DC Universe: Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn
Dec. 26th, 2011 03:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficYes, these two are getting their own article. Thinking about what to do with Poison Ivy, it occurred to me that motivation decay has not been kind to her. Yeah, sure, she's an ecoterrorist and in lesbians with Harley Quinn, but what more? What are her specific goals? How does she set out to achieve those goals? And why is she in love with Harley anyway (because animators on children's cartoon shows are perverts is not an answer. Although it is true).
You just have to look at some of Ivy's recent appearances to see how she's been mishandled. In Batman & Robin, her goal is to create a new ice age, which will somehow be good for plants (remember, this isn't Freeze's idea, she actually kills Mr. Freeze's wife to drive him towards this. Also, she wants to have sex with Mr. Freeze? Also, she just started out creating carnivorous plants? I know picking on B&R is like fish, meet barrel, but Christ, what a mess). And in an issue of Batman by the otherwise-great Paul Dini, it turned out she was torturing people to death just for the lulz. No, really, that was the explanation.
(Non-comics fans, to recap, there's a school of thought in superhero comics that creating "better villains" is a process of taking a sympathetic or complicated villain character and turning them into a Complete Monster. That this doesn't make for better villains is so patently obvious you'd think anyone who is paid to put words in front of each other for a living would learn that on day one. Just by watching the superhero movies of 2011 you can pick this up: Red Skull is a fine villain, and Hugo Weaving has fun with the character, but as written, he's just much less interesting than Loki. With Loki as the Big Bad in the Avengers, you want to see the movie just to find out how Loki's character evolves. Red Skull might be more out-and-out evil, but that just means you're less interested in the character; the only direction for his personality to go is doing more and more fucked-up shit. Of course, since most comic writers these days specialize in coming up with more and more fucked-up shit, we get supervillains whose entire gimmick is either graphic torture or rape.)
Let's think this through: I see Poison Ivy as someone who is sane and rational (her dynamic with Harley doesn't really work otherwise), she's just operating on a different system of morality from the rest of humanity. Just like most Americans would be offended at the thought of eating a dog, but your average Korean would see nothing wrong with it, Ivy sees the destruction of plant life as an incredible offense. To her, what she does is no more criminal than someone in the underground railroad helping freed slaves, even if it is against the "law" (so writing her as torturing innocent people to death makes as much sense as said slave-freer going around hitting kids, because both things are breaking the law).
But again, ecoterrorist. What does that mean? Your average terrorist attacks the populace to try and cow the political system, and to gain new recruits for the cause. For Ivy, there are no other recruits--she's pretty much the only half-plant person out there. And if her goal is to wipe out humanity so that plants can flourish, no amount of terrorism is going to accomplish that. "Cripes, we'd better all commit suicide, otherwise Ivy will kill us!" Maybe instead her goal could be to stop humanity's industralization in its tracks, reducing the population to a more sustainable level that can live in harmony with nature (to distinguish her from Ra's Al Ghul, she isn't such a psycho about it; she'd be willing to use her powers to create super-crops that could feed the current population if they'd just stop breeding and polluting everywhere).
So that's a sympathetic, even Tolkienesque motivation; how's she going about accomplishing it? Well, the niche of "Gotham City femme fatale" is empty--Catwoman is a gritty urban vigilante who only hits on Batman and Harley Quinn couldn't seduce a paper bag. So why not give Ivy back that characterization instead of turning her into giant-attacking-vine lady? She'll seduce a Fortune 500 CEO to get him alone, then use pheromones or threats to get him to stop some ecological action she objects to (this would explain why she chooses to fight for nature in Gotham instead of going down to Brazil to attack rainforest-mulchers head on; the shotcallers live in places like Gotham). Depending on the severity of the offense, she may kill the guy, leave him with some body horror fungus, or just leave him with a hangover and a warning.
Then we have Harley Quinn. Harley is best kept simple instead of gumming up the works with a new origin to keep track of. She likes Joker, and things go downhill from there. Then, during one of the downs in her relationship with Mistah J, she meets Ivy at a museum heist (Ivy was there to steal some fossilized seeds or something). They teamed up, and the resulting crime spree humanized Ivy. She saw humans as more than just "mammalian Dutch Elm" and started going on simple heists instead of plotting environmental attacks (of course, she donated her cut to environmental groups).
