afarcryfromgotham

[afarcryfromgotham]

Pov: Someone finally reacts normally to the Deputy having Peaches.

[afarcryfromgotham]

America has a weird relationship with cults where they’re terrified of small cults (or organizations they think are cults) but completely normalized massive cults that hurt many more people (eg: LDS Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Amish, Scientology, most Megachurches)

[afarcryfromgotham]

About Jason's moral alignement. I've already ventured into how judging his morals objectively is kind of uninteresting to me and I don't really consider it relevant to judge his actions according to the values we'd hold in a real world context. So, I want to talk instead about his moral position within the dc universe.

The majority of his characterization puts him into an anti-hero position, which has sometimes lazily been done as a tell-don't-show, but moving on from lazy writing, I also think that the anti-hero brand is slightly misfitting for him.

Jason is majorly characterized by his disillusionment from the hero-vigilante game. His objective is to do what needs to be done, so less of a categorical imperative (if the action is morally correct, then that makes it moral, regardless of unforeseeable consequences; Kant) and more utilitarian (the ends justify the means, positive outcome makes an action moral; Bentham)

This disillusionment would make it more appropriate if Jason didn't judge himself according to the hero-villain framework at all. Why would he consider himself an anti-hero if he doesn't particularily care about the heroism of Batman either? To Jason the way of judging people and sorting them is more along the lines of what does this action achieve, He does not care about whether someone is a good or bad person, but merely if they do good or bad.

That is why he sees Joker as only ever repeating one atrocious act after another, he does not care for the potential good within the person if they have never acted on it and don't show any development to ever act good either.

Jason does not care to consider whether he himself is overall good or bad or good-but-in-a-bad-way. He fits the anti-hero frame somewhat, but to really grasp his character I think it is essential to consider that he decides on his actions outside of that model. Which is why sometimes he can align completely with the other bats and work together and other times he goes against what they believe in. They have fundamentally different ways of thinking about justice. The fact that Bruce misunderstands Jason is because he is trying to make sense of him within the hero-villain framework. But it doesn't mean that Jason's actions are actually arbitrary or inconsistent.

Which is why at times the anti-hero role will at times suit Jason, but will also sometimes misconstrue his motivation and philosophy.

[afarcryfromgotham]

I would argue that abuse is a pattern for Batman. He mourns Jason by beating up Dick. He brainwashes Tim as "special training". He ignores Damian for extended periods; notice that Damian builds his own torture chamber during the Ric arc. He plays favorites. And then we have taking Jason to see the site of his own death.

Yeah? I've been saying it only forever?

And it's not only the boys, it's also the girls, Cassandra and Stephanie, and with Damian it gets worse than ignoring him tbh. For Damian, certainly, check out meta by @arabian-batboy and @wesavegotham. For Cass (assuming that's not the person whose post is prompted this ask), @but-a-humble-goon. For Steph, you should go to @tumblingxelian. Other meta blogs for these characters that write on this topic exist, but the usernames escape my memory at the moment, sorry.

I did write about this too but good luck finding it. At some point, and very early in the game, I stopped using Bruce Wayne's A++ Parenting tag because isn't it basically always. One or two hugs to one or two kids in the recent comics do, like, zero to correct this impression.

I mean, there are fans that consider this breaking a character, but it's whatever for me. A great man could be a shitty parent. And whether he's all that great to begin with, is also a subject of debate by future in-universe historians. I do understand that for fans of Bruce or Batfam it could ruin the enjoyment, so if they tend to focus on the good things, more power to them. I'm yet to actually read any tho.

But most importantly, a parent you love and a parent who loves you and a parent who made you happy and who was with you through thick and thin at some point and a parent you are so alike with, and a parent who is also capable of doing the shittiest thing imaginable to you, or your siblings, - they're all could be the same parent.

[afarcryfromgotham]

Still thinking about @forcesofnatureunleashed post about Bruce's abusive behaviour towards Jason (and all the incredibly insightful replies and tags on it!)

