There’s Always A Focus On Jason Remembering Exactly How He Broke Out His Grave But I Think Him Remembering

We are in desperate need of Death in the Family rewrite, instead of trotting out a horribly racist and bizarrely paced, thematically confused story like it’s one of the greats just because it’s load bearing. This is what i’d want from it.

Bruce is again the POV character, but he is explicitly a biased and unreliable narrator. We don’t hear Jason’s narration outside of a few key moments, but we are shown what he’s doing in direct contrast with Bruce’s theorising about his spiralling. Bruce never explicitly asks. Him and Alfred make well meaning, overbearing decisions on his behalf.

Jason is struggling with Batman and Robin’s catastrophic mishandling of several sexual assault cases in a row. I haven’t decided if we’re alluding to Jason being a victim of this himself, that might be overselling it. Either way he is deeply affected by these, and he is the only one. There’s a sense of isolation and injustice around him. He thought bruce cared. He thought batman was a solution.

Jason leaves to find his birth mother, leaving only a note and no explanation. Bruce sees the robin suit is missing and is annoyed. He doesn’t investigate, prioritising the hunt for the joker.

The death and build up happens exclusively in Africa, in a country with its own local vigilante, who wants to know what this American is doing here. (I don’t know enough about DC’s African heroes to know who it should be, but it needs to be one who is already established and competent in his own right.) Batman is in a state of awkward overreach with a patronising tilt to the way he hoards knowledge in the pursuit of the joker in someone else’s backyard. They agree to a partnership that in practise is unequal in Batman’s favour. We are externalising the themes here, mirroring Bruce’s personal relationships with his professional ones.

Jason and bruce run into each other by accident once again. Both are surprised the other is there for a different mission. They opt to combine forces anyway, since they’re both here. Bruce is touched and naively optimistic about Jason’s search for his birth mother. He is projecting. For a moment it is blazingly obvious bruce identifies as a fellow orphan to his sons first, and a father second.

There are local victims, arguably of the joker but it’s not definitive. Their deaths aren’t just numbers. They are real people. The local vigilante is very angry. Jason sympathises heavily, but he too is an outsider here. He sits apart from the funerary rites, listening in, uninvited, unable to mourn, unable to move on. Batman calls him to continue working the case.

Bruce isn’t blind, Jason is struggling. He makes a plan to reach out to him if they don’t find his mom, which will of course negate the need for action.

They find Sheila.

It all falls apart in the same way as the original. Jason does not try to take on the joker, although that is how it’s interpreted after he’s dead. He is trying to rescue his mom. She gets clobbered over the head by a joker goon on the way out and bleeds out while the bomb’s timer is still ticking down. Jason dies, alone, trying to shield the body of his dead mom.

None of the post-death UN stuff. Stupid.

Bruce disguises the death for publicity’s sake. He changes Jason out of robins clothes and hides the joker’s presence there to protect batman’s identity.

Time skip. The African vigilante knows he has been lied to. His country’s legal system paid off, and justice perverted. He comes to Gotham in pursuit of both the Joker and Batman, looking for justice.

At this point Bruce is in deep grief, swinging wildly between rage and self hatred. He is shutting out everyone. He loses track of a human trafficking case in crime alley to focus on the joker and the other vigilante.

The ending is an echo and inverse of the climax of Under the Red Hood, but nobody has set it up, it’s just the way a messy fight between the three remaining players works out. Bruce must choose between inaction and saving the joker. He doesn’t choose. He is frozen, and we do not know if it’s a choice or if he shut down too much to act. He is not in control. Joker appears to have died.

Joker is found, injured but alive, and gets locked in Arkham. The vigilante goes home, disgusted, having gotten what little justice Gotham offers.

The human traffickers escaped in the background of the fight. It isn’t called out, just a detail in the artwork.

Batman goes back to work in an empty house haunted by the dead. Jason’s grave stands alone. Everything has changed. Nothing has changed. Batman won, and everybody loses.

Fanon batfam fans are scary man. Why are they always fantasizing about Tim or Jason telling Damian, “if u don’t shut up i will sleep with ur grandpa/mom. Already did it.”

