One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy, The Voice Says As I Walk Down To The Well. It Echoes Against The Walls,

One must imagine Sisyphus happy, the voice says as I walk down to the well. It echoes against the walls, empty and wet in that peculiar way in which voices only echo in a cave, this deep, dark loneliness that chills you to the bone. One must imagine Sisyphus happy, it whimpers from very far away; my knuckles are rubbed red as they tie the bucket to the rope, and send it down below, and fill it with water. But I know Sisyphus. Who cares if he's happy? He was a bad man, but first he was a child, but first he was a man. What does it matter know, when the boulder rolls up and when it all falls down? I pull the bucket up, and fill my amphora ; watch the blood where I ripped my finger nails drip through and taint the water red. Something about eternity, I suppose. One must imagine Sisyphus happy, is the rule, but I hear him scream out every day, and he deserves it so much I am glad, and I pity him so much I could cry. And no one really cares if you are able to convince yourself that he could learn to love this endless, aimless task, and I could scream all my despair to the well and the well will never answer me; nothing changes around here, only the mind of those that are trapped, and that empty, violent freedom to imagine your neighbour is happy. Maybe one day it will be too much; perhaps, one day, it will be enough. For now I carry my amphora and feel it emptying and look for my sister. One must remember I'm a murderer. Plic, ploc. The water drips through.

Tell me WHY, upon introducing a monster that melts in shadows, my players' immediate reaction was to leave the empty sunlit garden they were in to go inside, while splitting up? And why one of them had the idea to teleport right into the old, empty library with stained glass windows? I didn't mean to make that encounter scary, it was a single monster in the garden while they were together. Choices were made... Which altered the situation. I found it very funny though.

Picture this: it's a cold, gloomy night. Rain is pouring and hammering against the windows of a cheap, dimlit motel, water cascading through the roof and dripping from a hole in the ceiling. In comes in a silhouette in a hoodie. They ask for a room and are gone as soon as they have the keys. The tenant checks the cash they payed with, only to realise it was all in shitty copper coins. With a sigh, he writes a complaint in the register book, but doesn't follow the stranger to their room: it's cold, and he is exhausted. He'll deal with it by morning, he decides. In the morning, ea nasir is long gone.

I was going through the anti Jason Todd tag because I hate myself and want to understand where people who dislike him are coming from and one thing I kept seeing was annoyance at Jason fans who claim that Jason is female coded and realized that the term “female coded” might not be the best term to describe what we mean.

A female coded character in literature and media typically means a character that has no specified gender or otherwise does not have a gender but is obviously meant to be a stand in for a woman or female. Kind of like how Starfire has no specified race (due to being an alien) but is still obviously black coded based on the way she’s drawn and treated by the narrative.

This is slightly different than what we mean when saying that Jason is female coded. It’s not that Jason is literally supposed to be a stand in for a female character, it’s that the way a lot of characters treat him and a lot of the tropes used on him are things that usually saved for female characters, not big buff men like Jason.

To start with, being Robin is narratively (or at least was) very similar to being a woman in a story. Robin is a role made to complement Batman (who we all know is basically the ultimate male power fantasy). Robin’s role is to be an accessory to Batman. Robin can be smart, but not smarter than Batman. Robin can be strong, but not stronger than Batman. Hell, Robin is often kidnapped and used as a literal damsel in distress, a role often regulated for women as a whole.

What sets Jason apart from the other robins (except for Steph) in this regard is that they were allowed to be characters outside of Batman. Dick might not have been the “man” of the story when he’s with Bruce, but when he’s with the teen titans suddenly he’s the smart one who has all the answers. Jason’s Robin was never really allowed this.

Then we get to the most, controversial, part of Jason’s female coding. The fact the he was effectively fridged. Fridging is usually only referred to as frigding if it’s a female character, but Jason’s death checks pretty much all the other boxes needed. An incredibly brutal death that was more about Bruce’s feelings on it than Jason himself.

This is especially apparent when compared to the other Bat characters. For all the female coding, the only other Robin to actually be fridged was Steph (and we all know about the misogyny surrounding her death). Barbara was also kind of fridged during the killing Joke. The only female character to escape this is Cass (to my knowledge). When you look at it through this lens, the fact that the only other characters to be permanently damaged like this for Bruce’s story are female, it’s not hard to see where the idea that Jason is female coded comes from.

You can even find this in Jason’s origin story. Poor little orphan is saved by benevolent billionaire is a role usually saved for little girls, like in Annie.

Despite what you might think, this even continues after Jason’s revival. Jason is still used less as a character and more as a motivation for Bruce. He’s regularly called emotional and hysterical (terms usually used to refer to women).

Jason is first and foremost a victim. A role performed by women in most media. Men are expected to be stoic and “rise above” the things done to them as to not be victims, as continuously shown by the way characters like Nightwing are not allowed to be effected by the horrific things they go through. The fact that Jason is shown the be angry, and sad, and emotional, constantly, and the fact that he’s punished and vilified for it puts him in a place much more similar to a female character.

There’s a reason that so many Jason fans (that like him for a reason past “antihero with guns”) are female. For most characters, when you swap their genders there would be a pretty clear and big difference in the way their story takes place. If you swap Jason’s gender, the story takes place identically.

A lot of this is best shown in men’s reactions to Arkham Knight’s version of Jason. In that game, Jason is similarly angry and emotional, albeit for slightly different reasons. He is also still unmistakably a victim. You’d think the men playing would like him. After all he’s a big cool angsty guy with a lot of guns and muscles. Instead, a lot of men’s thought that he was whiny. That his feelings were annoying.

There’s also something to be said about how his autonomy is regularly undermined by Bruce (specifically in Gotham war) and how his decisions and feeling are constantly treated as if they’re worth less than Bruce’s, but that’s a discussion for another day.