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sorry im a week late to this but. thank youuu for the tag @pluckyredhead :D <3 MWAH <333

There was punishment served with blessing when you were close to Dick Grayson because you could never get close enough. Was it Jason's fault for wanting more or Dick's for only pretending to be an open book but being as convoluted as Bruce himself? Probably the first, perhaps the latter but Jason doesn't care much because he was being nice and sitting patiently, not making his desire anyone else's problem. Dick drops a protein bar in his lap and keeps a bottle of water on the table in front of him. Jason slouches into the couch, half-heartedly working through the packaging to take a bite and closing his eyes. "Are you going to tell me why you're in New York?"

He recalls, during the Winter Holiday that year, that Bruce had practically drunk a fifth of his weight in liquor. In his infuriation, Alfred tasked Dick with keeping vigil on Bruce's disoriented stupor. The man had done little but lay on his back, squinting at the high ceilings, drooling from the mouth. Dick, then only fourteen and still some months shy of raiding the wine cellar, grimaced whilst wiping away the thick globs of spittle with a damp rag.

It went on for the better part of an hour, when on the seventh passing with the rag, Bruce grasped his wrist tight into his thickly calloused palm and said, “Dad used to drink when the memories of Viet got bad…used to scare the shit out of me.” Then, he let go, right back to squinting at the ceiling and Dick retreated into himself by the shrill pin-prickle that crawled over his skin.

To not blame Jason for his death, is to place responsibility on characters surrounding him (mainly Bruce, as Dick's character was mainly associated with TNTT at the time for a few different reasons).

big game hunting

Not for his character or anything, but because I don’t think I’ve seen anyone shoot themselves in the foot with a single character half as badly as DC did with Jason.

He was, during Under the Red Hood, one of the biggest gamechangers they could have thrown at Bruce Wayne’s Batman. Here was an intellectual equal to Batman and superior to the Joker and Gotham’s entire criminal underbelly. A tactical nuke primed to devastate Batman both emotionally and ideologically. Physically, ridiculously dangerous. exceptionally well-trained. a match for Batman in every way. He’s a character that Bruce can’t fight properly, and, worse, one that punches holes in Batman’s modus operandi in ways that instinctively makes sense to the audience.

Bruce’s son, his greatest failure, returned from the grave as an agent of vengeance. Batman, through a mirror darkly.

sounds super interesting, huh. 

Unfortunately, characters like Jason are also the agents of introspection and change. He would have forced Bruce to reflect and, worse still, readers to start second-guessing Batman’s morality. How many people walk away from Under the Red Hood thinking “holy shit, they should have killed the Joker”? Most, right? Jason would have changed Gotham’s status quo irreversibly and, unfortunately, Gotham can’t really change. progress can’t be made, villains can’t die forever, Batman can’t be wrong. 

Because it sells that way, obviously. The Joker will never die, no matter how heinous he is, not really. Not while he’s selling merch. 

So once it turned out that Jason was also super popular, what could DC do? He would shake things up too much if allowed to stay on course. He’s too dangerous, too strong. and so… character assassination! Keep the aesthetics of the angry shooty red helmet daddy issues clowns-bad man while changing the internal workings - fans won’t notice, right? 

Strip away his competence, reduce his skillset, make him an idiot, a lunatic, a brawny shoot-first-don’t-think meathead! He’s not a strategist, he’s stupid, he charges in headfirst. Change his approach to vigilantism. He was always a bad Robin - he was violent and petty and dangerous and he and Bruce never jived in the first place. Keep him out of Gotham as much as possible and when you can’t do that, either quietly pretend he’s on good terms with the batclan or have him and Bruce run around in circles.

And, most importantly, he has to be wrong. He has to be unreasonable. He needs to be the screwup that needs to be sanitised, put in his place, and come crawling back to Bruce so he can be safely assimilated into the family.

Circling around to Urban Legends, Jason and Bruce’s dynamic has completely flipped. Jason is the one that has to change for Bruce’s conditional love, rather than Jason setting the terms Bruce has to meet for Jason to trust him again. Jason is the one that has to learn a Very Important Lesson about the flaws in his morality and align himself with Bruce’s - bearing in mind that Jason developed his worldview after experiencing, firsthand, the flaws in Bruce’s.

Jason is no longer a mirror forcing Bruce to think and develop and grow. He’s one of two things - a stupid, unreasonable villain or Just Another Graduated Robin that Bruce has to control and keep in line just a touch more than the others. His post-reboot arc is him trying to move past his trauma and grow but losing it all and returning, battered and beaten, to Bruce’s side. He’s rapidly losing what made him interesting in the first place and fifteen years later Bruce still hasn’t learnt a damn thing.