ANOTHER DAY another cool au by the ghstbird community <33 Eldritch Jason Todd u are gorg <3, random question for brainstorming since I'm too invested now
How did the adoption scene take place? The same crime alley thing? Catherine todd? Willis? AAAAA or just local eldritch being that steals car parts (he's emulating human behaviour in crime alley, maybe he just tosses them later to kids???) maybe he just has immense compassion towards humans (although he doesn't fully understand them) (all Jasons need to be made out of bleeding compassion FOR ME BUT!! depends on what characteristics we're pulling for) (AND. IF HE'S DYING FOR SHELIA? gotta be compassionate. HE'S ROBIN, he is full of love towards these fleshbags. Though... uh... nonhuman... and having messed up emotional responses)
Nonono, because Robin Jason with his bleeding compassion is so important to me as well!!!
So basically (because I’ve put too much thought into this little au as per usual) the bullet points for eldritch Jason and the things you mentioned are as follows:
Jason spontaneously came into being. Eldritch things aren’t usually born in the way humans are, and Jason used to be a concept that suddenly gained consciousness.
(There was a short period of time where the brainstorming went into the direction of “eldritch jason found a dead street kid and assumed his appearance/inhabited the body”, but this seemed a bit dark so I had to come up with an alternative)
Jason watched humans for a quite a while and—alone from the very beginning— became enamored with the concept of family and love and happiness and belonging
One way or another (no specifics as of yet) Jason ends up with Catherine and Willis. Willis isn’t too shoddy in this au, he’s just… pretty neglectful. And a criminal. He does his damndest to stay well clear of wherever Jason is because that kid— he’s not normal. Maybe he’s a meta, Willis doesn’t care, all he knows that the sense of doom he feels around him is unnatural and he’d rather make his home in prison than around Jason
Catherine loves Jason. She can’t see beyond the surface layer of humanity Jason wears, partly due to her substance abuse, and Jason… knows that humans can’t last long like this. He can see her organs failing, her brain activity dimming, but he doesn’t know how to fix it. And he’s too busy basking in the love he’s finally feeling for the first time
Jason loves being human. If he could lock everything that isn’t human about himself away, he would. He thrives on witnessing strangers showing compassion to one another, to see them struggle and overcome hardships. They’re just a blip in the cosmos, in time, but they’ve got so much to offer. But likewise, he loathes witnessing injustice
When Jason ends up on the streets he’s just a big ball of sad. No home, no love, nothing. Nothing left. At least he needs neither food nor shelter to survive, but it still sucks. He loses some of his blind eyed wonder for humanity during this time, but not enough to give up on it. He adapts, he overcomes, and like you said, he starts emulating other street kids. Collecting scraps and handing them out to the young ones. And when he sees the Batmobile just standing there… well, that’s a week’s worth of food for ten of the kids he knows
Hitting Batman with the tire iron is a knee jerk reaction borne from cautionary tales about adults. He’s not actually scared of Batman
(Batman may be a little scared of Jason. Especially when he ends up buying him a burger and, out of the corner of his eye, thinks he sees Jason unhinge his jaw only to reveal five more jaws and and an abyssal void and—)
Just… eldritch things. And the tribulations that come with pretending to be human. Wanting to be human.