#loose bibliography for this post is of course caitlin doughty's entire ouvre

[vengeancemoths]

ok. yay! let's talk about jason todd autopsy scars.

WARNING: pretty thorough description of an autopsy ahead. if you don't like cut up bodies this one isn't for you.

prefacing this by saying i am not in any way a field expert in any of this, just a guy with really morbid autism and a pretty objectively concerning collection of nonfiction on the subject. i may be wrong about things! i did not crack open the books for my stupid little tumblr post (this time). people with actual experience feel free to correct me.

if jason had had a thorough autopsy performed on him, he would not come back to life* and also probably bruce wayne would go to jail.

*or at least come back with scars from it. more on that later!

if an autopsy was performed it would have to be by someone who knew about batman because robin's scars are pretty difficult to explain. it would be pretty easy to bypass an official autopsy, jason was blown up, his cause of death is not exactly a mystery.

bruce wayne might be the kind of guy who's so obsessive he needs to know exactly which event actually killed jason (if the crowbar killed him, batman couldn't have gotten there in time. if the smoke killed him....). but maybe he also wouldn't want to know for the same reason.

the most important thing is that we know jason had massive head trauma. if you were trying to figure out which of the many terrible things that happened to him was the one that killed him, you'd want to take a look at the brain.

and guys, i don't know if you know this, but the brain only holds its shape because it's inside your skull. the human brain is the consistency of silken tofu. once it's out of your head, it's not going back in.

this is inconvenient for coroners, so they'll probably spend several days soaking jason's brain in a chemical concoction designed to make it firm up. once they do that, it's time to dissect it.

but the fun doesn't end there! once they're done, if they don't just dispose of the brain separately, they're still not going to go through the trouble if wrangling it back into jason's cranium (now open on top, like an egg cup). it goes in the organ bag!

did i forget to mention the organ bag? look, they're not going to put all of his wet organs back into his chest cavity. he's already rapidly decaying. if bruce wayne gets his son back and he's leaking there'll be hell to pay.

so all the organs, which at this point have also been cut into little pieces to study, get jumbled together in a plastic bag. that they do stick back into the kind of gaping hole that the organs vacated. then they stick the ribs back in place (they were sawed off, at the beginning, to gain entry to the organs).

and honestly? without the brain in the mix i can almost believe it. i guess if jason had a really shitty autopsy courtesy of gotham's overcrowded underfunded mortuary? i mean more people who write jason resurrection fic should have to think about the organ bag, and what happens to it. would it just sort of glorp out of him while his organs wiggle themselves back into place? one day i will write my funeral industry accurate jason todd resurrection fic and it will make everyone sad and uncomfortable.

but i guess my thesis statement is that i think it would be really hard to come back to life if your brain was in 7-14 pieces inside a plastic bag where your stomach used to be.

the most likely way for the resurrection to work, in that case, would be to restore his body to its state directly before death, which does unfortunately predate his autopsy.

so what this post is saying is that jason probably wouldn't have had an autopsy, but even if he did, he wouldn't have the scars to show for it.

now, the idea that they're vivisection scars and ra's al ghul was poking around in there? i like that a lot