Happy Birthday, Jay And Alfredo

happy birthday, jay and alfredo 💕

nothing to see here, just the average divorced couple

A storyline I'm constantly rolling around in my head is the Jason Todd custody battle 2.0. Jason comes back to Gotham, doesn't tell the batfam, but everyone else finds out. This leads to the custody battle of the century with all of Bruce's exs. Selina, Harvey, Talia, Natalia. Oswald makes him the heir to his empire, and Harvey follows his lead. Even Clark, Ollie and Hal can get thrown in, though they have no idea who their fighting over. Eventually it slips to the batfam that all the chaos is being caused by a custody battle for his son, but nobody specifies which one, so they assume it's either Dick or Tim they're fighting over. The batfam are confused, Bruce's exs are tearing Gotham apart, Jason is unsure how to feel.

The thing is, I actually think it's a super interesting angle to look at the intersection of trauma and mental illness and vigilantism and coping mechanisms with Jason's character.

But, for me, if you want to seriously ask at what point does Jason need therapy more than he needs the vigilante lifestyle it's not Red Hood Jason you should be looking at. Red Hood Jason was literally murdered and the mysteriously resurrected. That's not something you can therapy your way out of! That's something that no amount of talking will ever help you understand, because it's a completely incomprehensible event!

No, if anyone needs therapy it's 12 year old Jason.

It's 12 year old Jason, who has poverty trauma and homelessness trauma and prison system trauma and parentification trauma and drug related trauma and, depending on your reading, potentially sexual trauma.

It's 12 year old Jason, who is taken in by Bruce - a man who is *also* severely traumatised (in extremely different ways) and chooses to dress up as a Bat and punch people about it instead of seeking healthy coping strategies.

It's 12 year old Jason, who Bruce decides - without psychiatric training or so much as a second opinion - needs the same outlet that "helped" Bruce and "helped" Dick.

And by the time aditf rolls around, Bruce is maybe just realising that he's made a mistake. But it's too late, because for two years he's told this child - a child who arguably feels indebted to him, a child who is extremely isolated and had very few if any other trusted adults to talk to - that violence and avoidance is how you deal with emotions.

I think that's fascinating to think about!

That Bruce's own failure to process his trauma left him blind to what Jason might actually have benefited from! That if Bruce had noticed Jason struggling earlier, if he'd reacted differently or explained himself better in aditf, Jason might not have felt the need to travel around the world alone looking for a woman he'd never met and only just learned about!

That if *Bruce* had been healthier, had been to therapy instead of throwing all his energy into vigilantism, none of this might have happened!

Reframe Red Hood Jason as a tragedy of Bruce's own making, not because of the classist bullshit that Jason was always going to end up a criminal and Bruce failed to stop that, but because Bruce's terrible coping mechanisms became *Jason's* terrible coping mechanisms and nobody likes to see the worst parts of themselves in the mirror.

Oh that 5 year gap at my resume? Yeah, I was dead.

Time meassured in Robins and Commissioner Gordon’s Hair. EDIT PATCH NOTES: Added steph.

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