If I'm being honest, I actually prefer the version of Jason Todd who had a whole arc where the trauma of being Robin during one of Batman's dumb and edgy eras drove him a lil nuts and made him violent, reckless, whatever.
It is a central plot point in A Death in the Family, a comic that while I actively believe no one should read because it is cartoonishly racist, some (me) consider pretty important to understanding the circumstances surrounding Jason Todd's death.
This is consistent with his appearances in earlier stories, forming a character arc wherein he becomes increasingly violent and reckless due to the trauma of his early childhood in poverty and the increasing exposure to violence inherent in being Robin, filtered through the strictly anti-Robin lens of writer Jim Starlin.
Batman #411, he has what is obviously a violent trauma response after finding out Two-Face single parentified his mother.
Batman #422, Batman needs to pull him off a pimp after said pimp threatened his bottom bitch.
Batman #424. I posted this once and someone told me with their whole chest they actually for real believed this dude slipped and Todd didn't kill him which is how I realized that there's a whole generation of Batman fans who do not recognize 1970s-80s action movie tropes. An extremely humbling moment for me lol.
Anyway, notice the sequential nature of the issue numbers.
Now, I sincerely do not want to be a bitch here, but I don't know how else to say this.
The reason Jason Todd is not a violent loose cannon in his earliest appearances, even post-Crisis, is that characters later in their arc are not the same as characters at the beginning of their arc.
These two dudes, who yes are the same dude, have very different relationships with the concept of violent revenge. One of them even cut his own head off in a spooky metaphor cave that taught him about how violent revenge means destroying a part of yourself. The other dude just saw his parents gettin weenie roasted and is mad about that. To reiterate my point, they are the same dude.
But in fandom we have this weird thing where we flat reject this concept of Jason by insisting that no, this characterization was just later writers like Marv Wolfman being haters and retroactively character assassinating him through Tim Drake or something.
We insist on who he was at the beginning of his arc as if he should not, could not, would not on a boat, could not, would not, should not with a goat, develop into anything but who he was at that moment. I have never seen anything else like it in comics or in other fandom. Character development that is just so flat rejected and avoided, in a medium where we usually celebrate development because characters are usually set more or less in stone until the next big reboot event.
And look, if I'm being absolutely honest with you, the smooth clean safe not a wildcard roundhouse kick freak version of Todd that fandom has created is so fucking boring to me.
He is, to me, by far the worst version of the character.
To me, Jason Todd was this Robin specifically:
Batman: The Cult.
That's not Dick Grayson. That's not TIm Drake. That's not Damian Wayne, Stephanie Brown, Carrie Kelley, or whatever other version of Robin.
Jason Todd is the "alright you sorry clowns, let's party" Robin. He was written in line with a bunch of action movie and buddy cop tropes. A Death in the Family was straight up a "hand in your badge McKlinsky, you're a loose cannon" arc. And I just feel like the fandom desire to smooth that out of him, whatever the motivation behind it might be, is ultimately in service for a far more boring, more "in line with Dick Grayson and Tim Drake" version of a character who should never have been in line with Dick Grayson or Tim Drake.
People insist on rejecting Jasonâs characterization as hyper-aggressive because thatâs how victim-blaming him was justified, and they reject the narrative crafted by Starlin because itâs off-putting and problematic.
I mean, people can like what they like, reject what they wanna reject, yadda yadda.
But with that said, the response to victim blaming is not to reject the parts of the victim that are being blamed, right?
Inventing a version of Jason Todd who was never hyper-aggressive feels like an acceptance of Marv Wolfman's framing that Jason Todd essentially killed himself by being hyper-aggressive.
The non victim blaming response seems to me to be more, yes he was hyper-aggressive, for pretty understandable reasons (the ongoing trauma of being Robin during the shift to more hyper-realistic crime and violence, such as the women in dumpsters case), but everybody failed him throughout the whole arc that led up to his death.
Y'know, we accept as a rule that no child, mentally ill or otherwise vulnerable person is responsible for their own death, their death is the result of failings on the part of the people entrusted with their care. In this case, that means Bruce and Alfred, who let him run off on his own out of Wayne Manor after being told he's not allowed to be Robin any more. They surely should've been attentive enough to know telling Jason he's not allowed to be Robin, in the middle of a parenthood crisis they both knew was ongoing (see: the Two Face thing and Jason's relationship with Nocturna). Awareness of this is part of what motivates Jason during his brief villain arc upon his resurrection, even.
Additionally, the whole early Red Hood era is Jason responding to trauma with hyper-aggressive violence, right? So... at what point does it become not problematic? Both eras of the character are built around the central theme of
trauma -> aggression -> violence.
It feels weirder and more problematic to me, as someone who has and has worked with a lot of men with C/PTSD, to accept the fanon framing of innocent baby Jason coming back violent. If that were published, we'd be calling it an embrace of the narrative that a sufficiently traumatic experience can make you into a violent freak, which is anti-medical and reflects a very real, very harmful stigma people with PTSD and adjacent traumagenic conditions deal with.
It's also the core of another Batman narrative a lot of people problematize and hate, The Killing Joke. Y'know, one bad day can make you a Red Hood?
So I dunno. It feels like there's no unproblematic way around this character, imo. And that's fine because fiction and drama, especially crime, horror and superhero fiction, kinda rely on problematic themes in order for the stories to happen. It just feels like something being "problematic" is a facile criticism.
And I mean, it's fine to just not like a story.
It'd be insane of me to sit here bitching about a specific version of a story I personally don't like only to tell people they have to like what I prefer instead lol.
I'm just saying that the specific fandom version of this narrative personally is not for me, and the way people construct their arguments about it frustrates me.
That doesn't and shouldn't mean shit to anybody.
I think the issue with calling Jason hyper violent and aggressive is that a lot of his behavior mirrors Bruce's.
Jason beating the Pimp follows Bruce doing the same thing to a different criminal Frank 'Cutters' (drug dealer, I think) where Gordon has to tell Bruce to stop. (Batman 414)
Gazonas parallels the ambiguous fate of KGBeast (and Bruce later causing the death of Garzonas' father).
Bruce is also depicted as taking his anger out on criminals, there is a scene where it depicts Bruce stating he wasn't in the mood and then the next shot is the purse snatcher being taken in an ambulance. Paralleled, I believe, to Jason taking out aggression on the child pornographers.
The issue with Jason's violence is not that it exists, it is that it is presented as more extreme than the violence of others, when it isn't.
Jason's issue isn't that he is too aggressive and hyperviolent as Robin. He is not much worse than Bruce in this era (if worse at all). The issue is (as I believe is stated in death in the family panels you shared) his suicidal behavior, him rushing into fights like he is looking to die.
