listen to me. listen. sometimes character development is your fav blooming into a well-rounded, emotionally stable badass. and sometimes it's your chillingly rabid dog of a man getting wetter and more pathetic, spiraling out of control, actively trying to sabotage his own life. now just pretend this is all intentional storytelling on dc's part. canon is a guide we just roll with it.
you can only maintain that kind of vicious momentum for so long before you start to fall apart. and i think i would interpret what has been occurring to jason in various titles (like rhato and team z and tmwsl) as 'falling apart'. his decision to try to play by bruce's rules (more or less) has not garnered him any more favor with bruce than he had previously. it cements the notion that he's gone too far to ever be tolerated in batman's eyes, let alone redeemed. bruce doesn't trust him, he doesn't trust bruce. he's aiming for that validation, but it's slapdash, halfhearted. he retreats into his anger, he refuses to communicate openly with bruce or the other bats.
this results in a series of mind-bogglingly self-destructive shenanigans of a somewhat indeterminate timeline. bruce gives him a disproportionately brutal beatdown over a perceived infraction jason does not even bother to clarify. jason goes undercover for bruce on a particularly dangerous mission, refuses orders to pull out, and finds himself coerced and manipulated into making things worse (without his knowledge).
it's alluded to that he's not eating, he's having nightmares, he's slowing down, he's getting sloppy. he's in a t-shirt and a hoodie half the time, for fuck's sake. roy dies, one of the only friends he even has. ALFRED dies, he's lost the one person who's made a point of maintaining a familial relationship with him without judgement. he's drinking more, always depicted at some bar or another. the 5 o'clock shadow of Sorrow. the joker(s) is/are in town and funnels all of this angst in the single-minded pursuit of taking his head. complete tunnel vision. someone's taking the blame for all of this and if it isn't the joker it's him.
he's off the rails, systematically putting every henchman in gotham in the hospital. the moment he thinks he's killed the joker (but not really) he lets himself get arrested without a fuss. doesn't even resist until stephanie (?) barbara (???) and rose help bust him out. he's using selina and her cat burglar students for information. batman, being out of his mind, has a couple more disproportionately violent encounters with him, gives him a fucking lobotomy and tells him it's for his own good. jason overcomes it enough to make Grand Suicide Attempt #1: Save Gotham From A Meteor (by driving a plane into it and making it explode).
later he is kidnapped by the joker feeding pigeons in the park, exposed to joker toxin so he is Violent TM again, and again misled into playing part in Yet Another Plot to Destroy Gotham with the promise of killing one (1) of two jokers. so begins Grand Suicide Attempt #2: Save Gotham From Joker Toxin (by driving a blimp into a train into a bridge and making it explode). has to be resuscitated by rose.
meanwhile batman makes the sage observation to dick that he is kind of shit at this family thing and actually dick it should be your responsibility. then fucks off.
this is not... some kind of face turn moment for jason so much as it is a desperate, unhinged bid for validation. from SOMEONE. or to die trying. the one thing all of his anger and his cleverness can't buy him is undoing the wrongs of his past and by wrongs he means the things that pissed bruce off. he's not quite ready to fully admit that the things he's responsible for ultimately have done more harm than good. he's always got justifications on the tip of his tongue, but they're getting fewer and further between. he confides in tim that he know's he's a failure, and a monster, and thinks he's alone. at this point, the only way out of this from his point of view is to pull some self-sacrificing bullshit and go out in a way batman approves.
do you see. i've put it all together it all makes sense. no no shhhh... no inconsistencies here. he's a messy, awful little man coming to terms with his humanity for the first time in a long time. so you know what. if the dude is a little unhinged. if he's a little feral. i'm here for it.
