imo the perfect series finale for south park would be for them to dedicate their last couple of seasons to their junior + senior year of high school (yes live action because i think it would be awesome if done right, not insanely gritty and emo like riverdale). same startling humor and amusement, but kind of with a slightly more mature feel (because they are teenagers now after all; even though they don’t exactly “act their age” in the show, you can still tell their naive youth plays a big factor in a lot of their reasonings and motivations behind their actions and decisions) like yeah, they’re still being stupid and getting caught up in the weirdest shit, but this time they’re being dumb teenagers instead of dumb kids. also! feel like romance would definitely be a core thing, because you know. teenage hormones. no explicit scenes, but definitely make outs and the like, and their relationships would play a more crucial factor in the show. for example, i think that at the start of the live-action saga, wendy and stan would still be entertaining their on-and-off-again-friends-who-make-out-and-have-a-different-response-each-day-if-you-ask-whether-or-not-they’re-together and pretty soon, they’d eventually just break it off for good, and that would be a major coming of age moment for stan as he realizes he was only staying with wendy because she was “safe” and reminded him of being a kid.
PROM EPISODE (for junior year)!!! it would be so lit. huge, huge potential there to get everyone dolled up. stan and wendy would already be broken up by that time, so naturally stan and kyle would just go together as FRIENDS. MUTUAL BACHELORS. DEFINITELY NOTHING MORE….not like kyle turned down heidi’s ask because “i don’t want stan to feel alone” even though cartman and kenny don’t have dates either? also stan definitely doesn’t sneak a bottle in and definitely doesn’t skulk outside and kyle definitely doesn’t find him and just. sits and talks and just laughs and talks shit with him outside for the rest of the night and nothing is said about any sort of feelings kyle might have (if he’s even fully aware of them yet now that stan is 100% available for the first time in years) but. you can tell, everyone can tell that something is there, something is starting.
main highlights for this adaptation idea!
- bebe (cheer captain!) and wendy (heavily involved in asb, voted president senior year; there’s a whole episode dedicated to her campaign against kyle at the end of junior year, she wins by just a few votes) as the queens of the school, most popular girls (bebe in more of a gorgeous-can-have-any-guy-do-whatever-she-wants-and-have-them-all-want-her kind of way and wendy in a beautiful-and-powerful-top-of-the-class-but-definitely-not-an-outcast way)
- cartman still cartman but not nearly as volatile as he once was, still generally considered to be a dick, though. at first glance you think he’s a stupid football player meathead, but he’s actually incredibly smart when he wants to be, kyle is annoyed by this every time he shares an ap period with him and he actually does well.
- ordered class rankings (top 5): wendy (valedictorian), kyle, butters, cartman, heidi
- shelley moved across the country for college the second she graduated, so it’s just stan, randy, and sharon. naturally he spends the night at kyle’s so often that he leaves an overnight bag there and the broflovskis are never surprised to see him stumble out of kyle’s room in the morning
- bendy canon literally like two months after permanent stendy breakup. poor stan is helplessly confused: “has she been a lesbian this whole time????? did she think i was feminine??? is that why we were together for so long???”
- creek thriving as per
- kenny does musical theater and show choir. greatly enjoys it! butters is always front row and has never missed a performance.
- kyle captain of the debate team! wendy is vp, and there’s kind of been a weird tension between them ever since stendy split, you can practically hear her say “i know what you are.”
- stan enjoys volunteering at an animal shelter whenever he can, he keeps this a secret for as long as physically possible and this becomes a big plot point as he makes up increasingly suspicious and not very believable stories and excuses as for why he is rarely available after school despite having no job or clubs. rumors that spread: | randy has managed to get access to harder drugs and is using stan to deal them across south park | stan is a whore-for-hire and will give you an excellent bj if you pay up and meet him somewhere discreet (cartman started that one) | stan is part of a crime group conspiring to kill the mayor and control the city (this one has him end up at the police station with his head in his hands).
- gerald really wants kyle to be a lawyer and practically has all of his schools picked out for him, thereby unintentionally giving his son an existential crisis on what the heck he wants to do with his life because he does not want to do what his dad does but he also doesn’t have a good enough alternative to combat him.
- heavily hinted bunny, it’s literally right there but they tell everyone they’re just friends. ongoing gag of them being caught in compromising and/or suspicious positions but somehow having a seemingly reasonable explanation each time.
