#i don't care about lazarus pits enough to elaborate further

[yvtro]

I’m sorry if you’ve answered this before as I’m new to the blog (and really enjoying your thoughts!!) but I have a Jason question for you. What’s your opinion on the whole fanon pit madness stuff the fandom seems obsessed about with Jason? I personally hate it because I think it’s problematic and often times veers into abuse apologism as well as flattening his character (and not being canon lol) but I’m super interested to hear your opinions!

no need to apologise, i mentioned it and interacted with many different takes on the topic, but never made a more articulate post about it on my own, so it's nice to have a pretext to do so. especially that my opinion doesn't really reflect any of popular stances on the topic in the fandom. this got very long, but: tldr; i don't like neither canon nor fanon depictions of how the lazarus pit affected jason, but there might be still something of value there. there's lots to talk about though; i refer to aspects such as ableism and the lazarus pit lore in wider dc universe. more under the cut:)

i addressed this many times, but the general assumption that the pit madness is purely fanon is actually not true. while it was never explicitly named in jason-centric comics, it is a prevalent theme in most of his pre-n52 appearances. there's, for example, tony daniel's interview, where he talks about it, and some editorial comments on the matter. the titans towers incident was supposed to happen under the pit's influence as well.

the fact that it appears in comics that used to constitute canon doesn't make it any better, but to the editorial boards' credit, it's not really relevant anymore. yet, the events tied to the concept remain popular in the fandom.

i know that many people focus on the abuse apologism angle when talking about it, and while it is a valid concern, i'm more worried about... the blatant ableism that it comes with. i talked about it briefly here and here, tldr: jason is also portrayed to be going through a (pit-induced) psychotic breakdown, as he has clinical delusions. and in this state – a state of extreme mental health crisis, he is shown to attack rather random targets (because, i'm sorry, tim is a random target given jay's general motivations). this is an extremely distasteful plotline that contributes to SMI stigma. so, to reiterate, what i'm saying is that maybe we should not spend our time perpetuating the idea that being "crazy" or "insane" is excessively used to excuse abuse, but rather ask why dc writers even tied these notions together?

needles to say, i'm not a fan of how the madness trope is used in jason's storyline, not really because i'm worried about whether he is held responsible for his actions – it's not like half of these actions would be committed if not for the vague notion of the lazarus interference combined with the ableist representation of psychosis.

and if you read more of my meta posts, maybe you noticed a common thread in how i like to headcanon that jason needed to actively suppress his innate compassion (known from his original robin run) as a form of self-sacrifice, and painstakingly forge himself into a weapon despite flinching at his own violence. i also tend to emphasise the circumstances of his resurrection, his trauma and his desperate dedication to fixing the world as his main motivations. and the pit madness doesn't exactly go well with those.

having said so, i think there is some space for layering this with the effects of the lazarus pit, and i can't imagine completely getting rid of it when it comes to jason's storyline as a whole. i think people sometimes forget that lazarus pits have been a part of dc comics' lore for much longer than jason's character even existed. i haven't read the recent realeses (i will be catching up soon), so i'm not sure what the writers are doing with them nowadays, but the whole point of the pools is that the power of healing, preserving youth (or even resurrecting fresh corpses to life in some versions) is supposed to come at price. this price has to make at least a crack in the user's humanity. it was previously referred to as for example a "lazarus fever," and usually was followed by even just temporary episode of rage. (i've read it a long time ago, but you might want to check out for example "the lazarus affair," a storyline from early 80s). and well, it would pose some difficulties to explain how jason is running and kicking without being exposed to the pit (unless you want to say that whatever resurrected him healed him completely or that he spent more time recovering, fair game), and the pit has to have some consequences. the tragedy of it is, of course, that he was not put in there consensually, and he would never want to compromise his humanity nor control were he given that choice. so it has to have at least some effect on his state, at least for a while, unless we want to throw world-building out of the window (which you can do, if that's your preference.)

i guess the question is, can we do anything with this element of the story so that it doesn't hinder the significance of other prominent forces, such as grief? maybe it's not that bad that the story isn't straightforward. i know that lots of people like to claim that jason is completely autonomous, but aren't the circumstances of his resurrection already affecting him to the point where a hint of "who's driving" body horror is implied? isn't he struggling with feelings of losing control, which also make him so fixated and methodical? and maybe there is something to be said about the potential internal conflict of wanting to detach himself further from everything that makes him alive and humane (as it makes him vulnerable) vs being desperate to reclaim what the pit has taken from him. i don't know. what i know is that the reverse-baptism lazarus imagery is quite appealing and that maybe all the talk about it helps to bridge the extreme gap in 80s robin -> modern red hood characterisation, by outsourcing at least some of his anger to be foreign to him in an uncanny way.

but then again, it's also not my favourite theme, and i definitely don't centre it in my reading, nor gravitate to interpretations that do. you could even say that the pit influence was very short-lived and didn't matter in the grand scheme of things at all (apart from adding up to a pile of jay's trauma), and it would probably make sense with how inconsistent comics are anyway. i definitely don't want to see any outward psychotic symptoms in it's portrayal, nor for it to render jay irrational to the point where mindless violence overrides all of his motivations (like it did in many books before and as it usually does in fanfiction). however, i still think that it's interesting to look at the narrative in a wider scope and consider what i mentioned.