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obsidianstrawberrymilk · 2 years

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Okay so I saw this post earlier about how the Battle for the Cowl should have been between Cass and Jason (I can’t find it; if anyone knows what it is sorry), and yk it make so much more sense than what happens in canon!! Neither Dick nor Tim want to be Batman - they’ve both been shown to want to make their own path and being Batman stresses them out like crazy. Having either of them fight for it makes no sense. Steph and Babs have their own thing, they have no desire to take the mantle, and Damian is like 10, so?? HE might think he’s ready to be Batman but no one would let him.

Anyway so I’m just gonna say Duke’s already been adopted into the Batfam here (bc I love him) and that Tim and Steph were Robins together because I like it better. And so Bruce dies right? So there’s no Batman. Dick’s chilling in Bludhaven with no desire to be Batman, no one in Gotham wants to be Batman... sans Cass and Jason.

Plus it would be like a moral conflict too - Cass is so against killing, even moreso than Bruce, because of her past and what she was forced to do, while Jason believes there are people you just can’t leave alive. And are either of them right? We don’t know. They both would want at least the role Batman has in protecting the city, though they’d do it in very different ways. And Cass would obviously win because she never loses, but I feel like seeing them battle it out would be so fun bc Jason is brutal, yeah, but he’s also smart as fuck - seeing him trying to figure out Cass’s weaknesses and use them against her and seeing Cass use her own experience and superior abilities against him.

What’s everyone else doing? Dick’s probably stressing the fuck out because two of his siblings are trying to kill each other in Gotham shit- but after a while of getting yelled at he decides to just leave them to it. Damian probably goes with him and is his sidekick like in canon when he was Batman, but given he’s still Nightwing here Damian’s not Robin. Maybe he could be Flamebird - to complete with the story Dick got Nightwing from. I like to think Steph winds up chilling with them too, because I love her bond with Damian (she’s literally the closest to him after Dick and they have such a annoying older sister-bratty younger brother bond and no one does anything with it??) and since I think she’s meant to be the next Nightwing (right?? Am I reading the wrong things??) I’d love to see her have a sibling bond with Dick as well.

Ig Tim has more time to like... obsess over bring Bruce back to life or whatever he did? I genuinely forgot how he did that aside from that “I’m not Batman; I have friends” (Tim my guy icon), so he can probably be doing that while he and Duke and Barbra all continue being vigilantes and protecting people in the middle of Jason and Cass’s fighting. Barbra has better things to be doing - yeah she cares about Jason and Cass both and she probably yells at them to sort it out, but they’re both old enough to figure shit out. Duke is also stressed out but he has more important things going on rn. I feel like Tim wouldn’t care.

Tim and Steph would probably become Spoiler and Red Robin (he named himself after a fast food place does this guy live under a rock) bc no Batman = no Robin. I guess you could go the Steph Batgirl route but I like the Spoiler costume better so I’m sticking with it.

Actually, I kind of don’t want Bruce to come back now. Like how did he even come back in canon what did Tim even do.

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mysterycitrus · 6 months

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i dont know who a writer would be who could handle it (more ignorance on my part than lack of good writers though there is that too) but i’m curious what you think a real, earned redemption could look like for jtodd and if you would even want it.

i definitely think there’s a path, esp because so much of bruce’s philosophy relies on a genuine and earnest commitment to rehabilitation and restorative justice, but i also think (and maybe i’m wrong if anyone has comics recs lmk) but i don’t think i’ve seen a comic with the hard work of reaching out and healing/moving on from the past from both bruce + co and jason

i really love his character but especially now i don’t think dc knows what it wants to do with him so he’s in this perpetual limbo where he’s always on the edges of the batfam, a fringe black sheep member but a member nonetheless, still entangled with them

personally i would love either way but i wish dc would either separate him and let him do his own thing that’s not just punisher lite or really actually go through the process of making amends and fully integrating with the crew, learning to love and trust again and all that

omg this really got away from me so apologies for just word vomiting in your asks but yeah im curious dc puts you in charge of j todd’s next big character arc, what would you do with him

i don’t think that’s ignorance — dc is not known for hiring writers who can include and explore complex themes in their comics lol

personally i think the easiest way to trigger a redemption arc for jason would be take him away from the batfamily and force him to interact with other villains, specifically amanda waller and the suicide squad. task force z came kinda close to this, but didn’t push the concept far enough imo. jason’s interactions with black mask were some of the best parts of utrh — i want to see his ideology be questioned by people who do the exact same things as him, and are fully aware that they’re selfish and destructive.

