#thinking about utrh storyline and the theme of love

[mintacle]

Another thing that fascinates me about Jason and Bruce is the way Jay can't get over having learned that there is a line Bruce wouldn't cross for him. How he can't get over the fact that love isn't childishly perfect and pure. Jason's way of understanding and demanding love is so painfully, desperately naive, that it will always tug at my heartstrings, because don't we all just want to be loved completely?

Learning your parents, your mother or father or both, will not actually love you to the point of self-sacrifice is painful. It's not like you have the right to demand it from anyone else. And most people will take this lesson and learn that love is not what they thought it was. Will learn that love is imperfect. That love can sometimes hurt more. That love is in the end just a feeling. And no guarantee of safety or care or anything.

But Jason refuses to think that Bruce can love him at all if he isn't willing to commit the act of avenging him by killing his murderer too. Isn't that question desperately familiar? How can you love me, if you won't even do this for me? How can you still say you love me?

It's about having gone through the pain of that question yourself, before you realized that you can be loved and hurt every single second of it.

And then there's hope. The hope that yields to placing the gun in your fathers hand. And bearing yourself. And what could it have been other than a futile hope to be wrong, that led to the confrontation between the Joker, Jason and Bruce? I think somewhere there was a last effort internally in Jason to provide an excuse to himself. Trying to convince himself that it will still count if Bruce lets Jason be the one to pull the trigger. Like this can still count. This will still be love.

But then he's laying on the floor, bleeding out, and I think what died there was the last spark of hope that love is magical. After that you know, love can mean something to you, but it carries no meaning in itself. And the world becomes a little bit more gray.

It's a childish way to love, in that we all wish, somewhere deep down, that we could return to loving and being loved in this way.

#jason todd #rambling #thoughts #utrh #bruce wayne #on love and loss #thinking about utrh storyline and the theme of love #along with #you could never stop me #because you love me too much #<- might have misquoted that one. but you know the line I'm referencing #love as a feeling vs. love as an action #lost in translation

[masonsystem]

arkhamverse as its own universe is a media where they can afford to shake up the status quo, so its soooo disappointing that the utrh plot thread ended like That, considering that utrh's own ending had to be shitty in order to maintain the status quo (joker still gets to run around doing whatever). like the more i think about it the more apparent it becomes to me just how Freaking badly arkham knight adapted utrh cuz like wow. you ended an amazing franchise like this?

utrh had many conflicts, and a prominent one was an arguement of ethics on why the joker was still permitted to live and run wild in spite of the fact that joker killed him, batman's robin. in a meta sense, its (likely unintentionally) also a commentary and attack on how jason was able to be removed from the status quo yet the status quo of a batman and a robin and a joker kept turning its wheels without him.

but arkhamverse as its seperate universe isnt binded to the status quo, the joker gets to die and it ends with batman being unmasked etc etc etc. and this is one of the biggest reasons why arkham knight is so narratively unsatisfactory bc like... how could this utrh plot thread have ended? theres no joker to kill, so where does jason's story go?

arkhamverse was too married to its conflict with batman and joker, which on its own isnt a bad thing, but then it tried to keep the gas pumping after the joker died. this is why after 3 games (or 2 depending on who you ask) without even a passing acknowledgement of jason todd's existence, arkhamverse suddenly decides to bring jason in bc his canon conveniently exists in the intersection between batman's and joker's canons. adapting death in the family was easy work, hell theres hardly any substance in the original story and its really just a long winded work to stuff a kid in the fridge. so the game does just that. but unlike ditf, utrh is actually trying to say something. it's a story about father and son, about avengeance and revenge, about the morality of killing, etc.

...except now with a dead joker, there is hardly anything to say at all. and so arkham knight as a character narratively does nothing, and his impact on the storyline as a whole is so extremely shallow. he serves to initiate and then pad out the continuation of batman's and joker's conflict, and also other plot conveniences like bringing in a whole militia and all that. but thats really the extent of what he does. just like utrh, jason receives no proper closure in this game.

and whats really annoying is that HE COULDVE!!!! FUCK!!!! arkham knight's (and honestly? the entire franchise's and batman's mythos is general) overarching theme is FEAR, batman relying on fear to intimidate and exist as a vigilante, batman's fear of losing control to the joker inside of him, batman being born from the fear he felt when he lost his parents (and also fear of bats lmfao), his fear and grief from losing jason, etc. AND JASON!!!! jason's torture filled HIM with fear and hatred! and you know what one of the final quotes of the franchise is?

