#willis.zip

[boyfridged]

who willis todd is sets the tone of the whole narrative for jason. i would even go as far as to say that him, along with catherine, represent the human side of the crime alley. his values quite literally establish the political and moral landscape of the story, at least through comparison.

[boyfridged]

perhaps it says something about the perception of adoption and even the institution of it that we first learn that jay has a father (who, for all we know, was a perfectly okay parent) who is in prison thus not capable (or rather not allowed) to care for him, after which he simply gets killed off, and years after he is retconned to have been abusive. sometimes it's good to take a pause and think about how these dynamics play out in real world. children being taken from poor parents because of perceived incompetence and placed with middle class/rich folks instead… etc.

[boyfridged]

so much of jay’s storyline and his unique position in the narrative is lost/upstaged in contemporary canon because of the retcons regarding his parents. i wholeheartedly believe that the best iteration and reading of his story has to incorporate the og characterisation of them, especially of willis. two aspects to be talked ab here:

a. ethics & crime: when talking ab jay's parents, people usually focus on catherine as a good mom. there's nothing wrong with that, but she is traditionally seen as more of a passive victim of crime, and in post-res jay content (+his backstory retcons, look: cheer) it makes him especially resentful to... dealers. on its own, it could be dismissed, but that along with making willis into an abusive father reframes the early storyline of jay to have a criminal antagonist, which gives him the incentive to become bitter and spiteful towards criminals. and that's, in my opinion, an actual antithesis to everything interesting ab jason's introduction. i talked about it at length here but what is utterly fascinating in his early stories is that jay doesn't care much for labeling people as criminals. he doesn't link the notion of 'crime' with that of moral standing, and explicitly says that he doesn't think that surviving is a crime, a statement that most probably also applies to willis. it's extremely important because it shows that jay is not ever vengeful as robin for the sake of serving any high black-and-white notion of justice; jay's understanding of morality is highly situational. it is both his strength (as it makes it easy for him to empathize with people) and also something that will make vigilantism difficult for him – where bruce's limits are still somewhat dictated by the law, jay will still seek justice guided by his own intuitions (garzonas case.)

b. grief & vigilantism: painting willis as an abusive father is usually followed by writers (and readers) dismissing one of jay's most important storylines. batman #410-#411 covers jay's grief after he learns about willis' death and imo these issues are one of the keys to understanding his character in general. i talk ab it more here (in another context) but tldr; i think that jay's initial way of dealing with grief has little to do with vigilantism and that he seemingly sees it as an independent matter. and around 2-3 years later, we learn that jay is still heavily grieving in private (once again, same quotes as from the linked post, batman #426) “i’ve come upon him, several times, looking at that battered old photograph of his mother and father, crying.”  “in other words, i may have started jason as robin before he had a chance to come to grips with his parents' deaths.” so. it's explicitly stated that unlike in bruce's case, vigilantism isn't a coping mechanism for jay's grief at all, but even interrupts it. and jay grieves after both of his parents.

this is also all interesting in the context of jay's relationship with bruce – bruce views jason as both a victim of criminality and someone who might go down this road in a cyclic reenaction of his father's [willis] life. in batman #410 bruce says clearly that he believes that if he were on the streets, jay would be doomed to die a criminal like his father [willis] did. but jay isn't murdered following a "path of crime" like his first father; he dies living up to his next father's (bruce's) heroic ideals.

[boyfridged]

[boyfridged]

"why did willis have shiva's details in his address book anyway" obviously she saw his beautiful eyes and gave it to him?

[boyfridged]

80s willis is truly the key character that upsets the red hood canon as a whole. first of all, he's proof that jason does not naturally consider crime to be a fundamental problem of life. secondly, jay has a whole plotline about forgiving a man who killed his father. perhaps it's not a 1:1 neat analogy to how he would have acted if the dead father was bruce, but it does suggest at least some level of dissonance in his words in regard to this topic that has to be addressed.

in terms of the first problem, there's no easy explanation that would clarify why jason regressed so much in his understanding of the matter unless you admit that he was immensely affected by batman's view on crime and is now taking this view to the extreme instead of actually subverting it. the second problem can be solved mainly by admitting that jason is more emotional and scared than he is often portrayed to be.

none of these challenges are anything the editorial nor writers care about, hence the relentless retconning of willis and the original two-face story instead. i refuse to let it go though.

