#but yeah jason and talia as a ship really doesn't work for me

[navree]

psst, jason/talia.

Yeah...no. No.

I have a lot of thoughts on Jason and Talia and their relationship, but I firmly reject any romantic interpretation. Jason and Talia as a romance seems to hinge on Talia having sex with him during the Lost Days, and I can never get into that because I'm not a fan of the "Talia the rapist" character choice, I wasn't when they tried to make it the canonical backstory for Damian's conception (like, if you want her to be morally/ethically grey about it, it's not like faking a miscarriage so that your partner thinks that their baby is dead and then immediately fucking off to raise that baby in secrecy with a culty terrorist organization is a super great move either) and I definitely wasn't a fan with Jason. Like, take stock of the situation Jason is in during the tryst with Talia.

For one, Jason Todd is a child. He's, what, sixteen when that all goes down? And Talia is significantly older, even physically she's the same age of his father, to say nothing of her literal age, and I'm of the opinion that people in their thirties or in their hundreds shouldn't be having sex with teenagers under any circumstances.

For two, Talia has an incredible amount of power over Jason that renders any affirmation he can give her totally moot. Talia is the one who got him off the streets of Gotham before he got seriously hurt or even killed again (which, as a catatonic fifteen year old no one knows is even alive, he very likely would have been). Ra's wanted Jason dead, once it became clear that he wasn't progressing fast enough for his tastes, and it's Talia's decision to put him in the Lazarus Pit and subsequently save his life. Jason owes Talia a life debt, and it is very clear that she is the only person in the League, a place that is half a world away from anyone else who even knows about him, let alone cares about him, who is even remotely invested in his survival. Even beyond the fact that Jason's ability to stay alive is dependent entirely on Talia's desire for him to be that way, she also funds a lifestyle he is becoming psychologically dependent on, his training as he prepares to head back to Gotham and become the Red Hood. Jason needs to stay in Talia's good graces to keep that lifestyle and that life in general, and who's to say that refusing something she wants wouldn't remove him from those graces? I'm sure everyone can see the problem with that.

For three, Jason is not mentally healthy during this time. At all. He is severely traumatized from the litany of horrible things that, to him, have happened in a very short time period, and he is not getting any treatment for it. Lost Days Jason desperately needs psychiatric help in order to deal with the mental toll of everything that's happened to him, and he doesn't have that, and that means he's stuck in a really bad mental space without the ability to really get out of it, and it does effect his decision making (the Red Hood plan, while it does show Jason's natural intelligence and strategic abilities, is not a normal thing to plan, nor is any of Jason's reactions in Lost Days normal or healthy, though they are understandable given the information he has available to him and his headspace).

There is no way that Jason can give meaningful consent to Talia in any of these circumstances individually, never mind all of them combined. Jason Todd is a teenage boy under a significant amount of strain and distress that does influence his decision making abilities who is entirely reliant on Talia, a very powerful adult and sole authority, not just to live comfortably but be able to live at all in an area where nobody else knows him, knows of him, or cares remotely about his wellbeing. And that doesn't even touch on the fact that Jason has been repeatedly and heavily implied to have solicited while homeless after Catherine died and before Bruce found him as a way to try and survive, so adding that mess of issues and past trauma from rape and molestation is a whole other can of worms when it comes to Jason and choices he makes to try and keep himself alive regardless of personal wants.

Any sex between Talia and Jason would be rape. Even if Jason is the one attempting to instigate or otherwise initiate, it is on Talia, as the adult, especially one aware of the situation in general and the situation of the power she holds over Jason and Jason's mental space, should put a firm stop to it, not indulge herself at a child's expense. Her not doing that, not being a responsible grown-up here, completely wrecks her character and is genuinely horrid. Not to mention it doesn't make any sense, what's the point of it? What gratification can you get from raping a traumatized kid, especially one who you know because of your affair with his dad? What's sexy about that, beyond "hot forbidden tryst with this older sexy brown woman" being something the writers are turned on by?

Because yeah, even going away from the Watsonian perspective, if we go full Doylist, this whole thing reeks of racism. Talia has always been a victim of racist writing due to the fact that she's a prominent woman of color and thus prone to a lot of racist tropes when storylines are being written for her. And brown women have a tendency to be exoticized, eroticized, and hyper-sexualized in real life, let alone in fiction, and having Talia, a brown woman, be so sexually aggressive that she rapes a child in order to satisfy her lust plays into that 100%, and was a horrible writing decision that decimates her character and really sours the entire Red Hood: Lost Days story for me.

Listen, I'm always in favor of ship and let ship, but Jason/Talia as a romantic pairing is a big fat giant NO from me and given that comics is the one medium that allows you to pick and choose your own canon, I am electing to excise it from my mind and my canon and say that it never happened.

[roobylavender]

Fellow Queen’s Thief enjoyer here! It always takes me back when Irene and Gen and their ages get mentioned because it is such an important part to who they are and it’s an age gap done for a reason that actually works within the series it is in. Irene was 20-23 (?) to Gen being 13-14 when the series starts? And even then she wasn’t framed kindly but the narrative still cared for her and allowed readers to love her.

What I have noticed when it comes to like Jason and fanon shipping is that the age gap problems always seems to be a problem for one ship but never for others. It’s like a selective fandom thing when like you see ships like JayRoy (age gap), JayArtemis (age gap, I mean she’s what 130+? or does Amazonian ages not apply to her?), JayKyle I’m not too sure about but there’s also that DonnaKyle ship so like how old is Kyle? But all are widely more acceptable than another certain ship. This is not like a defense or anything just something I noticed and I know you don’t ship any of these but it is just a fandom thing that caught my eye. And then you have characters like Talia and Bruce (age gap there) where you can talk about Bruce having a little of that upper hand and not really realizing where Talia might be coming from? Talia is actually interesting when you think of her age gap compared to Bruce and how she has been portrayed since the turn of her character.

Wait sorry. Gen was approx 10 in The Thief while Irene would have been 17/18.

eugenides is 15 in the thief! and he's about 18 by the time he finally returns to attolia to woo irene over in the queen of attolia. i think it's thief! where he's 10 years old bc it's a prequel story. donna and kyle i'm pretty sure are in the same age group bc kyle tends to be grouped with her, wally, connor, etc. but yeah it can be really amusing sometimes to see what fandom criticizes and what it doesn't (and like even moreso when it comes to jason bc his ships have such a broad range). like i can't lie i'm very confused by people who condemn dickbabs for the age gap only to turn around and ship dinahbabs gdkgjghlf like at least be consistent!

but yeah i personally really love the brutalia age gap from a narrative perspective. it's obv unintentional from an editorial perspective and maybe even subconsciously racist in the sense of pairing up an older white man with a younger "exotic" foreign woman but it inadvertantly really emphasizes on the issues in their relationship and talia's isolation as a result thereafter. she's young and comparatively without power or agency so when bruce walks away she's often left with nothing to stand on except for an abusive father occasionally meanwhile he goes back to his mansion and support system over and over. it'd be a nice thing to explicitly explore were writers to ever care enough (and tangentially i think the batcat age gap also brings up some interesting inquiries with respect to their places within gotham's hierarchy of power)