Jason the Bold
I went to see the Tomb of Philip the Bold and felt inspired! I love how they portrayed him as wearing his robes with his armour peeking out and the weeping angels putting his helmet on his head... and I couldn't stop my mind from wandering to the concept of (super)heroes and their secret identities.
Roller Derby!AU...
It was his first time playing against the Gotham Bats' new line-up, but Kyle already couldn't stand their new pivot, Jason Todd. According to Donna he wasn't all that bad... apparently he had practiced with the Amazons back before he had taken a mysteriously timed break. Kyle was inclined to believe her, though he couldn't imagine Todd's attitude mashing well with Diana Prince's team.
Kyle had only really started playing during Todd's strange, years-long break, and he -- quite frankly -- hadn't really bothered to look up any footage from before. Fact was, he couldn't stand the guy... and if the scowl on Todd's face as he rammed into Kyle was anything to go by, that feeling was reciprocated.
Are they fighting? Are they flirting? Are they... both?
Figured I'd draw these two for pride month.
Both of them can be such petty assholes (as evident in Countdown Presents: The Search for Ray Palmer), they're perfect for each other lol.
(That's not all there is to it, but I'll stop here for everyone's sake.)
And I doubt DC intended for this to mean anything, but they literally had Midnighter and Apollo mirror them on a cover, so there's that.
So yeah, here's some art of my favourite Jason ship.
Jagged Arrays (a Batman/Red Hood AU)
Lifelike androids are the norm -- for the higher class, that is. Child-bots that are treated like glorified tamagochi, robo-children that grow up as long as you feed them right yet don't starve if you do forget to feed them? That don't have to be watched at the pool because they can't drown? Sure. Terminator-style models? Those should be handled discreetly outside of military operations, but sure. Anything in between? Of course! Name your price and you'll find yourself with a satisfactory model.
Outside of the higher class, next to nobody can afford these outrageously expensive playthings... legally, that is. In Crime Alley, the black market for androids, parts and illegal modifications booms. Willis Todd is a mechanic and it had only been a matter of time until he had to resort to android business to get food on the table for him and his girlfriend. With the rise of androids that are able to do jobs that would've required paid workers before, the chances of scoring a legal job are at an all-time low.
One day, his girlfriend Catherine comes to him with a request: It seems she has found a banged up child robot in the streets, and she begs him to fix it for her. He can't help but oblige, knowing full well how much she has always wished for a child of her own. Crime Alley is no place to raise a child, especially not with the lack of food security, so a child-bot would be the next best thing.
And who is he to deny sweet Catherine her wish? So, after a few days of tinkering, Jason Todd is "born". They know legally registering the android child is not an option after acquiring him like that, so they go the far easier route: Registering him as their biological child.
And all is well, until it isn't... but that's life in Crime Alley four you. Catherine falls sick, Willis ends up in jail and Jason? Jason flees before CPS can catch sight of him. He can't afford to get caught, a simple checkup with a doctor would make it obvious that he's not like the other children. Lone android children don't go to orphanages, they go to the landfill.
At least his sensors and inability to actually starve give him an upper hand out in the streets... and while jacking tires. He's great at that, as it turns out. It goes well until one day, he bites off more than he can chew and attempts to jack the wheels of the batmobile. Or, well... He succeeds in jacking three of them, but gets caught upon coming back for the fourth.
He didn't know what he expected Batman to do, but taking him back to the batcave hadn't even been on the list of possibilities. Of course, it doesn't take the man long to figure out that he's not exactly made of flesh and blood, but the man's reaction to the revelation wasn't what Jason had expected either.
Knowing full well that a stray android child had nowhere to go, Batman offers to take him in.
The man offers Jason to register him legally, to which the boy reacts with the threat of running away. Batman - or Bruce, as Jason comes to find out - relents, seeing as the boy has a perfectly watertight human identity to use. What's one more family secret?
Jason, as it turns out, fits right in. Sure Dick takes his time warming up to him -- to learn that soon after moving out Bruce had taken in a robot child to play house with had stung, but interacting with his new brother quickly taught him that Jason acted a lot less robot and a lot more child that one might expect. The boy was smart, witty, and had stolen the tires off the batmobile! He could see what Bruce had seen in him that night.