And another layer to it that I didn't see mentioned yet is how many abusive parents don't see what they're doing as abuse, and how the rhetoric Bruce uses to excuse his actions falls into the same category for me a *lot*.

He *never* apologises for his behaviour. In fact, Jason has felt compelled to apologise (as recently as TFZ 12), but Bruce never has. He straight up just never brings up the end of UTRH ever again.

The closest he's gotten to accepting responsibility is during Robin Rises (after the return to Ethiopia incident, and also he punched Tim during the same timeframe), but what he actually says is;

Which 1) reframes the issue as a whole family issue rather than a him personally issue, and 2) boils down to "it will be different from now on, it won't happen again I promise" (spoiler alert; it always does.)

And then there's RHATO 27 which, to clarify, takes place after the infamous rhato 25 rooftop beating (in which Jason did not fight back, just fyi) which incapacitated Jason so badly he couldn't walk for a month.

"I don't hate you, I hit you to help you be better."

Which. Hmm. Could be read as out and out gaslighting too, I guess, but for me I think it reads as a parent dismissing and minimising the damage they caused to ease their own guilt and assure themselves they're not actually a terrible abuser.

I lost control for a moment, I was overwhelmed, it won't happen again, I promise, but if it does it's because you need it.

Bruce is abuser and enabler and excuser all at once.

[afarcryfromgotham]

Thinking about the idea of Jason being irrational about Bruce again and I actually think I agree that he is, but not how he is? I don't think Jason would find some new grievance if Bruce had let him kill the Joker. I think canon shows Jason being remarkably, and I would say to some degree irrationally, eager to be on good terms with Bruce again.

Again: I think how you view Jason is necessarily dependent on if you think he has a right to be angry. Personally I think 'has repeatedly allowed a mass murderer and his own son's killer to live' is actually a pretty reasonable thing for that son to be angry over. Even if you think Bruce shouldn't kill the Joker, it's not an unreasonable thing for Jason to have wanted and it's certainly not unreasonable to want to kill the Joker himself like come on.

So within the context of assuming Jason's initial grievances are sound, even if the ways he goes about them are morally dubious at best, how does Jason act around Bruce?

A short overview of notable moments (some of these are terribly written and I don't personally consider them in character for everyone but. they're what we have) after utrh:

In GA he's actively trying to antagonize him, but this is also a comic where Bruce refers to him as "just another piece of dirt in the gutters" so not a shining moment for anyone.

In Lost Days he goes from actively wanting to murder Bruce to just wanting to teach him a lesson / prove him wrong (in Talia's words: be the better him).

In the anniversary special he goes out of his way to give Bruce a birthday present:

Early in N52 and Lobdell's era he's willing to have a relatively calm if tense discussion with Bruce that ends with them having burgers and expresses a desire to be what Bruce "needs":

In N52's Deathstroke all it takes is a hallucination of Bruce saying they'll "look for" the Joker to make Jason immediately walk away from a battle:

In the infamous RHATO rebirth #25, Jason doesn't fight back even while Bruce is beating him within an inch of his life:

In UL:Cheer, he calls Bruce for help despite knowing what admitting to killing someone in Gotham could mean for him and Bruce, and his drugged hallucination is Bruce killing the Joker and him getting to come home:

Worth noting too is that Jason's hallucination doesn't show Bruce killing the Joker on screen, while Bruce's does. Draw your own conclusions there.

You might have more of a case for Task Force Z but even here, where it's fair for Bruce to be distrustful, Jason is also not like...trying to ruin their relationship? He refuses to back down, and he airs his percieved grievances, but once everything is over and his mission is done, Jason sends Bruce an apology letter. Actively reaching out to reconcile first:

Giving some benefit of the doubt to the scene that it doesn't deserve, in the recent Joker comic, all it takes is the Joker saying Batman is behind them for Jason to turn around and try to convince Bruce to let him kill the Joker:

At really no point has any writer, from Winick to Rosenberg, given any indication that Jason wouldn't be satisfied with the Joker's head on a platter. If anything, what we see over and over again is that Jason desperately wants to be reunited with his father. It's what he hallucinates about every damn time.

