I like all the Robins, including the ones who people often forget were Robin (Steph, Carrie, Duke and the We Are Robin crew, etc.), but Jason long ago stole my heart as though it were the tires of the Batmobile.
I’m going to ignore his Red Hood identity for now, because this thread is about Robins, and focus on him as Robin. I love a lot about Jason as Red Hood, but I think a lot of people now just see the Red Hood and assume the character starts and ends there. Jason’s Robin run gets squished down to a short, sad story: tires, warning signs, death.
His history as Robin gets retconned horribly. The kid who said he never wanted to be a criminal and was just stealing to survive becomes the kid who was destined to become a “third strike lifer at Blackgate” if Batman hadn’t intervened, something which is somehow always implied to be because he was a bad kid and not because he was thrown into bad circumstances. Acting like a kid becomes being a “whiny snot.” Getting angry at people who abuse women and children becomes being “reckless and violent.”
But I love Post-Crisis Jason. And he was a good Robin. He was bold and scrappy and had the guts to steal the tires off the Batmobile, and he made Batman laugh on the anniversary of his parents’ death. He stole tires to survive, but ran away from Ma Gunn’s school when it turned out to be a ‘Kindergarten for crime’ and took it on himself to try to stop it when Ma Gunn was planning a museum robbery for her own gain and he didn’t think Batman would believe him. He got angry at Two-Face for killing his father, but took him in by the book and even said he just pitied him. He spouted off bad puns and quipped wittily and got nervous about being abandoned and replaced by Dick or Catwoman but still did his best to be a good Robin. He tried to stop a missile launch and accidentally got stuck on top of it alongside Elongated Man. He got shot a bunch of times by the Mad Hatter and said he didn’t want to give up being Robin anyway. He stopped his classmates from changing their grades on a computer and loved books and history and got a 94.8(!) average in school and wanted to join the drama club but didn’t have any time for extracurricular activities because he was busy being Robin.
And when he took a turn for the violent, he was explicitly reacting to the things he’d seen. He lost it on a pimp who was abusing one of the women working for him at the same time that Batman and Robin were failing to bring a serial killer who targeted women to justice, and during the whole sequence expressed his disgust with the man’s gendered slurs and treatment of her. He got hugely upset when he discovered Gloria and what Felipe had done to her, and went after him out of grief and rage at him terrorizing her to the point where she did something I can’t mention without running afoul of the board filters. He dove into a ring of people who targeted children in one of the worst ways possible like a kid with a death wish, because he was so angry and frustrated and grieving everything. And Batman explicitly called it out as out of character for him and an apparent reaction to grief.
He was so desperate for any type of connection that he latched onto the knowledge his birth mother was out there like a drowning man to a life preserver. He searched for her and was willing to accept whatever he found, even when the candidate was Lady Shiva herself. His first comment when he found his birth mother had abandoned him at birth because she didn’t think she could win the custody fight was to express how hard that must have been for her. When he found out she was being blackmailed by the Joker, he immediately rushed to help her. He trusted her when she told him the Joker was gone and followed her. And in the end, after she’d betrayed him, when the bomb was down to one second left and he knew it was the end, he threw himself on the bomb to try to shield the mother who betrayed him from the blast.
He was Robin, and it was magic.
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