#bc i DO know poor ppl who think criminals deserve to die and they're all shitheads. every last one of them.

[autisticcassandracain]

it’s nearly 3:30 AM and I have an appointment tomorrow but instead of sleeping I’m busy feeling annoyed about Jason and I feel like I gotta get this out of my system before going to bed so. I feel like Jason would be an infinitely more interesting character if, instead of challenging Batman on his no kill rule, he challenged Bruce on the existence of the Batman to begin with.

What I mean is this: it’s not a particularly novel concept to challenge Batman on the no kill rule. Like, at all. Everyone and their mom has done it, with varying levels of complexity and success. Jason’s moral system isn’t fresh or unique by any stretch of the imagination. The only thing that sets Jason apart from all the other villains/anti-heroes who have challenged Batman on the no kill rule over the years is that Jason is Bruce’s adopted son, and that Jason has actually come back from the dead, so he offers a unique perspective as the victim telling Batman his methods aren’t good enough. Which isn’t terrible, I suppose, but I still have... issues with it. 

I’m not a Jason buff by any means, and I haven’t re-read a lot of the comics related to him in a few years, so take my analysis on him with a grain of salt obviously, but it’s always bothered me that Jason is so willing to kill not just top criminals and supervillains, but also the average mook, if they get in his way. Jason’s poor background is often pointed to as a reason for why he has the moral system he does, and it’s always fallen flat for me, since Jason should know better than to kill the average mook precisely because he was poor. Likewise, he should know better than to think killing criminals, even the ones that deserve it, will actually solve anything in the long run.

The cause of the majority of crime is socio-economic inequality. People often turn to crime because they are poor and have very little other options. The illegal drug trade also exists due to socio-economic inequality. Jason, having been poor himself, and having had a criminal as a father and an addict as a mother, should know this. So why does he think shooting drug lords and their mooks is going to solve anything? Even if he manages to control the whole drug trade and has killed everyone else, he might be able to make things a little saver, but it’s not a long-term solution by any means. It doesn’t address the root cause of why crime flourishes in Gotham.

The criticism most often labelled at Batman out-of-universe is ‘Bruce Wayne could do a lot more if he used his money to fix the socio-economic inequality than he ever could as Batman’, which is a criticism I find unfair for a variety of reasons (I think it makes more sense to criticize the trend of making rich people superheroes than to single out one particular superhero for falling into this trend), but nevertheless, it’s not wrong. Bruce Wayne has long been established as a philanthropist in comics, but it’s relatively rare for a comic to really delve into the ways he materially helps people as Bruce Wayne, not Batman. And of course, running a company like he does means that he will inevitably fuck over some group of people, which as also been shown in comics. Charity by millionaires is, in no way, going to fix socio-economic inequality in the long term, but Batman needs to maintain his fortune in order to be able to continue his operations as Batman efficiently.

I think Jason could’ve been a way more interesting character if that was the angle with which he challenged Bruce. A Jason who, after dying a violent death, comes back to see that absolutely nothing has changed; Batman is still there, Robin is still there, the Joker is still there, nobody stays in jail due to the inherent corruption in the system, and Gotham is as poor as ever. And he becomes disillusioned with superheroism, doubting that it could ever do any material good at all. So he goes the other way, and tries to fight crime by establishing grassroots initiatives and activist communities to fight socio-economic inequality.

 And when Bruce inevitably finds out he’s alive, Jason challenges him on the effectiveness of Batman, pointing out that despite his best efforts, he’s managed to make no headway at all in his war for crime; if anything, you could argue he’s made it worse, both in that Batman attracts weirdo supervillains like the Joker, and in that Wayne Enterprises as a gigantic corporation will, inevitably, fuck people over in some, way, shape, or form. 

Like idk could just be me but while it’d probably be less exciting in that it involves less punching, I think a Jason who challenges the very idea of superheroism as an effective tool to fight crime and challenges Bruce’s morality as a millionaire is infinitely more interesting than Jason as yet another villain who thinks Batman’s no kill rule is ineffective. 

#my posts #it's also maintain the rich vs poor angle but in a way that doesn't make jason look like a gigantic shithead #bc i DO know poor ppl who think criminals deserve to die and they're all shitheads. every last one of them. #i don't. want this to end in the tags #but i need to tag this for my own administration #hnnnnnnnnnnnnng #ok here goes #jason todd #bruce wayne #infodumping #i feel like this post is either going to get 0-2 notes #OR i just swung my bat into a hornet's nest and I'm going to get a lot of replies to this I don't want to read