I can let it go.
"You said that I made loving look easy / 'til I made it hard" works DOUBLE because it's about Bruce firing Jason as Robin when Jason got difficult but also, obviously, about how hard Jason made it post-resurrection, and Bruce's... reaction to that. Or lack thereof. "I thought that we played the perfect couple / 'til you didn't want the part" is basically the same but skews more toward the first thing, if we take "the perfect couple" as Batman and Robin, the dynamic duo.
"Give me back my time and I will / give you back your heart" is THE MOST INTERESTING part to chew on, to me, because obviously I'm reading this whole thing as if Jason is the speaker, but my first instinct would be to say that he's the one who needs his heart back, right? Bruce is the one who seems like he already doesn't care anymore, from Jason's point of view. And it'd be easy to take "time" in the same way I did in the pre-chorus, as Jason somewhat giving up on Bruce post-UTRH, but as I said, I think this chorus is mostly about Robin.
And it's hard to read the Robin years as time, because it's like, what else was Jason going to do with that time? He was a kid. He was a kid who had nothing else, no one else. Give it back for what, exactly?
So the thing that kind of cracked it for me is when I thought about time as life.
Because Bruce changed the whole course of Jason's life when he took him in, right? Arguably he became the center of the universe that Jason orbitedāand then didn't live up to the bargain when Jason came back, didn't keep playing the part. But Jason could never just stop and be anything else because Bruce raised him (thank you Talia Lost Days for this quote + emphasis). He would need those formative years back.
So then it becomes, to me, you did love me until it got hard, this did hurt us both, but it was a conditional kind of love, for you. The trade becomes: since it's obviously so easy for you to take it back, since you obviously want out of this now, I'll let youāif only you can figure out how to do the impossible and give me back time so I never loved you at all, because that's the only way out of it for me.
Some nights can be
So fucking lonely
But it's better than begging
For you to stand up for me
Back to the verse, fairly simple this time, but also devastating, because do we have to confront the loneliness at the core of Jason's character now? Yeah? And then obviously the last two lines would be about Joker. Which can also be supported by the pre-chorus this time around (which becomes "I resent you / for taking her side") if we change the pronoun.
I do think there's an interesting secondary reading of those last two lines that I can't quite articulate, almost about Bruce standing up for Jason to... himself? To his own moral code? Something about begging Bruce to love him anyway, to still see him as a son, in spite of everything he's done. But he has done it, and this is who he is now, and he's not going to beg. This isn't quite as supported by any of the wording, but it's what it makes me think of.
It's bone-dry, bitter and hollow
You'll be miles away tomorrow
Why'd I try at all?
It's bone-dry, bitter and hollow
You will never know my sorrow
Why'd I try at all?
I think this bridge is also self-explanatory and not tied to any particular events, because it's all feeling. "Bone-dry" = there's nothing left here. Bitter and hollow is how it feels to Jason and also what's between them now, bitterness and the hollow shell of something that used to be love and family. "Why'd I try at all" = more regret, more "if this had never happened, I wouldn't have to hurt this way," but I'm also kind of always reading this for Jason as "I should have known better." How many parents has he had fail him, now? Why'd he put so much of himself into this one, why did he try so hard? (Thinking about this always but also in post-RHATO 25 context...)
"You'll be miles away tomorrow" and "You will never know my sorrow" are both interesting because to me, they echo the thing that is implicit in the rest of the song, and the thing I was saying about Jason being the one to need his heart back, which is basically the idea that the speaker was the one to love more. They're the one who is getting left behindāI'll be here, you'll be miles away. Which of course, in Jason's case, would be about emotional distance, which is always pretty apt for Bruce.
Tell me something honest
So the memories turn dark
Oh, the memories go dark
The memories go dark
The memories go dark
The memories go dark
Go dark
Go dark
Finally, the outro. This isn't any new information from the chorus, but I do think that the focus returning to the memories at the end is telling. The repetition here. A lot of the song is a simple expressing of emotion, honestly, only in the chorus and here do we ever actually ask for something. And the fact that we return to it this way makes me read it, in this context, as: Jason can say all he wants about how he feels, how Bruce feels, he can regret and resent and be as self-aware as it takes, but this is what he needs. And it's impossible. In order to actually let go of Bruce and move on and stop feeling this pain, he'd need to be able to forget or change how good it used to be. How at one point, it was almost what he needed, probably the closest he ever came.
And then of course, do I think we can read a nod to Jason's canonical flirtation with returning to death/suicide into this ending? Yeah, of course I do. The last lines being shortened to a repetition of "go dark" so that it becomes ambiguous what is going dark, the memories or something else, the memories or everything.
(And is that the only way to stop the memories? To stop the pain?)
trying so hard to get new batman fic posted but fighting for my life to finish anything because the three things Iām working on are 1) a long fic that I impulsively wrote 27K of in 2 weeks but then got stuck halfway through, 2) a āquickā oneshot that I started as a break from that but now itās 10K and counting, and 3) a fic I wrote three years ago that I thought only needed one last edit but it turns out that it ACTUALLY needs a fairly comprehensive rewrite to account for my new and more complex understanding of canon after a recent reread, SOMEBODY please help me
so does anyone else ever think about how Red Hood and Batman are often set up in opposition to each other but Jason's stated goal in Under the Red Hood is actually to be Batman but Better. and also Worse. like he came back different but is the difference just that he is, in some ways, more like Bruce now?
he died a bird and then came back and made himself a bat
i love how being a robin is like. once a robin, always a robin. no one will ever understand what being a robin is like except other robins. you will grow older and your identity will change but you will still carry bruce's imprint in your dna. those are his moves. that is his voice in your ear. you will never not be a robin, you will never not be his. you will never be alone again, even when you want to be. you may have been the first, or the last, but you will never be the only. you are a robin. you will always be a robin. insane.
I don't think Tolkien is a good fantasy writer because he scored the highest at some objective Best Fantasy Book Test that every fantasy writer has to take, I think he's a good fantasy writer because he created a world based on things that he was interested in. I feel like a lot of fantasy writers think that they need to create a whole language for their world because Tolkien did and obviously his books are the best so they have to emulate him, but Tolkien did that because he was a linguistics nerd. I think the lesson to be learned from him is not that you have to include elves and deep history and new languages, but that you have to write endlessly about the things you are a huge nerd about and use those things to create your fantasy world
i understand all that shit about honor and knighthood and solemn vows but ākingslayerā is simply a bad insult. it sounds cool as fuck. might as well call him the landlord annihilator or the billionaireās bane.
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