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ITS DONE IM FREE

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i hc that little jason had an unrealistic crush on roy (like a “omg my older brothers friend is sooooo hot” kinda thing) then when he started hanging out with him as an adult it came back but it was fr this time and he was so mad about it

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second time drawing bruce as a human heater what does that say about me

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bruce wayne offering a trauma survivor the exact same tools he uses to physically and psychologically destroy himself every night:

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This would be my au if it didn’t have the pain and suffering

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people still don’t understand batman’s rogue gallery and what they represent to him. hollywood i will kill you. listen: each batman villain challenges a different aspect of his character and/or philosophy, and it is why grim dark batman was never meant to work

joker: chaos and order.

the foil to batman’s suppressed madness. bruce is discipline; none is above the code and justice. “you’re just one bad day away from being like me” WRONG!! bruce wayne has not had a good day since he was 10 years old. every good thing that happens to him is followed by 100 bad things. he is the universe’s punching bag. and yet he persists, does he not? does he not still believe in goodness in spite of it all? suck my dick joker he does not think of you AT ALL you are nuisance to him he wants to spend the one day off he has every year with his family and friends and you had to ruin it with ur lame jokes and terrorist attacks

riddler: obsession and intellect.

the foil to batman’s ego. bruce wayne is one of the smartest people in the world, by way of writer favouritism. wdym you outsmarted brainiac, a being of pure intelligence, just because ur the author’s favourite pretty princess? alright king whatever u say. but he never lets it rule him. his intelligence is a tool to of protection; it’s a shield, not a sword. he’d never raise it against the innocent. edward uses his intelligence to prove superiority, that he is better. he is batman without humility, and that is why he will always lose, because intelligence is nothing without wisdom

the penguin: wealth and corruption.

the foil to batman’s class. they’re both billionaires, Gothamite socialites. oswald embraces his privilege and uses it to oppress the poor. bruce wayne understands his privilege and uses it to pull others up. “you wear a mask too” yeah and it’s prettier than urs u ugly bitch. oswald’s socialite mask is a polished classy persona that disguises his inner evil. bruce’s socialite mask is just a himbo and remains true to his desire to help people

mr freeze: love and grief.

foil to batman’s ability to move on from the past. victor fries cannot let go of his wife and makes it everybody else’s problem. this is also the philosophy of grimdark batman, which is why it cannot apply to batman’s true character. bruce wayne is traumatized from his parents’ deaths, but it also inspired him to become the person who he wished had saved him in that alley. how many times has he looked into the eyes of a scared child on patrol and saw himself? he became the saviour for his 10 year old self left in that alleyway. he was able to heal; yes, his parents deaths has shaped him into the man he is, that’s literally what life does. healing doesn’t mean the grief will shrink, but your world grows bigger around it. he has a family again, built by his own hands

scarecrow: fear and power.

the foil to batman’s darkness. batman is iconic for instilling crippling terror into others by a mere look, psychics hate him because his mind is a screaming hellscape, he dresses like a bat because when he was a kid he fell into a hole filled with bats and he associates it with fear. jonathan uses fear to control the helpless, bruce instills fear in evil to protect the righteous. “you’re just as ruled by fear” WRONG!!! batman is ruled by love. it’s not fear that powers him when he drags his mangled, half-dead body off the streets at every dawn to go home for a costume change and immediately go to a charity gala for disadvantaged youths named after his street-rat son. it’s not fear that inspired him to keep lollipops in his utility belt for the children he saves. it’s not fear that makes him do the same old shit of throwing you fuckers into that useless max security prison twice a week after getting his shit rocked, knowing full well he’d have to do it again in a few days, instead of just killing you.

two-face: duality and justice.

the foil to batman’s divided self. harvey started off as a batman, a lawyer wanting to do good. his trauma split him, but bruce integrated it into himself. bruce wayne does not reject his pain, he lets it shape him and he asks himself: “ok that sucked. how do i make sure nobody else will experience that?” harvey dent is completely split, indecisive in his morality, good and evil depends on the flip of a coin. but batman? people say that bruce wayne is the mask and batman is his true self. dawg do u think his kids call him batman? that’s some shit he’d say in his 20s when he was figuring himself out but he’s a middle aged father now and his children would drag him to filth if he says his black-leather bat fursona is his “true self”. they are all him. brucie wayne isn’t completely his mask either, because it’s the persona he uses to fuck with rich people and you know full well he’d delights in that to the bottom of his heart

his rogue gallery is a mirror to each aspect of himself. everything high-brow reddit bros and zack snyder says about batman’s edgy true self is literally disproven by the people batman spends his life trying to save. he’s not on the edge of villaindom; he stares his inner evil that takes on the faces of broken people in the eyes every night and says “this isn’t the way forward”

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I think it’s hilarious that Ra’s is the only mfer to give a shit at all about the circumstances of Jason’s resurrection. No one else even talks about it. Jason doesn’t care, Talia doesn’t care, Bruce only cares insofar as he needs to confirm that Jason is who he says he is.