the truth is that while jason is acting out and murdering people, he’s still bound to bruce. he is autonomously making decisions, but fundamentally he is choosing to stay. he’s choosing to be tethered. he’s choosing to care. seeing the indentured recruits of the suicide squad would be confronting to him.

i don’t think the happy family fanon dynamic will ever be possible without ruining every included character simultaneously, but that’s okay. that’s not what jason truly wants anyway.

specifically, i don’t think he’ll ever be able to work with bruce, which is why i find the jason + dick dynamic so interesting. you’re right — bruce’s fundamental mission is about restorative justice, and he would continue to reach out. dick, however, is a realist, and is extremely protective and territorial of the people in his care (tim, damian, the titans, etc) all of whom jason has hurt. jason has been shown on page to respect dick and his position, and simultaneously think he’s pathetic because he refuses to lose control.

for me ideally, he’d be someone on the very outskirts. i feel like dick and babs would be his point of contact — dick because he’s keeping an eye on jason, and babs because she has way less hangups about working with killers. otherwise? i think he’s lost the chance to properly bond with anyone who knew before he died. that’s the risk he took when he decided to become the red hood. that’s the tragedy.

but to be perfectly honest, the most restorative thing jason could do would be to leave the game entirely, and relearn how to live.

#jason todd #dc comics #dick grayson #batfam #the ask and the answer

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roobylavender · 2 years

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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

#outbox #i will try to be brief. i said like a liar. sorry i just have so many thoughts on this #but yeah idk i am tired of people treating winick's word like gospel when frankly so much of it is shit #even starlin wrote jason better than winick did. do you know how sad it is to have to admit that #ALSO idk before someone jumps me. when i say he's unequivocally wrong i mean in like context of what he does in gotham #idc that he killed that sex trafficker in what was it. croatia? idr the place but that was deserved good for him #that's the only part of lost days i am willing to praise tho the rest is still shit #jason todd #dc

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jostenneil · 3 years

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Do you mind elaborating on what you dislike about Winick’s writing?

it’s a couple of different things, but where i think it stems from is the idea that some jason fans have of jason being turned into “the angry robin” as only a recent development, and that winick returning to the writer’s mantle would fix that issue, as if he didn’t ascribe to this version of jason in his own writing of under the red hood, and that influenced so many of the versions of jason thereafter. as much as i hate starlin and what he ultimately did to jason, i think there’s a distinction that has to be made about his writing. he didn’t think jason was a generally angry kid. in quite a few of his stories, jason is bright, nervous, insightful. he’s still very much a good kid. the central aspect to his writing of jason and how that eventually leads to a death in the family is his depiction of jason as reckless due to emotional involvement or naïveté, sometimes both (as can be seen in the case with sheila). and while that’s a bit annoying given the earlier issues collins wrote, where jason was capable of exercising restraint and patience, the part about him getting too emotionally involved at times is at least not all that far fetched given the issue where he learns two-face is responsible for killing his father. but that’s about as far as the portrayal goes, and even in aditf (which is immediately subsequent to the garzonas issues, the content of which obv deeply upset jason and that he also got emotionally involved in), the concern from bruce is that jason hasn’t had enough time to properly cope with his parents’ death, and that if bruce can help him then maybe he’ll be able to patrol normally. there’s never the idea that jason’s some angry kid with a mean streak, and while the thing about his “mean streak” is only a single throwaway line in under the red hood as a whole, i think it exposes the problem with winick and jason writers in general. they don’t want to acknowledge the fact that his issues pre-death were specific. he wasn’t hurling himself like an infuriated ballistic at every criminal. truly there were only two cases where that happened, and one involved his father’s murderer, obv a sore point, and the other a woman who hanged herself bc she couldn’t escape her rapist. (ig if you wanted you could also count him going overkill on the drug bust at the start of aditf, but that was the kind of temporary mental place starlin was leading jason to with the garzonas issues, rather than something that necessarily spoke on his character as a whole.) ascribing all of that to him having a mean streak and not just. . . the fact that he was a deeply empathetic person who was upset by these things that happened to good people is kind of bizarre to me. and yeah, i know winick writes jason killing people who harm children, but it’s the way he goes about writing jason’s attitude that bothers me bc it feels purely driven by rage as if jason’s feelings about certain criminals didn’t stem from a deep compassion for and personal connection to their victims. when you center so much of jason’s post-resurrection motivation around the joker and little else, you forget what drove jason to get emotionally involved with cases to begin with. more than self righteousness about what criminals deserved, it was compassion, and i think winick really missed the mark on that.

