The son of a two-bit henchman in Two Face's employ and a girl with a spectacularly poor judge of character. Jason Todd was born into the gutter and, after daddy took a 9mm lobotomy between the eyes, leading his step-mom to punt his little runt ass out onto the street the very next day, seemed destined to die in it, too.

But the universe has a weird sense of humour sometimes, and every once in a while Lady Luck rolls her eyes and deigns to go along with it's chicanery. So when the goddamned Batman himself encountered the young lad in an alley one chilly Gotham night, ten pounds underweight, garbed in moth-munched rags, clutching a tire-iron in a panicked, white-knuckled grip and looking all kinds of stunned and stupid as he stood next to a Batmobile put up on cinderblocks, our boy Jason was quite surprised that instead of getting the violent ass-whooping every part of his child imagination screamed he was about to receive, he got... a warm meal, a roof over his head, a much needed bath and a new job...

...As the new Boy Wonder.

And all things considered, he was actually pretty damn good at it. Sure, he lacked the easy charm, grace and finesse of his predecessor, but the boy was diabolically clever, tenacious, far more vicious and more than Barb, Dick and maybe even Bruce himself, had a deep, visceral understanding of the city he lived in, the people he shared it with and the crime that plagued it. Having been born into the dirt, having grown up surrounded by crooks and owning the scars, anger and chip on his shoulder to prove it.

...And to his shame, no matter how many lives he'd saved or costumed bad guys he put away while working with the Bat and, eventually, the Titans, that well of anger— that pit of raw fury— never went away. As a matter of fact it just kept on getting deeper and deeper, until it threatened to undo his home, his ties to the people he cared about and all the good work he actually did.

In hindsight, Jay would openly admit that he was a bit of an ass back then. And had Alfred not been there to snap the both of them back on track with a few choice words every now and again, he and Bruce probably would've come to blows a few times in those later years at Wayne Manor. But he was loyal. Unflinchingly, unquestionably so; Not just to Bruce, but Alfred, Barb, Dick, the Titans... hell, he even took a bullet for the Crazy Cat Lady once. Whenever they needed him to bleed, he bled. No questions, no complaints, nothing asked in return. And so eventually, horrified by what his own ego had done, Jason began to swallow his pride, put a lid on his anger and drive all that energy into fixing what he damn near broke.

Three nights of torture, a crowbar, a clown and a metric assload of C4 in a dingy warehouse in Sarajevo put an abrupt stop to all that.

Just like waking up screaming like a wild animal in a Lazarus Pit and tearing his way through the assassins of the League of Shadows who'd only been trying to help him before breaking out and plunging headlong into a gorge put him at rock-bottom. Figuratively and literally.

It took the kid a few days to recover his senses. Another week after that to get the League off his scent. And then came the really tricky part.

The climb back up.

Legally dead and with nothing to his name but what clothes he could steal, Jason began the long trek home, Selling those skills he'd learned under the Batman to pay his way. Riding alongside Bedouin nomads against a corrupt regime, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with the Peshmerga against marauding extremists in Iraq and Qurac, liberating and smuggling a little girl who had the misfortune of having a claim to the Bialyan throne out of her homeland, earning a significant vendetta against a human-trafficking ring out of the Balkans he made damned sure to settle, hunting Atlantean Army holdouts in the Amazon who'd stubbornly refused to acknowledge who won the last war, running afoul of venom-juiced drug cartels in Central America and Mexico... Every day, every leg of his journey seemingly plunged him into a new war, some new conflict of feud to get dragged into the middle of, or some new wrong he couldn't ignore. And though Jay always tried to pick the right side, wars were rarely that simple.

And he didn't always win.

But dammit, he kept on trying.

Until finally, after years of blood, tears, friends gained and lost, triumph and failure... he did it. He was finally home. He could literally see the silhouette of Wayne Manor looming over the horizon down the highway.

...But he couldn't do it.

Looking down at himself, parked on the side of the road and soaked in sweat and terror, struggling to breathe, Jason could only think about how long he'd been gone. All the things he'd done, all the hell he'd seen and the wars he'd fought and just... couldn't do it. Couldn't just waltz back into their lives with a wave and a smile like nothing had happened. What would they say? What would they think?

He was not the man Bruce, Alfred or any of the rest would have ever wanted him to be.

Hell, all things considered, he doubted he ever was.

Instead, he did a quick uey, planted the skinny pedal into the floor and peeled right the hell out of there. Clutching his steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip as his mind screamed at him to put as much distance between him and Gotham as humanly possible, only ever stopping every once in a while to hurriedly pump gas and get back on the road. Driving non-stop for a day and a half until, in his frenzy and panic, he wound up slamming his car into a ditch outside of Omaha.

Lucky for him then that it was a local farmer and his tractor that found him and not the sheriff, who, after pulling his wreck out of the ditch and seeing the state of the young man inside, all but dragged him home with him, sitting the boy down at their dinner table while his wife fussed over him to make sure the lad was alright.

It took Jason a solid day to stop shaking. Half a day after that to start talking in a manner approaching 'somewhat coherent' and finally a third day of their hospitality, sitting on their porch with a dog in his lap, burying it's head into his neck to sheepishly ask about that abandoned-looking woodland property down the road, surprising the hell out of the older couple when he went into town and bought it with solid gold bullion that very same day. Looking to all the world like after everything he'd been through, Jason Todd was finally ready to settle down into a nice, quiet life out in the mid-west.

But idle hands have a habit of finding use. And it wasn't long before our boy put himself back together and began plying his trade once again; adopting the guise of the Red Hood and marketing himself as a sort of 'Hero-for-hire'. Taking on jobs big or small, near or far and only staying in Omaha for brief stints at a time between cases— either to catch some rest, work on new projects, repair his equipment in the barn or, every so often, help his neighbours out when their cantankerous old tractor acts up or when their grandkids need a baby sitter.

Sure, he's not the man Bruce would have wanted him to be.

...But slowly and surely, little by little, he's learning to live with it.

Alright, so as you miiiight've picked up from my whole wall o' text up there, this version of Jason is just a bit of a departure from the usual brooding badass we all know and love. So before you get out torches and pitchforks, hear me out—

That rage and anger is still very much there, but this is a Jason that has had more time to marinate on his own failings and look inward, to be humbled by his experiences overseas, but not be completely broken by them. As, though life was undoubtedly shittier after his crow-barrening, there were light spots in between; little glimmers of victory, things he can look back on with pride and people he can remember with deserved fondness... a whole bunch of little things meshed together to keep that little light burning in his heart. And though it's not the way anybody intended or would have wanted, he's slowly becoming his own man.

To that end, I gotta admit that I haven't got much in the way of set plots for the guy— but that was always part of the plan anyway; to be the plus-one to any player character that needs a hand until fate conspires to bring him back to Gotham, either to collect on his due vendetta with the Joker, protect the family he left behind or maybe even save the Big Bad Bat from his own damned self.

So, with that in mind...

Angry aliens got you down? There's a Hood for that.

Got a creepy superpowered ex-boyfriend that won't leave you be? There's a Hood for that.

Inter-dimensional Demon Daddy knocking at your door? There's a Hood for that... but he probably ain't happy about it.

TL;DR: I'm trying to trick all of you into letting me play a secretly wholesome Red Hood. Is it working?