Painting Jason as never being satisfied not only is just a headcanon masked as analysis, it feels very...dismissive of Jason as a victim. He was a murdered child who came back to find his murderer not only alive, but alive and still killing. It's not some crazy thing to find that both personally and morally untenable. Turning it into "Jason wouldn't be happy no matter what" is defanging the conflict to turn it into a story about how trauma survivors just need therapy, not concrete actions, don't be silly-. Making either of them out to be completely irrational or never satisfied is doing a disservice to a genuinely good moral conflict and how the third party ideas of justice and what victims view as justice often conflict.

The Bruce & Jason divide is this: Jason needs a father who will kill for him, or at least allow him to kill for himself, and Bruce can't be that and still be himself. And they both have to learn to live with that.

[afarcryfromgotham]

Words from “in broad dayliGht black lovers look guest” by Roya Marsh

[afarcryfromgotham]

I am frankly baffled by the lack of canon interactions between Jason and Damian. Thank god fandom has way more of them and actually does analyze their potential for a bond, because they have so many parallel themes.

Both of them are the closest to being Bruce’s actual children, all other Robin’s and mentees are in a bit of a limbo position between sidekick, partner and child, but with Jason and Damian the parental-child relationship to Bruce has been made explicit. Both have a significant relationship towards Talia as well (even though DC canon also totally sleeps on Jason and Talia’s relationship.) They both have marginalized backgrounds, Jason coming from poverty an Damian with a chinese/arab background on Talia’s side and being raised partially with cultural ideals that Bruce, as a representation of the west, rejects and attempts to correct him on.

Both Damian and Jason have to deal with Bruce’s rejection of them and Bruce’s expectations of obedience. They are both blamed and held accountable for bad behaviour without understanding of external factors of abuse to their integrity and childhood. The victim-blaming/gaslighting they endure from the narrative should be such a strong ground for them to bond over. 

While I can’t imagine either that they would get on without disagreements, they should by all means have far more understanding and sympath for each other’s position than DC will write them as. 

[afarcryfromgotham]

On the flip side of doomed by the narrative Jason Todd, unserious funny version of that where he's the fourth wall breaking self-aware character after his resurrection and he's still going about his Red Hood business but now it's punctuated by lamentations about authors and free will and stories that can never end and everyone else thinks he's just being a dramatic literature nerd again (he is)

[afarcryfromgotham]

I do fully believe Winick had to write Dick out of the utrh ending, because not only would he have let Jason kill the Joker, Dick would have done it himself.

[afarcryfromgotham]

And another thing! I think that Damian harbors conflicted jealousy for Jason, because after all, Jason did get to have such a close and true father-son relationship with Bruce, but this jealousyy is conflicted by virtue of Bruce being by now just as dismissive and of an absent father to both of them. It’s hard to be jealous of someone for something they lost, but I do thin some of that is still there.

Jason is aware and wouldn’t begrudge Damian for these feelings either and when it comes down to it, I think there’s a deep mutual understanding between these two. I think Jason should feel a sense of moral duty to be there for Damian, because he knows Batman won’t. Not always. Not unconditionally.

[afarcryfromgotham]

Both Jason and Damian are definetely sons to Bruce, whereas Dick, Tim and duke just have a different relationship with the man. But I would argue that As far as being a dad, Bruce was only really one to Jason.

Bruce is harsh, abusive even with Damian. He is dismissive and reductive of Damian’s character and the panels that show him being a good dad to Damian are honestly just jarring in their juxtaposition to his usual negligience of his duties as a father. He does expect Damian to act with all the family duty and obedience of a son, but doesn’t uphold his end of fatherly duties and compassion in return. 

The only one who Bruce has ever had that kind of relatonship to was Jason. Driving him to school and smiling as he watches Jason eat breakfast, I feel like after Dick Bruce had awakened his desire to become a father and not only was Robin what gave Jason magic, but Jason gave magic to Bruce too.

And after he lost that, had that ripped away, I think it traumatized Bruce. To the point that that fatherly side couldn’t react freely to Jason’s return. To the point that he could never had let Damina in at all. 

