Actually, Tony Daniel did admit in an interview that he made Jason black-and-white Evil^TM on purpose because he didn't like that many readers had agreed with Jason's shades-of-grey attitude and he wanted to discredit it.

http://comics.ign.com/articles/972/972153p1.html

IGN Comics: Anytime you work with an anti-hero character I think you always run the chance that some fans will embrace his or her willingness to go the extra mile and actually kill. When I was talking to Judd Winick about his initial run resurrecting Jason, he mentioned he was a bit surprised at fans' willingness to get behind Jason. By pushing him further towards the side of villainy than ever before, were you purposefully trying to make it clear that Jason is not a good guy and is in fact off his rocker?

Daniel: Yes. At this point he is beyond the point of no return in terms of ever being considered even remotely a hero. What I wanted to do here is put him in a place that he can't come back from. The things that he does here in Battle for the Cowl are things that can never really be forgiven. The only outcome would have to be imprisonment or something worse. But from this point on for Jason the gray area between good and bad has disappeared. It's crystal clear now that he is on the dark side.

Truly, nothing says "good writing" like purposefully derailing a character and making him Rape The Dog in a blatantly OOC manner to shove anvilicious morals down the readers' throat.

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Yes, I remember reading that and it made me facepalm like WHOA. I'm hoping it gets reconned as trauma or something.

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I particularly like milleniumrex's explanation

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I can't really see Jason shooting himself up, considering his Mum, but it's possible!

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I don't know what's more horrifying, my off-hand conspiracy theories coming true, or Tony Daniel's bogus shit. Whoa.

So, basically, what we learn from Tony Daniel:
- there are no shades of grey, and mainstream DC's target audience should never kid themselves that there are
- there is apparently something wrong with you if you're sympathetic towards a morally ambiguous character?
- extensive emotional and psychological trauma? Pffft! He's Evil, it doesn't matter his psyche was probably wrung through a paper shredder!
- bad people cant even be good, full stop.

Thanks, Tony Daniel, for the reality check!

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bad people cant even be good, full stop.

Not only that, but even the offspring of bad people can't ever be good, because evil is hereditary. If you are the child of an evil person, then you must be evil.

It doesn't matter if you try to be good, it doesn't matter if you were raised by good people, it doesn't matter if you are part of a team of heroes and have already proved your heroism time and time again. You have Evil DNA, therefore you will eventually become a villain, there is no fighting nature.

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Sorry, I'm with Tony Daniel on this one; Jason has no trace of anything I'd call remotely heroic in him. He's gone WAY over to the darkside and is still accelerating. He murders (and it IS murder) without qualm, he's tried to kill the Batclan more times than most villains have, and sees nothing wrong with his actions. That's not someone I would call a hero.

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He kills those who would hurt others. He could have easily killed Tim in Teen Titans but instead, leaves and admits he's good. I don't think it's heroic but I don't think it's villainous to want to destroy the evils in Gotham by getting down and dirty with them. I can't call that villainous.

Especially not when he tells Bruce that the line should be people like the Joker and he's willing for it to be the line. I kind of agree with him there. There should be a line drawn on what you can and cannot do and in the end, they do all know that Batman will never kill them so more and more people will die. While his methods need work, I think his theology is spot on.

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Of course he's not a hero, and I agree with you. (Personally, I'm fond of the term anti-villain, because anti-hero still does seem like a bit of a stretch even in Winick's run.) He is a murderer, he's batshit crazy, and he's broken. I don't think Jason doesn't see anything wrong with his actions -- it seems to me more like he thinks someone has to do what he does, so he does it. We may, of course, disagree on how we read his actions, but I am definitely behind the idea that Jason's "I'll make a better Batman" wasn't referring to making a better person, but a figure more competent/suited/something for Gotham in Jason's estimation, which, again, is not the estimation of an emotionally stable person.

The thing is, I absolutely loathe cheating Jason out of any moral ambiguity and turning him into a murdering, psychopathic maniac in a way that in no way resembles his previous characterisation -- I highly doubt, for example, that Winick's Jason would shoot or try to shoot a child. I also absolutely loathe all the implications of what Daniel said: that Jason is Evil, and therefore irredeemable, and also unlikeable. (Which is totally a word.) That's just ridiculous, and damaging to the character. And, as I said above, a well-written redemption arc could easily establish Jason as the full-fledged black sheep of the Batfamily, who would still most definitely not be a hero -- but I recognise that that could be seen as potentially bad for the kiddies; maybe Tony Daniel was thinking of the kiddies.

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Oh, I wouldn't call him a hero either.

