#I’ve been fucking coerced into a position where I need a job badly and will take up literally anything

[whetstonefires]

I’ve decided I can’t healthily reblog that one Jason post again, for everyone’s sanity, but op’s most recent reblog was both highly illuminating and infuriating--and I mean that on two different levels; there was some really good explication of perspective and how we’re missing each other in the dark, but there was also more of the stuff that drives me out of my skull.

So, I’m going to make my own post, which can be engaged with at will, rather than coming right to op’s house.

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So, as I’ve mentioned, my biggest issue with a lot of a specific subtype of Jason arguments is they devolve really quickly into the insistence that he is owed anything by anyone in his family besides Bruce.

He’s not. That is just so, so incredibly important to me.

I want to talk about why, but I’m not going to because it’s way too in-depth and personally triggering a subject for me to fit a full breakdown here or to risk having it brushed off, so I’m leaving it as a strong assertion of personal opinion. Maybe I’ll come back to it at some point.

More germane to the inciting reblog...I also don’t think they, the batfam (specifically the batboys because DC never let the girls in on the game despite how much they should have, probably because no matter whether they got beat up or successfully deescalated, they’d ruin the dramafest by tipping Jason’s arc out of its toxic loop) could have helped him by approaching him in a ‘better’ way.

Partly because they did try--people will dismiss that as not counting because it ‘seemed manipulative’ but like. That’s not only textbook abuser excuse language to tell someone that doing exactly what they wanted still deserved punishment, there is literally no way people with no existing positive relationship could approach someone whose incredibly toxic behavior they are morally obligated to prioritize changing without coming across as having an agenda? How were they meant to possibly avoid that?

Especially when he had already approached them with violence and not signaled any intent to stop, so it would be insane to have their guard totally down?

(Like. Even Bruce being given actually good writing would have been pretty cornered into either physically containing or emotionally attempting to persuade him into doing a different thing, and that’s Bruce.)

But mostly they couldn’t have gotten different results with a different approach because they were his triggers. Their presence made everything worse. It provoked episodes. There was nothing they could have done differently to get a better response, because one of the most reliable triggers for his mental health issues and violent coping mechanisms is the batfam.

Is Batman and Robin. (Or was, in the relevant window. He’s mostly going by a different playbook since Flashpoint.)

Precisely by being his family, they were rendered incapable of giving him what the Outlaws eventually did, if you treat preboot and nu52 as being in the same continuity, no matter what they did or said.

Which all the more means that every assertion that the family (minus Bruce, because of some shitty drama-seeking bullshit that I hate but it’s canon so people who like it have the right to use it as they wish) treated him badly, and should have treated him better and then things would have been better...

Always sounds to me like an exercise in victim blaming.

Rich with what would be gaslighting, if it was said to rather than about them.

Which in turn triggers the fuck out of me, though luckily unlike Jason I just get passive-aggressive on the internet by accident, rather than stabbing people in the chest for saying no to me and waiting for their heartbeats to stop, and then grinning real big.

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And that moment of drama I just called back to ties into another really important reason that, in spite of how much I love him, pro-Jason arguments in this mode just fuck me up, one that doesn’t connect to my personal hangups.

Which is how this approach tends to argue for Jason being entitled to the utmost gentleness and care and respect for his needs, and opportunities to change without being coerced or contained or shamed or accused, and...

But will turn around and in the same breath brush away him murdering criminals as a well-intentioned action to improve the world, out of concern for the harm they might do him or others, even if it maybe isn’t necessarily right.

Will treat his crimes as details that have no real bearing on how people ‘should’ react to him. ‘Should’ being defined wholly in terms of his experience of the world.

Dude not only takes hostage and violently assaults Robin and shoots a ten-year-old near the heart, he slaughters low-level drug dealers and mob enforcers, people who are just small cogs in a machine whose evil only very arguably exceeds that of extraction capitalism, who in the former case may not have committed any violent crimes themselves ever in their lives.

People who have families and dreams and mental health conditions and traumas of their own.

He murdered everyone eating in Blackgate cafeteria and Blackgate isn’t some special, murderers-only facility with no, like, weed possession felons, for example. Even if it was, some of the other convicted murderers probably had worse childhoods and less control of their trauma-driven violent episodes than Jason.

Some of those people he kills might have lived in the same alleys as him at the same time, and the break they got to get out of there was a job in organized crime, rather than an adoption offer from a millionaire, and later a training subsidy from an assassin princess.

And somehow we are meant to be comfortable accepting that they deserve death. All of them. Somehow intervening non-lethally to prevent him from killing more of them is framed as a moral cruelty roughly equal to his personal, targeted assaults on children. His right to not be forcibly remanded to mental health treatment outweighs their right to live.

Because. They’re just. Scum.

And this, to me, represents a willingness to disregard the human rights of some people, while at the same time elevating the individual rights of some other person above every other moral good.

And that, on principle, upsets the hell out of me.

Where is their pity, their extenuating circumstances? Their acknowledgment that violence and rejection is not the answer to someone’s trauma-driven coping strategies?

How can ‘criminals’ be grounds enough to sacrifice people’s right to exist, while Jason--a serial killer and mass murderer both by any measure--deserves not only life and liberty but every good and kind thing? How can both these ideas exist together in the same space?

I can’t do it. I can’t make any sense out of it at all. For Jason to be more sinned against than sinning in relation to his family--to have had the right to be met with endless gentleness and patience rather than ever violently opposed or rejected, even leaving aside his personal treatment of them--the lives of those who commit violent, criminal acts must be disposable things. Easily traded away.

But then by that same cruel metric he, too, becomes a disposable person.

And I do not believe in throwing people away.