Some observations and analysis:
-In Under the Hood, Bruce is clearly Jason's favourite person and Jason is splitting about it, his perception of Bruce is ambivalent in very intense ways
-In Under the Hood, Bruce's attitude towards Jason is ambivalent in the sense that he 'passes' certain tests (fighting alongside Jason, despairing after Jason makes him believe he died), and 'fails' some others (condemning Jason for killing Captain Nazi in self-defense, disagreeing with Jason's philosophy, the final confrontation).
-In Under the Hood, Jason confronts Bruce and demands he put an end to the ambivalence by either letting him kill Joker or killing him (coherent with a bimodal worldview of "either you love me" (as shown by a clear universal set of behaviours) and "or you don't" (as shown by a different, clear, universal set of behaviours) that does not tolerate contradiction). Bruce attempts to reject the two choices given as he finds neither of them acceptable, but ends up not succeeding in doing so and ends up killing Jason again.
-in Nightwing, Brothers in Blood, Dick is very clearly Jason's favourite person, and Jason is seeking his approval and love. He is explicitly stated to be undergoing a psychiatric episode, being called 'psychotic' by most of the characters with dialogue in the story (this is not an exaggeration. Fuck that comic.), and that is probably part of the explanation as to why he continues to go after Dick without seeming to take into account/process the repeated rejections, telling Dick "we should hang out together" as though Dick hadn't told him to get fucked the last time he asked, kinda like he's not processing it properly at least at first. We also see a sequence of Jason that I interpret as Jason age regressing and the idea that he is seeking out his big brother's approval out of vulnerability, and then of course throughout the story there is the constant theme of identity with Jason going out as Nightwing calling himself Nightwing and clearly plastering Dick over his own sense of self. Nightwing Brothers in Blood, because dc hates me personally, ends with rejecting, and notably at some point Dick decides to leave Jason to did in a warehouse about to explode (because dc hates me personally), stating that 'Jason can take care of Jason for once' (because Dick has been so good at taking care of Jason throughout the comic).
-Bruce in general has a very interesting relationship with how he treats people in life and death that sometimes feels like he is more used to translating his love through grief than through interacting with living beings (probably because he built himself over his guilt and grief for his parents' deaths). See for example him telling Steph on her deathbed that she was really Robin compared to their relationship in her robin run or, in more recent comics and to stay on the topic of Jason, when Jason volunteered to die for the plan to stop the Failsafe whole thing and Bruce, who just a bit, earlier had fucked with his dna to permanently disable him.
-again, in Gotham War, Bruce fucks with Jason's dna to introduce a fear failsafe that makes him feel extreme fear and almost gets him killed when he cannot move to run out of a building on fire; Bruce tells him that he is doing this out of love
-in modern comics, Jason wants a relationship with the batfam in general, and expresses pain about the continued on-and-off again ambiguity of their relationship (ambiguity that, as we've seen before, Jason is really good at dealing with). See, for example, Task Force Z.
-in modern comics, Jason is explicitly, at least always passively and sometimes actively, suicidal.
Comic in which Jason tries to kill himself but from the angle of "because that's what the batfam wants". Aka a lot of "they love me better when I'm dead", "I can either be alive or be loved" thoughts, a lot of dichotomies and either/or reasonings, the incremental weight of the bat-ambiguity becoming less and less tolerable. Jason going through a psychotic episode (in the context of bpd/cptsd) and thinking that he is a Member of the Batfam (not like. any one of them at random, i mean it as like. The idea of a batfam member) who needs to kill Jason Todd to "fix it" (what is being fixed remains unclear). From a storytelling point of view, I think it can be done as a multipov story where people find out someone is ordering a hit on Jason, a mysterious hooded figure wreathed in shadows saying that they need to "fix it" (wording vague enough that this can be first understood as a time travel story, so that even as the characters find out that the mystery guy trying to kill Jason is Jason, the immediate in-world and reader theory is that this is Jason from the future trying to fix the timeline, with a scene where they recognise his dna and go "it's gotta be time travel). But it is not in fact time travel -just Jason who does not want to live like this anymore, who doesn't know if he is a member of the family or not, who thinks he both is and isn't at the same time, who starkly wants to be "a member of the family" and who believes that to be a member of the family is to want Jason Todd dead.
We never do get what it is Jason wants to "fix", because it's not about building something, it's about taking definitive action to solve an intolerable state, it's about his resurrection being treated as an undesirable/an anomaly rather than a miracle, it's about wishing to go in the past and making sure something that already happened didn't happen and attempting to destroy the cause of that impossibility. The theme of time travel is interesting here because it's both a red herring and a metaphor for the paradox of dealing with trauma and suffering by trying to fix the present by stopping something from happening in the past that's already happened so that they can create a future in which they're completely in control and they don't have to live their present torn between fear of the future (either fear of something bad, like rejection or pain, or fear of nothing changing), suffering from the past and grief over what the present could have been. The theory that this is Jason from the future trying to kill Jason from the present to stop him from fucking with time falls through, but does it really?
And if death isn't the solution (which it isn't) how do you even begin to untangle this knot? That's going to require a lot of help, and some time to figure it all out. In the end, it's still all about time.