But the thing is, I definitely wouldn't call him an irredeemable and unforgivable villain, either.

It's the difference between the Punisher and Bullseye. Both are ruthless, both are murderers, and yet I don't find their deeds and souls even remotely comparable.

My big problem with Daniel, the reason he makes me so angry, is that he completely denies the existence of shades of grey. It's all black-and-white to him, all "either you are a sinless hero or you are a complete monster", he refuses to acknowledge anti-heroes and anti-villains.

In UtH, Jason killed deadly criminals, and in particular he targeted those criminals who harmed women and children, shooting and/or beheading them (which, gruesome as it is, is still a quick death); in BftC, Daniel has Jason kill relatively harmless criminals (apparently one of the guys he hung was just a thief), shoot children, and chain random mooks up to make them starve to death slowly.

Do you seriously think that the former and the latter are equally bad? Do you seriously think that UtH!Jason is the same person as BftC!Jason? If so, then we'll just have to agree we completely disagree.

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Jason has no trace of anything I'd call remotely heroic in him.

His ideals still are pretty heroic to me, when he's decently written. He wants to protect the innocent and he wants to save Gotham. I'm not arguing his methods, but it seems like a noble goal. His definition os 'innocent' is not completely skewed either, so there's still that.

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*sighs* Yeah, I remember reading that. I don't think I've ever wanted to strangle a writer more.

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Ahahaha

Oh man, it's almost precious seeing writers use phrases like "point of no return" and "ever being considered even remotely a hero".

GUYS. COMICS.

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I think he mistook empathizing with a character for agreeing with his methods. While he saw nothing but a monster most fans saw a lost little boy that needed to be saved by his family.

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I would say 'some fans.' Or 'many female fans, but not all.' Because I see him pretty much like TD does.

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Of course the writer might not consider them anvilicious. And if he's willing to cross one line why wouldn't he cross another? At what point do you decide it's OOC?

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When a character who's made a goal of killing the dealers who sell drugs to kids ('kid' in that context including 'high-school students' as well) shoots a ten-year-old without so much as an explanation, he's clearly OOC.

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And if he's willing to cross one line why wouldn't he cross another?

Because the Slippery Slope Fallacy is a fallacy.

At what point do you decide it's OOC?

I consider it OOC when the character does something that has been previously established to be go against their belief/ethics (or lack thereof)/attitude/MO/personality.

As pointed out, Jason always made it a point to protect kids, he considered harming a kid to be unforgivable. So his shooting a child is OOC.

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He's not been derailed. I've always considered Jason to be evil from the time he was retconned into his current origin. He was just being watched too closely when he was Robin to really get away with much, yet he still managed to push a guy off a ledge and other stuff. Once that leash came off, though, we see his true colors: he's a thug, a murderer and a sadist who likes to dress up his wallowing in his basest instincts as 'justice' or 'going the extra mile' when all that really is is behavior just as sick and criminal as anything the Joker does.

Really, anyone that gets behind the 'yeah, some people just deserve killin' without a trial or any of that pussy stuff' deserve to be reviled. I think it would have been better for Daniel to come out and say 'you guys know Jason is and always has been a /bad guy/, right? Right?'.

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I think it would have been better for Daniel to come out and say 'you guys know Jason is and always has been a /bad guy/, right? Right?'.

Eh...that sort of statement would only work if Daniel assumed his particular view of morality, and what is good and evil (and what those terms mean), is the only correct one, which is something most people wouldn't be arrogant enough to do. It's all a matter of interpretation and opinion. I don't consider a boy who is outraged to see a rapist get off (especially after driving his victim to suicide) to be evil, and while I think killing that man is an evil act I don't think that means the boy is evil. I also don't think Jason was 'just' a thug looking for an excuse, I think he is a man who spent much of his early life watching people victimize and destroy one another without meeting adequate punishment, and who turned the sense of frustration and anger that resulted outward. His antisocial behavior is a relatively understandable reaction. Why respect a system that often fails to protect the innocent and only temporarily inconveniences criminals with incarceration in paper prisons? In real life I'd say he's completely in the wrong, but in the DCU the reality of the situation is that most criminals won't stay in prison long, and they'll soon be back to threaten the populace with death rays and fear toxins. I'm willing to relax and/or adjust my own views of what is and isn't wrong for this fictional world that operates with a different set of rules and expectations.

