#the Titans Tower beatdown kinda tried to address the child sidekick thing

[mzminola]

Love Preboot Jason Todd being a narrative vehicle for the discussions of:

1. what vigilantism entails, the lines around different levels and kinds of violence, what’s the overlap between the Bats and the organized crime they’re up against, etc.

2. the ethics of having child sidekicks.

Like...with #1, the no-kill rule is vital and shouldn’t go away, but when writing normal humans fighting other normal humans, instead of metahumans punching robots or monsters, on a sliding scale of realism (yay different titles in same universe) asking “Should we deliberately kill?” leads to the question of “Should we be using violence that could kill?”

Robin 1993, aimed at a younger audience, asks “Should we be doing this at all?” when Tim causes the death of Young El; the other teen wouldn’t have died if Robin hadn’t chased him. It wasn’t a “fight that went wrong”, it was Tim giving chase and Young El fleeing into a structurally unsound building. The death causes Tim to re-examine if he’s doing the right thing as Robin.

Bruce Wayne/Batman is presented as hypercompetent most of the time, so his titles don’t lend as well to that kind of arc. Enter Jason Todd in Under the Red Hood, where Jason shoves questions about Batman’s ethical stances into Bruce and the readers’ face again and again and again.

A comic aimed at little kids with cartoon violence does not have to worry about the hero punching too hard and killing someone. Comics aimed at older teens and adult do. It can be an editorial decision that no, nobody is gonna die like that, but the characters need to be aware of the possibility (thank you Nightwing beating the Joker to death, for putting that on the table) and if the comics never have them wrestle with the possibility, never have them decide if it’s a risk worth taking, the character ethics feel disappointingly flat.

Jason works really well in this role of saying “Hey, your methods haven’t fixed shit, so why not change them. What’s the big difference between potentially fatal moves and deliberately fatal moves?” because Jason isn’t a random new character, he’s not a pre-existing villain just claiming to be working for good now, he’s Robin.

Jason is someone who was a hero, who did play by all of Batman’s rules, who did and still does desperately want to help people, and he saw how this plays out for the victims by being one.

Jason’s points can’t be dismissed out of hand. No one can say he doesn’t understand how difficult and complex the Bats’ work is, no one can say he doesn’t understand the stakes.

Which swings us around to #2, child sidekicks, because Jason’s death had two big factors which was one, he’s Batman’s sidekick so the Joker had it out for him specifically, and two, he was a child, which put him in a more vulnerable position than an adult sidekick would be in.

Jason was a fifteen year old kid failed by several parents and directly betrayed by another. A Gotham Rogue who Batman personally locked up multiple times and keeps escaping murdered him.

Jason’s death is on Bruce’s hands as much as it is on Gotham’s corruption.

If we take the interpretation* that Jason died again at the end of Under the Red Hood and went through further resurrections, that drives home the point that Bruce’s methods are lethally flawed.

Because Bruce fucking kills his son directly this time.

Jason sets up the confrontation, Jason arranges a no-win scenario where he insists that the only way to save Joker’s life is to end Jason’s (though he’d prefer his dad to kill his murderer for him) and Bruce tries what he thinks will get around it. Bruce throws a batarang at Jason’s gun hand, but the angle is wrong and it slices open Jason’s neck. He’s last seen curled up in a pool of his own blood right before being caught in the middle of an explosion.

This is the big ethical Bat dilemma written out in a very close, personal moment. If no one stops him, Jason is going to kill the Joker. There’s no back-up coming. Shit is way too personal for de-escalation to work. Bruce has spent years making violence into his primary tool. The only way he can stop a murder from happening in front of him is to physically hurt Jason.

So Bruce does. And because he’s a normal human with no powers, because years of training isn’t magic, it goes wrong and his son dies. He kills his son.

Jason has spent this arc insisting that Bruce’s methods don’t fucking WORK.

If Bruce had hit his hand, if like so many other Batman stories he Finds The Third Option, it would be a simple boring rebuttal of “Yes they do!”

Instead we get a batarang to the neck, and the question shifts from crossing specific lines of violence to “Is this worth it? Is the risk worth it?”

Because it was never a choice between “do nothing & someone dies” or “do something & everyone lives” it was always, always, a choice between “do nothing & someone dies” or “do something & risk killing someone yourself.”

Gotham’s justice system and city government is corrupt, there’s a fuckton of mafias, a growing number of costumed villains, and if everyone just keeps their heads down not only will things never get better, they’ll get worse.

The Bats do a lot of non-violent work; they do forensics, witness interviews, break into places for evidence, wiretapping, etc. They’re detectives. But they also, because this is a combination of noir and the caped superhero genre, do a lot of violence. They get into physical fights all the dang time.

Which means they’re taking the risk that Bruce did here all of the time.

They all have to ask themselves if that risk of someone dying by their hand is worth it to potentially stop other harm.

Jason driving the narrative to this question makes it as personally painful and impossible to ignore as it can get.

*Joker survived despite also being right on top of the bomb, but he also wasn’t bleeding out, so...