It didn't take long for Jason to debut as Robin, taking to the role like a fish to water. It was amazing, really.
It was amazing, until it wasn't... but what did you expect from a Crime Alley kid? They just weren't afforded with such luck.
Bruce, the ever-worried father, had realized something: Most robot models were programmed to adhere to Asimov's rules... especially the child-bots -- yet was Jason able to go out as Robin and fight humans. He knew that Jason's coding wasn't exactly... traditional, but this realization did cause him to worry. How far did this irregularity go?
So when a diplomat's son fell to his death and Jason claimed to not have pushed him, Bruce was unsure. He had always believed that the irregularity only allowed his son to fight humans to protect others, but what if he had been mistaken? Bruce had to get to the bottom of this, so he decided to bench Robin for the foreseeable future.
Jason, meanwhile, felt hurt. And yes, maybe robots didn't compute emotions like humans did, but he had read a lot of books and couldn't help but... well, feel like those words were fitting. His own dad didn't trust him.
But maybe the one who designed him would be able to make Bruce understand! So, with newfound enthusiasm, Jason started researching and tracking down the person behind his particular model: Sheila Haywood, who currently worked in a program for medical assistance androids in Ethiopia. His "mother", for lack of a better term, made robots to help people. Ha! Take that, Bruce.
We know how this story ends... Jason leaves home to find his "mother", and he succeeds. Only is Sheila not what she appears to be. Where her "son" stands before her, all she sees is the product that she'd helped building... And realizes that she had helped building her ticket to freedom, to get away from the Joker.
Sheila would be proven wrong, but in the end that didn't matter.
What did matter was that on that day, Batman failed to save Robin, that Bruce failed to save his son.
Rich people like buying child-robots because they're durable... but even his durability, despite it far surpassing that of a human boy, couldn't save him from that blast. That day, Bruce returned home with the mangled body of a boy... and the fact that there was wiring poking out of the costume instead of bones made no difference for his grief.
🦇
Years later, there's a new player in Gotham, one who calls himself Red Hood, hiding his face under a helmet and distorting his voice with a modulator. He wears a bat on his chest yet won't hesitate to use the guns strapped to his thighs. Is he a man? Is he a robot? It's hard to tell... but what quickly becomes apparent is how dangerous he is.
It's just a regular day in Gotham when Jason comes across a lone Star City brat just around the corner of... Crime Alley?
The kid stuck out like a sore thumb in his bright, clean clothes and his general aura of naivety... not to mention his speech patterns. It's easy to imagine what happens to kids like this in Gotham... chewed up and spit out and never the same -- and that's IF they survive.
Jason, who couldn't spot any adult who might belong to the kid, figured he'd talk to him... only to receive the shock of a (second) lifetime upon hearing why the kid came all the way to this hellhole known as Gotham. Stevie is looking for his birth mother: He knows she's from Gotham, knows she must lead a dangerous life and most importantly, he knows that her name starts with "S". The parallels are not lost on Jason.
Stevie is a smart kid to have made it all the way to Gotham on his own, yet he's way too naive to survive on his own -- Jason can tell that by looking at him. It's right there and then that he decides to help the kid... he won't leave his side and he'll DEFINITELY make sure no creepy clowns get their hands on the boy.
Stevie's understanding of protection is NOT Gotham-proof...
It's May, so-- yes, merman!Jason.
Some relevant details about his scars... most would know the scar on his neck, but merman!Jason has two other significant scars on his body: The one on his shoulder and the one on his fishtail-- both inflicted by Joker (a poacher in this AU).
Side note-- when he was younger, Jason's tail had a much "muddier" colour scheme, his fins were a lot rounder... Sheila was a shark and Willis was a tiger oscar, but he only really grew into his shark features when he became an adult
Bruce had told Jason not to swim to the surface, but his only recently discovered birth mother Sheila asked him for help, so of course he went with her... but at the surface, waiting, there was the Joker. He got the boy with his ship, causing the scar on his shoulder, before getting him in board. He then gave him the one on his fishtail by "trying to give the fishy legs". The merboy didn't survive that day.
Years later, there's a new player in the sea... whose tail is both black and strikingly red, who viciously hunts down human poachers and the merpeople who work with them.