@wahbegan: why do you hate Jason/Babs so much? I mean tbh Three Jokers was the only time i'd ever seen it in any capacity [x]
This required an answer that was longer than the replies would let me give, and forgive me if it comes off as a bit snippy, but basically: it's a ship that is directly an outgrowth of comic creators being misogynistic and shopping Barbara around to every male Batfamily member in her radius because DC refused to allow her the same consideration in her romantic relationships that they gave for the male Bats and refused to allow more than one woman to exist within the Batfam. It's gross and the reason it exists is blatantly sexist.
Jason/Babs is a relationship that is entirely predicated on "giving Jason a love interest" rather than respecting Barbara as an individual character outside of her potential to be paired with whichever Batboy the writers like best that week. It's a situation where she was considered an empty vessel to be paired with whoever was convenient because she was the only major female Bat character allowed to exist during the New 52 era (besides Kate Kane, who's explicitly lesbian and was therefore Not An Option).
The decision to tease them as a potential couple happened during a period of time when DC was quite literally passing Babs around between the male Batfam members. In various pieces of comics and non-comics media over a three year period, she flirted with/dated Dick, Jason Todd, Luke Fox, Jason Bard, Ethan Cobblepot, Tim (in the Arkham games), and Bruce (in Bruce Timm's DCAU-adjacent Killing Joke movie). This is despite Babs usually being DECADES older than Jason and Tim and DC's dramatic de-aging of her during the New 52 being the only reason she was even remotely within an acceptable age range to potentially date Jason in the first place.
Writers largely did not give Babs equal treatment in any of these relationships, even the ones portrayed within her own book (Dick, Luke, Jason Bard, and Ethan). She was either a reward to be handed to whichever Batboy a writer wanted to do a love plot with, a way to create "shared angst and bonding potential" so the writer could focus on a male Bat's trauma, or subject to a carousel of dating subplots that had very little to do with her actual desires or character development. Writers just wanted to pair her with someone, so they grabbed the nearest available Bat-adjacent character whether it made any sense for Babs or not.
Barbara is traditionally over a decade older than Jason (since she's 4-6 years older than Dick depending on the retcon and Jason is 6-ish years younger than Dick); she, as a grown adult and full-time librarian, canonically tutored Jason before his death when he was 15. The fact that she was ever considered a viable love interest for Jason in the first place has its roots in the misogynistic de-aging of Babs in the reboot and the stupid-ass nonsense DC was perpetuating at the time about giving Jason all of Dick's old friends and teammates and love interests to hang around with. It was transposing Dick onto Jason in an attempt to do something interesting narratively with Jason rather than actually caring about Barbara as a character in literally any capacity. It's also not a relationship that makes sense in any way other than "ooooooh we need to give Jason a girlfriend who understands his ~trauma~. Let's pair him up with the other Bat who's been fucked over by the Joker!" Disregarding...you know, the myriad reasons why that's a shitty basis for a romantic relationship.
tl;dr: editorial and writer misogyny via using Babs as a shipping bicycle and reward for whichever male Batboy editorial likes best this week is bad, actually. Therefore, I hate Jason/Babs even conceptually because it does not consider what Barbara might want or need out of a relationship nor is it a relationship that was ever about her; it was strictly about what might be "cool" or "interesting" within the concept of Jason's story and the result of various writers trying to do something with Jason and make him interesting by giving him a potential girlfriend who "understood his trauma." Thankfully, it never truly manifested in any way other than flirting and some insinuations (except in Three Jokers, the original book under discussion), but we will all be better off when even the concept is dead and buried.
