whenever I think about Jason and family there’s always an anger towards his father figure. He’s angry at his bio dad for leaving, he’s angry at Bruce and his inflexibility when it comes to morals (and therefore him). That one comic where he saves that kid and gives him his helmet revolves around his anger towards a father figure abusing their son.
But with moms? Idk. There’s like, a sadness and idealization towards his mother figures that isn’t there with all the other orphans in the family. We don’t get much of Catherine but it’s clear he loves her a lot, Nocturna is redeemable in his eyes, even Sheila is someone he jumps in front of knowing he’ll die.
I’m just rambling at this point.
oh for sure. This whole thing about Jason with parents is so interesting to me... I can never quite make up my mind around it. There's a lot of external factors I guess that we can use to explain why it is the way it is (this double play of like mother absent/good, father present/bad), but I'm really curious about how HE thinks about it. Like, all of Jason's feelings towards fathers are so much more immediate to us (and to him too, I think) because of Bruce. The father-son relationship is much more prominent for each of their characters, and like a good 60% of Jason's motivation in general. I also think there's a lot of like gender stuff going on, with like the fridged mothers BUT all of those women are SO much more complex than like, Mary Grayson or Martha Wayne (with exceptions). So the external stuff is fun, but I'm really eager to crack Jay's head open and see what's going on there.
I think you're right that the anger, first for Willis and then for Bruce, helps a lot in keeping his relationship to fatherhood/his fathers relevant and alive. It's such a visceral, immediate feeling, and it stick and needles in a way that pure sadness doesn't. It incites action. So then fatherhood becomes an ongoing issue, something to resolve, because Bruce is there to maintain that connection alive. And also I think because of the gender mirroring (how can I be a man if nobody is teaching me to be a man? (Willis) + what sort of man can I be if I cannot be your son because I have done the one thing you do not do? (Bruce), which is closer or more apparent to him than with motherhood and femininity. My theory here is if Bruce had never appeared in his life, his parental issues would be falling heavyyyyy on mother stuff, and Willis would sort of meld into the background.
Because like, canonically, he's got some stuff going on with his mothers. I think the root origin of it IS Catherine: her kindness towards him, her failure to shield him from the worst of the world, and the harrowing tragedy of her death (and its circumstances). To him, the mother is the person who is always trying their best and who loves him unconditionally despite their glaring flaws, and that DOES include all the times they hurt him. It certainly informs his relationship with Sheila: he wants that back, whatever he had with Catherine, the intangible, unchangeable core of it which has to be persist despite Sheila clearly doing wrong by him, because that's what a mother is. It cannot be any other thing because then. Then, what? He loses Catherine again? It's unabidable.
I don't know if the idealization persists because he doesn't get another mother after Catherine, not really. When you lose a parent young, particularly when their loss changes your life radically (and I do think her loss is far more devastating that Willis's in the long run), it's so easy to 1) forget what your parent really was like as a person, because you never met them as an adult, and 2) to pin all your hopes and longing and failures and anger on their loss. This, I think, is in some way deviated by Bruce (because he is a decently good parent, I think, at first), but it is ALSO active by the time Jason dies. But then the trauma of his death and Bruce's betrayal to their relationship as father and son is so large, it interrupts it entirely, and then replaces it. I wonder if he'd never died, whether Jason would've grown up, like. Seeking a mother. Maybe sleeping around a lot with women. Living up to the Wayne son reputation. Interesting to think about a Jason like that.