[boyfridged]

the thing for me is that i do not care whatever niceties lobdell implied about willis and i do not care that there's sympathy for willis even when willis is portrayed as an abuser. portraying him as an abuser is inexcusable to me in the first place. the deeply ingrained belief that willis simply had to turn violent toward his own family (even if lobdell thinks it's pardonable) is a sign of how liberalism and classism eats through the writers' minds. the most radical thing you can do with willis' character is always to simply allow him to be who he was meant to be from the beginning. which is someone who was never before implied to have raised a hand at jason at all. i don't care about any compromises in that matter. and btw i'm not taking a moral stance on whether or not forgiveness there would be apt and i do think jason would forgive as he usually does. i also do adore complicated familial dynamics but you do have to simply ask yourself when it's appropriate. my issue is, hence, the very core of that retcon. and just to remind you, lobdell is at least comfortably middle class and got his job due to connections, he's relentlessly racist and admitted to have sexually harassed another writer. isn't it crystal clear that at heart of this retcon there is the same bigotry that guides him in his personal life? please be serious for a second

[boyfridged]

i love bruce wayne and i don't think he was a bad parent to jay but i also think willis todd, gd bless his soul, deserves to get to spit at him.

[boyfridged]

willis todd appeared in maybe 2 panels and yet he is literally the most political character

[boyfridged]

yutro i need to hear more abt ur canon oc willis todd. please.

oh the pleasure is mine! (i feel like i have waited for this question my whole life though so it will be long. and won't even cover all of it.)

obviously, willis todd was born in the crime alley. he was raised by struggling parents and an assembly of aunts and uncles, not all blood related. his family broke down due to financial trouble. there's a whole background here i have in mind: the area used to be more dominated by heavy metal industry workers, but the companies started seeking cheap labour abroad, throwing the community into an almost decade old crisis and causing them to disperse while also trying to gentrify the area (partly by exploiting the queer & artistic spots in the area that are also often found in districts with high immigrant & working class areas. that's a thing that happens in many cities) (that's offtopic but hence the fancy cinema in the area!). when willis was very young, his father was a victim of aggressive lay-offs and was soon found dead. his mother left gotham with another man when willis was 17. he did not blame her for it.

he is also a 2nd/3rd gen immigrant. i do not have a "set" ethnicity for him (although in thursday night and my other wip he is vietnamese.) it's also important to me that he speaks the language.

he's never been exceptionally good at school but he's smart and knows his way around plenty things. he spent his adolescence working many odd jobs, involving the less-legal ones mentioned in canon - "running numbers" and boosting cars, but not only. he managed to get the GED despite and enrolls into a scholarship LPN programme provided by the wayne foundation (nothing to do with bruce btw, who at the time is not involved neither in the company nor in the philantropy. it's probably based on late thomas wayne's project.) it's not his dream job but this is what is available, it's honest work and he's good enough at it. this is also how he meets sheila.

willis does fall in love with sheila, but she takes interest in him first and tbh willis also falls a bit in love with pretty much anyone and everyone he meets. he sees the best in people. they are never serious though, but when pregnancy comes into play, willis is determined to work something out. maybe sheila thinks she can be a mother for a moment too, and she is vaguely around for the first 2-3 months, except she's not being a mother anyway. and also soon she looses her freshly obtained license as a result of medical malpractice, and willis loses his scholarship because of the association with her too.

he meets shiva by accident and performs first aid on her. sandra gives him her contact details "in case he ever needs anyone gone." willis being willis thinks absolutely nothing of it.

on that note. willis just has what i'd call middle mannered boyish charm, good-spirited sense of humour and the tiniest amount of shyness/awkwardness that makes people (women especially) like him a lot. and he doesn't mind casual romance himself so his address book (or whatever the contemporary equivalent would be) grows to be quite a weird list.

he's briefly a single dad to jay before he meets catherine. they manage just fine for a while, he gets a job as a mechanic, and he is home enough for jay to speak the language too (jay does not speak it later in life though. but jay's relation to willis is a whole another topic i could write hundreds of words about). when catherine gets sick and the financial issues follow, he gets much more absent and depressed. still, every decision he takes is always motivated by the love for his family. he might not have time nor energy to entertain jay as much as he'd like to, so their past-time becomes taking naps together. and willis likes music so he sings him to sleep.

i talked about willis' parenting and his attitude irt violence here so i will not repeat myself but i do think he was relentlessly patient and that this kindness in the eyes of many made him a bit naive. but he would also stop at nothing for his family. love drives men like him into paradoxical points of no return sometimes. &he is convinced he's getting his hands bloody so that jay's never ought to be.

i think he goes on blackgate on a murder charge, because blackgate is blackgate. if he did it or not is a whole another matter; and he surely knows too much for two-face to get rid of him. perhaps contrarily to the charge, his "crime" was actually trying to take a step back and this is what got him in trouble.