on another end, i also think ignoring the case with his father specifically has spelled a kind of disaster for his character. jason’s father worked as a lackey for one of gotham’s biggest crime bosses, and jason initially thought he’d been abandoned by willis until he learned two-face killed him. i think it’s crazy that his philosophy regarding who deserves to die and who doesn’t wouldn’t account for that deeply personal experience, esp since he loved his father. that’s not to say that every person he’s ever killed is suddenly in possession of a conscience and that every head, lackey, etc. was as sincere of intentions as his father was, but i think what winick’s vision lacks is the idea of jason having to contend with difficult questions. what is the definition of “bad”? how do you get to decide who lives or dies? what marks the point of no return for a criminal? it’s that lack of specificity that to me has harmed the character as a whole, not bc i think drug lords and rapists don’t deserve the absolute worst, but bc i think jason should come across situations where he’s forced to ask himself what gives him the right to play god, esp since a part of his philosophy is that he’s unperturbed with killing people who get in the way of him exacting what he calls justice (also this is not to say i agree with how urban legends handled this; while i enjoyed the premise i think the execution was lacking). people like to say there is a lot of nuance to jason’s introduction as the red hood but i don’t really think there is. the film version of the comic marginally improves on things but it’s still far from a genuine analysis on crime or the question of what criminals deserve what punishment, and how one would actually decide on that or on their right to decide to begin with

ultimately, i just don’t see how people believe subsequent writers are what drove jason to end up as the resident batfam psycho by the end of preboot, or as the angry robin in more recent years, when i very much think it’s a direct consequence of winick’s writing. so long as people hold that writing on a pedestal devoid of any criticism whatsoever, jason’s never going to improve as a character, and i’m still going to be of the belief he hasn’t been written well since before he died

#jason todd #dc #mine:media analysis #anti judd winick #i hope this is coherent sorry there’s probably so much more i could say but it’s already so long

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roobylavender · 2 years

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what are the main conflicts between bruce and talia in the post-lexcorp area? also you are so right in the seeing relationships with tension instead of just unrealistic idyllic "bliss", it's so much more rewarding when there is tension and having to work to get through things. two different people with different goals making the mutual decision to understand each other. relationships where love is a deliberate, conscious choice!!

trust and faith, imo. bruce is someone who generally has faith in talia's good intentions, and that's why he's quick to ally with her whenever their paths cross, even in situations where they're originally at odds. but the problem is that his faith is to an extent conditional. so long as she's even moderately attached to her father he doesn't trust himself to be with her bc of the potential complications. and he has a right to that obv, but at the same time it's not what talia deserves, esp as someone who eventually grows to dread being within her father's vicinity and could use an out like being with bruce, considering she has no other connections. when bruce does give her that option, in dc #750, it's too little, too late. talia leaves on horseback and insists on forging her own path, to the point that she conveniently avoids meeting bruce face-to-face even once during her lexcorp tenure (there is their meeting in hush, but we all know it's ooc and not in line with anything else that transpires between them during that era, so) despite indirectly helping him. she ends up exhausted, embittered, isolated. so in the aftermath there is a lot of fractured trust that has to be rebuilt on bruce's end so that talia isn't made to feel like she'll only ever be the product of her father's actions

on the flip side, though, provided we're trying to overlap lexcorp era with lost days/under the red hood era in some sensible capacity (a missed opportunity from editorial, alas, although maybe for the better considering winick was already on his weird talia kissing jason agenda by that time, tragically), there is also a fractured trust that has to be rebuilt on talia's end as well. for whatever her good intentions, she indirectly brings the red hood to fruition. she hides the truth of jason's resurrection from bruce. she hides the truth of her own involvement in his progression thereafter. and in an ideal world obv i would have loved for her to confront jason after his insane stint trying to kill the joker, maybe convince him to forge another, healthier path, but even then: she has to confront bruce someday about what she has already "allowed" to happen. she has to take ownership of those things. she has to take ownership of hiding damian. she has to potentially figure out how to work with him again when they try to save damian from ra's, despite all of the secrets and apprehensions between them

so bruce and talia have a lot of faith in each other as people, at the core. they always will. but their trust in each other is shot to hell by the time lexcorp era is over, and repairing that will take time and effort that they've never really had before bc their meetings with each other are so often clandestine and chaotic. trying to help jason, working to save damian. those are circumstances that could cause their paths to overlap in a more long-term manner and that would really force them to confront some of the subconscious issues plaguing their relationship despite the very real love they have for each other. and that could probably help them actually be friends for once. they zoomed through the in-love and married stages very quickly, and it was hardly healthy, esp for talia. i wish writers were more willing to address that

#outbox #and yes for real conscious choices! it's always about conscious choices

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