i've been bamboozled!

the story goes like bruce hates the criminal element, he despises looters, thieves. along comes jason. hes a thief but he has a good heart and doesnt want to hurt anyone. a boy of the "criminal element" can be good. can be a hero. jason is murdered. retroactively his criminality determined this would always happen. Stephanie is not herself a criminal but is tainted by association with her father. there is no hope for crime ally. leslie is a fraud and a murderer. every adaptation pushes jason away from "before bruce exposed him to violence he was not violent, he was good; red hood is batmans creation" and explicitly into "jason was always bad, batman made a bad character judgment, jason was unhelpable"

Major bummer that "emotional brick wall/hyper-masculine" Jason ended up as some of the prevailing characterizations because both of those things are like notably not things that he particularly is. The closed-off thing I understand (outside of Lobdell's characterization) to be an extension of general bat-family behavior, which is an extension of general Bruce behavior, bc in everything pre-Lobdell he's just trying and trying to form bonds and even post-Lobdell its the less prevalent of the two, but I have trouble pinning down the hyper-masculinity. I think realistically (beyond questionably-written stuff like NW:BIB) it's probably a mix between his physical appearance of being a big strong man, the pragmatism-centric Red Hood identity, and being mean/punk and seen as more hotheaded/violent than the others due to the killing (with the aterisk that his hand to hand fighting style isn't actually much more brutal than any other bat,) but idk I feel like we're overplaying it a little. I'm not saying he's the fem-est beast to walk the earth, I'm definitely not getting into Jason-is-woman-coded discourse, but. He's referred to as a drag queen (derogatorily) at one point, every worthwhile platonic connection he has outside of Bruce and Dick (and as of N52, Roy, which isn't done well but something that would have potential imo if it wasn't done awfully) is with a woman, he takes a recurring interest in victorian culture/fashion, he tends to be REALLY theatrical, is emotionally open as much as he's emotionally self-aware (which is still more than most bats, even if it's the lowest of bars,) and cries like, a noticable amount, none of which super gives tropey macho meathead. And although gendering personality traits is arbitrary and pointless, I could get it if he actually had any real stereotypically masculine interests (besides weaponry,) or was a gym bro, or one of the guys, but he isn't, really. You know who is sporty with a close friend group of other men? Tim Drake, who never gets hypermasculine allegations despite that. And I'm not saying Tim should get them, I just think it's a little weird that Jason does so much!