Then, we divulge from canon. A Darkseid attack results in an even worse No Man's Land. Joker is killed by Red Hood. Bereft of him, Harley actually works through her issues and goes sane. Long months of being h/c'ed by Ivy pay off and Ivy, who has taken over Gotham Park, strikes a deal with the rest of wartorn Gotham. Clean drinking water, fresh fruit and vegetables, in exchange for all industrial emissions meeting her standards and her followers going unmolested (this includes amnesty for herself and Harley). The deal takes; Gotham is too bad off to say no and Dick Grayson is much less of a hardliner than Bruce.
Harley actually reverses their old dynamic; by human standards, she’s saner than Ivy, valuing human life and talking Ivy down from some hotheaded moments. But she’s still crazy enough to end up running what’s left of Arkham Asylum (who else would want to take over Arkham Asylum in the middle of an even worse Gotham?). The fact is, before the disaster, the only people willing to work at Arkham were either too incompetent to go elsewhere or too ambitious for their own good. Harley is actually halfway competent, and manages to cure some of the more willing patients (the Ventriloquist, et al).
But the fact is, Harley did some nasty things under the Joker’s control. Even if Ivy managed to curb some of her homicidal tendencies (not out of much concern for innocent civilians, but because she felt sorry for Harley and didn’t want her to get a murder rap when she was caught), Harley still has a bit of a body count. The courts rightfully found her not guilty by reason of insanity, but it’s still enough for a post-breakdown Jason Todd to have her on his hitlist.
What he doesn’t know is that Ivy has an insurance policy. A single fungus has grown for miles under Gotham (this happens in the real world; it was in an episode of the X-Files). She meant it as a nuclear option; if the Gothamites go back on their word, she reveals the fungus, and while Batman is dealing with it (he’d have no warning to deal with it beforehand, hence her keeping it secret; so embarrassing to try to use your doomsday device and find out the red wire was snipped), she’d have time to make a getaway. But now that Harley’s in a hospital, Ivy has a new deal for Dick. “Bring me the Red Hood or Gotham burns.”
You just have to look at some of Ivy's recent appearances to see how she's been mishandled. In Batman & Robin, her goal is to create a new ice age, which will somehow be good for plants (remember, this isn't Freeze's idea, she actually kills Mr. Freeze's wife to drive him towards this. Also, she wants to have sex with Mr. Freeze? Also, she just started out creating carnivorous plants? I know picking on B&R is like fish, meet barrel, but Christ, what a mess). And in an issue of Batman by the otherwise-great Paul Dini, it turned out she was torturing people to death just for the lulz. No, really, that was the explanation.
(Non-comics fans, to recap, there's a school of thought in superhero comics that creating "better villains" is a process of taking a sympathetic or complicated villain character and turning them into a Complete Monster. That this doesn't make for better villains is so patently obvious you'd think anyone who is paid to put words in front of each other for a living would learn that on day one. Just by watching the superhero movies of 2011 you can pick this up: Red Skull is a fine villain, and Hugo Weaving has fun with the character, but as written, he's just much less interesting than Loki. With Loki as the Big Bad in the Avengers, you want to see the movie just to find out how Loki's character evolves. Red Skull might be more out-and-out evil, but that just means you're less interested in the character; the only direction for his personality to go is doing more and more fucked-up shit. Of course, since most comic writers these days specialize in coming up with more and more fucked-up shit, we get supervillains whose entire gimmick is either graphic torture or rape.)
Let's think this through: I see Poison Ivy as someone who is sane and rational (her dynamic with Harley doesn't really work otherwise), she's just operating on a different system of morality from the rest of humanity. Just like most Americans would be offended at the thought of eating a dog, but your average Korean would see nothing wrong with it, Ivy sees the destruction of plant life as an incredible offense. To her, what she does is no more criminal than someone in the underground railroad helping freed slaves, even if it is against the "law" (so writing her as torturing innocent people to death makes as much sense as said slave-freer going around hitting kids, because both things are breaking the law).
