jason became robin because he was inherently just and wanted to do the right thing even when batman ignored him. this is literally his origin story.
the pattern of him being naturally kind and sensitive to injustice preserves throughout all of his robin days. even when he was written by starlin – a writer who hated him on principle and wanted to make him as unlikeable as possible, he was still motivated by how much he *cared* about other people and how much he wanted to be loved. the incident with garzonas, for example – he chased him because he was so deeply traumatised by learning that a woman he knew for mere minutes committed suicide. the whole reason for which he wanted to find his biological mother – he wanted to be loved!
now, utrh (and some earlier flashbacks) already retconned a lot of this stuff to create the idea of the ‘angry’ or the ‘mean’ robin. that’s an issue especially when you consider how classist it is to insist that a child who was taken off the streets can have no other fate than becoming a criminal. but even there, in the utrh, jason was anything but cold. was his plan calculated, was it cruel in many ways and morally questionable? it was. was it cold? no. honestly, i just don’t get how you can read a scene in which a teenager offers his father an ultimatum between killing his killer or him and think it’s a reasonable, cold decision. on the contrary, it’s utterly delusional and desperate. if jason wanted to just get rid of the joker, he could – but he wants bruce to prove that he still means something to him. he wants to be loved. he cares.
“delusional” and “desperate” also describe his methods in general pretty well. i know it goes against a popular reading that jason is very down to earth and pragmatic because he’s intimate with the way crime and evil works. it is true, to a certain extent. but his aim itself, that is to do everything he can to minimise harm of other people, no matter the cost? is it not utterly delusional? and yes, he doesn’t agree with batman’s moral code. but the reason he feels so strongly about it is because they have essentially the same goal – protecting people, and he sees that batman sometimes fails at it. and jason cares so much, he can’t take any failure, he can’t let anyone be harmed, he takes it all personally.
even in jason’s villain era (I’m talking the battle for the cowl shtick for example) jason was anything but cold. his targets were always extremely personal. and that’s the content when he was written as a villain, it’s not even canon anymore.
it’s also pretty ironic that you say that he has a pretty strong sense of identity, given that he completely commits to being the red hood and doesn’t even have a civilian identity. and ‘red hood’ is a cruel reference to a man killed him, too. that doesn’t seem like a strong sense of identity to me, it seems like he sacrifices himself for what he thinks is right and like he identifies with his trauma so strongly that he can’t move on.
you’re talking of jason being ‘soft’ in fanon but that’s the point of his character in comics. he cares too much and it makes him cross the line. it makes him cruel. he’s a very interesting twist of an anti-hero archetype because of that: anti-heroes usually lack idealism, and act out of self-interest. their heroism is more of a side-effect of their actions. jay is the polar opposite: he is an idealist at the core and his heroism is what makes him defy conventional ethical codes. and I love seeing that, i love seeing him morally failing when his only goal is to be *moral.* what do you call an urge to keep other people safe, if not moral?
but the thing is, sacrificing yourself to become an authoritarian murderous robin hood will not change the world. i think at some point he would fuck up and harm people he intended to protect. and jason cares. so it would make sense for him to step back and consider his actions.
jason is no punisher nor deathstroke. he has a considerable baggage as a legacy character, and your reading completely disregards his original robin story. and that’s boring, tbh. because what makes him so appealing and tragic is that he is all of those things that he was when he was a robin still – an idealist, a protector, someone who cares. even the most awful plotlines point it out. i hated most of that specific plotline, but when damian said that jason is ‘the most emotional one’? facts.
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