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The trouble began with Bruce, and an over-simplification.
Or, well, that’s an unfair statement. The trouble between Dick and Bruce was a deep, dark sprawling thing, the product of two very strong-willed and stubborn people living in close proximity, and the usual troubles of teendom and fatherhood. And from this seething, indefinite mass of hurt and pride and perceived betrayal, no singular trouble could be wholly extricable.
But, the Jason problem began with Bruce and an over-simplification.
It is a bald fact that everyone is simplified in the minds of other people. It is a necessity. No human mind could come anywhere close to encompassing the entirety of a whole human person. People exist to others by their edges and impressions. More, when a person knows someone they make sense of these pieces, a thousand thousand moments if they are close, and compile them into something comprehensible, a narrative, an idea, their thematic significance. People create a sort of short hand of what those closest to them are, a concept connected to a name and face to form a sort of three-pronged abstract of personhood. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of this. People are subjective, even more so the idea of a person.
But the problem of Jason began somewhere along the line, when Bruce began to think of Dick as being Normal.
The idea of “normal” for Bruce had a sort of mythic significance. It was for ordinary people that he fought and was willing to die. Bruce’s father had been a doctor once. Bruce thought of people in terms of standards, of baselines and averages, of being broken and fixing it. Normal was a goal, one always to be strived for and never achieved, an ideal. Dick was not normal, and he would never, except perhaps in certain situations, like when on a team mostly made up of metas, think of himself in conjunction with that term. But the problem was one of simplification, not just egregious error. Bruce’s conclusion was, in its way, obvious. Dick was not normal, but he was normal in many of the ways that Bruce wasn’t. Dick was normal in that he knew how much an apple cost. He was not born into the lap of luxury, and even after living in it for nearly a decade, he still failed to take wealth for granted in a way Bruce had never quite managed to. Dick was normal because he had people skills, because he laughed easily and he understood pop culture. Dick was normal because he moved on, because his parents’ deaths didn’t define him.
That, of course, is where Bruce’s misunderstanding came in. It was never Dick Grayson’s parents’ deaths that defined him.
Bruce had never been one for legacy. He constructed his own future, defined his own mythos, built himself from the ground up. The Wayne fortune, Wayne Enterprises, held no intrinsic significance to him. It was a tool, an undeserved windfall. The weight of the privilege of it lay heavily on his shoulders and instilled in him a constant, vague sense of guilt, even as it blinded him to so much. But he never defined himself as an heir . He loved his parents so much, clung to them and everything they had stood for to a truly unhealthy degree, but it never once occurred to him to become a doctor simply because his father had been one. He loved the Manor, would never dream of leaving it behind, but it was important to him because his parents had lived in it, and loved in it, because his own personal memories were built within its walls, not because his ancestors had built it, not because generations of Waynes had lived and died in it. The only ghosts that mattered to him, the only people whose memory he felt the need to honor and live up to, were those he’d known in life.
The point though, the first point, is that Dick Grayson, age eight, was about as far from normal as a happy, well adjusted child could possibly get.
By the age of eight, Dick was a professional trapeze artist. He was a prodigy, the most promising young performer of his craft the Flying Graysons, and therefore the world, had ever seen. He had trained his entire life to be the best at what he did, and he was spectacular. He was smart, he was gregarious, and he was entirely unused to taking no for an answer. Dick Grayson had been risking his life for people’s entertainment since he was five years old, because he wanted to, because no one could stop him, and because he was just that good . Dick Grayson was to the trapeze what Mozart was to music.
Somewhere along the line, Bruce forgot that.
Batman gained a second Robin. Chose would be too strong a word. It was Jason who chose to be Robin, and it’s likely that Bruce could no more have stopped him from entering into heroism than he had been able to stop Dick.
But regardless, another boy wore the Robin mantle, one who had never flown a day in his life before he had donned it. Batman had a second Robin, as though Robin were a thing belonging to Batman, as though it was Batman that made him from the start. As though Robin was not Dick’s mother’s name for him. As though it had not been his parents who had taught him to fly.
Bruce Wayne gave Jason Todd Robin, as though it was his to give, as though everything Dick Grayson was and could be was his.
The Graysons had been performers for longer than anyone could remember, longer than they’d been called Graysons, and the Flying Graysons had been trapeze artists for as long as there had ever been a trapeze. This was Dick’s legacy, his home and family.
Bruce did not give this to Jason, not because he could not, not because it was not his to give, but because somewhere along the way he had forgotten Dick had it to begin with.
Robin had no inheritance. He had no mansion on a hill, no ancestors hung in portraits on the walls, no city to protect. All Robin had was the clothes on his back and the names on his lips and his own body dancing unearthly light through space. These things were all he needed. These things were all his family had ever had.
So Dick looked at this other boy, this stranger wearing his father’s colors, this true gothamite with his pale skin and alley accent. Dick looked at Robin, and what he saw was that Bruce had skinned him, and dressed this other child in his plumage.
So Dick did not hate Jason really. It was only that when he looked, he could not see Jason at all. All he could see was his own wounds ripped open, his legacy bleeding out, his own soul torn out to be made into another man’s symbol, the desecration of his parents’ graves. And so it was easier simply not to look.