#but yeah idk i am tired of people treating winick's word like gospel when frankly so much of it is shit

[roobylavender]

What’s one thing you think people get so wrong about Jason Todd and his relationship to Bruce and Talia? What is your interpretation of it? Should Jason work away from the Batfamily or it is it where he needs to be? Who should Jason be close to?

i will try to be brief.

i want to preface first that i think what jason's progression as the red hood has led people to believe is he's emotionally impenetrable and impervious to any and all forms of reason. which on a surface level i get why that would be the assumption bc i mean what he does to become the red hood and then executes as the red hood is quite insane and gives the impression of a ledge you can never walk back from, but (and you know i'm beating a dead horse with this) crucially i think what people forget is that jason is barely eighteen or nineteen years old when he makes his grand return. and as someone in her mid-twenties, an eighteen year old is still very much a child to me. i have a seventeen year old brother and when i think about the kind of mental, emotional place someone his age would have to be in to do the things that jason does, i imagine it to be quite volatile and unstable and perilously vulnerable to collapse. is jason in the wrong with what he does? unequivocally. he has no right to play god regardless of his reasons for it. but his reasons for it are also very clearly driven by trauma even if that response to trauma is packed into some deluded semblance of practicality, in that he's using his ends to justify his means. he's clearly operating from a standpoint of knowing death intimately and understanding the terror of that moment where you're alone and you have no one but the force beating down on you making sure you don't survive, and he believes no one innocent should ever be made to feel that. so there is a clear, coherent thought process there. but it's still driven by a personal, traumatic experience that has inspired him towards this cause, and to bring it back to your first question, i really hate that people act like that can't be worked with to help him heal and reform, esp with bruce and talia's help

my biggest problem with the way winick portrays the relationship between jason and talia is that he presents the same caveats as most modern writers who tackle talia: they don't understand what sets ra's and talia apart. talia is in pursuit of the same ends as ra's, but her means aren't aligned and her questioning his means at the expense of her loyalty to him is what drives them apart. she's not a nihilist, she will only kill those people who have harmed her family first, and she doesn't fraternize with debased criminals with no sense of morality (remember, she believes what ra's is doing is right and noble. he's a couple notches up from your standard villains bc, yes, he's utterly deranged, but there's also a level of class to his schemes that makes it less about targeting individuals and more about enacting a large scale environmental renaissance, even if it's utterly delusional). she can assassinate and she can scheme bc it's what she's grown up learning to do but she doesn't actually enjoy doing any of it. so yes, a lot of people like to reason that talia sends jason to learn from all of these despicable teachers to prevent him from killing bruce, but realistically i don't think she ever would. she values human life and she values children and i seriously doubt she would throw a child into that kind of education knowing the kind of trauma he's already been through. sending jason to these teachers and shaping him into a weapon for potential use while allowing him some leg room to pursue his own agendas, so long as he does not stray too far, is way more up the ra's alley, and i think most of what happens in lost days after jason comes back from his failed attempt on bruce's life would make more sense if it was orchestrated by ra's

talia to me should be the person who watches in horror as jason evolves into someone she knows he was never meant to be and whom it would break bruce's heart to see, despite her own efforts to imbibe him with love and learning and compassion. she should be the person who tries her best to hold him back from the demon's influence as much as she can and who hates to see him go bc she fears in her heart that she hasn't done enough. she should be the person who completes her tenure at lex corp, exhausted, isolated, embittered, only to turn on the news and see the red hood on every screen, then march her way over to gotham to make it right before it all truly goes to hell. she should be the person who makes it to the building with jason and bruce and the joker and the bomb and hides in a corner with a gun trained to the joker's heart, and the second that bomb threatens to go off she pulls the trigger and ends it forever. she should be the person who drags jason away from it all and takes him someplace where she can break the helmet on her knees and look into his eyes and tell him that there has to be more to his life than just this, than deciding to play god and taking these lives away at his leisure as if it will solve anything about himself or about the world. she should be the person who asks him to remember his parents again and asks him to remember that he's barely a man and asks him to remember that there was a time where he was loved, that he still is loved. she should be the person to help him break free, bc the guilt of allowing him to remain chained to his past would hold her down like a deadweight otherwise and i doubt she could live with herself