If Json had lived, grown up as Bruce’s son and at some point more naturally gained independence and become his own hero, if Jason was there for Bruce to have raised a child instead of having lost, Damian appearing would went way differently than it did.

[afarcryfromgotham]

Ideas that would fix Utrh for me personally:

1. Bruce is made to explicitly panic and have his throw of the batarang be a mistake. It is shown how his trauma of his own parent's deaths and of Jason's death are warring within him.

2. Bruce lets Jason kill the Joker because it is true that he could never so it himself. DC can later find some excuse to ressurect the Joker, but Bruce understands that Jason isn't talking about killing all villains, but just this one. And for what he did to Jason.

3. The sentence "this doesn't change anything." refers to Bruce's own guilt and shame. It means that it doesn't allow Bruce to excuse any of what he did just because Jason is alive again.

4. Take out all victim-blaming parts that have Alfred talking about how Jason was always dangerous and bound to go down a dark path.

5. Show Bruce in extreme self-denial and conflict that Jason is truly alive again, because he has hallucinated or been manipulated with this scenario too often to trust in a good thing. Show Bruce coming to the realization that this time it is true. This time he does get his son back. Have Bruce surrender to Jason in the confrontation where Jason pulls his helmet off the first time.

6. Have Jason say "I was going to kill you." Have Bruce answer "I'd let you."

7. All of this is to say, I think any more cohesive and compatible with other canon and characterization utrh would need to have a stronger acknowledgement of how fucked up Jason's death and ressurection were. And of how it fucked Bruce and Jason up in their respective ways

(8. Bonus. Include Dick, Tim and Barbara in the story as relevant characters to Jason's life and death.)

[afarcryfromgotham]

Here’s some reasons why I think utrh hits home very strongly for people who were victims to men, and it is surprisingly not because Jason was a victim to a man (Joker), but because of how Bruce, the man that Jason feels hurt him in a different way, has reacted and dealt with Jason.

I’ve made a few posts about Jason being girl-coded or Bruce representing strong patriarchal ideals, but for this one the only thing that really matters is that patriarchal suffering, because utrh actually does show very well how patriarchal sexism can affect men too.

First of all is the fact that the narrative agrees with, or doesn’t really criticize, the victim-blaming from Alfred regarding Jason. Under a patriarchal system not only does gender determine your ranking in the social order, but age plays a really big role, assuming that older people are necessarily more experienced and that leads them to making better choices. Jason was young, very young, so it is standard to assume that he must have been in the wrong, without that assumption necessitating critical thought.

A second thing, Jason is asking Bruce for emotion. There are already a lot of posts out there about Jason being brutally honest and open regarding his emotions. A vulnerability that Jason takes without that openness translating to any leverage that is exploitable against him. The thought of feelings being our weakness is a mysoginistically weighted one, as women have been portrayed as being overly emotional and therefore weak to  the “male quality” of reason. In utrh we have the contrast of Jason with desperate and pleading emotions, facing Bruce who is indeed the stone-cold wall he has always been. And that experience of screaming your emotions of hurt and injustice and getting nothing but perfectly distatched and reasonable responses is strongly symptomatic of the victim experience in patriarchal systems.

[afarcryfromgotham]

Jason’s final monologue in Under the Red Hood is so impactful and important because he’s being honest. His speech hinges on the fact that he’s being open and honest with his feelings on how the last few years affected him. I’ve seen many people argue that because Jason is an unreliable narrator at times, that means he is an unreliable narrator all the time, therefore nothing he says can be trusted. Unfortunately, this feeds into the “anything can be canon behavior for Jason because he’s written so inconsistent therefore I don’t care and besides fanon is better anyway so there” argument where actual consistent character traits often get ignored.  

