…You Know What Could’ve Been Cool? If Vassago Had ACTUALLY Looked Like A Pirate, And If He Were Octavia’s

Two Goddess OCs I made a couple of years ago that I’m planning to redesign. I have a fondness for them, but there’s a lot I could do to make them better

this is my version of a ‘things to keep in mind when writing abusive/bad parent bruce’ but this is focused on bruce’s perspective rather than that of his children. i am not debating whether or not bruce is written as abusive (he is) or the exact parameters of the harm he has done.

1. bruce has mistreated all his kids at times. bruce’s kids all overlook or put up with his bad parenting to some extent

2. bruce (like all abusers) will not change unless he is made to* his behaviors serve a purpose and benefit him. if he didn’t get something he wanted from it there would be no need to subjugate and punish or lash out at** his family. this stuff is not some kind of self sabotage that hurts him worse than it hurts anyone else. i don’t think he takes pleasure in hurting his kids but it is a means to an end for him. the behavior may be borne of or influenced by trauma but that does not excuse it or make him any more worthy of understanding or forgiveness from the people he has wronged.

3. bruce is well meaning and cares a great deal about the family he mistreats. he knows them well and wants them to be safe and happy but he is clearly very good at ignoring all that and prioritizing his preferences and imposing them on others if he chooses. abusers often have good qualities and not just as some kind of camouflage or shell they show the world but because all people have some good qualities. there is no amount of goodness or benefit to the world as a whole that excuses or erases the harm a person does. abusers are incredible at feeling bad about things they do and the ways victims are impacted but not letting it influence their opinion of themself. abusers are commonly able to denounce the violence and cruelty of abuse while holding themselves as different and justified. they don’t necessarily think of themselves as bad people. all of this is important to keep in mind when going for a nuanced take on bad parent bruce

*he is made to understand that the only way to be in his family’s lives is to actually change and progress and quit hurting them

**i am talking about both physical abuse, emotional/verbal abuse, and control and coercion using his wealth and his role as their father and batman

Perfuma fanart I made last year

I'm curious, what are nudibranchs? They sound neat.

nudibranchs are a whole order of marine invertebrates!! they're commonly called sea slugs!

you might know the sea bunny (Jorunna parva) which went viral for being so adorable with its little tiny bunny ear like rhinophores:

but nudibranchs come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and places all over the world!!! they range from literal bean size (blue glaucus) to Absolutely Mahoosive Specimen (black sea hare)

as much as i want to give a little kiss to every single one of them, it's recommended not to touch them because some of them are venomous, and some are protected under law depending where you are in the world! i will do so from a distance instead

jason antis who hate his fans bc they treat him like a sad boy are so funny... wdym you're mad i think a character who was tortured, murdered, victim blamed for his own death by people who were supposed to be his family, repeatedly beaten by his adoptive father, and canonically suicidal.... is sad?!

you're mad that he's one of the characters who are actually canonically depressed and so fans treat him as such?????

Counterintuitively, Jason trafficking drugs himself, and the way he treats drug dealers in general is actually one of the core reasons I do believe he has a real moral backbone.

In Lost Days we see him mention that he killed his small arms teacher because the smack he was dealing was poisoned. In Nightwing (2016) Annual #2 Jason is particularly violent towards their enemy because he cut his heroin with other substances, leading to his mother's first overdose. In Under the Red Hood, his most important rule is 'no selling to kids', and he is specifically employing people who do sell drugs to adults.

Playing a bit of Headcanon Jazz here - listening to the notes Jason doesn't play as much as the ones he does - It feels really notable to me that dealing drugs is not enough to get on Jason's shit list. On some level Jason thinks it's okay to deal drugs. Even more importantly: Jason doesn't at all imply that drug users are at fault - nor that they need to have the choice to use taken from them 'for their own good'. Heck, I can't remember any instance of him saying that doing drugs is a bad thing.

He has lived with and cared for someone struggling with an addiction that she died to, which would have made it really easy to take him in a 'no leniency, no tolerance, kill all drug dealers and burn all the crack so no one can smoke it' road. Yet that's the opposite of how he's operating.

And I'm putting all that together to get a Jason who firmly believes in harm reduction and that when it comes to drugs, people have a right to risk; they have a right to choose to use. I don't think it's too much further of a stretch to say that he thinks that those who do use should be supported by infrastructure ensuring that their drugs are uncut and properly dosed and that they should have safe places to use and well funded rehab options if they want to quit.