wrt bruce. i honestly truly despise the way bruce is written throughout the entirety of under the red hood. i understand it is working in context of war games and bruce's horrific tenure with stephanie as his robin but truly i will never read those comics ever bc the minute bruce started being utterly heartless towards stephanie is when i put the books down and decided i was content with whatever i had read up until that point and would be content with exploring rather than putting myself through progressively more and more awful depictions of bruce as a character. i like bruce a lot. i agree he is incredibly flawed, a poor communicator, pathetically clingy, emotionally repressed to a frightening degree, etc. but to me the bedrock beneath all of that is that bruce cares. he cares to the point of utter devotion and delusion and is caught in this struggle of caring about his kids and wanting to give them everything that he has to offer but having to hesitate and reconsider when the path they take as his partners poses threats to their life. he can't take back the mantle that he's given them and he can't hold them back from their destiny but he's still a frightened parent with deep regrets over his line of work even if he believes in it and i think, for however boring and slow of an overall arc it is, knightfall is utterly fabulous at depicting that. the sheer devastation and grief that permeates bruce in this culmination of everything that has built up to jason's death and bruce's sense of his own failure in the aftermath is so tragic, and it shocks me that we don't even see a glimpse of that in under the red hood when it's hardly been a year or two since

i have talked about it somewhere before, but to go on a slight tangent, what distinguishes dick and bruce to me is that dick is slightly better at compartmentalizing his own grief and trauma. he knows he has to perform as a leader so he doesn't let things get in the way of his own execution despite however much grief and anger and confusion he may be roiling in. he will be utterly unlikeable in the moment, but he'll get the job done with complete clarity of mind bc that's how seriously he's learned to take it. bruce, comparatively, is someone who i honestly do not believe can compartmentalize for shit. he lets his emotions make a mess of themselves on his lawn. he broods. he falls into deep depressions. he isolates. he devolves into pathetic meow meowism (derogatory). so it's odd that his characterization in under the red hood is so detached and cold, bc sure, he'll obv question the possibility of resurrection. but once he confirms that it's all real, i feel like his reaction should be.. way more emotional. devastated. desperate. delusional. anything to get his son back whom he adores more than anything and to help him understand that he is still so loved and will be loved forevermore if he would only give life another chance. the best thing about bruce used to be that he cared. he cared so much and it was so easy for him to reach out to people, esp children, out of a deep sense of compassion and understanding of how frightened they felt at the other end of a gun barrel. he was a little awkward with it, and sometimes he didn't know what to do with himself, but he cared, and i refuse to believe he wouldn't do everything in his power to help jason heal. him prioritizing the joker over jason genuinely makes no sense and i wish any writer had taken the time to have someone relay to jason that bruce tried to kill the joker but it was other people who stopped him, bc that feels like a very significantly left out detail to me

as for the last thing to address since i have already rambled for so long i will actually try to be brief here but personally i do think he should stay in gotham, he should just have his own sphere separate of like. the cave and the manor. i really want him to work with leslie and barbara and even talia on the side towards community upliftment initiatives and for him to slowly phase out of vigilantism entirely. i realize that is an incredibly unpopular opinion bc everyone loves jason going pew pew but i really do think he's a character who was meant for retirement and to explore more with his life from the outset and that it would make so much sense for him to find a way to pursue justice that's still important and centered on his community but that doesn't come at the cost of his own sanity and doesn't have him trying to play god bc he comes to recognize it's wrong (esp in context of what happened to his own father). there once was a life that he wanted to live and he deserves to live it and i'm honestly tired of fandom acting like the only natural conclusion to his character arc is for him to remain a forever removed classist murderer who will never achieve closure with anyone ever bc then he doesn't get to continue being an edgelord. it's stupid and it's why he hasn't grown as a character despite being here for like eighteen years now. the red hood really should have been a temporary identity at best i truly hate that we are forever stuck with it