While, yes, Jason can be an unreliable narrator, and while, yes, Jason is written incredibly inconsistently, this doesn’t mean there’s nothing consistent about him. I remember a couple of years back, some people were arguing how absurd it was for Jason’s opening line to be: “Bruce, I forgive you for not saving me” because it would be impossible for anyone, especially “someone like Jason” to not hold a grudge against a person for not making it in time. They couldn’t buy the fact that someone could concede like that. Of course, Jason is lying here, how could he not, in some part, blame Bruce? But this completely side-steps that Jason does that all the time, pre and post-death. Some of his last words were forgiving Shelia for murdering him and apologizing to Bruce for not being good enough. He doesn't blame Catherine for forcing him into the parental role for both him and her and Jason usually places Willis strictly in the “it’s complicated” box. He constantly takes the fall in his tumultuous relationship with Bruce like his apology letter to the man at the end of TFZ. It’s not out of character for Jason not to place the blame on Bruce, but rather forgive him and dictate his ire to where the real blame falls: the Joker. Again, he doesn’t even place the blame fully where it belongs because he doesn’t mention Shelia’s role. (yes, DC wants us to forget about her role in his murder. Especially in UtRH as can be seen in all the bad robin!Jason rhetoric, but that outer world meddling affects the inner story) 

It’s a cop-out to claim that because Jason is unreliable at times and inconsistent at others that means you can subscribe whatever meaning you want to his words and actions. He’s not his own character anymore, he’s an OC to fit you’re narrative which strips him of his story. By saying he’s actually lying(whether over if he forgives Bruce or so he can blame Bruce later on because “he needs something to be angry over”), it strips away the farther-son tragedy of this moment.

Jason is having a contained breakdown. He’s trying to keep it together, and that’s why when his voice breaks on “doing it because–because he took me away from you” and he starts crying, it’s impactful. He’s raw and alive and it’s still not enough to be seen. He has no point to soften the blow with “I forgive you.” He has no reason to lie about that when trying to get his father to see him. If it was just about the joker then Jason could’ve said “I blame you for not saving me and to redeem yourself, you have to kill the Joker.” But Jason Doesn’t ask him to kill the Joker but instead demands to know why he’s free without consequence, why he is still breathing.

If Jason wanted “to push his goalpost farther with Bruce,” he would prey on Bruce’s blaring guilt complex. It’s incredibly telling and significant of Jason's character that he doesn’t do that in this moment. Therefore, we can assume that if Jason had succeed in killing the joker, he still wouldn’t use that to guilt Bruce.

Jason instead talks about how much he loved Bruce–still loves Bruce–and how the man meant the world to him, and how he feels used because he thought he meant the same to Bruce. By saying he’s lying in this moment to trick and ruin Bruce, you are undercutting some of Jason’s most consistent behaviors: his desire to love and be loved, his desire to be a part of a family, his desire to be important to someone, and how he will put up with almost any and all maltreatment to get that connection.

Jason “pushing his goalpost” further highlights how many don’t understand his emotional distress tied to his murder and instead want to place him solely in the “completely delusion” category where his victimhood is undermined. It’s not about getting Bruce to kill, at the end of the day, the ultimatum was to kill Jason, not the Joker, it’s about wanting his father to understand what he needs to feel safe. That is Jason’s request. Not the clown. Him. He’d rather his father kill him with his own hand so he’s not forced to live on the same earth any longer with and share the same air as his murderer. What makes this as an ultimatum is that Jason fully believes that Bruce loves him too much, therefore, the man would never kill him allowing Jason to achieve his peace. Whether you agree with Jason’s methods or not is a different matter, but that is the tension in this contained scene.

Furthermore, a lot of meta lately says that if Bruce had let Jason kill the Joker then he would guilt Bruce by saying “why would you let me do that? You tainted my soul and hands!” which ignores: 

A. Jason’s actual legitimate reason for wanting the Joker dead. The former belief falls back on the “Jason is so delusion and dramatic!” trope, the “he’s not the right kind of victim” trope because he’s angry instead of submissive and “actually has no good reason to be angry, he’s just being difficult for the sake of.” It completely undercuts Jason’s actual trauma with getting no justice. Bruce preaches Judge and Jury, but Jason got neither. So many victims get neither, and Jason’s anger represents that. What gives Bruce the right to say Jason’s not allowed to play his own executioner in relation to his victimhood when he never got the morals and ideals that Bruce himself preaches so thoroughly? 

