#you end up with clunky kludges as in e.g.:
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silverwhittlingknife · 13 hours ago
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comics are super-contradictory on what the pit does, but YEAH, i'm 100% with you, OP. it should have bad consequences!!
if you want some of the lazarus pit stories that skew more toward the ominous side, i think some good comics to check out are
batman 243 (first comic to introduce the lazarus pit)
lost days (backstory for jason's resurrection)
resurrection of ra's al-ghul (dick & tim fight over whether tim should experiment to see if he can use the lazarus pit to bring back his loved ones)
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I do not care about what canon says, pit "madness" exists to me. Not because I need an excuse for Jason's violence and the murder attempts on his family, but because, from a storytelling point of view, you need your immortality bath water to have some consequences for your heroes to not use it every tuesday. You want death and injuries to still matter, it is silly for your characters to be worried about each others' health when they can just take a dip in the magic green goop and be back in one piece without side effects. Which is literally what is going on now in the comics, with the batkids dying and immediately being resurrected with a sip of the forbidden green smoothie. Like, what's the point than? You're going to tell me the tale of a man who created a symbol from his grief, only to give him some magic goop that can make him and his loved ones immortals without drawbacks, and I'm supposed to believe he would refuse that power? That he would not have dip Jason himself the moment the kid died if there was no consequences? Nuh uh. Like, I can understand a "immortality is against nature" as the simple reason why your heroes would be against using it, BUT when we are talking about a child that was murdered, it's not really immortality to bring him back to life, so it doesn't work.
Immortality must have some aftereffects so your heroes can understand the attraction to its use, but the cons are too much for them to actually do.
#my personal favorite take is 'it damages your soul which manifests diminished self-control / less inhibition / a kind of madness'#i think you can piece together canon moments that support this if you're willing to squint a bit#but mostly i just prefer it because i think it's better storytelling#i think it's important not to have a get-out-of-death-free card or it really messes with grief storylines#plus every time comics try something OTHER than 'it shreds your soul & makes you unstable'#you end up with clunky kludges as in e.g.:#'cass was resurrected & it was fine & unrelatedly she went crazy because of magic brainwashing deathstroke drugs' (tt)#''jason was halfway sane but then dick played a recording & childhood trauma (?) made him have a mental break'' (bftc)#'we can't use the pit to resurrect boring people like dick & tim's parents but it's fine to resurrect bruce bc he's special' (b&r)#'kate died ooopsie!!! but it's okay we can just resurrect her' (b&r)#i think the pit madness concept sometimes gets presented as a binary#where either jason must be 100% fully culpable (all his fault) or 0% not culpable at all (all the fault of the pit)#but i find it more appealing to think of the soul-damage effect as vaguely akin to ptsd / mental illness / addiction etc.#obviously people In Real Life do not die and get resurrected by magic#but people irl DO struggle with all kinds of Brain Problems that make it hard to be a person & make good choices#are you culpable for everything that you do when influenced by the Brain Problems? not 100%. but not 0% either.#and like. you can have a family member who's an alcoholic or w/e & they can behave badly#in ways that are very much influenced by things like addiction / mental illness/ trauma / etc. that are beyond their control#but that doesn't mean that absolutely everything is beyond their control & it doesn't make their bad actions not real!!#like. if your alcoholic sibling stabs you in a drunken rage you're allowed to hold a grudge about it!!#you can be sympathetic if there's a super-tragic not-their-fault story behind how they got addicted to drinking#but ''i was really mad but i swear i wouldn't have stabbed you if my head hadn't been muddled from the alcohol''#can be perfectly true & unfortunate for that person & still something that you have zero obligation to forgive#and meanwhile on jason's side you can make him more sympathetic without taking away all of his agency#i feel like 'culpability is not 0% but not 100% either' is an extremely common thing in the real world#and it can be compelling both from jason's pov & from the pov of the ppl who are deciding whether to trust or forgive him#tag ramble sorry sdfsdfsd <333
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