This whole thing is so important to me because it lies completely outside of his emotional conflict of 'I wasn't avenged'; it's proof that there was more to Jason's talk about running Gotham differently than simply killing people.

Factually, there are a huge number of criminal activities that could be used to improve the lives of vulnerable people.

I firmly believe that no government has the right to detain, imprison, deport, et.c. people fleeing violence and persecution in their country of origin. A criminal organization that genuinely had their best interest in mind who could provide access to new identities, jobs, housing, and paperwork for cheap could save and change hundreds of lives. Sex workers, especially survival sex workers who want to quit and move on to a new job, could benefit enormously from protection from the cops, and from landlords kicking them out, and the ability to get criminal charges purged from their records, and lots of other stuff. People who use street drugs need a lot of the same things, as do people who need access to medication but for whatever reason can't get prescriptions the legal way.

This is all stuff that is already a staple of organized crime - they just do it in ways that are insanely abusive and exploitative.

It makes sense that Jason would look at that and think he could make it work! Honestly I'd love to read a comic about him trying! He could be the pinnacle of Be Gay Do Crime! Sadly though, it's very unlikely we ever will, especially because his term as a drug lord was so incredibly short to begin with. Under the Red Hood, a tiny snippet of Robin (1993) and Green Arrow (2001) #69 - #72 is really all we get, and none of those really got into the politics of his organization either.

Tho, there is a tiny snippet we possibly see in Seeing Red, my favorite Jason run ever, and I will take any excuse to talk about it so here we go lol!

This is a comic in which Batman gets some things wrong about Jason, and might be straight up lying to Green Arrow in places too, so I don't think we can take his word for it when he says Jason is driving up the trade. Especially not when Jason hasn't given a single flying fuck about collecting wealth for himself in basically any other appearance ever.

Is he using drugs as a trading good to some capacity? Yes, that's a minor plot point here, however, I think justice is very present in his reasoning. I think Jason is being selective with which shipments he's keeping - testing each and destroying the stuff that's extra dangerous, making sure that what's getting used is as safe as it can be. Plus, he might be reducing the supply so that drug trade can't expand, while considering complete elimination to be flatly undesirable, since it could force users to go cold turkey, something that can be dangerous, or at least very painful.

Now, obviously this is still headcanon territory, we never really see into Jason's head about this specific topic, but I do feel like it's a reasonable way to fill in that gap!

Anyways, this is why I've never felt like Jason's disagreements with Bruce's methods were purely about his own emotional desires. There's too much else surrounding that which he clearly also cares about.

the way that some people talk about jason and batman and the joker is so jarring to me because it relies on some unspoken assumptions that i will never buy into

1. the assumption that taking a life inevitably always makes the person who did it worse. killing someone isn’t always this earth shattering thing that harms the person who does it and fundamentally changes their outlook on things. i guess if you have never met a veteran or someone who survived an armed robbery or any number of other things you might make that mistake, but like some of the people who fought in wwii came home and were normal members of the community and the times that their bullets hit the mark were not necessarily the parts of the war that kept them up at night. these assumptions that once you kill you are wicked and have to feel bad and do this whole show of repentance are insidious. if you are gonna look at all this through the lens of christian morality you should at least be aware that that is what you are doing but you cant have just one character be wicked and unclean because of his actions when the bible says that everyone is wicked and unclean by our nature and all sins are equal. a lot of people object to that view but if thats how you see it batman and jason and the joker are all sinners and are all as bad as each other so at least be consistant about how you apply that moral framework.

2. the assumption that being robin or being taken in and trained by bruce means full agreement with and acceptance of every part of bruce’s personal philosophy on justice and morality. jason was a homeless child and even if all this was explicitly laid out for him he could not have agreed since he needed bruce as a matter of survival. bruce’s ideology is extremely important to him and he can teach it to his children all he wants but they are not beholden to it above all else the way he thinks they should be. jason has to live according to his own beliefs regardless of how unacceptable bruce finds it and it is unfair and hypocritical of bruce to get bent out of shape about it.