I imagine him going around shaking people by their shoulders demanding are you not at all curious or at least worried how this came to be?!!?? Just POOF? No necromancer, no science experiment. Nothing, just- Boy is dead, boy is alive. That’s fine to you?

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Jason Lost Days arc.

He should’ve been studying for his SATS

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Jason thinks that Bruce groomed Tim into becoming Robin because that was the kind of effusive enthusiasm he got when he was Robin.

It makes sense why the story just skimmed over all of Jason’s training if Bruce’s impression of it was just “Oh cool! This is just like training Dick!” and slipped into it without much drama or differentiation. But really, for a homeless 5th grade drop-out to match the learning curve of prodigy Dick Grayson, who was born on the highwire? “One of a kind” is accurate.

Most of the time between Jason’s death and his return to Gotham was spent as a zombie. His world training tour was only something like a year, and prior to “the tin man growing a heart” it was just Talia throwing Jason at various instructors in the hopes they would keep him occupied- none of whom occupied him more than a few weeks!

My favorite part of Hush. Bruce again says that Jason wasn’t good enough to be Robin, but this time Jason’s there to clean his clock and prove Bruce’s grief-mangled memory of him wrong as soon as Bruce makes the assertion.

Jason being a match for Batman isn’t a plot hole, it’s a character trait. He is the raw talent Robin :)

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"As well as generating negative press all over the world, the gimmick created a status quo which put the creators involved at odds with the owners of the Robin trademark. As Starlin remembers:

So we did this and the book came out, Denny was on all these talk shows across the country that day saying, it's kind of funny because he was taking credit for the whole project. But as soon as the book came out and Robin died, the executives up at DC started going "Whoof!" because they had all these lunch pails withs Robin's picture on it—suddenly it was all my idea again.

DC Comics needed a new Robin, and fast, but they had successfully convinced the majority of their audience that they did not want Robin and, in fact, preferred the character dead. They had to create a Robin liked by people who didn't like Robin; a Robin for the Post-Modern Age. Enter Tim Drake.

[...] Rumours at the time suggested that Carrie would take up the now-empty role 30, but such an event was most likely prevented from occurring for the same reasons that Robin could not simply be left as dead: those lunch pails needed selling. DC Comics needed a Robin who looked like Dick Grayson and Jason Todd had—dark hair, white skin, male—and equally importantly, he had to be obviously distinct from the "uneducated children" which the readers had been coached into disliking."

mary borsellino was out here doing a historic materialist analysis of batman comics. can we get more stuff like this please

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tbh my take on the whole “should batman kill the joker” thing is that batman is a volunteer gig, and bruce is allowed to have boundaries

should *someone* kill the joker? maybe, idk. that’s above my pay grade. but just bc bruce wayne is willing to shoulder the weight of the world (whether anyone actually wants him to or not) doesn’t mean we should all just accept that it belongs to him. he chooses to help in what ways he is able, the ways he can live with, and if killing is the one line he won’t cross no matter what, well, it could be worse. but he has no actual moral obligation to do any of what he’s doing, actually, and if having this one boundary firmly in place is what keeps him from having a mental breakdown and becoming the thing he swore to stop, then i say more power to him and we could honestly all stand to learn from his example

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Crazy how many people want characters in fiction to speak and act like they’ve had 20 hours of intensive therapy. Could NOT be me I want these bitches fucked up insane

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Hey guys.. my friends all are really into dc and batman but i have no clue what its about so if i could have someone who’s really autistic about dc infodump to me about all of the lore that would be amazing thank you

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instead of arguing if precrisis "sweetheart" robin jason or newer "bad kid" robin jason is canon (technically they both are), i think its better to ask which interpretation is more interesting.

personally, between "he was a good kid who went through a lot of traumas and then was murdered and brought back which messed him up even more and he became a killer, but he has his moral code and still cares about people and thinks hes just doing whats necessary"

and

"he has just always been bad and violent (because ???) and he died from being stupid and arrogant, and came back an even more heartless killer and now is just evil and doesnt care about anyone"

i know which one i find more compelling to read about

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rewatching the under the red hood movie and i gotta say as much as i love jason’s speech to bruce about how mad he is that the joker’s still alive, i still maintain that a severely underrated speech in this movie is from ra’s when he’s talking to bruce and in essence says ‘yeah so i hired the joker to distract you which was my bad because he totally went overboard and killed your son :/ and i felt so guilty i decided not to try and fight you anymore and then i stole your son’s corpse and tried to revive him via lazarus pit so i could like. make amends. except that was also my bad because we fucked that one up real good and when he came back out BOY was he weird in the head. killed my guys and then fucking jumped out a window and we lost him. my bad. and i thought he’d died again but apparently he’s in gotham and is like. totally destroying your whole lives which again, my bad. shouldn’t have tried to help. sorry about that. i’ll just stay out of your business from now on.’ which is actually the funniest characterisation of ra’s i’ve ever seen

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@jerseydevious read Creature of the Night and causally presented to me the idea of Batman being something Dick willed to life to bring justice to his parents’ killer, and i ran 20 miles with it