#but dc has a habit of taking morally gray characters and making them Just Good or Just Bad and passing it off as character development | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fairymascot · 2 years

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also, another question (sorry for being annoying) but, how would you make harley a villain again? dc is being so dense with making her a hero and it's so boring 😭 like, what kind of plot do you think could be done to turn her into a villain?

this is a really interesting question! and not annoying at all. :) (you're more than welcome to message me off anon as well, if you'd like! always enjoy making new comic nerd friends.)

anyhoo! one thought i had when i started reading harley's 2021 solo series (which i no longer follow, so don't expect any kind of congruence with it here), is that it's actually really uncomfortable to watch harley bend over backwards to impress batman. to me, it looked less like an honest shift in her character and more just... perpetuating her same old patterns. think about it. she met joker when she was in a rough place in life (if you look at sejic's take in 'harleen'), working a job that eats away at her soul and bottling her issues up for years on end. he makes her believe things can be different. offers her an alternative. she's utterly enamored with the world he promises. throws out everything that's made her her, and takes on a new persona to win his approval and earn her place by his side.

years pass, she emerges from the abusive relationship with joker. various nonsensical dc universe shit goes down. she loses ivy (temporarily), loses her sense of direction in life, feels alone and desperate. batman makes her believe things can be different. she takes on a new persona to win his approval and earn her place by his side.

i don't believe stephanie philips ever acknowledged this in the series, but it's so easy to read harley as someone with a pattern of molding herself to please influential male figures in her life, in the hopes it'll grant her fulfillment and a purpose. if we follow that logic, her decision to redeem herself and become part of the batfam is less her 'finding her true self' and more just, harley being harley and having an incredibly flimsy sense of personal identity. if they ever choose to go down this route, the natural conclusion would be that harley needs a break from deranged men in tacky costumes defining her life for her, and that she should break away and find her own path, which would probably lead her in a more chaotic, muddled, morally gray direction. that would be ideal for her, in my opinion.

(i have a bunch more to say about this, actually, so i’m just gonna stash the remainder of this text behemoth under a cut.)

even setting that particular interpretation of mine aside, though, it would be incredibly easy to de-redeem harley, because she honestly sucks at staying on the straight and narrow. there have been countless instances of her turning good for like twenty minutes before flipping right back -- in older comics and btas, for example, she'd cooperate with batman under specific circumstances, but ditch his ass the second joker was threatened. in gotham city sirens, she was content to live with selina and ivy in their considerably healthier and more functional threeway arrangement for months on end, but the second joker reentered her life, she turned her back on them.

even without joker in the picture-- as he's hardly relevant anymore-- you can see in the harley's holiday episode of btas, for example, that she could barely spend 6 hours outside of arkham without relapsing into her old habits. it's not even out of malice or criminal intent, it's just that she's been living as a villain for a very long time, she has an innate distrust of law enforcement, she's used to using violence to get her way and resorts to it as a kneejerk reaction. she's flighty and has a hair trigger temper and doesn't think before she acts. it's incredibly difficult for her to break the cycle and act 'correctly', even when she's making a conscious effort to. her characterization in the harley quinn animated series is consistent with this, as well-- even when she's trying to do the right thing, her idea of 'the right thing' is often warped by her skewed perception of reality and loose morals. she decides to 'save' nora from mr freeze because she assumes he's lying about keeping her frozen to protect her, which ultimately results in his death and horrible heartache for nora. and on a similar but lighter note, in her 2014 series she decides to take on a day job as a therapist at a senior center, basically trying to 'go straight', and ends up kidnapping and threatening the family of one of her patients, a sweet elderly grandma who told her stories of their heartbreaking neglect. harley thought she was delivering justice and teaching them a lesson for abandoning grandma. turns out she didn't read through her file, and grandma is suffering from dementia, and doesn't remember her family has been visiting twice a week for years. even when harley is trying to do good, she's uh, not great at it.

and let's also just take into account that a lot of aspects of her personality, are, like... bad? straight up terrible? don't get me wrong, i mean this lovingly. her current run tends to ignore this, but there's a REASON she spent years as the joker's lover-slash-sidekick, and it's not because she's a pure baby bean who had been brainwashed by him. she has dark, violent tendencies. she's sick of abiding by society's rules. she's manipulative. she's selfish and greedy. in her 2000 comic run, there's an entire arc where she has to act as a bodyguard for an elementary school girl with a rare ability who's being hunted by very rich men for nefarious purposes-- and even though they form a connection, and harley comes to care for her, she ends up selling her out for the money. this is a very similar trajectory to her relationship with cass in the birds of prey film, where she ends up selling cass out despite their developing bond. she regrets it later, of course. but she still made that choice.

with all that in mind, i think the real question is, how on earth would you keep harley a hero? the answer to which being: through extremely shallow and forced characterization dictated by crappy executive decisions. the dc higher ups saw that harley has become incredibly popular, that she's seen as something of a feminist icon and role model for girls, and went 'oh shit... she's too problematic... gotta make her a hero to justify her fanbase', never mind the fact that her fanbase formed AROUND her flawed, morally complex character.

realistically, harley wouldn't last a week as a hero. put her around the batfam or the justice league for more than an hour and they'd all want to kill each other. it would become exceedingly clear she is not cut out for the role. she does not have the moral compass or the self-discipline to be a proper 'good guy'. i don't think it even makes sense for her to WANT to be one. that's not to say her only choice is to be a villain-- but like i said before, carving out her own path, trying to do good in her own well-intentioned but messed up way, without giving up her selfish, chaotic, law-breaking side... that's the harley i want to see.

#askbox #text #dc comics #harley quinn #meta #long post

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