But again, ecoterrorist. What does that mean? Your average terrorist attacks the populace to try and cow the political system, and to gain new recruits for the cause. For Ivy, there are no other recruits--she's pretty much the only half-plant person out there. And if her goal is to wipe out humanity so that plants can flourish, no amount of terrorism is going to accomplish that. "Cripes, we'd better all commit suicide, otherwise Ivy will kill us!" Maybe instead her goal could be to stop humanity's industralization in its tracks, reducing the population to a more sustainable level that can live in harmony with nature (to distinguish her from Ra's Al Ghul, she isn't such a psycho about it; she'd be willing to use her powers to create super-crops that could feed the current population if they'd just stop breeding and polluting everywhere).
So that's a sympathetic, even Tolkienesque motivation; how's she going about accomplishing it? Well, the niche of "Gotham City femme fatale" is empty--Catwoman is a gritty urban vigilante who only hits on Batman and Harley Quinn couldn't seduce a paper bag. So why not give Ivy back that characterization instead of turning her into giant-attacking-vine lady? She'll seduce a Fortune 500 CEO to get him alone, then use pheromones or threats to get him to stop some ecological action she objects to (this would explain why she chooses to fight for nature in Gotham instead of going down to Brazil to attack rainforest-mulchers head on; the shotcallers live in places like Gotham). Depending on the severity of the offense, she may kill the guy, leave him with some body horror fungus, or just leave him with a hangover and a warning.
Then we have Harley Quinn. Harley is best kept simple instead of gumming up the works with a new origin to keep track of. She likes Joker, and things go downhill from there. Then, during one of the downs in her relationship with Mistah J, she meets Ivy at a museum heist (Ivy was there to steal some fossilized seeds or something). They teamed up, and the resulting crime spree humanized Ivy. She saw humans as more than just "mammalian Dutch Elm" and started going on simple heists instead of plotting environmental attacks (of course, she donated her cut to environmental groups).
Then, we divulge from canon. A Darkseid attack results in an even worse No Man's Land. Joker is killed by Red Hood. Bereft of him, Harley actually works through her issues and goes sane. Long months of being h/c'ed by Ivy pay off and Ivy, who has taken over Gotham Park, strikes a deal with the rest of wartorn Gotham. Clean drinking water, fresh fruit and vegetables, in exchange for all industrial emissions meeting her standards and her followers going unmolested (this includes amnesty for herself and Harley). The deal takes; Gotham is too bad off to say no and Dick Grayson is much less of a hardliner than Bruce.
Harley actually reverses their old dynamic; by human standards, she’s saner than Ivy, valuing human life and talking Ivy down from some hotheaded moments. But she’s still crazy enough to end up running what’s left of Arkham Asylum (who else would want to take over Arkham Asylum in the middle of an even worse Gotham?). The fact is, before the disaster, the only people willing to work at Arkham were either too incompetent to go elsewhere or too ambitious for their own good. Harley is actually halfway competent, and manages to cure some of the more willing patients (the Ventriloquist, et al).
But the fact is, Harley did some nasty things under the Joker’s control. Even if Ivy managed to curb some of her homicidal tendencies (not out of much concern for innocent civilians, but because she felt sorry for Harley and didn’t want her to get a murder rap when she was caught), Harley still has a bit of a body count. The courts rightfully found her not guilty by reason of insanity, but it’s still enough for a post-breakdown Jason Todd to have her on his hitlist.
What he doesn’t know is that Ivy has an insurance policy. A single fungus has grown for miles under Gotham (this happens in the real world; it was in an episode of the X-Files). She meant it as a nuclear option; if the Gothamites go back on their word, she reveals the fungus, and while Batman is dealing with it (he’d have no warning to deal with it beforehand, hence her keeping it secret; so embarrassing to try to use your doomsday device and find out the red wire was snipped), she’d have time to make a getaway. But now that Harley’s in a hospital, Ivy has a new deal for Dick. “Bring me the Red Hood or Gotham burns.”
