sassy vintage robin

but what's interesting to me is how #409 is in conversation with #408. i've seen very few people mention this, but bruce doesn't instantly adopt jason after the tire meet-cute for a few reasons, the biggest reason of all being that he's in a phase where he's really questioning his impact as batman. dick's "death" in the media leads to a public outcry against batman, an outcry that vicki vale supports ("who better than bruce wayne to understand -- and take a stand against -- the violence of a batman? violence which can only lead to more violence.") bruce himself begins to wonder why he returns to crime alley as batman on his parents' anniversary, only to never visit again for the rest of the year. this is why he entrusts ma gun with jason. he outright says she's doing more for crime alley than he is (lol). bruce does not actually have any hubris in #408 and acknowledges that robin might be a dangerous job for little kids (heck, he even thought it was dangerous for dick, who was in his twenties atp).

but #409 undoes all of the developments in #408 through the reveal that ma gunn was secretly a villain this whole time. and this ends up accidentally becoming a sort of,,,,,fate thing for bruce. there's a world's finest issue (#7, i think?) where bruce says he was destined to meet dick and jason, and i think that mentality applies here as well. bruce thought he was going about things the wrong way, but when ma gunn is proven to be a villain and jason once again stumbles into his life at around the same time, it can't be anything else but fate that brought them together. bruce tried to hand jason off to someone else, to do things the non-batman way, but in the end, TO HIM, it feels like a sign that jason is back in batman's life. that they took ma gun down together. combine this with his empty nest syndrome post-dick and the craving he has as an orphan to create bonds and families, it must have all connected in bruce's mind like a puzzle. jason was meant for this life.

And rule number three: I make the rules.

cover of the flash (2016) #9; hermes wikipedia; flashpoint #5; mark waid interview about barry allen; souls on the banks of the acheron; hermes page on theoi.com; the flash (2011) #9; pandora's wikipedia; blackest night: the flash #2

I honestly roll my eyes at 90% of fandom's "Jason is being victim-blamed" claims.

Like, I agree that the comics that try to argue Jason was a "bad seed" who was destined to meet a sticky end because of his upbringing or bad attitude or whatever are wrong and also kinda mean and dumb. But that's a Doylist problem of narrative framing, not anything that can or should be placed on any of the in-world characters.

But it's not "victim-blaming" to acknowledge that Jason got himself killed, ie, that he made the pivotal choice which led to his death. Bruce ask him to wait. Jason chose not to. If he had, he wouldn't have fallen into the Joker's trap, and he wouldn't have died. Like with Steph and War Games, it's taking his agency away to claim otherwise, all in the name of making them "perfect" victims.

It's also not "victim-blaming" to acknowledge his reasons and motivations for making that choice. Jason needs to be in control of that moment, because that's the real core of the tragedy. It wasn't inevitable, he wasn't somehow "destined" for a bad end, but his circumstances and choices combined to put him on that path anyway. It's the culmination of his rocky relationship with Bruce and Jason's own trauma and hang-ups about parents, specifically mothers, coming to a dramatic end that both plays into and deconstructs the tropes of the kid superhero genre.

To paraphrase an old John Green video, the core struggle of being a teenager is that of being pulled in many directions by the world around you, while also desiring to live fully and fearlessly and maybe a little foolishly. And the occasionally tragic thing is that, as a teenager, you are just grown-up enough for those understandable, natural desires to get you killed.

If that happens, it's not "your fault," but it is the result of your choices, and it's insulting and infantalizing to pretend that it's not.

In that regard, Jason's role in Tim's story, as the ghost who hangs over his adventures reminding him of the price he can and will pay if he makes the wrong decision, makes perfect sense. What people who call it "victim-blaming" are actually mad about is that the story isn't about Jason. It's not about his tragedy, it's about how his tragedy affected the people around him, the people who were left behind to continue on and the people who came after.

There's a smart post going around stating that one of the things you really have get used to -- or better yet, learn to enjoy -- about superhero comics is that there will be times when it's just plain not about your fav. And you will have more fun if you learn to embrace that, to enjoy seeing them in different lights and from different perspectives.

But some people can't or don't or don't want to do that, and so they get mad at the stories that aren't centered on their fav's feelings and perspective. And they use loaded psychiatry language to express that.

The true nature of Jason's tragedy is that it was preventable via three different sources outside of the Joker if they'd made different decisions - via Bruce, via Sheila (this one noteably the Bats wouldn't know about, which I think some of these people also forget), and via Jason himself. Guess which one the next Robin would concern himself with. Which one he would be worried about. The only actions he can directly control are his own. It's not about Jason being responsible for his own death, it's about Tim not wanting to be responsible for his own.

(via @katanahime )

Even disregarding whether or not Jason is actually to blame in some sense for his death a lot of the examples people cite of this are pre-UTRH Tim just, like, thinking internally about the risks of being Robin and it's pretty disingenuous imo to use the language of "victim blaming" (something that connotes using social pressure to shame a person for the abuse or violence they've suffered) when Jason is a dead person that Tim has never met. Tim isn't demeaning Jason for what happened to him or engaging in blame calculus to determine who's "really" at fault, he's trying to survive being Robin by looking at what the previous one did, and going "okay, let's not do that." Jason fans take this very negatively because to them Jason is a protagonist they've come to empathize with, and they know he's going to come back, so they read this as an element of a relationship between characters that they are taking a side in. But from Tim's perspective, there's no relationship in the first place, because Jason is a dead stranger. Tim thinks about Jason and his life insofar as it is relevant to Tim (i.e. largely as a lesson).

(via @mothemotics )

#disagree only on the point that the ‘bad seed’ rhetoric is purely doylist. it is absolutely in character for certain characters (alfred) to#frame it that way especially in grief. even in ditf before jasons death alfred is armchair psychoanalyzing him#and i think it makes sense to read alfreds classist biases and excuse of a moral decay as something not ooc for him in particular#but otherwise agree.#semirelated is the really bizarre way many have latched onto the language of the ‘perfect victim’ as if that is a real status one could#achieve. and that jason is somehow being denied by people?

(a fair point from @getanshi )

#I think that to truly constitute victim blaming it would have to aim some level of absolution at the perpetrator#because that’s what victim blaming is for: displacement of fault from victimizer to victim#the fact that Jason made a bad choice is never used to make the joker less culpable for his death

(via @fredricwertham )

#it would be victim blaming to say Jason's actions absolve the joker for killing him#it's not victim blaming to say someone undertaking a dangerous activity made a mistake which led to their death#the cave diver who gets turned around#the electrician who doesn't check that the power's out#the mountain-climber who doesn't pack the right gear

(via @ceescedasticity )

And finally, a good summation of points from @trekkele

Inclusive, alguém conhece algum lugar pra ler justiça jovem de 98? Tô procurando desde ontem e não encontro

@dukethomas-week