- college decisions would for sure be a big plot point towards the middle of their senior year, especially for kyle. he only applies to two schools and is accepted to both of them: princeton (college of his parents, their pick for him to study pre-law) and stanford (his pick, unknown to his parents that he even applied, to study psychology). yes it is absolutely insane that he only applied to two ivy leagues but what is even more insane is that his parents only wanted him to apply to princeton and no other schools. haha well now he has to explain to them that he is going to california and is not following their carefully constructed plan for his future haha
- stan is similar to shelley, he doesn’t really care where he goes as long as he gets to leave south park! he also knows he wants to do some sort of career helping animals but is unsure what exactly, so he just puts zoology as his major and applies to a lot of different schools. he ends up committing to uc davis! sharon is incredibly proud of him and cries when she sees the acceptance letter, randy is kind of bitter because he wanted stan to stay and help out with the farm since shelley booked it but eventually comes around (also stan would’ve gotten a job at 7/11 before he started working at tegridy alongside his dad).
- butters gets accepted to the university of rochester for biomedical sciences. kenny doesn’t plan on going to college, but him and butters decide to share a flat in the city, and kenny works odd jobs while also doing performances at various clubs in the at the area. also him and butters choosing to live together across the country is purely platonic!!! there is nothing romantic going on at all, they are just really good friends!! nobody buys this anymore
- cartman literally gets accepted to ucla on a full ride football scholarship for business management and it makes kyle want to tear him to shreds! liane would’ve absolutely somehow paid for his entire tuition anyway if she had to
i feel like the length of each episode would be about 45 minutes with the series finale being like 90 minutes, the first half being their graduation with wendy giving an incredibly corny yet oddly emotional speech as valedictorian that pretty much summarizes their entire lives in south park. and then the second half would kind of be just like providing conclusions and tying up loose ends such as:
- shelley flying back home for stan’s graduation and reconciling with him; she’s a junior at NYU and actually became a lot nicer and at peace with the world + herself after she was able to leave colorado
- randy actually having a good father-son moment with stan as they discuss his going off to school in california; stan realizes that his father definitely is not great, but he maybe also isn’t the worst person in the world
- a moment of “this is the last we’re ever gonna be like this, huh?” when the main four are hanging out at cartman’s, traditional teen paranoia of the future
- bunny finally 100% confirmed as scene shows with Kenny having his arm loosely hung around butters on someone’s couch, lightly pressed kiss on his cheek
ok i have a lot more but my #1 idea for the finale would be this:
- stan and kyle just aimlessly hanging out in the latter’s room about a week or two after graduation, easily talking about everything from college to music to new films to their friends; just enjoying each other’s company before fall comes (they are unbelievably dramatic. uc davis and stanford are like a hour’s drive away from each other but coming from best friends who have lived in the same city together their entire lives, an hour away may as well be a whole ass country away)
- occasional comfortable silence. kyle has come to terms with his feelings about stan at this point, but has chosen not to act on it in favor of keeping his longest friendship intact. nobody knows, he never told a soul. unbeknownst to him, stan has been accumulating the same feelings towards kyle, but likewise has been keeping them sealed tightly in so as not to ruin anything.
- eventually, they somehow start talking about relationships. stan never dated anyone else after breaking up with wendy at the start of junior year, and kyle has never truly dated anyone, not if you don’t count a faint fling with some loud city girl when he spent most of sophomore year summer with his mom’s family in new jersey. he came back from summer break more certain than ever that he was 100% gay. he recounts this story to stan for the first time (he’d been too embarrassed to tell anyone when he had come home) and it’s met with an enormous fit of laughter.
- they start talking about how weird it is to love someone, to have these strong urges and desires towards someone in a way that’s entirely unprovoked. to feel like you would do absolutely anything for this person, and to have life be unfathomable without them. they both agree on all their points, but no names are mentioned though!
- it’s the early morning hours before stan realizes how long they’ve been talking, and despite knowing he could stay the night, he decides to head home, suddenly flushed and overwhelmed with some sort of..something. does he really love kyle that much? in that way?
- the air is lightly tense as he leaves, kyle left feeling confused and slightly perturbed. against his butter judgment, he chases after stan outside, as he’s placing his key in his driver-side door to unlock his car.
- “wait!”
- stan turns his head, looking puzzled and faintly apprehensive. it’s summer, so the early morning is not bone-chillingly cold, yet also not as scorching hot as it will be come afternoon. it’s the perfect temperature, and it’s the perfect time, and before he knows what he’s doing, his feet are carrying his stiff, trembling body towards stan, whose eyes tell a thousand pictures despite his frame not moving a muscle.
- he stops in front of stan so that they’re gazing slowly, directly, meaningfully into each other’s eyes, and stan feels his throat go dry and his mind go blissfully blank. it’s slow and tender, the gentle yet firm way kyle stares up into his eyes, like he’s been waiting a lifetime for it (and he probably has) and he can feel his familiar breath whispering across his face, and all of sudden the careful movements, the gentle intention, all of it is gone in a flash.
