No disrespect to anyone with this post, it’s just that Jason would not suddenly let go of his bitterness if someone else killed the Joker. It just wouldn’t happen.

The Jason-Bruce-Joker conflict will never have a satisfying resolution for Jason, even without taking DC’s opinions of the Joker into consideration because Bruce unintentionally set up a situation in which he must choose between a promise he made as a child in the wake of his parents’ death (his no-kill code) and an unspoken promise he made to Jason before his death.

For context, the “unspoken promise” comes from Batman #425, in which Felipe Garzonas’s father seeks revenge against Jason for his son’s death. In this issue, Bruce explains to Jason why the confrontation happened, and states that “For every action in this universe, there is an opposite and equal reaction. Consequences, Robin. There’s no escaping them.”

He even refers to Garzonas Sr’s actions as “a father’s righteous fury”. It’s not hard to see how a teenager would take this to mean that the natural consequence for killing a son is a father seeking vengeance.

This, combined with the discovery that not only had he died, but that his killer was still alive to brutalize and kill many more, paints a clear picture to Jason. That being, essentially: If Bruce refused to avenge Jason, then Bruce does not consider Jason his son.

Following that line of thought, Jason sets up a choice for Bruce:

Option 1: Allow me to end this clown, turn a blind eye, and prove to me that I’m your son, your family.

Option 2: Save him, and you prove to me that I was never your son, and you don’t care about me like you claimed you did.

With these options, Jason does account for Bruce’s unwillingness to kill with his own hands (more on that in a sec), and offers him an option that allows him to keep both promises, while also ending the terror the Joker continues to inflict then and there.

However, Bruce, unable to reconcile his view of Jason, the killer with his view of Jason, his son (combined with the pressure of Jason about to pull the trigger), breaks this unspoken promise and the kicker is that, in doing so, he breaks the other one as well. Jason’s throat is slit, he bleeds out, and is revived once again as seen by the same visual effects appearing both after he collapses and when he’s revived in his grave. The son dies by the father’s hand, and Batman has taken a life.

because both of them do come at a cost. so how do you decide which is better? is it the way that bloodies your hands in the name of sparing the innocent? or is it the one that keeps your hands clean while giving the wrongdoer another chance to either turn it all around or keeping hurting people? if you kill to spare future victims, you risk spilling blood you have no right to if you misjudge someone, but you assure the protection of many if you’re right. if you choose not to kill, you guarantee that you will never shed innocent blood and leave open the possibility of redemption for the wrongdoer, but you jeopardize the welfare of countless others by not doing what it is within your power to do.

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 he’s 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 garzonas’s 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 happen— including batman’s 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 that’s exactly what he does by taking the fight to garzonas (whether you think he’s 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 injustice— and when the system doesn’t work, as we’ve 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 that’s 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:

jason’s 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, “i thought i’d be the last one you ever let him hurt.”

the first time i read this, i misunderstood it as “i thought you’d do anything to make sure he didn’t hurt me,” but that’s 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 person’s possible redemption over the real suffering of everyone else. he thought that bruce would make sure jason was joker’s last victim, the “last one he ever let him hurt,” and what wounds jason to his core is that not even his death was enough to radicalize bruce to his way of doing things.

jason’s angry that joker is still alive, not just because that’s his killer, but because that’s a killer. but even this isn’t specific enough, because jason clearly doesn’t think that every killer or criminal is worthy of death:

in jason's idea of a just world, bruce doesn’t 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 he’s not sorry, because he has absolutely no desire to reform and thus no capability to do so, and, at the personal level, “because he took me away from you.” 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).

Robin Jason was a sweet, kind kid who cared about victims. He also had righteous rage and violent tendencies towards those he thought deserved it.