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Cass and her complex relationship with mothers due to Shiva being Shiva and Barbara being harsh on her (to put it lightly) is so :(

I've noticed Cass' mentor figures seem to care about her in inverse proportion to how well they understand her. On the one end of the spectrum there's Barbara who outright admits she doesn't really get Cass as a person, but she would also move heaven and earth for her and is about the only person in the whole story (including Cass herself) who prioritises Cass' emotions and wellbeing. Or tries to anyway. On the far other end of that spectrum there's Shiva, who understands Cass perhaps better than anyone. In many ways they're so alike and Cass feels like there's things she can talk to Shiva about that she could never tell anyone else. But Shiva doesn't care about Cass, at least not as more than a fascinating potential opponent. Then there's Bruce who's somewhere in between the two and ping pongs from one extreme to the other violently depending on how he feels that day.

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also before anyone gets the wrong idea about my Jason response, I wasn't trying to say that Jason doesn't care about women and kids or that a well-characterized Jason wouldn't respect women. The point I was trying to make is that while Canon!Jason is perfectly happy to shoot rapists or abusers or drug dealers dealing to kids because he thinks they're scum, he's not shown as someone who like...specifically sets out to protect the unprotected or thinks it's his actual mission to do so.

Post-Crisis!Jason had exactly two life goals as Red Hood: make Batman's life a living hell by creating chaos and prove he's "better" at crimefighting than Bruce. Even taking over Gotham's gang scene was largely a means to an end for him. He kills all those guys because he genuinely thinks the world is better off without them, but his primary goal is not actually to clean up Gotham for the sake of cleaning it up or to protect other people from suffering his own fate; it's to fuck with and piss off Bruce by showing him that his way (killing people and becoming a crime lord) is a "more effective" way of solving crime. And in doing so, he often fucked over or blatantly used people he would have previously died to protect when he was Robin.

And whether or not you agree with that characterization, Judd Winick has been very open in interviews about how Jason's hypocrisy is something he genuinely enjoyed writing, so it was clearly a deliberate choice on his part to portray Jason that way even disregarding the various awful OOC characterizations of Jason we had to deal with in other post-Crisis stories:

As we saw in the original run, he’s also comfortable controlling crime and even becoming a part of it. He can’t kill everyone, nor does he want to. So, along with handing out his own brand of justice, he does believe that crime can be controlled. Batman had said it makes you a crime lord. Jason doesn’t think it makes him a crime lord at all. He thinks it makes him a much more effective Batman. Yes, Jason sees what he’s doing as making himself into a better Batman, the Batman that the world actually needs today. But some of that is just Jason fooling himself. The truth is, all of it is based in the fact that Jason is just damaged and tortured and angry with Bruce. And this is a constant revenge upon him..... ......I also like the fact that Jason’s actions aren’t black and white. Sometimes he functions in that gray area, and it gives you the license to be somewhat hypocritical, because he is. I used to do that with Oliver Queen in Green Arrow, and people would go crazy, because I thought it was interesting to explore that sometimes he’s a bit of a hypocrite. I find that likable about the character. And in Jason’s case, he professes that he’s trying to be a better Batman and he’s trying to rid the world of evil, but then he’s also just trying to stick it to Batman. It’s very much a man-child thing going on. [x]

Warning for victim-blaming Jason for his own death in this one:

Jason can do a certain level of good in one arc and a horrible in the next, and none of that would be out of character. He’s very unpredictable. Maybe that’s what makes him kind of interesting. He’s someone who is tortured, he’s someone who is damaged, he is someone who has been through a lot and is still just trying to find his way. You could say he’s a good man who does very, very bad things, and it’s not always the case that he’s doing bad things for the greater good, sometimes it’s doing bad things just for the bad. Killing villains in his opinion isn’t a bad thing. There is somewhat a message and methodology to what he’s doing, but at the same time he lets his emotions get the better of him. It’s what got him killed. It’s the sort of thing that Jason, in a way, wouldn’t surprise me if he is viewed as somewhat heroic for a fashion, but then falls back on bad behavior, which could happen from year to year, you don’t know. From anti-hero to villain to back again, I don’t know. [x]

So that's the opinion of the man who brought Jason back to life, wrote his debut arc as Red Hood, and also wrote the one other post-Crisis story Jason fans universally like (Lost Days).