- the very last scene of the very last episode of south park shows kyle slam his lips against stan’s, and then, lips still pressed together, the show ends.
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Where are the best comic representations of Jason in your opinion? I’ve read some of the Red Hood and the Outlaws stuff and that’s okay (I really like Roy and Jason interacting) and the Nightwing 2021 annual was great, but I want to read more. I just don’t want to read the versions where writers distill Jason down to “angry, violent, no empathy, doesn’t care about anything or anyone” which I feel like happens a lot.
Whew…okay, this is going to be long. Just a head’s up.
SO…this is kind of a complicated question when it comes to comic characterization, at least for me. Honestly…I don’t really judge things based on “best” with comics but more “my favorite,” because comics characterization is so all over the place and inconsistent that (IMO) “best” just…doesn’t really mean much.
Because of that, this list is going to be some of my Jason Todd faves, with a focus on Red Hood, that I think all or most of your specifications!
(Also note that I am NOT the person to give pre-A Death in the Family Robin!Jay recs. Hopefully someone in the replies or reblogs can help out! I’ve only read the Garzonas arc and part of A Death in the Family.)
(ALSO ALSO NOTE: I have SIGNIFICANT GAPS IN MY CANON KNOWLEDGE because I dropped out of DC comics for like…many years because ALL OF MY FAVORITE CHARACTERS WERE DEAD. I am FAR from a Jason Todd Exploit Expert. Why was Jason “Wingman”? What was that whole thing with Donna Troy and Kyle Rayner? I DO NOT KNOW. I am WORKING ON FILLING THOSE GAPS but I am also FREQUENTLY TIRED.)
ANYWAY, on with the show!
Let’s start with the classics!
Under the Hood+Batman Annual #25!
Don’t call it a comeback…he’s been here for years!(Technically, via retcon.)
Okay so I’m putting this one first because this is the Jason Todd I fell in love with. FURTHERMORE, I mean, this pretty much sets the stage for all of Jason’s Red Hood appearances.
WHY do I like it?
—Jason is COMPETENT. He GETS SHIT DONE.
—Jason is FUNNY. Like, legitimately funny. Other characters are also funny! Black Mask and Slade are funny! The Joker is funny! It is frequently a funny story!
—Jason is SO SAD. With every part of this arc, I very much get the feeling that Jason is just…desperately trying to live for something and this is the only thing he has. And I, for one, eat that up with a spoon, it gives me LIFE.
Red Hood: Lost Days
A mini by our buddy Judd Winick, filling in the details of Jason’s backstory originally seen in Batman Annual #25.
WHY do I like it?
—We get to see Jason killing baddies! Unapologetically! Like…real bad baddies! Wooo killin baddies!
—More of Competent!Jason! He learns a lot of very useful killin skills and he learns them quick! And he uses them very well.
—Once again, Jason Todd is VERY SAD. Here, we get to see WHY he is so sad in Under the Hood. Have you ever wanted to see every element of a character’s stability in life get slowly but surely worn away by circumstances completely outside of their control? Well, here you go!
Red Hood and the Outlaws: Rebirth+Red Hood: Outlaw
Ah, the Lobdell Years. (Original flavor RHatO not included)
WHY do I like it?
—So, RHATO:Rebirth!Jason Todd is not quite my Jason Todd. He’s more subdued, more of a Stoic Woobie than my preferred Jerkass Woobie version of Jason. HOWEVER, Lobdell’s version really exudes a sort of sense of…doom?…crushing sense of existential hopelessness?…quiet despair?…that hooks my heart. Good old Jason “not everyone wants to be alive” Todd!
Whereas Winick’s version of Jason plays with the fourth wall in a kind of pointed way, RHATO:Rebirth Jason (IMO) feels very…trapped in the narrative. He knows that everything is going to fall to pieces for him—because he can’t have nice things, because he’s Jason Todd, and Jason Todd will never be allowed to keep anything nice—but he’s still going to help his friends, goddamn it.
—It’s nice to see Jason have friends that are his own. I love the “Dark Trinity” of Jay, Artemis, and Bizarro. You really get why they cleave together, and they’re just…cute. I love them.
Okay, now…here are some recs with caveats!
Cheer from Batman Urban Legends #1-6
There’s a new drug called Cheer on the streets of Gotham! Flashbacks and problems abound!
SO.
Cheer.
My caveats are:
1. Jason is annoyingly incompetent.
2. Part of the setup of the story involves Jason acting in a way that I consider OOC (he kills a guy and it’s made out to be a very big personal deal for reasons that I have ranted about previously).
