#and the other people joker killed

[thegurlwhoisntthere]

I’ve been thinking about the whole “Batman won’t kill the joker and that’s stupid” take and I’m just thinking-

Okay? Like if mans wants to stick by this one specific moral code for a job that he has literally nothing but a moral obligation to do, than by all means, let him be.

But you know who we should annoy? The fucking DC Government. “Oh he plead insanity and that mean we can’t kill him” be so fucking for real. This is the same government that made the suicide squad. This is the same government where Amanda fucking Waller is in charge of random shit. You’re going to look me in the fucking eyes and tell me they couldn’t just make an exception??? You’re going to sit there and tell me the judge or jury or whatever the fuck couldn’t be like “actually we don’t believe that he’s insane, kill this motherfucker”???

I’ll be honest, I’m not extremely familiar with the comics, but if this is not a storyline that has happened? It needs to be. Story where Batman catches Joker, but instead of just throwing him back in Arkham, the Gov. steps in and puts him on a super high security trial, and regardless of what he claims, they legally sentence him to death. Nothing Batman can do, it’s out of his hands. Joker dies, not by a pissed off Harley Quinn, or an enraged Red Hood, but by a Government that’s tired of this motherfucker costing them too much money in property damage and other shit.

[emacrow]

For the longest time Danny did not want the crown nor did he want to be king. The floating eyeballs where somewhat overjoyed at that but knew they would need to find a reason to make him take up the crown.

Just so they could hopefully challenge him for the right to rule. That halfia did not realize what kind of power he had and yet did not seem to want.

Till one day he not only took up The Crown but The Ring to. Why one might ask.

Jazz his lovely sister and world renowned was asked to have a talk with The Joker. If he was king he had diplomatic immunity and he knew how to prevent people from becoming ghost too thanks to collecting most of John Constantine soul contracts

Only reason he will take the crown that day just to spector the talk.

Only he and Jazz can see how messed up Joker's soul was, not because the crimes he committed but much worse and deeper then anyone in gotham had known yet.

It was like someone had mold play-doe with this guy's cracked up soul, mixed up names of previous and present lives and past personalities like Jack Oswald White, Arthur Fleck, and Jack Napier and more others being a mismatched into each other into some sort of abomination Frankenstein and physical glued together into a single soul with raw glowing green chemicals in a shape of a smile. Obsessions mixed up with uncontrollable laughter, the color green and purple, very creepy stalker borderline level standard with Batman/Brucie and trying to get him to laugh, he hatred for the robin for getting batman to laugh at his joke instead of his jokes, and pure insane mayhem with life as a joke.

This was unnatural even to most fucked up Soul standards, yet pretty fascinating in a way that would explained why he survived so many life ending attempts on his life.

Jazz couldn't even psychoanalysis him without having a major migraines after 5 minutee with the pure amount of information that just keep going like a broken Dam bursting at the seam.seams..

The questions burns deeply with the both of them though...

How did this happen to him? Who done this to him? Was it even fixable at this point? And whom is the person messing with someone's Soul to turn someone into this..?

[daisybell-on-a-carousel]

Still very wild to me when people try to gotcha Jason with the whole "if you can kill other people for being evil why can't they kill you" when jason is like. One of the most passively suicidal characters I've ever seen. What if man

[glitter-stained]

I used to dislike Lazarus Pit Madness headcanons but I've seen people say "he doesn't need magic madness he has normal madness" and "why would you need a magical explanation for his behaviour have you people never heard of cptsd" and while I understand the sentiment (and Jason definitely has cptsd) this is exactly what I'm talking about when I say dc has a dangerous habit of demonizing/villanizing mental illness and it has a real impact on the fandom's perception of mental illness. Winnick isn't the worst when it comes to Jason's writers but the fact that he wrote Jason as both a brilliant hypercompetent villain and a sympathetic character that makes you go "oh hey, he has a point..." should not distract you from the fact that no, decapitation is not a common symptom of cptsd.

[batfam-stuff-posts-0]

I'd like to imagine Tim Drake just going around killing the people who've hurt him and his family (who are not also his family)

[littlefankingdom]

DC comics: Jason and Harley cannot stand each others.

Me: I recognize the council has made a decision. But given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I've elected to ignore it.