Meanwhile post-Flashpoint!Jason is generally too busy dealing with his own trauma and his teammates' issues to actually dedicate any significant, consistent effort to protecting and saving vulnerable populations like sex workers, abused women, and orphaned children. Wanting to save them is usually his response when he stumbles upon something happening, but reboot!Jason generally does not consider it a core moral mission to seek out opportunities to protect or save these groups. Writers other than Scott Lobdell occasionally gave him stories featuring him doing so, but they were incredibly few and far between since Lobdell was Jason's primary writer for nearly a decade. Not to mention Lobdell's blatant misogyny led to a Jason that repeatedly objectified women and engaged in casual sexism on a depressingly regular basis...which despite being theoretically antithetical to Jason's childhood and Robin-era characterization is a characterization he maintained throughout the majority of his post-reboot appearances. So like...that's also a thing to consider.

DC finally seems to be moving a little more in the direction of matching Jason's motivations with his pre-death characterization (where he DID consistently showcase a genuine respect for women and desire to protect vulnerable children), but until that becomes a more consistent aspect of his character now I can't in good conscience pretend like fanon's interpretation of Red Hood!Jason as this incredibly pro-woman guy who has a core character trait of respecting and protecting women and wanting to keep children out of the crossfire actually exists in canon. That's the point I was trying to make in my original post about Jason and Helena. Nothing more, nothing less.

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the greatest tragedy of the 2000s-era Batfam is the lost story potential that happened because Jason's villain era and the Evil Cass arc happened at the same time instead of when Cass was Batgirl

we really could have gotten Jason and Cass being narrative foils, ripping each other to shreds over their different morals and perceptions of Bruce, and stories exploring how they're basically each other's walking nightmare scenario and instead we just got Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain!Jason and Cass being character assassinated and then shipped off to Hong Kong

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hi! did bruce ever come to accept that cass DID kill a man or is this something he's still in denial of?

Oh boy, so this is a favorite subject of mine and especially now that we have two continuities to provide comparison for, I’m going to wig out a bit and go for a full deep dive here. My apologies, one and all.

Discussions of murder, child abuse, and suicide under the cut.

Keep reading

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Thinking again about what my favourite Cass moment is and it might just be this one from issue 37 because of how bleak it is.

This man is a thief, but he loves his kid. The mother not only doesn't love her, but exploits her for her talent with art and uses it to make herself rich. According to the law, one is a criminal. According to anyone with decency, it should be the other way around.

But Cass has just gotten a gift from David Cain. She's just figured out that he's her real father, and she's projecting so hard. It doesn't matter that he loves her and that she loves him. What he does is wrong.

The key difference here is that David Cain horrifically abused Cass while this father genuinely cares for his daughter. But Cass still does not fully see it as abuse. She sees the love he has for her, and that she has for him. The same with this kid and her father. The problem isn't that Cain hurt her constantly as a kid, she's heartbreakingly fine with that given that it was the only childhood she knew. No, the problem is that he hurt other people. He's a killer, and he made her a killer too. That's why his "love" doesn't matter.

It's such a good piece of character work because it shows why Cass's moral code, which is iron clad when it comes to killing and redemption, can also be flawed due to her own childhood trauma. There are these key elements of good and bad parenting that seem straightforward to everyone else but simply elude her, and all she has left as a framework is the law and her own projection of her relationship with Cain.

It's something she gets to work on and grow from. But as a character statement on it's own it's so tragically bleak and I love it.

