Jason Won't Admit It But He Really Loves His Family. He Tries To Maintain Distance From Them And Yet

Jason won't admit it but he really loves his family. He tries to maintain distance from them and yet he always cares about his brothers. Even if he's a bit tsundere.

Love him.

Wayne Family Adventures: Episode 31 Dirty Little Secret (2022)

let’s talk about Jason

One of the things I used to hear the most about Jason - and that I still see nowadays now that I’m coming back to batfandom - was that Jason was “the angry Robin.”

This is categorically false for several reasons, all of which have been discussed at length by various people who have studied this much more than me, but I think that we need to address and reproach the inherent classism in the way that the fandom and DC itself discusses Jason Todd.

At his Post-Crisis roots, Jason is a kid from Crime Alley. Before becoming Robin, he was homeless (let’s leave aside the issues with Ma Gunn’s entire story-line) and fending for himself after the death of his mother. Jason’s first encounter with Bruce isn’t (just) a quirky aspect of his backstory to to show how audacious he is, it’s a marker of how desperate he was at the time. Stealing the tires off the Batmobile while Batman is still around? Absolutely off-the-charts unheard of. No one would have even dared to think about that, not when the Batman of the time was still half-myth half-legend full-on terror of the night. Then there’s the fact that Jason would have gotten away with it, if he hadn’t gone back for that last tire. And when Bruce does show up? He hits him and insults him and while Bruce is surprised, tries to make his escape.

[IMG ID: panels from Batman (1940) #408. Bruce tells Jason to return his tires. Jason, holding a tire iron behind his back, asks why Bruce thinks he took them. Bruce, with his hand on his hip (and in his dad voice) asks what else the tire iron could be for. Jason says “This!” and swings it into Bruce’s stomach then runs away, shouting “Try and catch me, you big boob!” /END IMG ID]

What does this tell us? That he’s daring. That he was desperate. That he knows how to seize on an opportunity when it presents itself. That he’s quick on his feet and quicker with his mouth. All of this leading to….

Jason is smart. Despite the fact that Jason has consistently been written as a nerd who loves classic literature and theatre, both DC (most recently and egregiously in Titans) and fans continue to claim that Jason wasn’t smart, didn’t like to read, and did poorly in school and dumb Jason down in favour of uplifting other characters.

There’s always some confusion over whether things are canon or fanon but Jason liking to read is most assuredly canon (and has been addressed by user @/thebatmanfiles-blog recently.) He and Alfred bond over books, he reads Pride and Prejudice for fun, and he gifts Alfred a first edition of a book.

[IMG ID: panels from Batman: Under the Hood Issue 648 All they do is watch us kill part 1. While walking to the mailbox, Alfred reminisces that it was something he and Bruce used to do. Now, despite the two of them growing older and apart, Alfred muses that they both still like to collect first editions of novels. According to Alfred this is a hobby only [Dick] and Jason know about. Alfred returns to the manor then opens the package, revealing two books and a green giftwrapped box with a note that reads B & A, just two to add to the pile. Cheers - Jason /END IMG ID].

So Jason is both street-smart and book-smart. I’m not going to claim he’s smarter than Dick or Jason or Bruce or whoever - I think it’s dumb to rank them when each member of the batfam is a genius and while they all of course have different areas they prefer, they were specifically trained to excel in every aspect. That’s not even going into the fact that in Jason’s first appearance as the Red Hood, he ran circles around Bruce up until he finished drawing his trap closed.

So Jason is smart. Why does that get overlooked?

Let’s talk about the fact that Jason was originally written Pre-Crisis to be a carbon copy of Dick, just with different coloured hair. When his backstory was rewritten, it was done so as to present the absolute strongest possible contrast against Dick and Bruce since Jason would be the child of a criminal and an addict, and come from a completely different world than Bruce.

The writers have spoken at length about the way that fans flipped after Jason’s backstory changed - Dennis O'Neil said “Collins’s Robin was dramatic, did have story potential. But readers didn’t take to him. I don’t know now, and will probably never know why. Jason was accepted as long as he was a Dick Grayson clone, but when he acquired a distinct and, Collins and I still believe, more interesting back story, their affection cooled. Maybe we - me and the writers who followed Collins - should have worked harder at making Jason likeable. Or maybe, I guessed, on some subconscious level our most loyal readers felt Jason was a usurper. For whatever reason, Jason was not the favorite Dick had been. He wasn’t hated, exactly, but he wasn’t loved, either.”