And B. more obviously, Jason killed in UtRH before their big confrontation? Famously, the duffle bag of right-hand mans’ heads. He killed in front of Bruce already as well? Captain Nazi? Like, also in lost days, which is a prequel to UtRH, he kills? What’s the actual argument here? Loosely, It reminds me how everyone wants to blame the entirety of Jason’s takeover on pit madness. This “you’ve tainted me” argument sounds as if Jason is not aware of his actions and traumas. Not to say he’s completely sane or not delusional at times throughout his publishing history, but to think Jason would be pissed at Bruce for letting him kill the Joker is to dismissively say “no, you don’t know what you need, but I do.” 

No, the Joker being dead won’t fix everything, but with the joker dead, it would literally be removing a real-life constant trigger of Jason’s. Yes, Jason is a synecdoche for victims, but he is also that himself: a single victim. Joker is a stand-in for everyone who’s ever gotten away with a vicious crime free of judicial step-in or failure, but he also is just that: Jason’s murderer. Yes, they both metaphorically represent something bigger in this scene, but on a fundamental level, the Joker is also just the person tormenting Jason and nothing more. By saying Jason doesn’t actually want what he wants stands in for saying victims are too wrapped up in their trauma to understand what’s causing it. It’s mitigating and demeaning how bad it actually was/is. Jason’s murder in comics still holds such power over the mythos today even though “everyone’s died. He’s not special” for a reason and it’s because his life is actively shown to be affected by it.

Jason has been shown to have PTSD-induced panic attacks around the joker (Lost Days), and about the joker (famously the rebirth issue where Jason hallucinates murder victim him), it’s not far off the say that whenever Joker commits a mass atrocity, that it affects Jason in some way. 

And we canonically know that it does! In Lost Days, Jason breaks down in tears in the streets over all the families that have been and will be destroyed by the Joker. So that Survivor's Guilt train of thought is canon for him: “those people are never coming back, I’m here and I’m not supposed to be, but they’ll never return”-esque

No, killing the Joker won’t fix all of Jason’s issues and trauma surrounding his murder, but that’s obvious. Yet, have you ever been in a bad relationship and part of the issue is literally just being around that person? The healing process starts when you step away. You can’t heal in the same environment that’s harming you. This goes hand in hand with how Jason will only begin to heal as a person when away from Bruce because he’s such a dominating, constant trigger in Jason’s life (again, proven in canon when Jason backs away from Gotham and the Bats). No, the joker being dead won’t fix everything, but it will allow the process to begin where Jason isn’t constantly rehashing his trauma every time the Joker escapes. Jason has tried to heal on his own except the clown keeps coming after him. Whether it’s him attempting to burn off his face or in his mind when Bruce physically drags his murder to the forefront of Jason’s thoughts shoving him into a breakdown over how he’s trying so hard to heal. Part of the reason it’s so hard for Jason to move on is because his trigger buttons are constantly being held down for extreme amounts of time. It’s not that he heard or saw something that brought him back to his murder, it’s that Jason is literally being held in a constant state of panic, grief, fear, and unsafety.

By saying Jason is looking for something to be angry over and he’d find that in Bruce if he let him kill the clown, it frames the moment as a winning vs losing moment that Jason will always lose no matter what. This is a faulty understanding of how healing works and is reminiscent of Three Jokers. You can’t win at healing like Geoff Johns tries to say Barabara did and Jason failed at. Healing is something you do with ups and downs. At the end of the day, it’s a son yelling at his father to help him. It’s not about winning or losing, joker tries to make it about that (“everyone still loses”), but that frames the interaction in a much pettier light. This strips the moment of both Jason and Bruce's raw, exposed wire in water, vulnerable emotions. This looking to be angry argument is also reminiscent of the fandom's love for pit madness which strips Jason of his righteousness. Jason has very understandable reasons to be angry. His life was stripped and stolen away from him. It’s like when people say Robin Jason had anger issues which completely ignores what he was angry over! He hated rapists and pedophiles and big, authoritative tough guys who beat on women! He wasn’t angry all the time over everything; he had very real, systematic issues that upset him in overwhelming ways. Boiling him down to “he needs to be angry” wipes Jason of his motivations.