[batboopp]

i hate tiktok batman fans because like. “he should kill people!!!!1! he should just kill joker!!!!!” graaagag no. i don’t care if a criminal bombs an entire city batman shouldn’t (and he honestly wouldn’t) kill at all.

and also its just like. he wanted to quit being batman at the THOUGHT of truly killing someone. he starts shaking profusely when he points guns at people (even if they deserve it.) he has ptsd attacks upon seeing corpses, no matter how often he sees and interacts with them

its that batman won’t kill, and also he just CAN’T. its not how he’s wired. the core of batmans beliefs is that he strongly supports the idea of rehabilitation. it’s the reason he still even bothers saving gotham, a city that is literally cursed from the outside in and can never really be fully helped. it’s why he still bothers with many of his rouges (Harvey Dent/Two-Face, Harley Quinn, Killer Croc, some versions of Grundy, and some versions of Riddler are the first ones that come to mind.)

if batman killed, it just throws out one of the reasons for batman existing out the window. he believes in vengeance AND justice, and It’s crucial to use BOTH of those personality traits together if you want an accurate and likable portrayal of batman.

vengeance for the innocents his rouges have harmed, and justice and empathy for his rouges as well, co-existing.

anyways if you want a character like batman except that they kill people then be a red hood fan idfk

[rockingthegraveyard]

They way he just protects this little girl!!!

All the while he's just so fucking scared!

With three villains after him now, one completely losing interest because he's already scared out of his mind. Meanwhile everyone is just gossiping about Batman doing something to the Red Hood that might make him an easier targets and I'm stomping Bruce to death with my hooves.

[oifaaa]

I understand when people say that they don't like Jason being a villain, there's a Lot of those issues that just suck because the writers lost the plot (but I also like Jason as a Robin and then the very first after-death iteration and a lot of the stuff concerning him later tends to get really fucking weird, but that's true for literally all comic characters)

but saying he's better off with the "batfamily" is so funny

like i don't wanna be hating on someone in your ask box but holy shit

Yeah I also get it especially between Morrison Geoff Johns and Bruce Jones I don't blame people for being adverse to villain Jason but still saying Jason is better off with the bats makes me question how much a person actually likes Jason as a character

[ghost-bxrd]

I'm reading the whole Mockingjay fluffy/hilarious headcanons, but defaulting to horror...

Am I the only one who thinks Jason, himself very messed up, teaching a mini Bruce that killing is okay if it's a "bad guy" is going to end with a lot more bodies than even Red Hood would be okay with?

Yeah, Bruce is a smart kid, but he is an eight year old kid, and very traumatized. Kids tend towards binary good guys and bad guys thinking. Elite kid Bruce is... not that likely to get why some bad guys should be spared, or why he can't have fun with (torture) all the bad guys.

I'm picturing Mockingjay killing some teenaged would-be mugger in Crime Alley and being utterly puzzled why Jason thinks this bad guy didn't deserve death.

He was just hungry and desperate? He needed the money to live? Well, some bad guy who was hungry and desperate killed his mom and dad! Would Jason have helped Joe Chill escape if they had caught him?

In Antithesis of Magic Bruce is currently ten! (I think. I haven’t checked but he’s either ten or eleven)

Very young, I agree. But despite his age he has a good sense of right and wrong, and all Jason’s influence did was make him become more flexible in how to deal with the really bad people.

Right now we’re still at the very beginning of the story, and there’s a massive amount of world building and character development still ahead of us. However, Bruce does not kill people himself. And he doesn’t like Jason doing so, either. He understands why Jason does it, and he trusts him enough to only kill the people who truly deserve it, but at the core of it all Bruce would still opt to take the non-lethal route. Which means he probably won’t fall into the rabbit hole too deeply.

Jason and Bruce balance each other out like that. With Bruce’s insistence on keeping it to necessary kills only, and Jason’s refusal to stop killing. A fragile balance, yes. But also one that allows them to harmonize as well as they do.

[kittykatninja321]

controversially I do think that the under the red hood comic ending is a solid answer to “how do you get Batman to kill someone without breaking him as a character”

[twistpixel]