Scarecrow: Without fear, life is meaningless!

and you know what the ending of the franchise, as a closing love letter to batman's mythos, shouldve been an encapsulation of?;

It's without fear, that life can begin

bc like as much as batman's mythos is about fear, it's also about HOPE....

(too lazy to put batman's relation to hope in my own words so im borrowing other people's words instead LOL. both screenshots are from The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture by Glen Weldon, but the 2nd pic is referencing one of the nolan films. idk which one)

arkhamverse shouldve ended on a note of HOPE, jason's reform into the red hood shouldve been the highlight of the ending, not a barely glanced over sidenote. the fact that jason can continue living without being consumed by the desire to kill bruce is the biggest fuck you the baman could give to the joker, showing that batman as an entity was able to save a boy so far gone, and that jason still has hope for his life and future in spite of all that has been done to him, but instead it just gets glossed over! WHAT THE FUCK!!!! arkham knight was too obsessed with giving batman and joker an extremely epic interactive final finale cutscene (which ngl is so epic lol BUT NOT THE POINT) that it treated it's literal titular character as a side character similar to the likes of gotham's most wanted! WTFFFF.

(and instead of using the full knightfall ending to actually expand on jason's fate or reformation or whatever, we instead go thru 243 hellish riddler trophies to receive an extremely childish oh Ha ha Batman Can Never Die cutscene. like firstly the idea of locking the full ending behind all the riddler trophies is so unbelievably fucked and secondly FUCK UUUUUUU. full knightfall protocol shouldve been the default ending AND THEN 100% completion shouldve been some proper resolution on jason's end AT THE VERY LEAST.)

despite the potential to become something amazing, arkhamverse sadly became not unique in being another batman media that fails to become something phenomenal all due to it not properly acknowledging jason todd as a character and merely using him like a tool for dramatic but ultimately shallow story points. sad!

#my meta

[redhoodsrobin]

I like giving really extended author’s notes (or ‘director’s commentary’ if you will) about my fics, but since AO3 is hardly the place for adding those, ehm, guess it’s gonna be bonus content for the tumblr crowd?

Now chapter 3 of No Shadow Falls is up, I just really want to ramble a bit about the thought process behind it. Do people give spoiler warnings for their own fics? If so, consider this it. Please read ch3 first, just in case :’)

So this is that UTRH/Court of Owls mashup fic I mentioned a while back! The premise I wanted to do was basically ‘What if the Court caught wind of Robin!Jason being led into a trap by the Joker & saw a chance to get a new Talon’. Combine this with a little of ‘what if Bruce never found Jason’s body but still presumed him dead bc of the explosion and copious amounts of blood at the scene etc (even though he secretly keeps looking for him still) à la Arkham Knight’ and voilà, here we are.

Considering the fact this fic’s setting is contemporary, I actually imagine Joker would’ve recorded video evidence of him beating up Jason to taunt Batman with too... Hmm, maybe I should re-label this a UTRH/CoO/Arkham Knight mashup instead...

Did I mention that if you’re here for romance, you better strap in for the long haul? Because this is gonna take a while, alright

Prologue

Can you tell I like being poetic? Or that I enjoy parallel & contrasting sentence structures?

first & last paragraphs (the ’beginning’ & ‘end’) include ‘a boy’ & ‘a bat’

‘how the story goes’ vs the later ‘NOT how this story goes’

second & second-to-last paragraphs both start with ‘you see’

3rd & 4th paragraph start with ‘maybe’

the structural halfway point is between the 3rd & 4th paragraph, so between ‘an end (death)’ & ‘a start (resurrection)’

in those same paragraphs: ‘in flame and fire with ice building in his gut’ versus ‘in liquid and ice with fire running through his veins’

Yes, the prologue is from Jason’s POV through his death and resurrection

Chapter 1

The working title for this chapter was ‘Something In The Water (...it’s bodies)’ though I changed the location the body was found in the end.

That stream of consciousness that serves as the intro paragraph(s) is supposed to reflect the opening narration of the Court of Owls storyline, wherein Bruce muses over the Gotham Gazette's 'Gotham is...' column.

Also let me tell you I knew from the start I wanted to do a UTRH retelling but with Talons, and I still somehow forgot Dick’s leg was in a brace during the original UTRH story until I went back to fact-check.

