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Tweak says, "What are you doing Dave?"

claudie (flirting with modernism) (lipsofpoison) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-07-03 17:38:00

Entry tags:

char: robin/red hood/jason todd, char: robin/red robin/tim drake, creator: doug mahnke, creator: judd winick, creator: tony daniel

Batman #641 vs. Battle for the Cowl #2
Upon rereading Under the Hood, I noticed something that I loved from Jason at the time and something that I wish had stayed consistant on, to be honest.

Batman #641

Yes, Jason, I do think it's ridiculous when they do that.

Oh, speaking of...

BftC #2

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runespoor7
2009-07-04 05:42 pm UTC (link)

I think it's one of the reasons why Bruce feels so guilty about Jason's death. Jason wasn't simply his responsibility, his behaviour was Bruce's responsibility as well. Jason's death and his being too violent aren't actually linked in the comics, but it's (one of the) meta reasons why he was disliked and DC killed him, and it occasionnally gets linked in the mouth of other characters.

There's also the fact that more recent writers have often depicted Bruce as a lot more reticent in the face of Jason's violence, including Winick. I don't know how much of it is to show Bruce as less blind than he was at the time, and how much is to try and show Jason's issues, but retcons insist on that. (To be fair to Winick, he showed Bruce's awareness and Jason's violence as a slow process that clearly took a while - in keeping with the portrayals of Jason during the original canon. Starlin wrote Jason angrier than Collins. The relationship between Bruce and Jason getting worse with time is also in keeping with how things went between Bruce and Dick, or simply how things are between a parent and a growing child/teenager.)

Now, about Batman encouraging Jason's violence, there's at least three reasons I can think of: 1) Bruce recognized Jason's anger as something he was intimately familiar with, and obviously having an outlet worked for him, right?; 2) Bruce let the fun of the fight run away with him (as shown/implied in the UtH flashback, for instance); 3) Bruce (unconsciously) let Jason act out his own anger, as well, because Jason was Robin and while Batman has to be controlled, it's not one of Robin's attributes (the same way Dick's Robin was chatty and fun-loving). Concerns about Robin's control, IIRC, came mostly post Jason (and came up a lot during Steph's time as Robin).

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