regarding the difference in jason's actions towards two-face when he learns of willis's murder vs. his desire for bruce to have avenged his own death: rather than a change in morals or caring more abt bruce than willis this case shows jason's own hypocrisy. jason forgives and pities harvey bc hes a deeply empathetic person. i personally think that contrary to what he may say if bruce had died in jason's place, jason would've reacted very similarly to how he did in willis's case. after his resurrection jason latches on to the specifics of joker's continued existence, but inwardly what he's really feeling is a deep sense of his own worthlessness. he sees that bruce has moved on as though nothing happened, as though he never mattered; this triggers a deep sense of insecurity in him because he cannot so easily move on. he's stuck in the moment of his death, 15, waiting for someone to prove to him that they love him as much as he loves them. this discrepancy he feels between himself and bruce leaves him unbearably vulnerable. to assuage his own humiliation and feelings of inferiority he fixes on a problem which rapidly becomes black and white before his eyes: heres what bruce should have done if he actually loved me. id have done the same had it been him. however, as with almost anything jason says or thinks after his resurrection you have to ask yourself is he really being truthful to himself, consciously or unconsciously? when jason encounters earth-51's batman in countdown who did kill joker in response to jay's death, he seems instinctively to find this version of bruce lesser. he says to him 'we're both dead "batman." any fool could see you've been dead inside for years.' jason can't reconcile the caring person he had known with someone who would have become what that bruce did.

i think the reality of the situation is that jason would likely have reacted badly even (or perhaps especially) if bruce had killed the joker because the situation is just so fucked. bruce can't react in any way that jason isn't able to twist inwards into self-loathing. jason is simply unable to admit to himself that what he really wants is not for bruce to have killed the joker, but for his life, his death, his tenure as robin, to have been meaningful; for bruce to have unconditionally loved him as jason loved him in turn; for bruce to continue to love him, in fact to continue to need jason; more than anything though--he wishes he hadn't died, because ultimately he wishes desperately for things to be as they were -- but neither of them can ever go back to being those people.

... the tldr jason thought process is essentially -> bruce doesnt love me bruce never cared about me at all or not in any way that mattered i loved him wholly i would have done anything for him i would have died for him i would have killed for him. but LOL he would not have done that!

I love that you brought up earth 51 Batman because i think about him a lot and I think I’ve said it before how they’re both just hanging out with shuffling corpses BUT ☝️ I would attribute Jason calling this Bruce dead more to how he keeps calling Jason “Jason” and ignoring and not addressing Jason’s attempts to distinguish himself from dead-Jason. I think it’s very palpable to Jason the uncanny valley and horror of the situation because when Jason talks about dead-Jason bruce says “you” for both of them. And yet in the end bruce dives in to help when that Bruce is in trouble even tho he’s sooooo doomed. (Funny as hell for Donna and Kyle to just give Jason space to do that like in context it’s a sad moment but “we’ll just be over here”. )

I do think Jason has hypocrisy ngl but I will also but you here- I think it’s what you’re saying about the desire for proof of love but also with a combo of a change in morals. The difference could lie quality of the bad guy. I mean we get that out of Jason’s mouth, “I’m not taking about X Y and Z” but you’re right that you know, we can’t always take Jason’s word for it. But the other half of that line “doing it because he took me away from you” I think Jason thinks killing people is okay. It’s how the world works to him.

Tbh preface that I don’t think modern Jason feels this way about Bruce anymore, but the joker thing specifically was UtH Jason feeling Bruce was living in naïveté and that Jason’s death would be the thing that took him by the shoulders and forced him to confront that it’s okay to kill people sometimes. It wasn’t, because I don’t think anything is, although I see people saying he would if it were a different character and I get a little :(

Thanks for the ask, sorry I only talked about where I disagreed with you

[lygma-nygma]

The genuine struggle of being a Riddler fan when all three of his most popular incarnations are different levels of deeply ooc for completely different reasons and you find all three insufferable but they're his most talked about because they're the only non-comic versions of him that aren't Jim Carrey, in three episodes of an animated series, or made of lego. You still reblog stuff about the ones you don't like though because the art is nice but god damn does it ache a little.

[donnatroyyyy]

Can I be honest with everyone a second? I honestly think that every instance used to justify calling Dick Grayson the “angry robin” is him being justifiably mad at something that would make anyone who was put in the situation mad.

[rmbunnie]

Red Hood Characterization

This is really long so I'm putting a cut here, I've been thinking about Jason Todd's character motivations and the question of whether or not his actions are based in a Moral Code (I don't think so, not to say he's without any morality) and I talk about that in more depth here.

I saw someone say on here that Titans: Beast World: Gotham City was some of the best Jason Todd internal writing they'd seen in a while, and I've been a Red Hood fan for 8 years or so now? pretty much since I read comics for the first time, so I went and checked out and I thought it was good! The way the person I saw talking about it as if it was rare and unusual made me wonder though, because as well-written as i thought his stances on crime were, there wasn't really anything in it that went against the way I conceptualize Jason?

