look, i know i'm predictable. i know i keep making children to help the angsty black-and-red anti-heroes cope. it's fine. i'm fine. anyway, this is Perry, and she's part of my weird RH/Jason Todd rewrite adventure.
sometimes, you just gotta give the traumatized vigilante guy a small child to protect and a TLoU journey to go on. a healing journey.
more info/premise summary under the cut!
To summarize, part of my personal Jason timeline/canon for how I write my DC stuff is sooooo altered from canon Jason past UtRH that it's not even funny. Instead of a villain arc with Scarlet, he gets a self-discovery arc with Perry! yay! She eventually becomes his sidekick later on. This would, in theory, take place after a revised Battle for the Cowl arc that suits my personal tastes/purposes more and replace Revenge of the Red Hood. Meaning, in my chronology, this takes place between 2022 and 2023. Jason is 24.
Perry lives and works with her mother, a mechanic, in Crime Alley. A metahuman from birth, she possesses the powers of mechanokinesis— the ability to manipulate machinery and hardware —which makes her useful to her mom, the shop, and some shady guys Perry calls "the Men in Suits." She loves machinery and engineering, and she excels in her science classes at school, but she struggles with actual literacy and social skills. Her mother, Ruby, does her best with Perry, but she has struggled since birthing her to feel a true motherly attachment. In order to make rent and pay off the Men in Suits, Ruby lends her daughter's metahuman skills in secret to the criminals. Sometime during her childhood, an accident while working on cars/bikes has led to Perry losing both her right hand pinky finger and her entire left leg. She built the prosthetics herself.
Jason has recently attacked Tim at the Titans Tower and, confronted by his situation, spiraled into excess violence (sound familiar?). He decides, nearly killing a bunch of civilians in an attempt to down a rogue, he needs to leave Gotham until he can get it together. He takes his bike into Ruby's Roadster Repair, his usual spot, only to find the woman dead of a drug overdose by what seems to be several days. Stray dogs have gotten to her body. A little girl is hiding in the office crying.
After getting her out of there, Jason tries to take Perry to Social Services, but much like himself at her age, she refuses. Instead, she asks him to help her find her father. Her only insight as to his identity and location are his old military dog tags and some stuff from her mom's phone. Jason agrees. It's an excuse to get away like he wanted while also preventing this child from going off the rails by escorting and mentoring her (SOUND FAMILIAR?!). He learns of her powers when she fixes his bike, and the two set off across the country.
Along the way, Jason grows stupid fond of the kid and starts teaching her things. Perry comes to trust Jason more than anyone else. Here's what happens in their development respectively:
Jason
- Basically in the position Bruce was in with him, he starts to understand more of Bruce's past behaviour. It helps him understand his father, but Jason also makes choices that break the cycle.
- Because he can't do normal Red Hood stuff right now, Jason relearns his own good side and golden heart. He'll never be who he was before dying, but that doesn't mean all of that former self is gone. Just older. Different. A work-in-progress again. Perry brings back the adventurous spirit of his.
- Stupid dumb idiot learns to rely on other people to help him. Thank God for that. He even calls Dick and asks for help cash-wise and advice on small child handling.
Perry
- She comes more to terms, over time with Jason's help, that her mother wasn't really a good mom. Ruby undoubtedly loved her daughter, but Perry still suffered a lot. She learns that family is more than blood.
- With a lot of training, she gets better at using her powers tactically. Jason also helps her learn how to read mostly via Wishbone books and stops at libraries. Perry, also, learns to rely on others and understands that she's the kid; it's not her responsibility to be self-sufficient yet.
- Thanks to traveling (supervised), she learns there's more to the world and herself than being useful and being good. There's a lot of things to be, and she wants to expand her horizons. Jason helps her navigate this safely.
The other main obstacle besides the traveling itself is all the weird crime stuff they come across along the way. The two stop muggings, robberies, a murder or two, and even a train hijacking! This is still a Red Hood story after all! To Jason's benefit, Perry has good aim. Don't worry, though. It's only a BB gun.
And that's the gist! A year later, Perry returns to Gotham after her father's abandons her again. She seeks out Wayne Manor based on Jason's old emergency instructions from their time together, and the two reunite. With some help from the family, she becomes the Red Hood's sidekick properly, a young vigilante by the name of Little Wolf. Here is the design!
Also, yes, this whole shebang does eventually result in her becoming Jason's adopted daughter because I can do whatever I want. "But Jason is legally dead!!!" I have a solution, and it's called forge Witness Protection documents. Jason hates that he became his dad (Bruce), but everyone else thinks its both funny and endearing. Little Wolf/Perry can be seen either in a RH safehouse, the Batcave, or Jason's apartment/garage.
Shout out to Eve Teschmacher tho. She realized her boyfriend was a piece of shit and that she was in extreme danger, and she managed to gather everything needed to take him down without him catching on until it was too late.
Its frustrating when non-horror people come into horror spaces and ask why we like violence and watching people suffer and sexism and all other manner of moral hand-wringing, but i also find it frustrating when horror fans (myself included) attempt to sincerely engage with these questions. Like 9 times out of 10 the question is either being asked in bad faith, or the asker is genuinely confused, and neither of those types of people are prepared for a proper answer about how horror reflects the cultural landscape or the complex relationships between the genre and gender and race etc and they definitely aren't ready to hear about the real facet of sexuality and eroticism in basically all horror media
horror is an easy target for pearl clutching but you can subject pretty much any genre to the same criticism if you frame it poorly enough. Oh you like romance movies? So you enjoy watching men stalk women and violate their boundaries? You think cheating is okay? You think its cool when women give up their careers to get married? I dont like or watch romance movies but based off my limited understanding thats what they're all like, etc
i think we need to just start responding to bad faith questions about horror with "yeah i thought it was awesome when The Killer fed all those teenagers into a wood chipper"