Oct 15, 2023
jason sweetie you cannot keep doing this
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jason sweetie you cannot keep doing this
jasons got so much black and white thinking at times like. if Bruce can't do this for me he never loved me. if Bruce never loved me i am unlovable. if im unlovable i might as well be hated for something ive done instead of something i am...
its that last one thats the only thing that really keeps me firmly in camp shrodingers felipe... like i vehemently disagree that jason having done it is like "proof" he was ~already bad~ or ~too damaged~ or whatever the fuck dumbshit. like morally speaking jason weighed this mans life over the life of his next victim and made a choice and while you don't have to agree with him, or judy koslosky for that matter (batman 422, jason goes on to paraphrase her in lost days)... like, come on. it was explicit that the law and batman couldn't touch him, he bragged he was gonna do it again, jasons options as presented to him were "let him" or "kill him".
but the reason i continue to like the ambiguity there about whether or not jason did kill the guy is because bruces reaction... i mean my god, compare and contrast ollies reaction when 16-year-old *mia* thought she had to kill someone while ollie visibly disagreed-- ga 39:
ga 40:
^ btw this is also one reason OF MANY why i kill and eat anyone who compares ollie negatively to bruce. fava beans nice chianti etcetera etcetera
(dinah also reams him out about it more in this same issue while they're breaking up. read green arrow 2001 🔫)
anyway. fuckin buce by contrast
batman (1940) 424
batman 425
just to start. (ditf starts at issue 426 btw.) (also god starlin is such a hack. Bruce directly causes the deaths of 3 people in 425-- two by jumping out of the way of gunfire so they hit each other, one by accidentally knocking over an unstable pile of cars. but sure, Jason's the one who can't handle it.)
anyway. all this just to say that if jason truly did not kill felipe but bruce believed he did and that leads directly to him feeling so unloved that he runs away to find his birth mom and yknow. gets murdered bc she sold him out bc, from his perspective, *she* also found him unlovable...
jason todd should have killed more people 🤷
i think its so funny when ppl ship jason/black mask bc like. they're clearly going for like a fucky toxic badtimes yaoi for jay a la dickslade or rastim and you know what i respect that i do but jason does not lend himself to that at all man. jason was running circles around black mask all through utrh he was walking that man like a dog from the beginning and it wasnt even hard. you need to understand that the thing youre shipping here is bugs bunny/elmer fudd
one thing i think people miss when trying to nail down the like nitty gritty of like-- okay. so post-crisis post-resurrection Jason's a hypocrite, right? and hes purposely fancast himself as the villain opposite bruce in utrh.
but also even while Jason's doing this he *has a point,* and he *knows it.* Jasons got a lot of big moral ideas hes spouting, and from what we see, he mostly only abides by *some* of them. so while you're like acknowledging that utrh/lost days jay is motivated by his emotions and doesn't act in ways that align with his moral principles, but also he *keeps bringing **up** those moral principles*, you start to wonder like. What the hell is going on in that big brain of yours jay.
and what i was getting at. the thing i think most people miss or forget when exploring that. is jasons appearance in outsiders 2003.
im looking through the tpb so im not giving you the exact issue numbers for any of these panels sorry but its 44-46 plus the annual.
but here is the crux of the matter:
cutting for length!!
it actually does matter that talia put jason in a gold pit because like. lost days did technically come out after there had been other instances where this wasn't the case (because comic book lore is inconsistent at the best of times) but the predominant Lazarus pit lore was still that green ones get ruined when you use them. what talia did instead of ruining one of them (and for context Ras very much sees all Lazarus pits as inherently belonging to him, thats the kind of person he is), was push jason into the gold pit ras was using while ras was using it. the sheer moxie. the unmitigated gall. absolutely who is doing it like her.
jason slowly coming to terms with the fact that he's a real boy and he's not going to die young a second time and starting to unravel some of the habits he built when he thought he came back for a bad time not a long time. is SO compelling to me
and i think in its most tangible form its just... allowing himself to care about domesticity. stopping holding himself back so much from being a bit of a homebody... letting himself learn the names of his neighbors. he's always wanted a kitchenaid and, fuck it, this bread machine at the second hand store is only $10 and if it doesn't work, it won't be the end of the world.
but it does work, and he makes homemade bread with apple butter his neighbor gave him, and if he's going to wake up again tomorrow with the sun shining on his face, he might as well pick out some curtains.
actually. still thinking about the stuff i mentioned in this post about like. people getting disproportionately mad at jason for mia compared to. like. any other supervillain that is *absolutely* also supposed to be somewhat sympathetic. like, thinking of two-face here in robin: year one (the dixon/beatty version).
because harveys role in the plot is adjacent to what Jason's is. he poses a clear danger to robin that makes the guardian/mentor reconsider the wisdom of having a kid sidekick at all. jason's actually there to make mia think about it, moreso than ollie, but their role as the antagonist of the story raises similar questions.