3. the assumption that killing is always bad. maybe i have listened to too many episodes of behind the bastards but some people will do significant and appalling damage to others no matter what unless they are dead. those people can’t be allowed to keep causing harm. it isn’t glorious and there is no honor about it but it is right and just that they be stopped. there is no reason to strive for purity or ideological high ground when you can provide a measure of safety and justice to victims and prevent future harm instead.

4. the assumption that bruce didn’t have to answer to jason. parents have a duty to their children and it is my opinion that that duty does not end when the child dies. bruce adopted jason and made himself responsible and accountable for everything that happened to jason under his care. that responsibility was ignored over many instances. i am not going to detail the things that led to jason’s death here but it was not good or effective parenting. after jason’s death the disrespect starts pretty immediately with bruce compromising evidence of his murder in order to preserve his ability to continue as batman and continues with bruce getting rid of pretty much all traces of jason’s presence in his life. he is only spoken of as a mistake, a lost cause, or a cautionary tale and is assigned blame for his own death, a death that batman never bothered to fully investigate since he was buried next to the woman who led him into the trap. a new kid is endangered and the joker and batman both continue doing whatever they want as if jason’s life only matters for the way it affects them. bruce needs to answer for all of this, as his son jason has a right to expect more from his father. now the extent to which that extends can be debated but it is clear to me that jason deserved better from bruce.

conclusion: killing is accepted in society in certain circumstances, you may or may not agree with this but self defense laws and even things like jury nullification exist because people knew there should be some wiggle room since no one could have the full context of every situation that would ever arise. ending a life is not normal or ideal but it is not an unfathomably rare experience and it does not always weigh on the person who does it. bruce has never to my knowledge killed someone so he has no idea how he would actually respond but that still isn’t even what jason was asking him to do. all he had to do was be present and not move and he would have been the only parental figure who didn’t let jason down.

You are a long forgotten god. A small girl leaves a piece of candy at your shrine, and you awaken. Now, you must do everything to protect your High Priestess, the girl, and her entire kindergarten class, your worshipers.

Fanart of Adora’s She-Ra form I did…two years ago, I think. I remember it being fun, I should draw Adora more

Jason does a really interesting thing in UtRH where he consistently positions himself with the other victims of the Joker. Every speech he makes about the Joker is essentially "them and, worse, me". The worse there being because Jason is Bruce's son. His argument over the various moments (and this goes for Lost Days, as well), comes down to this: It is bad enough that Bruce didn't kill the Joker before Jason died. That, in itself, when the Joker had already killed who knows how many, when he had already shot Barbara (and Jason was alive when that happened, canonically) - that is nearly indefensible.

But even if he forgives that. Even if he accepts that.

The Joker then killed Bruce's son. And not only did Bruce not kill him them, he continued to not kill him, even when bodies continued to pile up. Note that at this point in continuity, not only does Joker likely have a body count well into the triple digits, he's also attempted mass infanticide and killed Gordon's wife (fiance?).

And yet. For his moral code, for his peace of mind, because it would be too easy - Bruce lets him live. And inherently, in the world of DC as it exists, letting the Joker live means letting the Joker kill. Even if you don't agree, it's certainly what Jason believes, look at what he says:

"I thought I'd be the last person you let him hurt."

So here's our scene: Jason, who has been positioning himself as both Bruce's son and also just another victim of the Joker, is holding the Joker at gunpoint. The options are: let Jason kill the Joker, or kill Jason.

Him or me, you have to choose.

This is a choice. This was always the choice. Inaction is still a choice. Every victim of the Joker is also a victim of the collateral of the no killing rule.

Him or me, you have to choose.

Bruce has to choose. No more pretending his choice doesn't have direct victims, no more acting like no-killing doesn't also mean accepting that the victim's of the Joker are a sacrifice to the rule.

Him or me.

Him or me.

Him or me.

You have to decide. You have to choose, now, while his victim looks you in the eyes. You have to choose while the victim still has a voice to tell you you're making the wrong choice.

But Bruce is Bruce. And he tries a third way. And everybody loses! Bruce finds a way to win and everybody loses - but then, maybe that's been the choice he's been making this whole time, over and over. Until there were graveyards full of the consequences.

If Jason is going to be wrong, let him be wrong and cathartic. Let him be wrong and still a voice of every victim. Let him be wrong and unforgiving, uncomprising, demanding every hero to choose, to look at the graveyards full of bodies and know their role in it.

Let him be rage and grief and blood crying for blood, of everyone who has ever been collateral.