#re: jay calling bruce dad and the formal adoption etc

[boyfridged]

What do you think Jason would feel about mothers? Considering he was betrayed by one and then would have gone on and had figures in his life like a mother.

since someone brought up sheila yesterday, i just remembered that this ask has been stranded in my drafts for a while! sorry.

some loose thoughts on the topic, in a "chronological" order:

in the 80s canon, jay grieves after willis and catherine the same. while it's safe to assume that willis was (physically) more absent, there's not much indication that jay had any parental preference (neither of them really could responsibly parent him anyway.) so i believe in general terms jay doesn't really differentiate much between parental roles (and that's why, subsequently, my answer is more about parents in general rather than just mothers...)

i have a post talking about jason's parental relationship with bruce here but i just want to add that atp we also don't see jason having any specific longing for a figure of a mother. imo the reason he gets obsessed over seeking his biological mother out is that in this particular moment he does not feel secure in his relation with bruce. i think if he found out about a biological father instead, he would also want to find him. what he wants is simply a stable family (<- which he does have in bruce; but does not trust to be able to keep without robin.)

i have mentioned before that it's very important to me that jason most probably forgave sheila. of course, the fact that he tried to save her does not alone confirm it; he would probably do it for anyone, and so it's more of my headcanon, especially since the contemporary canon nearly completely erased her from the narrative up until cheer. but as i said, i prefer to think that he forgave her, as he forgave catherine (if he even ever truly blamed either of them.)

i like to think about his relationship with talia as a parental one too (ignoring the two infamous pages of the lost days), but there's not much canon material, and freshly post-res jason seems fixated on the idea that he is "no one's son." nevertheless, he is also just still a kid when first in her care, and i do think that they could grow into that kind of relationship throughout the years (despite his best efforts to deny himself the comfort of familial connections.)

tbh one of the reasons for which i headcanon that, compared with other kids bruce has taken in, 1. he is the only one who used to call him 'dad' regularly 2. he is the only one who actually settled into a more 'standard' parent-child relationship with him 3. he is the only one who got formally adopted (which "on page" happened only pre-crisis btw), is because jay had a rather traditional expectation of what a bond with a parental figure should look like (and because bruce wanted to overcompensate while working through on jay's attachment issues). the others were either older or did not have a past that conditioned them for such focus on keeping the parent close, so it did not matter much. i think in terms of parental relationships, jason needs to call them by that name and needs formal ways of them being recognized, or at least this is what his abandonment issues call for. at the same time, it also freaks him out because he was a parentified child before and he doesn't think he should need it, so it's a game of pulling closer and pushing away, testing the bonds.

my conclusion is that i don't have much to say about mothers in particular; i think he has plenty conflicting feelings about the parental roles no matter the gender.

#i'm not talking about nocturna because pre-crisis jay's experience with parents is completely different #i'm so sorry it took me so long. for no reason at all. i knew exactly what i wanted to say since i saw it #and it's an interesting question! esp that i would reply to it differently like a year ago - before i did a solid reread of starlin's run #re: jay calling bruce dad and the formal adoption etc #it's important for me to be understood that i don't say it because of favouritism #but because i don't think batfam should ever fit anything resembling a typical nuclear model #and all in all it's really just jay who's been shown to actively seek out these traditional role #<- because he has a ton of issues that in particularity correspond with it #and also esp re adoption bc legal adoption is a very conservative thing #<- which is why (among others) i don't want it for dick. and i don't think *dick* would want it #anyway sorry!! this is not even an answer to your ask. what a tangent #outbox #jay.zip #dc #robin days