Jason doesn’t plan for a future. Really, he never even thought Bruce would kill for him in the end. When he first came back, sure, he thought Bruce would kill the joker and make Jason “the last person he ever hurt”, but in their final confrontation, Jason just asks “why on God’s earth is he still alive?” and then “I’m going to blow his deranged brains out and if you don’t like that you’ll have to kill me. Shoot me right in the face”: his ultimatum. In the confrontation, Jason doesn’t even believe he has a full claim to be upset over the Joker for just himself. He talks about Barabra being hurt by the clown and is pretty rescind to his murder in the fact that he says he was one of so many corpses filling dozens of graveyards made specifically by the Joker. Again, “last person he’d ever hurt,” Jason is fairly fine with being dead and doesn’t even think he deserves to be back, but because he wasn’t the last person the clown hurt he pushed that as his climax for why he’s angry. 

Really a better commentary focuses around “well, what does Jason think is going to happen after?” because Jason clearly doesn’t want to be alive. He sets up like four ways of suicide in his final scene. One of my mutuals a while ago posted their thoughts on what they wanted the after to be. They said they wanted to see a story where Jason killed Joker in this showdown. They believed he would probably enter this dissociated shock over the joker’s dead body, over the fact that it was just that easy, that it’s over. But, this fact would lead Jason to the realization that he doesn’t need Bruce to “save” him (i.e. protect him/keep him safe). This has literally been rotting in my head for months, you have no idea. And I truly see this as the outcome of the showdown if it had gone that way. Sure, Bruce didn’t stop him, but he also didn’t stand up to protect Jason from his murderer. Jason, just like in every other aspect of his entire life, had to protect himself. Once again, he has performed his own emotional labor, and that would probably break him away from Bruce’s chains. He got what he wanted and he didn’t need anyone else to do it for him. This interaction further shattering the heroic image he upheld Bruce to. I think that’s a much more realistic outcome based in Jason’s characterization rather than him throwing a fit over the fact the Joker’s dead therefore he has nothing else to be angry over when Jason is shown to be angry over a lot of other things as well.

[afarcryfromgotham]

do yk if jason smokes in canon?

Only as a kid and at that we only see it twice. First time is in the apartment he’s hiding away in while homeless where Bruce tracks him down to. And another time as robin in a retcon (as in he’d already been murdered) where he’s smoking on the docks in secret. Pretty sure it was written by Devin Grayson. Both were pre-flashpoint

We never see him smoke as an adult

Jason is def not the chain smoker fanon makes him out to be. As an adult or a kid

Many people have theorized the reason he smoked as a kid was because smoking staves of the feeling of starvation. And as Jason was literally starving to death on the streets, i buy that. Going with the retcon, he would seem he continued to smoke as Robin because nicotine is incredibly addictive and smoking is super hard to quit.

People also say that Jason would probably avoid smoking cigarettes as an adult due to literally dying via smoke inhalation (a la his death certificate which isn’t necessarily canon but we do know it was the bomb that canonically killed him soooooo smoke’s probably a no go) and the smell/taste would be highly triggering in some way. Which I dig as well. He dies with smoke in his lungs, he probably doesn’t want to reacquaint himself with the feeling

But ya, smoking is literally never brought up around Jason except for those two incidents. I assume a lot of people divulge in the trope for the bad boy persona trope. Personally I don’t as A. There’s frankly no evidence to show that Jason does smoke heavy/at all anymore and B. I’m just not fond of cigs

[afarcryfromgotham]

Pwease let me into Eden's Gate. I'll behave UwU

You have a lot to confess and to atone for, detective, but it is nice to see that you have a change of heart. Of course, before confession theres the cleansing. Where shall I meet you so you can be escorted to the baptism?