i love the ways that under the red hood shows that this is not just some petty revenge scheme for jason. this is not just about getting back at joker or at bruce. this is about enforcing a new definition of justice that prioritizes the suffering of victims over the possible redemption of evil people.
this is why takes that characterize jason as being motivated solely by personal vendettas are missing my favorite read of his character. i mean make no mistake, it is personal for him. but this fight was personal even before he died, and only more so since his resurrection. jason has always held a righteous anger toward systemic injustice, and heâs consistently motivated by empathy for those that unjust systems leave behind.
when he confronts garzonas in batman #424, for example, he is motivated by a palpable empathy for garzonasâs victim, who ultimately kills herself after he gets out of jail and threatens her over the phone (at the police station, in front of bruce, jason, and gordon). his empathy gets expressed both as clear distress upon finding her body, and more frequently as a righteous anger toward garzonas and at the systems that allowed all of this to happenâ including batmanâs way of only abiding by legal procedures. jason understands his role as a vigilante to be one who circumvents the systems in place when they fail to bring justice to people, and thatâs exactly what he does by taking the fight to garzonas (whether you think heâs the one who pushed garzonas or not).
in utrh, jason also places his victimization at the hands of joker within a much larger pattern of systemic injusticeâ and when the system doesnât work, as weâve established, jason is more than willing to go around it. reform is not his gig because waiting for the system to do its job delays justice, sometimes with dire consequences (see again #424, and also everything thatâs ever happened with joker since jason died). so when jason makes his appeals to bruce on the grounds of what happened to him specifically, it is also an appeal to finally take the larger problems at hand just as personally as he does, and to handle them his way. from #641:
jasonâs primary aim is to establish a way of doing things that will eliminate those who do harm from the equation entirely, and in doing so he will remake batman (and gotham) in his image. whether that is something that jason, bruce, or anyone else could ever actually achieve is an entirely different question. but we still see these larger, system-oriented goals come out in his very personal final monologue when he tells bruce, âi thought iâd be the last one you ever let him hurt.â
the first time i read this, i misunderstood it as âi thought youâd do anything to make sure he didnât hurt me,â but thatâs not it. it's not about the fact that bruce didn't save him. it's about the fact that jason thought that when it finally hit home for bruce, when joker's chaos and violence and killing finally showed up at his front door, that bruce would stop trusting the system to take care of it, that he would stop prioritizing one personâs possible redemption over the real suffering of everyone else. he thought that bruce would make sure jason was jokerâs last victim, the âlast one he ever let him hurt,â and what wounds jason to his core is that not even his death was enough to radicalize bruce to his way of doing things.
jasonâs angry that joker is still alive, not just because thatâs his killer, but because thatâs a killer. but even this isnât specific enough, because jason clearly doesnât think that every killer or criminal is worthy of death:
in jason's idea of a just world, bruce doesnât need to kill any of his other rogues, many of whom also have blood on their hands. he just needs to kill joker, he insists, because he keeps hurting people, because heâs not sorry, because he has absolutely no desire to reform and thus no capability to do so, and, at the personal level, âbecause he took me away from you.â again, the fact that even being robbed of jason was not enough to make bruce see what must be done is what drives him to this extreme. much like bruce thinks he can force joker to reform, jason thinks that he can force bruce to change his understanding of justice by cornering him, by forcing him to choose him or joker then and there. and somehow, it still turns out worse for jason than it ever has for joker (i will spare us all the image of The Incident).
tl;dr jason's personal vendettas are inseparable from his larger commitments to a completely different regime of justice that will prioritize the prevention of suffering rather than the reform of rogues. to make it only about his desire for revenge or proof of bruce's love obscures the empathy (often expressed as righteous anger on othersâ behalf) that drives him and flattens some of his characterâs most interesting complexities.
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