#but one thing bruce && gotham convinced dick of is that evil is senselss && the best you can do is scare it back into hiding

[vigilaent]

a fatal flaw of dick’s robin was projecting his own self - inflicted sense of innocence onto the rest of the world.     the judgement he wielded was very much black and white and didn’t leave much room for shades of gray.     there’s good and there’s bad,  murderers and the murdered,  the guilty and the innocent.     a lot of this thinking came with being batman’s sidekick,  but a lot of it was just dick’s mind trying to cope with the injustice of his parents’ death as a child.     watching them plummet to the ground just out of reach and learning someone did that on purpose.     their deaths were just a blip on someone else’s radar,  and years later when he finally gets to avenge them,  bring this learned idea of justice to the unjust and finally reap the satisfaction,  the repercussions wind up killing more innocents in an endless cycle he thought he could bring to a close.     violence has never truly provided a sense of fairness for him,  despite all his trying.     it only ever seemed to beget more violence,  and the feeling of guilt he carries for his portion of it is something he imposes on anyone else who makes similar choices he did. 

living in gotham gave dick a bird’s eye view of some of the worst humanity has to offer,  the deplorable and irredeemable,  the desperate,  senseless kind of living.     in a city like that,  there was no room for shades of gray if you wanted to survive.     anything less never felt like it would even the odds,  never felt like it could keep you alive and separate from the evil that devoured everything around it.     ‘  all it takes for evil to succeed is for good men and women to do nothing.  ’     you either fight against the evil or you become it.     or worse,  as dick would discover,  in fighting against it,  you become the very thing you fought to destroy.

the kind of justice batman and robin dish out in gotham requires a level of arrogance to exist.     it’s in the definition of justice when you believe you can embody it  ;  if you're the hand of justice,  there’s a stock you have to put in your very own ideas of right and wrong,  that you know what’s unfair and what’s not,  and what the correct course of action is for making it fair is.     you’ve imposed an ideal greater than a single person can conceptualize onto yourself—  you’re the judge,  jury,  and executioner in every way but the actual finality of death.     living this way leaves no room for things like redemption.     you’re either guilty or innocent,  savable or irredeemable,  evil or prove yourself righteous enough to judge what is.     being robin showed dick most evil can’t be redeemed,  only punished before it can do any more harm.     it’s a reactive sense of justice that leaves no room for confronting why it exists to begin with.     it’s animal,  base survival,  asking the bare minimum of what life is willing give.     begging god to throw you a bone and get you out alive long enough to squash your enemies before they can hurt anyone else like they did you.     no bargaining,  no fixing the circumstances that pumps these perpetrators out like a factory,  just a clinging to the life rafts left in the wake of them.

in a way,  the world is safer like this.     it’s an easier pill to swallow,  especially once dick considers himself irredeemable.     the only option is to stop trying to fix the world altogether,  all or nothing,  playing judge or complete abstention.     the pressure to try and fix evil is too much to even think about,  too heavy if he himself is un - fixable.     dick either swoops in to save the helpless or punish the guilty,  and after all the punishing he’s enacted,  it’s a dangerous question to ask,  if something could’ve been done to reach someone before he cracked their skulls in,  maimed their bodies.     when he himself crossed the imaginary line of morality he created as a symbol of justice by abandoning tony zucco to die,  he did it because he was embittered and volatile,  out of control to even himself and reveling in the damage he dealt.     when he learned the world was corrupt,  he was too young and the event was too traumatic to be anything other than senseless to him,  and bruce’s own grieving process only kindled this.     there was no mercy,  no room to understand the brutality,  just an equal and opposite reaction.     and when he felt like he fell from grace,  he extended the same capacity for understanding to himself.     when confronting the rest of the evil in the world,  it’s easier to project this onto the people he hurts in a new kind of never - ending cycle that does nothing to try and cure harm,  but simply judge it.

it requires a level of kindness for oneself,  to consider that the worst parts of him were born out of the desperate need of a child for the world be fair when it just isn’t.     that maybe anyone can be turned into a weapon like he was,  just without billionaires willing to take them in and give them direction.     and if even with that,  dick turned out the way he did  ;  all serrated edges just waiting to cut into someone,  surely the worst of gotham alone is elementary.

robin,  much like batman itself,  is a symbol donned by orphaned vengeance.     it’s only once dick burns his bridges with robin that he’s able to create something new from it’s ashes that allows a greater purpose,  and furthermore a greater understanding of it  ;  one that allows shades of gray to come out of his black and white world.