#sheila.zip

[boyfridged]

you wanted to talk about Sheila well I think on his death day Jason brings flowers for himself and for her 😗. Their shared grave is the only meaningful connection that they have besides blood. They died together they’re buried next to each other like that is significant!! #StopSheilaErasure2024 as wretched as she is Jason did NOT die alone. Like I think it’s actually so important that Jason spent the last seconds of his life trying to protect someone 🙈

i very much like this thought, but i'm also wondering if he would be able to be so casual about it? i think it would be more of a big step for him -- at least to me, it seems like in jay's mind, sheila's memory would be closed in a little box he would not interact with a lot, or would try not to. not because he blames her, because he doesn't, but rather because of the painful reckoning with the fact that she did not want him. which, again, is not something he would condemn her for -- if anything, i think he would feel guilty for the fact that he was buried next to his mother who did not want him, who before agreed for such close proximity first to deceive him, and later only in their last moments. so i think jay has a lot of love for sheila, but that love is tainted by that sort of intimate understanding of her that children sometimes have of their mothers -- the understanding that ultimately comes at price of their own self-esteem, since it means coming to terms with the fact that their [the child's] presence was a burden. (which is ultimately so interesting in comparison to his demands toward bruce -- but bruce chose him. there was a promise that blood does not hold there.)

but you are right, the fact that they share (well, shared) a grave is significant, and i think for him to do so would also signify some sort of peace. because as it is, i imagine he drags her memory like a corpse.

btw i believe if bruce ever told him of her last words-- the ultimate proof that she did not think of herself as his mother (speaking of which. why did bruce choose that arrangement after that...), it would be yet another heartbreak.

[boyfridged]

sheila haywood is actually such a good character.

there’s something about how hard it is to imagine her as jason's bio mother that makes sense because she is not his mother in any other sense. she’s such an ill-fitting piece of a puzzle. she’s so far removed from him as a person she could be an alien and it would not change much. and it’s fascinating in some ways.

the glimpse that we get at her- it’s the gritty realism that i would not mind that much. she’s such a piece of shit but also for all we know she never wanted jason. she never wanted to be a mother and she has that right. and yet there’s perhaps a moment when she’s willing to at least act like she’s happy to see him and like it’s a privilege to see who he has grown into. she doesn’t love him except maybe there is a part of her that wishes she could which is also already a bit like loving him.

and as i said, she's a piece of shit and she knows it. and yet we do not know how many of her actions- or rather the consequences, were fully intentional. was she truly responsible for the death of that patient back in gotham? did she first get involved with the joker voluntarily? was that a slippery slope or was she always like that? i don’t think she’s ever been kind at her core but i think she was capable of being a bit resentful toward herself because she was aware that she was wrong. i’m just not sure how much of it was shit she got herself in because of her lack of consideration for other people and cynicism and how much of it was deliberate malice and ambition. perhaps a conflation of both.

either way, her casual cruelty is something that absurdly does not fit into jason’s world. jason’s family has not always been the best, but it has always been loving and well meaning one. this is something that he clings to when darkness of vigilantism becomes too suffocating. sheila’s pragmatism is an antithesis to his hope. she’s a character that represents the new opportunistic image of gotham’s lower and middle class; but you’re not really supposed to hate her for it.