3. Jason gives up guns. Ugh. Boo.
—Okay now OUTSIDE OF THOSE THINGS…
WHY do I like it?
1. We get flashbacks to little kid Jay, Robin!Jay, and Bruce in UtH that I consider to be very meaningful to Jay and Bruce.
2. The plot hook involves a drug called Cheer that makes people hallucinate their happy place, and Jason and Bruce’s hallucinations kind of break my heart into pieces. (I’ve talked, uh, A LOT about them, I have no chill.)
3. I really love the art for the flashbacks, and bb!Jay is REALLY CUTE.
So, yeah, thems my feelings! Jason definitely isn’t portrayed as “angry, violent, no empathy, doesn’t care about anything or anyone” so I’m gonna go ahead and rec it.
Robins mini
The Robins get together on their own and decide whether recruiting child soldiers to fight a never ending war on crime might be…you know…a bad thing.
Okay my caveat is that…some people don’t like it for reasons that I haven’t really explored because I REALLY like it. In the beginning of the story there is some talk of Jason being a ne’er-do-well…buuut it comes from him, so I very easily take it with a grain of salt.
WHY do I like it?
—First of all, I just really love the Robins all getting to hang out together and then work a case together. They should get to do that more often/all the time.
—Jason gets MANY Big Damn Hero moments. And they’re not just Big Damn Hero moments but like…BIG BROTHER Hero Moments, and I love every one. Multiple times he’s watching out for the other Robins and I just…I love it.
—Stephanie Brown is also a Big Damn Hero.
—Bruce Wayne is kind of a woobie and I can’t help but get feelings when he gets feelings about his kids.
Battle for the Cowl
Batman is dead! (For now.) His cowl is like…right there. People may or may not battle for it.
WHEW…okay so…THIS ONE IS VERY CONTROVERSIAL. A lot of people hate it. FOR VERY GOOD REASONS.
It is NOT good. In fact, it is very BAD. It is bad on MULTIPLE LEVELS.
—Characterization for multiple characters is BAD!
—The story is DUMB! It’s not even a BATTLE! Only one person WANTS to be Batman!
Also, Jason is a villain in the story, just straight up.
So…
WHY do I like it? (And WHY would I rec it?)
WELLLLL…two main reasons.
The first is that, in his attempt to make Jason “irredeemable,” Tony S. Daniels (the writer) ended up making him AWESOME.
Do you like watching Jason run around Gotham beating up his whole family? Do you like seeing Jason get to be a proper villain? Do you like Jason being perhaps the only competent person in the whole fucking city? (Okay Tim Drake is also competent but he gets jobbed by my boy.) Do you like seeing Jason go off the rails with absolutely no hinges to be seen? Do you like seeing Jason play dress up with the Bat costume?
I DO! I do like all of those things! And if you, like me, answered YES to most or all of the above, Battle for the Cowl may be relevant to your interests!
Okay so reason number 2 is…
Jason is going through a mental fucking breakdown through the whole story brought on directly by Bruce fucking Wayne. And there’s nothing I love more than hating Bruce Wayne! And, gosh, he is just SO HATEABLE in this story! He’s not even in it, but I guarantee by the end you’ll be like, JFC, JASON is supposed to be the irredeemable one?!
ANYWAY! As a diehard Jason Todd fan, Battle for the Cowl is my filthy guilty pleasure. DO NOT pay money for it! Get the TPB from the library or get it through sneaky means. It is NOT worth paying for but it IS a rollicking good time if you are a person of specific tastes.
Okay, whew! That’s it! Well probably. That’s at least the ones that I can think of right now! Hopefully people will throw more recs your way!
(Sequel list here with all of my faves I didn’t put on this list! :D)
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let me know if you need anything
“Hey, Solo!”
Ben looked up. The sudden motion triggered a dull ache in his right eye—he winced.
“Uh—sorry.” Amalia came to a halt in front of him in the grass. The tall, bulky Togruta girl always looked like she was going to barrel right into you, but always managed to stop a few inches short. Back when they’d hated each other, Ben had thought this was some kind of intimidation tactic. But now that they were something like friends, he realized that she was just…well…awkward as heck.
Amalia peered at him and at his covered eye, then tapped her own cheek. “You look like one of the deep space pirates.”
“Wow,” said Ben, deadpan. “I’ve only heard that about five hundred times since I came back to Jedi school.”
“What’d they do to you, huh?”
Ben juggled the air with his hands, trying to figure out how much detail to go into. “Uh…they cut my eyeball open, and sewed a synthetic band into it to hold it together and make it stop falling apart. Basically.”
