i love harley and ivy together, but regarding their separation i think it’s so important to consider how much of poison ivy (2022) is about pam being a selfish, power-hungry narcissist who also chronically pushes those who love her most away because she’s afraid of what it means to be close to people and to care about them. one of her key conflicts is this tension between her intense need to be seen and known and loved and her own hunger for control, which is so wrapped up in her self-aggrandizing.
sometimes i see people write or talk about ivy as if she’s this uwu precious baby angel who just likes plants and kissing girls, and while it’s true that the moment she kneels down in the dirt to look at a plant and say “Hello, little friend” she transforms into something child-like and untouched by nihilism, she is absolutely not this idealized object of soft tumblr sapphic cottagecore fantasy, but rather an incredibly complex villain (or anti-hero or anti-villain, perspective depending). in her contemporary incarnation she is, to simplify some very intricate character work, a bad person trying to do a good thing. part of what makes her so compelling is the fact that her most villainous qualities are her most human and mundane ones. she often thinks of herself as a monster because of how her body transformed after it survived woodrue’s experiment, and while her connection to the green did change her sense of morality and her sense of purpose by bringing her in line with the cycles of nature and its indifference to humanity, it is her pain, her fear of vulnerability, her volatility, her hubris, her arrogance, that drive her to perform villainous acts. what does her characterization say about what it means to be human? to be human is to be imperfect, to be hurt, to channel your pain into hurting others, to make choices (good and bad) about how you move through the world.
the question of pamela isley’s humanity has also been one of her central conflicts over the last 30ish years of comics publishing. she's loved harley for so long, in spite of herself, and while she has always protected harley and taken care of her, she has not always been kind to her, and Harley has not always been kind to Pam. so many people hate janet from hr, some because they simply don’t like the character, but others because they don’t like that janet isn’t harley. it took janet some time to grow on me, but i never hated her because the nature of their relationship makes sense to me. pam cares about janet, but takes advantage of janet’s love for her to suit her own agenda. janet loves pam, and understands that she’s being manipulated, but ultimately desires a dynamic in which she is essentially pam's submissive pet, as long as she isn’t being taken for granted, as long as at least a part of pam loves her back. i don’t like every individual story beat that deals with the escalation of pam and janet’s relationship, but the overarching idea works and even honors certain historical aspects of pam's characterization in a way similar to how wonder woman: the hiketeia (2002) honors the bdsm aspects of diana's origins without being weird about it. I think pam and janet's relationship only becomes more cohesive as the series continues, and janet's characterization became much more concrete between issue #26 and now. that said, i didn’t fully like janet until issue #38 when she confronts pam over her cruelty and emotional isolation, telling her:
“You can be so nice when you’re happy. But when you’re mad it’s like the sun goes behind a cloud. Like you don’t even remember the happy parts. Like they never happened. It’s really hard to love you. I don’t think you like being loved. I think it annoys you.”
this is the thing janet understands that actually makes her so vital to pam's story. pam is going to hurt harley. she is going to hurt janet. she is going to hurt herself. one of the questions of poison ivy (2022) is whether or not pam will learn from the consequences of her actions, or if she'll continue to succumb to her most evil (and most human) tendencies.
i appreciate this book so much for the nuanced way in which it handles pam (even if i don't love every plot point or wish some of it was executed more elegantly), and for the way in which it explores what i think are very relevant questions in our post-capitalist techno-fascist hellscape of a world: how do we balance hopelessness and hope? how do we balance nihilism and idealism? at what point do we become the things we hate?
pam has always been a villain. often a likable one, depending on the era in publishing. a villain we can empathize with. but still a villain a the end of the day. and humans, all of us, even the most well-intentioned ones, are capable of villainy. this is one of the reasons i love pam. she's a mirror. it's scary how much of myself i see in her, how much of other people. she's messy and sometimes repulsive, a narrator rendered unreliable because of how she lies to herself.
also, if you wait five or ten issues, i'm certain about one thing: pam and harley will get back together. again, i love harley and ivy. but i also think if you're reading this book to focus primarily on the ship, you're missing out on so much good, interesting shit! i literally haven't scratched the surface of all my thoughts about it here!!! questions about who's actions are framed as villainous versus heroic, questions about what it means when what you are at your very core is villainized because you don't fit correctly into society, about what it means to be understood, about how, as pam puts it, "it's the monsters that teach us how to be good."
there's nothing wrong with reading for a ship, but at the same time this is literally such a rich text, and it makes me so sad to see people reduce it to "it's the worst thing I've ever read because i don't like what's happening with my ship."
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