Or rather, the IDEA of his resurrection began to take on said resonance before DC Comics finally decided to bring Todd back for the first time since he was murdered by the Joker in BATMAN #357 (1983). After his overblown termination, Jason was left in dead-guy limbo for the next twenty years, until there was the SUGGESTION that he had been resusciated in the 2003 series HUSH. The HUSH storyline teased Jason's return, only to back off and say that the "Jason" who appeared was a clone-like entity constructed from living matter taken from the metamorphic villain Clayface.
I'm going to guess that "Phony Jason's Return" grabbed regular readers enough that writer Judd Winick successfully pitched a BATMAN continuity in which Jason was miraculously returned to life, only using a new identity. The former Robin now called himself The Red Hood, a name taken from an early identity of the villain who callously murdered Jason with a crowbar. As if imitating the coarse, un-Joker-like method of Jason's execution, the former hero's new modus operandi is to callously murder as many of Gotham's hardcore criminals as possible. Jason does so specifically to twist Bruce Wayne's tail; to reject Batman's credo of extending mercy to even the worst felon.
This 2005 continuity rambles quite a bit, as Winnick works in over a half dozen familiar faces from DC history, most of whom are extraneous to the main story. (Amazo? Captain Nazi? In the same comic as down-and-dirty scuzzballs as Black Mask?) The core of the story ranges from Batman's initial disbelief regarding the apparent resurrection to his gradual acceptance that for reasons that are never too clear, Jason has indeed come back and is seeking to contravene Batman's ethos. Jason's motivation smacks of personal affront: he doesn't resent having been killed, but he's angry that Batman didn't decide to end the Joker's life after the villain committed such an enormity. The story would have been quite a bit better cut in half and focused only on the Bat-family.
UNDER THE RED HOOD blames Jason's resurrection on the arcane phenomenon known as "Hypertime." As for the question as to what happened to Jason following his resurrection, Winick rings in familiar Batman-luminaries Ra's Al Ghul and his daughter Talia. The two villains stumble across Jason, initially believing him to be a hoax, possibly perpetrated by Batman. Eventually, Ra's loses interest in the undead Jason, but Talia-- who presumably has not yet conceived her own child by Bruce Wayne-- becomes a surrogate mother to the memory-stricken young man. She betrays her father by giving Jason access to a Lazarus Pit, which brings back Jason's lost memories, and thus causes him to lust for vengeance against his surrogate father.
But before sending the future Red Hood forth to become Batman's new bane, Talia takes a curious action: initiating a quickie romance with Jason. Winick doesn't give the reader access to the thoughts of either participant. However, earlier in the continuity Ra's has lectured his daughter, telling her "the detective" will never truly love her. In the scene above, Talia encourages Jason to "punish" Batman for having brought about the (temporary) demise of Talia's father. But it would be fair to suspect that she might really want to punish the hero for not fully returning her love, by making love to his surrogate son. I don't know if this quasi-incestuous encounter was utilized in later stories, but I find it interesting in that it showed Winick's willingness to take risks with the Talia character. I confess I have no idea how well this version of the DC character dovetails with Grant Morrison's version, who unsurprisingly gets killed at the end of his opus but is resuscitated by some other raconteur. I also have not tried to follow what has happened with Red Hood since these two series, but I have the impression that his massive slaughter of Gotham gangsters was pretty much forgotten so that he could become a regular ally to the Bat-family.
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