I'm reading the whole Mockingjay fluffy/hilarious headcanons, but defaulting to horror...
Am I the only one who thinks Jason, himself very messed up, teaching a mini Bruce that killing is okay if it's a "bad guy" is going to end with a lot more bodies than even Red Hood would be okay with?
Yeah, Bruce is a smart kid, but he is an eight year old kid, and very traumatized. Kids tend towards binary good guys and bad guys thinking. Elite kid Bruce is... not that likely to get why some bad guys should be spared, or why he can't have fun with (torture) all the bad guys.
I'm picturing Mockingjay killing some teenaged would-be mugger in Crime Alley and being utterly puzzled why Jason thinks this bad guy didn't deserve death.
He was just hungry and desperate? He needed the money to live? Well, some bad guy who was hungry and desperate killed his mom and dad! Would Jason have helped Joe Chill escape if they had caught him?
In Antithesis of Magic Bruce is currently ten! (I think. I haven’t checked but he’s either ten or eleven)
Very young, I agree. But despite his age he has a good sense of right and wrong, and all Jason’s influence did was make him become more flexible in how to deal with the really bad people.
Right now we’re still at the very beginning of the story, and there’s a massive amount of world building and character development still ahead of us. However, Bruce does not kill people himself. And he doesn’t like Jason doing so, either. He understands why Jason does it, and he trusts him enough to only kill the people who truly deserve it, but at the core of it all Bruce would still opt to take the non-lethal route. Which means he probably won’t fall into the rabbit hole too deeply.
Jason and Bruce balance each other out like that. With Bruce’s insistence on keeping it to necessary kills only, and Jason’s refusal to stop killing. A fragile balance, yes. But also one that allows them to harmonize as well as they do.