and i get that with comics in particular, your emotional reaction to what you read will always be influenced by what you see the fandom doing, and you do have... like im fairly sure the harv apologists are just like "i dont care who he hurt he looked good doing it" (and tbeyre so valid for that). and by comparison the jason legion, for we are many, are this whole scatterplot range of--some people only like him as a villain/think hes "unredeemable" (🙄), and some people want every bad thing hes ever done to be whooshed away by "pit madness" (🙄), and some people who. i have no ill will towards them but theyre fans of the new guy, the prime earth guy, and thats just a different character from my guy to the point that hes not even really relevant to ga 69-72 when we talk about it-- but nevertheless theyre in the same fandom, and the guy they like has the same name. so that can color peoples interpretations of whats on the page jf, for example, any of those factions really grates their cheese.
anyway. all that aside i do still feel like people get very angry at jason for being the antagonist--being a supervillain, even--maybe because he's so sympathetic by comparison in under the red hood/lost days (or i guess stuff the new guy's been in, if thats more your speed). like why did he terrorize mia! why did he scare her and beat her up!
and while i think the answer to that, from a character motivation perspective, is so obvious as to be. fucking asinine to need it spelled out-- the real answer is because as the storys antagonist he is there to challenge the protagonist. and in this case the challenge is not only the physical fight, its also a challenge to the question of whether or not plucky teen sidekicks should still exist in a post-death in the family dcu, where the baddies are badder and anyone can die.
r:yo was never asking that *specific* question, so lets just set it aside. thank you for your help harvey.
jason is a much easier target for reader anger than ollie because well. jason is absolutely doing something *wrong,* and he knows it, but he also has a fucking point, *and he knows it.*
ga01 was ABSOLUTELY engaging with and exploring aspects of the kid/teen sidekick trope that we know and love--mia kills a man on her test run, and the responsibility for mia being in a position where she felt like she had to do that, and the resulting trauma, is placed squarely and correctly on ollies shoulders. mias origin story meant she was never safe in her fucking life until she moved in with ollie, and now she finds out its left her with something permanent and life-changing--shes HIV+. what is safety? what is childhood? what does she want out of life, faced with her own mortality? she wants to help people. she wants to be a hero. and the way this unfolds, in the context of the dcu and how it works, you can see why ollie says yes this time. (and im so so glad he did.)
and jason shows up 20ish issues later when shes good and established to be like, "hi. you sure about that?"
and this is a chicken or the egg kind of situation where jason would not have done this to a civilian. shes a superhero. shes in uniform. there is an inherent danger to doing that and while you know that--both you the reader and you, speedy, green arrows junior partner and teen titan--nobody demonstrates it like jason "trolley problem" todd, both as the first notable dead sidekick and an incredibly dangerous, incredibly *terrifying* person. one who is *hell-bent* on *proving* it to you.
and when i say chicken and egg i mean while jason's responsible for his own actions, Ollie is explicitly responsible for mia's safety. imo blowing up the school wasn't to scare mia--it was to scare ollie. jason took the stakes of what it means to be speedy, or to *have* a speedy, and made them concrete. and that takes the concept of a plucky teen sidekick and makes it uncomfortable again because, god, she's just a kid. should she really be fucking doing this? (should her guardian really be *letting* her do this?)
(and people forget this, or purposely ignore it, but jason cant be more than 2 years older than her in this continuity, using tim as a benchmark. and i say this not because i want to emphasize that he would see mia as a peer rather than a child--though he would--or to imply he wasnt responsible for his actions--he was. i say this bc what was he doing in the supervillainy, he should have been at the club)
what i was getting at was i think rather than allowing the concept to exist in that gray area it is so much easier, so much more comfortable, to instead just be like. Well jason shouldn't have done that. he could have done it a different way. if he never put her in danger she wouldn't have been in that danger that night. and yknow all of those things are true but they don't negate the point he was making (and he was also doing more than that yk but this post is already Long lol), which was that that uniform puts a target on her chest. are you prepared for what that means?
and the difference between jason doing this, and Harvey, aside from the relative annoyingness of the people who want to condemn or exonerate them, is that. jason is not just a supervillain. he is a victim of *exactly* this thorny question. and he became a supervillain directly in response to this. you can not separate his actions here from the part where he knows what the fuck hes talking about, because it happened to him. and to make that less thorny, less uncomfortable, the focus turns away from the point he was making back to. Well he shouldn't have done it like he did it. while also ignoring that...... he did it like he did it because he knew how it felt, what it meant, to be a hero. if he didn't do it like he did it, would it have gotten through to them at all? would we still be talking about it like 20 years later?
anyway jason did such a good job posing uncomfortable questions in the narrative 🥰 im so proud of him for all his hard work!
while i do believe jason is fussy about, even at times crossing into precious about, wasting food, i absolutely dont believe jason actually refrains from just like. throwing money around. the guy went from having nothing but a lighter, a tire iron, and a saucy little vest to being bruce waynes son. at no point in jasons formative years was money a resource he had access to for longer than the time it took to sell hawked car parts and immediately buy whatever he needed. after he came back from the dead and had talia as a patron that was all expenses funded but even without that one of the first things we see jason even do in utrh is steal metric fuckton of kryptonite and while hes lying to sionis that he did that for the money. That is truly worth so much fucking money. not to mention the "what, like its hard?"ism of becoming a major drug lord in gotham city at 18 just as an inconsequential stepping stone towards his actual goal. Money is absolutely not real to him, personally. if he runs out he will simply go get more.