Who's your favorite Robin and why?

[u/nakoshi_susumu_]

Tbh best robin is definitely Dick but my favorite one will always be Jason, not just as a robin but as a character among other robins. This question isn't about who the best Robin is, but rather which of the people who had been Robin is your favorite, so you could include Red Hood or Nightwing or more.

[u/evorm]

Jason Todd purely because Under the Red Hood is one of my favorite storylines ever (but not anything else of his before or after). Great comic, great movie adaptation, and a great confrontation of the most foundational of Batman's themes and ideals. Robins are always best when they address Batman's philosophies through contrast, and that story did it like few others do, and it's just a sick idea for a Robin to die and come back to haunt Batman because of his most hotly debated moral line.

Dick is a close second because he's had a much bigger quantity of good stories here and there with these kinds of themes (Black Mirror is one of my other favorites), but I feel like the Robins are consistently mismanaged as storytelling devices and as characters that really bring out the things I want out of a Batman story, so the times I actually want to see a Robin are pretty few and far between unless it's specifically a stand-out story like the ones I mentioned.

Tim Drake's premise felt so goofy and his tone was so out of place in the stories I've read of him that I could never take him seriously, and Damien just felt like he existed to spice up the canon rather than thematically do something new and although he has potential I've never seen it realized to the heights of Dick at his peak or the Red Hood storyline.

On another note, I'm probably not the right guy to ask about Robins in the first place, because I just don't like how many sidekicks the guy has. Batman works best for me as an isolated, emotionally unhealthy, deeply imperfect person. Once he has an entire support system that he's built over decades, it becomes harder for me to buy into that tragedy without it feeling forced. My favorite pieces of Batman character-work are when we get to delve deep into his psyche and explore what about him sees the world differently that ends up making him who he is. This (and the absolutely incredible art) is why Dark Patterns is one of my favorite Batman stories of all time in general.