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you’re soooooo right for the cass and jason stuff. i am obsessed with how their views make them behave in their own separate selfish ways. cass needing to believe people can change and be redeemed because she herself needs to believe she can be redeemed…… im thinking specifically in batgirl where she tries to save a murderer from death row. saying “maybe he changed” to the victims mother….. and then everything with jason really, the way he can’t see beyond how he was a victim to see how he has hurt and victimized others. how he has made himself into someone who really can’t see beyond his own tragedy in many ways… how he sees bludhaven literally blow up but refuses to let bruce leave to find Dick

YOU'RE so right because it's easy for people to side with Cass or Jason only, but it's more interesting to see it as neither being 100% in the right. That issue in Batgirl is literally so good - as this post points out, the crime the guy was in prison for was most likely a hate crime. The motive doesn't matter to Cass, since her belief is that no one should die, but it's deliberately disquieting that she doesn't stop to consider the victim until the victim is actually in front of her. Her point of view is focused around redemption and absolutes, to the detriment of justice and specific circumstances.

Jason, on the other hand, is so focused on justice that he has trouble making room for redemption. His is a situational ethics (in contrast to Cass' moral absolutism), which can be good in certain instances (like, debatably, killing the Joker), but can lead to really muddied actions and reasoning. Jason, like Cass, is fundamentally compassionate, but his actions are calculated in a way Cass' is not, leading him to sometimes lose sight of saving lives as the original goal.

Bruce, Jason, and Cass form a really interesting triangle of people whose views on murder are irrevocably tied to the perspective they witnessed the defining murder of their lives in. It's why none of them (yes, even Cass and Bruce) can ever truly understand each other, but also why they have a lot in common. Idk it's just very interesting to think about!

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Thinking about Cass and moral codes and how her moral lines, her black and white attitude towards killing , is not because she doesn't understand moral grey areas. She emphasises with every single killer, she projects on them, she wants to save everyone, from a woman in an alley to a man on death row. No one had to make her follow a moral code, in fact the people in charge of her childhood would very much prefer if she didn't have the code she does! She chose it herself, chose exactly what her line would be. And within that line, that clear line she's decided of "nobody dies", there is so, so much grey. Every killer she's helped, every person she couldn't save, has taught her of another shade of grey.

Her attitude against killing isn't there because she doesn't understand morally grey situations. It's there because she understands the moral greyness so deeply, in a way not even Bruce can. She looks at it, projects on it, is saddened and disgusted and furious and sometimes even despairing at the things she's seen and the situations she's encountered.

And she chooses to stick with her line in the sand anyways. You'll never convince her that killing is the solution to anything. It doesn't mean she can't ever be reasoned with, she put the man on death row back because his victim's mother made her feelings on the entire thing very clear. But despite how it shook her, despite how she failed to save that man, she still went out the following night determined that nobody will die. Nothing can ever shake that moral center of hers, even when she fails it just reinforces the trauma that formed her worldview in the first place. Is it healthy? Not at all. Is is entertaining to read? Absolutely

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Just read Batgirl 2000 again and I have thoughts. Specifically about issue 19.

1. I seriously can’t believe I didn’t realize before but that guy straight up committed a hate crime. It’s never explicitly stated but the fact that his victim was a young black girl and he was sentenced to death in Gotham means it definitely was a hate crime.

2. This issue was for sure the moment Cass decided the only way to be redeemed was to die. One of Cass’s biggest flaws is her refusal to consider nuance when it comes to crime, especially murder. Despite the world of difference between her being raised to kill and that man committing a hate crime she believes that what they did is the same. So in her mind, if he has to die for what he did, so does she. She’s literally staring his victims mother in the face and thinking, ‘I caused that sadness, that hate, in someone else’s mother, so if she thinks he must die, I must die too.’ It’s so tragic on so many levels.

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TV show people writing poker scenes putting layers of intricate symbolism and push-pull back and forth conflict and strategy between characters into every hand and combination of cards. Me watching it: whats a flush is that good.

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I took my little brother (autistic, mostly non verbal) out and he was using his voice keyboard to tell me something, and this little boy (maybe 4 or 5?) heard him and asked me "Is he a robot??" I tried to explain to him that no, he isn't a robot, he just communicates differently, but my darling brother was in the background max volume "I am robot I am robot I am robot I am robot"

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Superman tarot for assignment :3

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Did a brand new kind of bowling shot today

we called it the "trust the Force Luke" shot or the "through God all things are possible" shot

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they call me normal man on account of my normal nature

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He means a little squeeze bottle with brine shrimp inside but… bottle feeding the loblings…