This kinda plays into a larger question I've been thinking about for a while with Jason though, which is that, do people think that the killing is part of a fundamental worldview that motivates him a la batman, and that worldview is the reason he does the things he does?? Because 8 years ago i was a middle schooler engaging with fiction on the level that a middle schooler does, so I simply did not put much thought into it beyond "poor guy :(" but ever since I actually started trying to understand consistent characterization, I don't really see Jason as someone who's motivated by a moral code in his actions the way batman or superman is!

tbh my personal read is that he's a very socially-motivated guy, his actions from resurrection to his Joker-Batman ultimatum in utrh always seemed to me like every choice made leading up to his identity reveal was either a. to give him the leverage and skill necessary to pull off his identity reveal successfully, or b. to twist the knife that little bit more when he does let Bruce find out who he is. Like iirc there's a Judd Winick tweet like "yeah tldr he chose Red Hood as his identity because it's the lowest blow he could think of." And I think that's awesome, I think character motivations rooted so deeply in character's relationships and emotions are really fun to read! I also think it's where the stagnation/flatness of his character comes from in certain comics, because if his main motivation is one event in one relationship that passes, and he is not particularly attached to anything in his life or the world by the time that comes to pass, it's a little harder to come up with a direction to go with the character after that, because there isn't much of a direction that aligns with something the character would reasonably want? But I do think solving this by saying "all of the morally-off emotionally driven cruelty he did on his way to spite Batman was actually reflective of his own version of Batman's stance that's exactly the same except he thinks it's GOOD to kill people" isn't ideal. To be fully honest, it seems to me like he never particularly cared one way or the other about killing people to "clean Gotham of crime," he just did everything he could to get the power necessary to pull off his personal plans, and took out any particularly heinous people he encountered along the way (like in Lost Days.) Not to say I think the fact he killed people keeps him up at night anymore than everything else in his life events, I just never really thought he was out there wholeheartedly kneecapping some dude selling weed or random guy robbing a tv store for justice.

Looping wayyy back to my question, Is this (^) contradictory to the way he's written/the overall average perception of the character? Because like I enjoyed his writing in Beast World i have zero significant issue with anything there, I just didn't believe it would be a hot take, like yeah, that is Jason. It's been a while since I've read utrh and lost days, but I don't think my takeaway directly contradicts either of those too bad iirc. Idk all this to say I think Jason killing and being alright with killing is an obvious and objective fact, but i guess i've always seen it as more of a practical tactic than a moral belief, and I think taking the actions made during the lowest points of a character's life where he is obsessively focused on this ONEEEE thing and trying to apply it as a Motivating Stance to everything he's done after that, doesn't really follow logically for me.

[clownprince]

finally reading the metal/death metal arcs and related stuff and the timeline is just so insane. like. first batman chooses his family over joker, rejecting him and breaking his shriveled black heart. joker's reaction to this is to kill batman and destroy gotham, as one does. then they both make the executive decision to commit homoerotic murder-suicide. but they're resurrected with dionesium. joker in his new persona all pleads with batman not to go back to the way things were.

batman, now re-batmanified, captures joker, locks him in the batcave for several months, extracts the dionesium from his body, re-jokerfying him (???). bruce proposes to selina, presumably at the same time he has joker imprisoned in the cave. then despite joker all but begging him not to, batman effectively breaks the multiverse and opens the door for barbatos, the batman who laughs, and a whole other host of cosmic horrors. nice one, bruce! joker later teams up with batman to fight tbwl even though, again, this entire mess is very much bruce's own fault and joker was actively trying to prevent all of it! even though bruce Locked Him In A Cave. For Several Months. and broke his heart and literally killed him...

and joker's later reaction to all of this unfolding is to team up with lex luthor who's trying to take control of the multiverse because ofc he is. however joker fully intends to backstab lex the second he gets close to succeeding, and then to murder the entire legion of doom and show off their bodies to batman. but this plan is derailed because luthor is working with the batman who laughs who joker DESPISES.

then when tbwl resurfaces to target batman, joker shoots himself in the heart to infect batman so he can fight tbwl. bruce holds his dying body so very tenderly in his arms and then has alfred perform open heart surgery on him, refusing to let joker actually die even though alfred is basically begging him to do so. then joker escapes but comes back to wish batman good luck in fighting tbwl. batman asks joker to kill him if he becomes like tbwl. joker agrees and ends up keeping his promise and shooting batman (who ends up fine ofc because y'know, comics).

then like a year-ish later everything with their dark designs and joker war goes down. and some time during this the whole batcat marriage and best man arc takes place (not sure exactly when, the timeline makes my head hurt). like... how am I supposed to be normal about any of this.