Like, telling a minor (who’s usually depicted as 10-11 in fanon) about ur sexual activities (with his OWN FAMILY MEMBERS) is actually weird as hell… Especially when they say it as soon as damian opens his mouth to say legit anything…

for some reason dick & jason's relationship is often written as if jason was supposed to know plenty about dick even before they met for the first time, but in canon he knew close to nothing other than the fact that he was the previous robin (or rather, not even that, but i sort of refuse to believe that the topic did not come up even *once,* no matter how much bruce would like to avoid it). hence, i think upon hearing that dick used to be in a circus, jay should (completely seriously) ask him if he was a clown

Comic characters are both so entertaining and so frustrating to analyse because as someone who usually likes to have all my bases covered before I type something out on the Internet it's like:

Batman is misogynistic.*

*Note 1: I am referring to the late 90s to 2000s version of Batman primarily his treatment of Helena Bertinelli and Stephanie Brown as these are the two women I've read most of however he also treats women terribly on a consistent basis no matter which era I'm reading**.

*Note 2: I am aware that he was written by many different writers over decades and it's hard to pin down the real batman however even his creators wrote him as misogynistic due to how acceptable that misogyny was in USA culture at the time he was created.

**I'm also aware that modern batman tends to no longer be written so plainly misogynistic however I find that instead the misogyny has been transferred over to the narrative, what with the erasure and flattening of some female characters and the flanderising of others all attempting to paper over his past treatment of them so that they can pretend he always treated women normally like he does nowadays, which often downplays their history and what they went through because of him

*Note 3: If batman is your favourite character of all time and the version that lives in your head is actually a champion of women's rights then this is not a personal attack on you and your version of him. This is just me analysing the comics I've read

*Note 4: "But Batman's a hero it doesn't make sense for him to be sexist." Yeah in a perfect world DCs flagship hero would not be a child abuser with a history of bigotry unfortunately Batman is a product of his writers and his company and DC has been pretty shit at this stuff since the beginning. I don't think ignoring and denying it helps either it just minimises what the victims actually go through in canon. They write him badly a lot. It's a problem.

rewatching the under the red hood movie and i gotta say as much as i love jason’s speech to bruce about how mad he is that the joker’s still alive, i still maintain that a severely underrated speech in this movie is from ra’s when he’s talking to bruce and in essence says ‘yeah so i hired the joker to distract you which was my bad because he totally went overboard and killed your son :/ and i felt so guilty i decided not to try and fight you anymore and then i stole your son’s corpse and tried to revive him via lazarus pit so i could like. make amends. except that was also my bad because we fucked that one up real good and when he came back out BOY was he weird in the head. killed my guys and then fucking jumped out a window and we lost him. my bad. and i thought he’d died again but apparently he’s in gotham and is like. totally destroying your whole lives which again, my bad. shouldn’t have tried to help. sorry about that. i’ll just stay out of your business from now on.’ which is actually the funniest characterisation of ra’s i’ve ever seen

lost days jason is just so good. I love him. He tries to be badass and cool and full of revenge and he just can’t. He keeps going on sidequests to help innocent people and kids. He’s like “talia I wanna kill the joker and Batman” and she’s like “of course, here’s a lot of money” and he comes back to have tea with her and bitch about the joker and Batman and also tell her about how he saved London from getting blown up. like obviously he got his stuff together by the time utrh rolls around (sorta), but man, lost days was a hard time for a very compassionate man trying to be ruthless

every time i see a post that only references a character named tim i need to do a massive double take to figure out if it’s tim drake or tim stoker

i’m thinking of the ramifications of bruce throwing out all traces of jason’s existence in the manor. do you think he threw away the box of belongings from his parents? what about his adoption certificate? is all that remained of jason peter todd police records of a horrific accidental death overseas, of an overdosed mother and murdered criminal father, school records of a bright yet overlooked boy, and memorials of a dead boy and a dead robin?

consistently characterised jason todd you will forever exist only in my heart

Considering every attempt at bringing Jason Todd back as a villain (Dixon’s AU attempt in ‘96, Loeb’s Hush attempt in ‘03, + Winick’s successful UTH attempt in ‘04-5) was predicated on retconning Jaybin into someone that he wasn’t, I actually don’t think you can remove Red Hood from the discussion of how DC write Jason as a child. You can prefer one over the other if you want, but Red Hood + all his problems only exist because DC needed to villainise Jason Todd somewhere along his character history to prove that Jaybin’s death was a net positive.

The second Robin receiving an embryonic Red Hood-ification in Cheer, Robin Lives + apparently Lemire’s Robin + Batman was the whole point of Jason coming back as a Bad Guy to begin with. And at a stroke, it returns us to Marv Wolfman + Dixon’s classist victim-blaming narrative. And to their intended goal — to blatantly overwrite Jason Todd’s actual character with stereotypes to preserve the Batman + Robin power fantasy.