sashene

the way the first cover is laid out with bruce at the top and lonnie at the bottom, their symbols the same size and overlapping in the middle, almost like a venn diagram.

them both approaching their targets with 'punishment' in mind, bruce being notably hypocritical about it later on

the way that bruce and lonnie reacting to the playing of lonnie's tape on the news is set up side-by-side with the news broadcast in the middle

and how their internal dialogue tends to bleed into one another

what i find interesting also is that lonnie is just as hypocritical about bruce as bruce is about him

and there's the ever-prominent ending pages of 609 that directly compare lonnie to jason/those who've taken up the mantle of robin because, as some may know, lonnie was intended by grant & breyfogle to become robin before they found out about tim drake. i do think lonnie and tim go on to become excellent foils and have plenty to say about that. but i also think it serves to highlight his similarities to bruce as well

OwO I'm guessing you saw my tags on this post ! I'm happy to talk about it, but I am gonna put it all under a read more because it's long, and also I am wary of getting hate 😅

So for anyone reading who isn't fond of aspec Jason Todd, keep scrolling lol

but that’s not the interesting part but rather, it’s the fact that he was adopted by bruce wayne. because if a system is corrupt then it must serve a certain demographic: the privileged class. and you really cannot get more privileged than bruce wayne.

and yet, it is during jason’s time as the only son of the richest man in the whole of gotham where he sees the extent of which the system is stacked against its victims. by working alongside the system, he is privy to their procedures and more importantly, he is privy to talk shop. he has now witnessed how callous they are to the people they are allegedly supposed to protect from both sides of the system.

The Trickster is one of those character archetypes that is damn near universal across cultures and very, very old. This is my summary of this character's characteristics:

Moral ambiguity. A Trickster is not really "morally grey" in the sense that they're conflicted, they just aren't consistently motivated or ruled by either "good" or "evil" impulses. A Trickster may do good things, but usually it's not because they are good, and they may do evil things, but usually it's not because they are evil.

Inversion of order, creating absurdity. A Trickster inverts order and custom; they don't usually break it. They exploit rules and categories (especially social rules and categories) in a way that causes them to implode on themselves. They augment what is considered dignified until it becomes pathetic and ridiculous, take something considered honorable so far it turns into insult. They outsmart stronger enemies by turning those enemies' strengths into weaknesses.

Thus, a Trickster's power is linked to cunning and insight. They are powerful because other people are controlled by rules, customs, and order. Even gods have a way that they do things. Even kings' authority rests on people habitually agreeing that it exists. A Trickster can bring down a king, not by blowing him up with a bomb the normal way or by asserting that there is no divine right to the throne, but by getting the king so confident of his divine right to rule that he somehow blows himself up on his own free will.

Ultimately the Trickster personifies the limitations to our ability to coerce, define, categorize, and/or dictate the universe and other people. If you try to create a complete definition of "chair" that includes all chairs and excludes all non-chairs, a Trickster invents a horse out of spite. "Four legs, you can sit on it—behold, a chair!"

They are frequently, but not always, shown as genderqueer or outside the gender binary in some way, for reasons I would hope are obvious. This is true of both Loki and Bugs Bunny, even though those characters otherwise have little in common.

They are frequently, but not always, ultimately a victim of their own nature in one way or another, just as they show customs and institutions to be—some Tricksters are hedonistic and full of vices that they keep coming back to, some fall victim to their own tricks in the end.

They are frequently, but not always, some sort of "shape-shifter," whether literal or metaphorical.

What's interesting is that this is also a real, necessary social role that also exists across boundaries of place and time. A court jester, because of his role, had the power to speak the truth; the 'Holy Fools' of early Christian history and the 'sacred clowns' of the Oglala Lakota are echoes of this. This is where we get the concept of drag and of satire websites like the Onion, ultimately. Even today real comedians use the power, notoriety, and convictions of politicians and powerful people against them. It's the idea that by turning something inside out you can see it for what it really is. The holy is shown as profane, the just is shown as unjust, institutions choke on their own power to coerce, venomous snakes die from their own poison. It's the idea that upturning something completely can be more insightful than taking it seriously.

The old good team is back

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