Being one of the poor saps who bought the Arkham Knight season pass, I recently gained access to the Harley Quinn playable DLC. My thought on Arkham Knight writ large are best saved for another theoretical post; for now, I'll just say that I thoroughly enjoyed it, and felt it was the perfect wrap to the Arkham "Trilogy." That being said, it did nothing to address my longest-standing issue with the series, which is their portrayal of Harley Quinn as the unerringly loyal hench-wench of old, joyful and psychotic, having no personality beyond her unfaltering love of good ol' Mistah J. In the comics, Harley Quinn decidedly graduated from "loyal hench-wench" and became a walking bedlam entirely of her own volition a few years back. Harley was originally created for Batman: The Animated Series in the early 90s, and her relationship with the Joker has been deliberately written as horrifically abusive (by anyone who isn't a rampaging misogynist with half a slug for a brain) ever since. Even within a season of her appearance, Harley got an episode dedicated to her trying to leave Joker. As such, it seemed weird to me that as of Arkham Knight, Harley would still be prancing around in clown makeup, bashing heads in the name of her puddin', long after he had left this world. I'd just accepted it as one of the flaws of the series, but as of the Harley Quinn DLC, I think I understand the choice a bit better. In the comics, future publication potential dictates that the Joker can never, ever die. Not for good, anyway. They only got away with it in the DCAU by doing it post-main series, in the Batman Beyond movie, and even then they brought him back for one last punch-up. So, Harley had ten long years of delightful spousal abuse to realize that maybe the Clown Prince of Crime wasn't interested in having a princess as much as a punching bag that followed orders. However, the Arkham timeline is largely isolated from the mainstream comics, so we don't know for sure how much time passed between Harley joining the Joker and Joker laughing his last. What we do know is that at the time of Joker's death, Arkham Harley had not moved on. She was still obsessed with the idea of the joker, fascinated by the only person who ever seemed to care about her, enthralled by the brave new worlds of murder and insanity he showed her, and as soon as someone dies, everyone is immediately more inclined to think fondly of them. So Harley is left as a violently psychopathic killer, driven by an obsession she calls love (and will likely never learn was anything else) to carry on spreading death and chaos. Another thing I really liked was how they did Harley's equivalent to Detective Vision. The dark red color scheme and slight shaking of the camera made me instantly uncomfortable, which I suspect was the point, and gave even the safest situations a sense of chaos. In addition, every surface is covered in giant scrawled writing about Joker, which (in addition to adding to the discomfort) makes me wonder if that is literally how she sees the world, or if it represents how much thought actually goes on in her head, underneath the aggressively chipper and ditzy facade. All this and a few brief internal dialogues between Harley and an inner voice subtitled as "Harlene" paint a fascinating picture of someone who has been thoroughly broken, to the point that she may actively want to stay that way. Unfortunately, the DLC clocks in at about ninety minutes, and that's if you take your time and die a few times. I would be really interested to see a game focused on Harley, exploring her psyche, her relationships with Joker and Ivy, her feelings towards Batman, and maybe culminating in her becoming the still murderous, but more more mentally healthy Harley Quinn we see in the comics. This seems unlikely, though, because in no incarnation of her character has Harley been a burly sullen white man with a bit of stubble.