I have so many feelings about UTRH and Jason Todd in particular. He's a bit of a walking tragedy,isn't he?
JASON IS MY POOR ANGRY SON
I love the Batfam, like, every single member of the Batfam, even those from alternate universes (shout out to Helena Wayne), but Cass and Jason have special places in my heart because of everything that they suffered as tiny children.
(I know they all suffered horribly but bear with me)
Jason and Cass were completely stripped of their personhood. Like, Cass couldn’t speak. She was in her mid-late teens and she could not speak, all she knew was murder and combat, she didn’t know friendship or music or laughter or nerding out over comic books or joy.
Jason was brutally murdered and then brought back to life in such a way as to rob him of his sanity, and ALL HE WANTED WAS TO GET BACK TO BRUCE, but his instability and the brutality he’d experienced and his own natural tendency toward violence and a harder sort of justice than Bruce advocates getting in the way, and HIM AND DICK and then later on him and Tim oh my God the betrayal Jay feels sometimes at having been replaced which makes his and TIm’s relationship so interesting, and then him and Damian, my murder sons, larger and tiny.
Also I ship Jay with all three Batgirls. Is that bad? I especially ship him with Cass bc I feel like they’d super understand one another, and they have shared experiences with the League that the others couldn’t understand (maybe Bruce, but his weren’t... Forced on him, the way Jay and Cass’ were), but I also feel like him and Babs would be kind of scary-brilliant together, because they’re the only characters we see holding a grudge against a Rogue who did them a great wrong and I think that only Jay could accept Babs’ hatred and only Babs could accept Jay’s bc I don’t think the others could understand it.
Jay/Steph is one of those pairings where you have the Massive Grump and the Happy Fairy and no one understands it and I am about that. Imagine if they’d been together when Bruce flipped his shit over the whole War Games mess. Jay would have torn Bruce apart.
IMAGINE JAY AT THE END OF WAR GAMES IF THEY’D BEEN TOGETHER OH NO.