#fandom has done so many lore gymnastics to make sense of the mess these writers have done before

[gilbirda]

Also, anon, if you really want to go there and be snippy about canon, you are just plain wrong.

There is a canon "pit madness" comment, even for those that are dipped once:

And Jason has ALWAYS had a code about keeping the innocent out of the battle. Always. Deciding to take a more permanent route to stop criminals never made him care less.

And he chose his targets well:

Talia not influencing Jason's decisions?

Talia "struggling to keep him in line"?

Jason came to his own conclusions. He chose to not kill Bruce, claiming it was "too easy", and lied to himself that he was going to beat him at his own game --- but for Jason it was not about killing Bruce. It was about making a difference, about understanding that to be the hero vulnerable people needed, he had to be the bad guy.

And Jason did care about Tim. Is another child getting himself killed, at least it feels like that for him.

He cares about children and his condition was literally "do not sell to kids."

Jason Todd, sadly, has been the target of a lot of hatred from DC writers. He was, at his conception, a Good Boy (tm) but he was not Dick Grayson, and he had to go.

People wanted him dead. The writers wanted him dead. They did the poll thing, and "kill him" won the poll, but the truth is that they had prepared an ending where "he lives" but he dies a few issues later anyway.

He wasn't supposed to live after Under the Red Hood either. It was a one time thing, an experiment, the whole "sins from the past" storyline. But people liked this grey area character and wanted to see more from him, to see more of this man that was fucked over by life and was given a second chance to do what he didn't dare do before.

And DC writers kept hating him, not really knowing how to write their own characters. We've had a Bruce that learns how to shoot a gun, Barbara having a sexual relationship with all the batboys (and having her age retconned every now and then), Dick's erratic romances that don't make sense (and Ric Grayson). How can we give them the benefit of the doubt about what's "canon" with Jason?

It doesn't make sense to pick the asshole iterations and decide that's the real Jason and mock the fandom that tries to make sense of a character that people getting paid big money don't have any idea how to write.

DC stands for Disregard Canon.

So.

Do you even read comics or just watch (biased) youtube analysis?

hi so this isn't meant to be mean at all! but um, pit madness isn't...a thing. like, at all. the only cases that can be made for it is characters like ra's, who had prolonged exposure to it, but characters that have been dipped just once (jason, cass, damian, etc) aren't mentally affected by the pit in canon at all. at least during post-crisis, jason didn't Have a rule about not hurting kids—that was not his version of bruce's no-kill rule, it wasn't a hard rule of any sorts. he was an asshole. that was his whole character after he came back during post-crisis, until the n52 reinvented him (and the n52 decanonized all he did after he came back. so it didn't change what he did and why he did it, and since we're now in a hellscape where everything is canon, his motivations (is an asshole that chose to take out his daddy issues on a kid) are still the same they were back then, nothing changed.) he also mocked, kidnapped and blew up the school of a teenage csa survivor BECAUSE he was an asshole, so if he had any sort of "rule", it was one he made many exceptions for.

also, ra's had no interest in tim until red robin, he didn't gaf about tim back then past him being another one of bruce's robins. talia didn't influence jason's decisions; she was struggling to keep that guy in line during lost days.

this isn't saying you can't like jason—hell, i love him. but he did all that shit because he wanted to. he chose to do it, and sure he wouldn't have made them if he hadn't died and come back angry and hurt and struggling, but he did. and pit madness or saying talia made him/manipulated him to do it (which i think plays into the racist stereotype surrounding talia, but i digress) feels like absolving him of all wrongdoing for his own actions.

once again, saying all this in good faith, but it gets sort of annoying watching people make it seem lile jason didn't CHOOSE to be an asshole. for a while, he was just an asshole.

Fam. I get you're saying that you came here with good intentions, but all I'm seeing is you jumping in my inbox to "um, actually" me, which is, quite frankly, rude and unappreciated. No one likes to get "um, actually"ed. Especially over personal interpretations of things.

What all this really tells me is that you put on some selective reading glasses and chose to take offense to my tags in particular on a post that *checks notes* was initially about Tim having no obligation to forgive and forget Jason being an asshole to him. Which, fair. Point to that. But then the addition to the post was about *checks notes again* how the writing for Jason's comeback was all over the place, skewed, and completely dissonant with how his character was before. But the add on also offered some nice perspective on why people liked to use pit madness as a plot device (which, frankly, there has been other instances outside of Ra's displaying it. i.e. the first person dunked in the pits literally came out made and killed Ra's wife. It's just DC can never expand on the little bits of lore they drop surrounding this without either completely forgetting it or retconning it.)

But back to the point. Which was that people like the concept that pit madness brings to the table. They like using it as a means of explaining the shitty writing of "canon". Do some people over do it and use it to absolve him of all his sins without consequences? Yeah, and it's not great, but it's whatever. And I never said that I want it to absolve him of being an asshole. I said I liked it being A factor to skew his thoughts. The can also apply to other concepts that I toyed with in my tags.

Can Jason still be an ass just to be an ass? Yeah. He can. But I'm not here to explore canon's desperate fixation on toxic grimdark bullshit. And you can't say in one breath that something is canon, but then in the next say that canon is a hellscape where nothing makes sense. That's contradictory. You get how that's contradictory, right? Canon doesn't even know what's canon, plan and simple, that's why so many people disregard it in the first place!

I could go out and pull up receipts to counter a bunch of other things, but frankly, I don't need to keep justifying how and why I play around with ideas and concepts. So please, next time you feel the need to come into someone's inbox to "correct" them. Don't. You just make an ass of yourself.