The thing was, Jason wasn’t unlikeable. He was outspoken, sure, and he was plenty passionate, but the other characters in the DCU loved him. Jason was a sweet kid and he absolutely adored being a hero. He looked up to the vast majority of supers and he had a strong sense of morality and justice and what was right or wrong.

There’s this whole agenda that DC and fans try to push, that Jason was unruly, that he acted out, that he was always aggressive and took it out on criminals. I don’t have the panels but I can say flat out that this is heavily skewed. There’s an issue where Bruce comments on him being more aggressive but you know when that happens? After Jason finds out his dad was Two Face’s goon, and was murdered by Two Face, and that his birth mother wasn’t Catherine after all.

The fact that Bruce states that he’s worried about Jason’s aggression at that point means that before this, it wasn’t an issue at all. The Felipe Garzonas incident is also one that used to have a lot of finger pointing as well, but it was deliberately written to make the reader question what the truth was, because it was from Bruce’s pov and he hadn’t seen Felipe fall - so or course he wouldn’t take it at face value when Jason said he didn’t push him. And like. If he did, so what? Like. For if you didn’t read that issue it’s not as clear cut as people like to make it seem. Garzonas had raped a woman who later committed suicide because of it and was running cocaine, and both times they caught him, he was back out on the streets under less than an hour without even getting booked, because he was the son of a diplomat and had immunity. At the time, it was call to the limited power that Batman and Robin have as vigilantes, and commentary on the inability of the justice system to provide victims with relief. Now, however, the Garzonas incident is referred to as some kind of proof that Jason was unfit to be Robin.

ANYWAY all that to say that like. Jason certainly didn’t do anything in universe to “get himself killed.” He wanted to find his mother on his own at first because he didn’t think Bruce would help him, what with him being benched so that he could clear his head after the Garzonas case. But when Bruce found him again, he was supportive! He understood why Jason wanted to find his mother! He would have helped! The thing is. The fucking thing is. Jason was a kid and his mother betrayed him and both she and the Joker took advantage of his trust.

Jason didn’t die because of his actions. He died because DC received 72 more calls saying he should be killed than they did from fans who wanted him to live. 72. And since that time, O'Neil has stated that he thinks it was possible that many of the negative votes were from one person, “who programmed his computer to dial the thumbs down number every ninety seconds for eight hours, who made the difference.” One person. Who hated Jason so much they wanted him gone. When O'Neil proposed the poll, it was literally just as a gimmick to increase reader engagement. He thought it would be overwhelmingly in favour of Jason living. He wanted Jason to live.

The fact of the matter is though that after Jason died, he was replaced with a rich Robin who went to a private prep school, and Tim was miles more popular than Jason ever was during his run.

And you know what! Damian is angry! Steph is angry! Cass is angry! Tim is angry! Dick became Robin because he wanted vengeance for his parents. Every single one of them saw injustice and wanted to fight against it. That’s why they became vigilantes in the first place. Instead of talking about that, though, Jason gets painted over as a black sheep among the Robins. His time in the shorts is commonly referred to as the Jason Todd problem. Consistently, he is blamed for his own death. He was fifteen years old! He was angry, yes, but he was hurt and fundamentally lacking the support to heal.

Jason’s revamp and successive rewrites are admittedly a mess, but too often I see his actions post coming back to life being conflated with who he was before he died and that is fundamentally untrue.

This got way off track from what I originally meant to discuss but anyway neither DC nor fandom is innocent in this. Stop calling Jason and Steph dumb, stop making them and only them the comic relief, stop coding it into your narratives that Jason did drugs just ‘cause he was poor just. Stop and think about why you’re doing this.

The way his though bubble gets more frantic as the panic attack worsens? Call me Jason Todd cause I’m not okay

Jason Todd in Batman: Wayne Family Adventures episode 44

siblingism