This Is Pure Evil

HUGE shoutout to the WORLDS most DOOMED mentor mentee duo ever to live. Just two extremely emotional, lonely, jealous, closed-off, insanely determined vigilantes against the world and also against each other routinely.

Imagine you are Batman, and you are immensely similar to this teen girl, and because it increases the emotional vulnerability that you can be comfortable with when she doesn’t know anything about you, or because it’s convenient to have a team member who is isolated and can be easily fired and completely cut out when she gets too close or hurts you or when you don’t need her anymore, or maybe just because you’re lonely and you just got hurt emotionally by the people who know you the best and you like the idea of getting the benefits of company without that vulnerability again, you don’t tell her your name and you don’t let her see your face.

Imagine your primary team is finally back, imagine Alfred has come home, imagine you aren’t alone anymore, so you ghost her Completley, cut her off until she tracks you down to demand an explanation, where you then fire her with the excuse of her ‘lacking the skills and talent’, and are fine to leave it at that forever. Imagine you think about it some more and it’s the anniversary of your son’s death and you feel comfortable enough admitting aloud that that must’ve been part of why you fired her. She was reckless and wanted to prove herself too much, and all that other stuff that got your son killed as Robin. Steph is just too like him, too wrong and too much to be a vigilante.

But then Robin has to quit, and he’s leaving you behind and he’s going to go away, so you, maybe half consciously come up with a plan, and when Stephanie Brown turns up in your Batcave with a homemade costume and a frenzied look in her eyes you solidify that plan, maybe still unconsciously. Imagine using the same excuse, the same exact phrasing, of Steph’s apparent lack of ‘skills and talent’ that you used to fire her, in order to justify hiring her as Robin.

Imagine pushing away that graveyard conversation, imagine ignoring the very same comparison that you drew. Imagine, for the very first time, having to keep the cowl on when it’s just you and Robin in the Batcave. Imagine the gnawing sense of wrongness. Imagine keeping it on anyway. Because if you took it off, she would have something. Because if you took it off, it would count. Because if you took it off, you’d have to look her in the eyes, and she could look into yours, and you don’t know if you could do that and also convince yourself what you’re doing to her is okay. If it’s just Batman, it’s fine. It’s manageable. It’s business.

You get that cozy, comfortable distance once again. You get to pretend you didn’t stand at your sons grave and told someone you didn’t want Steph to die like he did, and then turned around and gave her the same costume he died in the second it was more useful to you. And that unease grows and grows and grows. And that yawning uncomfortableness expands and expands. And eventually you can’t ignore how wrong it all is, how gross this all is, so you start looking, and you start hoping, and sure enough, she makes a mistake. And you immediately feel this Huge sense of relief. Thank god.

And you fire her and it feels legitimate enough and you get to walk away, justified and rational and reasonable and fair. You get to do it again, you get to wash your hands clean of it all, and you know then, it was the right choice to keep the mask on, because now you can change the lock to the side entrance you showed her and now you can tell the computer to stop accepting the password you gave her and now she is gone. Just out of your sight. Just gone.

making it so that tim is in jason’s shadow in any major way is a disservice to both of their characters

nothing shows a character is evil quite like a good cooking montage

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

Cass' love language is indeed tactile and touch and it particularly manifests in hugging and embraces - thinking of how touchy Steph is in her death visions, the way Cass touches Bruce after their fight, Bruce's hug when he adopts her, the various Babs-Cass hugs and the way Cass touches her when they reconcile after their fight (which is very similar to the Bruce post-fight touch as well). Even in New 52, Cass sees two people hugging and tries to replicate it. Hugging represents love and connection in every iteration of her character. But at the beginning of it all is a little girl who has just killed for the first time, staring at the person she loves most in the world waiting with open, welcoming arms - and she runs away.

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

Heard this song a few days ago and locked tf in and drew this in 2 days

jason todd would love lady macbeth

adding onto this, it’s so important to me that jason was chosen for his heart even when classist stereotypes would expect him to be naturally violent, cruel, and selfish.

he only becomes more aggressive and bitter the more time he spends as robin BECAUSE of robin. he saw all the injustice first hand in violent crime and the ineffective, corrupt system and he became frustrated. he wanted to kill two face because he killed his father; he wanted to attack the pimp because he directly saw him beating up a woman; he might have killed garzonas because he had to witness gloria’s dead body and garzonas would walk free to do that to other women, just out of america.

jason’s not naturally violent and cruel, it’s what he’s learned is the only way to protect other victims in a world that perpetuates suffering.

i know starlin is seen as the main post-crisis jaybin writer but jason writers PLEASE read collins

(pictures are from batman #409 and #411)

Batman and his robins but it’s ‘I’m Your Man’ by Mitski (other than steph maybe because bruce was just awful to her)