So I’m a Jason Todd fan and I read your fic last night (and enjoyed it) but I was wondering about your interpretation of his place in Gotham. In a lot of fandom stuff he’s usually put as a very menacing person that other characters go to for help, but your version felt super different. I liked it a lot because it felt more… realistic to how people would probably react to him. I don’t know. Have a good day!

firstly im glad u enjoyed!! hehehe

wrt to my interpretation of jason — a significant influence for when i was writing wolf-king is that i can’t suspend my disbelief when people write jason as like…. this super terrifying person that other bat characters rely on to do the dirty work. its a personal thing tbc. it seems reductive to me, and also relatively divorced from reality. ur telling me that if someone needs intel they’ll go to jason over babs or helena or selina??? hmmmm me thinks not.

that in turn really shaped his relationship and interactions with dick in particular, because imo there is no world where jason would be considered a bigger threat than dick is. no way and no how. id rank jason on the same threat level as like…. a david cain or slade wilson, (though a significantly less rapey one). he’s not as well connected as ra’s, and he’s not a turbo level threat like shiva. he’s dangerous because of who he is to bruce, and what he does to achieve his goals. in particular, this passage —

jason, although he operates on a different plane of reality, is not an idiot. he would not be obtuse to the fact that dick has the upper hand in any situation because of who dick is and who he knows. that, in turn, affects how jason perceives dick and his actions. he spends a lot of time hypothesising about dicks motives, only to find out later he’d technically already been played! that’s what makes him interesting as a character to me — through his own actions, he’s isolated himself from a network, and cut himself off at the knees. by causing harm, he has reduced his ability to cause it. he is, fundamentally, only hurting himself.