What is less subjective is the fact that Daniel's Jason has seemingly abandoned any sense of morality and values that Winick and earlier writers had given him. Even if you feel he is a bad guy it should be acknowledged that he had limits, as arbitrary as they may occasionally be. There was never an adequate reason given for his sudden rejection of those limits in Battle for the Cowl. I don't think it makes much sense for someone who once stated that kids are off limits to start shooting ten year olds in the chest, and I'm more tempted to say that's just bad writing than anything.

So, with all opinions being equal, I can say without bias or prejudice that I'm right and you're wrong. Nyah!

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First off, for Felipe- so? I mean, sure, Jason should have pushed him, but let's look at the context here. Felipe had just- admittedly, IIRC- raped a woman, then harassed her to the point where the fucking killed herself, and completely got away with it because he was a diplomat's son. Jason always seemed sensitive about violence towards women, and he was there at the clean-up of both scenes- in fact, IIRC, he was the one who found the woman's body- and the guy got off? I can see how he might have lost it in the heat of the moment. Especially given that he was, what, 13? I mean, come on, how much rational judgment are we expecting here? Right? No. Understandable? Yeah.

As for the rest: buh? Look, I agree that no one should be judge, jury and executioner, let alone Jason, who is nowhere near stable enough to be a good judge in these cases- but he's hardly "wallowing in his basest instincts."

Bluntly put, Jason is nuts. I love him, but he is. His psyche has been trampled to bits many times over- he was brutally, violently murdered by one of the most monstrous criminals in the entire DCU, then resurrected, forced to dig his own way out of his coffin, spent some time being severely brain damaged, dumped in a Lazarus Pit- which, for all we know, didn't even fix said brain damage completely, given how much of his behavior could be said to be consistent with various types of frontal lobe damage- probably manipulated by Talia Al Ghul, and then, to top it all off, found out that Batman, his father, had essentially let the Joker get away with it? That'd make anyone go nuts, and as Robin, Jason had already experienced frustration with the failures of the justice system.

Speaking of which, let's highlight that a bit. From what Jason saw, neither the justice system nor Batman's rules could ever stop the Joker/ or Two Face/Felipe/a huge number of other villains who were at leisure to kill/rape/mutilate/generally terrorize the populace again and again. As a kid, he likely saw a lot of shit on the streets. Chances are, he saw drug dealers, pimps, and worse, hurt people again and again and again. As Robin, he fought these people, and the supervillains, and repeatedly saw them escape justice, or just plain escape- come on, Arkham practically has a revolving fucking door. He saw the Joker cripple Barbara, and he was brutally beaten, to the point where the Joker was covered with blood, and when he came back, the Joker was still at it. The system had failed him again.

Let's say we take a street kid who already has anger issues, shove him into little panties and send him out to fight crime; night after night, that kid's exposed to the worst humanity has to offer: rapists, murderers, drug dealers, pimps, pedophiles, etc., not to mention the assorted supervillains. Let's say that that kid sees said worst of the worst evade justice again and again and again, sees the system fail to keep these monsters from hurting more people time after time after time. Let's go ahead and have one of the worst monsters the DCU has to offer cripple one of his friends, then go on to brutally beat him to death. Let's say that that kid then goes through a long trauma conga line, suffers potential brain damage- in short, completely fucks up his psyche. Let's say that, just to put the icing on the cake, he comes back to see that, not only has the system failed to bring him any justice for his murder, but his very father failed to avenge his death, to stop the Joker from hurting and killing so many more people. Would it really surprise you when that kid says "fuck this" and starts to put an end to these people the only way he thinks will work?

Is Jason right? Mostly, no. He certainly has a point that the system can't stop people like the Joker, but at the same time, he takes it too far, and, as I said previously, he should not be the one making that call. But he's not evil- he's a lost, traumatized, and, yes, probably insane, little boy who desperately needs his family to help him, because he can't deal with this shit on his own, or, in all likelihood, without a pretty healthy serving of serious fucking therapy.

So, yeah. I don't know about you, but I know that I like to cut the guy a little slack, given all that.

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Before Jason was resurrected, what marked him as "evil"? Was it Felipe's death, that was never stated to be his fault, which Batman found so doutbful an idea that he didn't even bench Jason, and that happened when Jason was 15? Was it Jason's overpowering concern for victims? Was it Jason's eargerness to beat rapists up when Batman was generally more than happy to stand aside and let him? Was it that he stole tires as a twelve-year-old living on the streets?

all that really is is behavior just as sick and criminal as anything the Joker does.

Jason has never been into hurting innocents the way Joker is.

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Clearly, a lot of people, me included, strongly disagree with you.

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This makes me sad and very disappointed.

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Really? It makes me more pissed off and homicidal, but to each their own, I guess.

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