#i think the askbox adds that automatically for signed messages?

[kieron-oduibhir]

DC AU Headcanon: Imagine a Post-COIE like universe where The Jokester and Batman both co-exist and fight crime on occasion in Gotham City.

That would be fascinating, tbh. Batman not having driven Jokester out alone means either Jokester was too damn stubborn for him or they came to some kind of agreement.

Now, somebody did a little one-shot version of this scenario a few years ago where they were, inexplicably, dating, and I followed up my kneejerk reaction to this of ‘no, why, no’ with a painstakingly reasoned-out set of headcanon justifications for how this situation could have arisen, which ultimately didn’t line up with the little scene I was riffing on very well because it relied heavily on the kids, who weren’t actually in evidence. 😂 As you do.

So my brain went there, first, even though I definitely don’t ship it, because the groundwork was laid.

Even without that, though, the first two Robins are a really great focal point in this hypothetical ‘verse. Because the Joker and Robin were both written as literary foils to Batman. And that means there’s a lot of overlap, when neither of them is evil. That is to say, they’ve got a lot in common.

And Jokester is a clown, and Dick’s from the circus. And as I understand him Jokester’s inner Gotham local, and so is Jason. So if they’d bumped into him on patrol etc and knew him as acquainted fellow Gotham vigilante whom Batman had not put out of business, he’d be a really natural person for either of them to go to, when feeling homesick for pre-Manor life, or frustrated with Bruce.

Dick already had Superman so I don’t know how much having a Weird Local Clown who Isn’t Really Friends With Batman would have done for him as he got older, but I really think it would have been good for Jason to have an adult to go to who shared more of his background, and wasn’t automatically aligned with Batman. So there’s my optimism. ^^

Funniest scenario, both inherently and for irony points, when Jason fights with Bruce as a teenager he storms off to the old neighborhood and stays with the clown, who spends the whole time flipping back and forth between supportive and ‘kid you cannot just move into my safehouse your dad is going to literally kill me. all the way dead. also i’m low on grocery money now you are a growing boy. what do you mean you have three cards with no credit limit.’

The really fascinating thing, if I’m laying out my own headcanons here, is that Jokester and Batman would clash about enforcement strategy and ideology hard, and largely along class lines, though this would blend extensively with the underlying lawful-chaotic alignment issues.

For example: Batman wants to fix the police, but considers the #1 thing wrong with them that they’re vulnerable to bribery and extortion from organized crime. That has...not been the primary police corruption issue in America in quite some time.

Jokester meanwhile regards police and organized crime as filling similar roles in society, and while he’s willing to concede that police in their theoretical form are better for providing general security-through-threat-of-violence, he kinda trusts the mob to actually live up to their much more limited obligations more reliably, and he’s iffy on the whole principle of the state monopoly of force, or he wouldn’t be a vigilante. He’s all for police reform! But he has a very different visual of what that means, and he considers it as its own distinct issue rather than a prerequisite for tackling ‘real’ crime.

So he’s pretty prone to getting arrested and/or fighting cops, and he and Batman have a lot of arguments about the definition of ‘criminal’ and how it relates to their own activities.

Also Jokester mostly doesn’t take mugging very seriously on a scale of Problems I Worry About Daily, and feels very boo-boo the fool when he at long last learns Bruce’s secret identity, because he should have realized that hangup was personal.