“Whoa. Sounds gnarly, dude.” Amalia paused. “…Can I see?”
Ben laughed. “Bro. Do you want to see?”
“I mean? Kinda? Will you like, die if it’s exposed to air?”
“Listen, I’ll show you, if you want to freaking see so bad.” He lifted the patch. He had to manually pry his eyelids apart—they were still swollen. He closed his left eye, just to see how well he could see her—everything was sort of a bright, slanted blur.
Amalia made a face. “Ew. It’s all red. Is that blood? Nasty. I see a coagulated mass of—something. There is straight-up slime in your eye, dude.”
Ben put the patch back on. “Yeah—I’ve been trying to, like—cry it out, but I can’t think of anything sad enough to make me cry. I dunno. I’ve had a hard time feeling emotion lately, in general.”
He said it, and then realized he hadn’t wanted to say it. He backtracked as quickly as he could.
“But now that you’re here, Mal, all I gotta do is look at your ugly mug,” he quipped.
Amalia rolled her eyes so hard she pretty much just rolled her whole head. “Hardee har har. Have you looked in a mirror? Geez, Solo, you can’t say shit like that to girls.”
“Oh—you’re a girl? Oh my Force, I didn’t realize. Sorry, miss.”
She wound up and punched him in the arm. Hard.
“Ow! Bruh. I’m already injured.”
“Well, you weren’t injured enough,” Amalia huffed. “Fixed it for you.”
“I’m telling Uncle Luke.”
“Yeah, go run and tell your Uncle Luke. Pissbaby.”
Ben tried to think of something clever to retort, but then his eye started hurting again, and he felt kind of sick. He hissed and lowered himself down into the grass, which seemed to initiate a truce.
Amalia leaned down. “You okay, bro?”
“Yeah—fine.”
“Are you still allowed to train and stuff?”
“I’m not supposed to do any ‘strenuous activity’ for four weeks.”
“Well, you were never getting any, anyway,” Amalia snickered. “Now you just have an excuse.”
Ben wrinkled his nose. “Ew. No, I mean…”
“Does lifting rocks with the Force count as strenuous activity? You’re not technically lifting them physically.”
“Eh. I always give myself headaches when I do that normally, anyway, so…maybe just littler rocks.”
“When are you gonna be able to see again?”
“Out of this eye?”
“Yeah, well, which eye do you think I’m kriffin’ talking about, dumbass—“
“I don’t know.”
“…Damn.” Amalia sat down next to him. “Sucks.”
“Yeah, I mean…I know it’s gonna be months. Maybe a year. And I don’t even know if it’ll ever be the same. Probably not.”
Amalia twitched her lips to one side. “Does it bother you?”
“Like, what, the pain? Or…”
“No, like…losing your vision. Like, coping with the loss.”
Ben shrugged. “…I dunno. Sure ain’t the biggest thing I’ve lost. It’s hard, I guess, knowing you’ll never be the same, but…I was already never gonna be the same, so…” He trailed off.
Amalia nodded at the horizon, picking a blade of grass apart with her fingers. “Yeah…I get how that is.”
They sat there in silence for a few moments. A low breeze came and rustled the grass.
“…Maybe I’ll gain some kind of extra Force sensitivity,” Ben said hopefully. “To compensate. Or something.”
“Yeah,” said Amalia. “Or…maybe you won’t, and you’ll just be half-blind.”
Ben threw her a tired glance. “Thanks, Mal. You’re a real pal.”
“What can I say? I try to offer a realistic outlook on life.”
“Hm.”
“But, for real though…let me know if you need anything. Okay, Solo?”
Ben raised an eyebrow. “Like what? Another punch in the arm?”
“Well, yeah, if you need that, I’m your girl. But, uh, seriously. Like if you need to talk, or…” She gestured vaguely at nothing.
“No offense, Mal? But you are not great at talking.”
“Hey. Never said I was. Just said that I would. Or if you wanna, like, just go throw rocks in the pond together, or something. Go look for weird bugs. Climb that cliffside Luke said not to climb. You know?”
Ben smirked. “Ha. Okay. Yeah. Gotcha. And then I’ll bang my head real hard, and knock out my other eye.”
“Exactly. You get me.” Amalia stood up and dusted the grass off her tunic. “Well…I’m on kitchen prep with Fannie and Meliko tonight, so…guess I gotta go. Do an extra meditation for me, will ya? Fannie drives me nuts.”
“Really? She’s so nice.”
“Yeah,” Amalia scoffed. “That’s what drives me nuts.”
Ben snorted. “Well, okay, Mal. See ya at dinner, then, I guess.”
“Will you see me though?”
“Dude, shut up!”
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