[boyfridged]

You think that Jason learned his forgiving nature from Willis? He strikes me a guy with enormous patience. And I love the idea of Jason taking a lot after his dad without even realizing it at times.

this is the loveliest ask... and yes, it is my headcanon! perhaps it's because willis became a sort of a (parental especially) foil to bruce to me, inwardly. i don't think willis has ever enjoyed violence or even deemed it necessary in most situations. i think to him, it only comes down to the barest circumstances in which it is unavoidable for survival (including long-term arrangement such as work, unfortunately) and other than that it is reprehensible. and i reckon for this reason he never wanted to teach any of it to jason. imo he had that half-delusional belief (or a wish) that jason will never need violence because willis will be there for him, to protect him. and everything willis does involving himself in organised crime is to spare jason the same. in the end it seems naive. but as you said, willis is a man of enormous patience, and this enormous patience comes from somewhere; from a place of intimate understanding that most people do not commit wrong-doing for the sake of it, but rather as a result of their environment. this is obviously something we see early on in jay's robin run... and i think it's all their common origin (crime alley), willis' parenting style (even if he was more absent than present at some point!) and the simplest matter of sharing your parents' traits.

and ah the fact that jason does not realise it is even more painful, because this is something that he tries to kill in himself. it fits so well with the fact that he seems to distance himself from willis... he does it both because of bruce (his longing for acceptance and bruce's instruction irt the criminal system, his tenure as robin as a whole) and because of his own, incredibly difficult relationship with victimhood... after what he has seen and went through as a vigilante, mercy does not seem like an option (ironically! batman thought vigilantism was what was going to teach him that, but he might have reversed an already instilled lesson instead). but it's still there. and i think for jason to fully rediscover it and embrace it, we need a willis-centric story. as always he's a key to so many plotpoints and dilemmas of the narrative.

[boyfridged]

Ignore if there's already a post you've made about this extensively but I'd really really love to hear your opinions on Willis Todd. Because in my opinion, who Jason's parents are and how they're portrayed basically shape him to a pretty good extent. It's always interesting to see how people view him!

(Side Note: Absolutely Absolutely love your metas. I'd print them on edible paper sheets and consume them LMAO)

i have lots of opinions on willis todd, and i even said something very similar to what you did; though perhaps even more radical... i said that who willis todd is shapes the whole narrative of jay, even. he's, strangely, one of my favourite characters and i admit to oc-fying him a bit (a lot...)

and i have written lots about it. in fact, it took me so long to reply to your ask because i was fighting the algorithm to find my posts and finally figured out the most reliable way: i added #willis.zip to my featured tag on my blog - i think it still misses some of my metas, some because it's tumblr, and some because i'm not that committed to tagging anymore, but you should find a decent selection there! let me know if it doesn't work.

and thank you so much for such a sweet message!! it's always so nice to hear that people actually find my takes at least a bit interesting since i mostly just come here to incoherently ramble and let it all out.

[boyfridged]

an interesting thing i've noticed is that people usually assume that willis was already with catherine when sheila dropped the baby on him. personally, i prefer that he was a single dad for a moment.

[boyfridged]

thinking about jay's morality and willis again. the conflict between the faith in batman and robin as symbols and his disinterest in labeling criminals. thinking about jay kicking some goon in the face and spending hours trying to shut down the thought that has his father lived, maybe he would one day have to break his arm too. and of course, on a crime scene, it's him or them, it's the safety of gotham or them, and he has to choose, or rather he simply has to follow batman's lead, and bruce knows what he's doing for sure. so he suppresses.

obviously, no dc writer (even in the 80s, when the classism of their content was much less glaring and offensive) would have made this into a storyline. but in my heart, it's an internal conflict that logically had to occur, and that would have to be eventually properly explored if jay lived. especially given the role that grief after his parents had.

[boyfridged]