[announcer voice] All names of the victims/CoO members are purely made up, canon can bite me because I don’t care much for the turn the CoO story took after a while but that’s a rant for another day

‘Dick is getting precariously close to the end of his rope’, get it?? foreshadowing that the victim was gonna be found hung up under the bridge? eh?? I like to think I’m funny when I’m not

Chapter 2

I re-wrote this entire chapter from scratch (except for the last 'night’) because I hated the first draft so much

Guys, I love Babs-as-Oracle. Dunno if I can do her justice, but please know I love her.

I don’t think this detail matters if you don’t know much about comics canon: Tim and Cass did stay in Blüdhaven for a while in the past, but they’re mostly back in Gotham now. They still have a hideout in the Blüd and drop by to visit Dick/avoid Bruce every so often, and Cass also spends a lot of time with Babs (& Steph, again, I’ll mention her at some point. so many characters to juggle, christ. I’m gonna level with y’all, I just do NOT want to deal with the War Games storyline in this fic, so don’t expect me to reference it)

Talon did, in fact, use a crude version of Batman’s grapple hooks to get the body up on the bridge. Why display it in the first place? See ch3: as a provocation to both Batman and Nightwing in specific, because Jason is a dramatic lil’ shit no matter what universe you put him in

The Talons in canon seem to have more weapons that fit their fighting style, but I went for the combination of grappling line + (throwing) knives for now because Jason actually does use a knife in UTRH. I might make him use guns, at some point, but for now it’ll be the usual improvised bat-gadgets like flashbangs, smoke bombs etc, plus knives

And thus starts our story of Talon messing with Dick

Chapter 3

The ‘Such Terrible Hungers’ chapter title is taken from the same poem as the main story title (’No Shadow Falls’), namely, Louise Erdrich’s “The King of Owls”. For obvious reasons.

This chapter, I re-wrote about fifteen times. I wanted to cry in frustration.

Anyway, yay, more Jason POV! (in my weird quasi-poetic format)

[insert obligated identity crisis because he was forced into a role he never wanted but it’s now useful to his cause]

Points I want to single out:

Whenever I use text in italics+brackets, it’s some form of unbidden thought coming to Jason’s mind

Drinking game: spot the references to how Bruce failed to find Jason/the Owls (”a detective who cannot find what he is looking for“) or how nobody seems to want Jason bc he’s Jason, they just want him as a substitute for Dick

This is also why Talon doesn't want to be caught, he wants to be found. Small but significant difference

There’s an underlying theme of ‘stories’ in my quasi-poetic chapters, so I really wanted to incorporate the classic ‘Once upon a time, there was...’ ‘One day, ...’ structure of fairy tales/bedtime stories. Lest we forget the CoO also had a nursery rhyme dedicated to them

“Talon never spilled his secrets but oh, how the Owls would have laughed if they had known.”  >>>> the Owls ovbs interrogated ‘Robin’ (Jason) while he was in captivity, but they didn’t get much info from him. I’ll mention the details in some later chapter!

Yes, I do the ‘Night-Wing’ ‘Gray-Son’ spelling thing on purpose to show that Jason’s mind isn’t all alright at this point

The switching between ‘the Gray Son’ & ‘Gray-Son’ is also on purpose to show the cracks in Jason’s conditioning/the Owls’ failure to brainwash him fully

I try to keep most of Jason’s core characteristics intact - his focus on victims + helping them, his disdain of Batman’s methods - but I’m going to have to change some bits to fit the Talon narrative I think. We’ll see how it works out...

That being said, he’s mostly gonna be messing with Dick because he’s petty and bitter, but it turns out to be more fun than he thought it would be. After all, our boy severly lacks human interaction & Dick is a relatively expressive person (the polar oposite of the Owls’ haughty/better-than-thou/distant demeanor & even Batman’s carefully controlled reactions)

Bonus scrapped story element: at one point I had the idea to have Talon be as good as mute because of a particularly brutal blow (from the crowbar) injuring his throat/vocal chords. I couldn’t think of a way to incorporate it on top of everything else though, so that remains an idea for another time...

(Seriously though, Jason and Cass silently bonding over speech issues, sign me up. Especially bc Jason loves literature and Cass is into theater it seems, you can do so much with that)

#eve.fic #i still haven't refered to Jason by his actual name in-fic but I assume all my readers figured out by now he's Talon #addendum: nsf #fic: nsf