Some Fan Attitudes About Jason Todd's Morality Are Insane. No I Don't Condone Murder In Real Life. But

some fan attitudes about jason todd's morality are insane. no I don't condone murder in real life. but he's not??? a real person???? most importantly he's operating in a fictional reality where rehabilitation is proven impossible, imprisonment has proven impossible, and single individuals are responsible for more deaths than anybody since the fucking nazis. obviously he's in the right. if anything, bruce, who I should agree with since I think murder is wrong, gives the weakest fucking argument in utrh against murder. like utrh told this truly incredible story about a boy's irreparably damaged relationship with his father and positioned us to make a truly gorgeous point where the villain is both right and wrong and the hero both is right and wrong and then it fucked up bc batman isn't right!!! it isn't about his own personal inability to control himself, or at least it shouldn't be!!! but that's how it was positioned so it came across as jason todd is obviously right and honestly yeah the joker should die. there is no other in-universe option bc the joker cannot get better and he cannot be kept away from harming people. jason's been through a lot of writers since then and at first he's an outright ultra-violent villain who hates the batfam and later he's a tortured anti-hero with complicated familial relationships and idk whatever like. I'm not examining him through the lens of my actual real life opinions on whether or not you should kill people or whether or not I support the death penalty, and neither should you. he's a character in one of the most convoluted stories ever told and he needs to be treated as such, both in a doylist fashion (he's been written by real people who have differing opinions on what's morally correct and what makes someone a villain and who might not necessarily have the best grip on what makes murder wrong in a philosophical argument) and in a watsonian fashion (his worldview is shaped by extreme violence that is a cycle with no end in sight and that cycle has more to do with bruce and jason's relationship than it does the joker) and a combined fashion (the cycle will never end bc comic books need to keep using the same tensions over and over again and if bruce and jason resolve their differences jason's character will no longer serve its current narrative purpose and besides even if he did change another writer will just bring him back to whatever's most familiar and convenient for them and their story so meanwhile jason has to make the same exact choice to leave the joker alive and hate bruce for it and bruce can't truly communicate with jason bc the writers need to keep the story going in perpetual limbo). anyway none of this is readable but basically what I'm saying is that when I say I think jason's right for killing people yeah I mean it in that I think it's hot but also I mean it in that narratively it makes sense for him to see the world this way and it makes sense in universe for him to believe there is no better option for villains other than death. like. irl obviously a vigilante running around killing people would be bad (nevermind that jason isn't using guns rn specifically to avoid killing people accidentally or impulsively) but this isn't irl, it's a story, and I'm judging it on the merits of what kind of story it's trying to tell. and also I think jason killing people is hot.