[harleenfrances]

just updated can't fight the seether. it's my favorite chapter so far, with 4.7k words. Part 2 of this chapter will come out next week, and together, Harley's upbringing will be pretty fleshed out, which has been the goal of the fic + setting the groundwork for her to become Harley Quinn.

TWs for everything you'd find in a psychological/slasher horror movie (more details on ao3).

not to get sappy but this fic has been a really cathartic experience. Harley has been my favorite character since I was 11 years old, and she's only become more relatable as time has passed, especially upon surviving a violent partner (and now being a PhD student who is surrounded by people who grew up with a lot more money than I did, which will be a thing much more in Part 2 of the fic). in some ways, I see her as the worst-case scenario of what my life could have become if I'd remained close with my family & turned all of my negative traits up to 100.

funnily enough, she also keeps coming up in my research. I keep finding things in my readings that remind me of her, particularly regarding psychology/criminology, pop culture, white women, and poverty. I honestly had no intentions of coming back into fandom when I started this degree, but she started coming to me in my dreams, too, and then I knew I needed to flex my creative muscles again. and I don't really know if I would've made it through this past semester without having my hobby as a writer back. the more time you spend in grad school the more you really get why Batman's rogues are like that.

but anyway, I hope you guys like it.

[jokerous]

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Metahuman with super healing powers whose entire job is that once a week they go to a nearby hospital and are put into a medically induced coma for 24 hours while all their organs and blood are harvested, and kept there until they've healed up again.

They get paid a small stipend by the Heroes Council for this, and they live off that.

No crime fighting, no obvious heroics, and they only took a Super Identity because it's technically hero's council policy. Nobody's ever seen them in a cape.

Every so often the Heroes council will release an official report to the public, and there'll be another bunch of news articles wondering how some unknown super calling themselves 'Meat Factory' somehow consistently holds the record for most lives saved across the city.

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

It is essential to my vision that they are not at all sanctimonious about this.

Like, they regularly act like they're getting away with something. They joke about how they get to earn money in their sleep. They show up to their hospital visits in deliberately ridiculous disguises, on the excuse that they need to 'protect their identity'.

Part of their employment contract is that they get served the same post-operation vanilla ice cream that they normally hand out on the childrens' ward. Also a sticker. Their overnight bag is covered in stickers.

[shinyhappygoth]

Okay, Meat Factory is awesome and hilarious, but if they're being harvested for and regenerating absolutely everything, may I suggest an alternative super name: Theseus.

[zahri-melitor]

Look, there’s a reason people don’t like Tom King, I get it, but it’s fucking HILARIOUS to be called a ‘racist grandma’ for pointing out Tom King is still reacting to the Iraq War, because it was a enormous deal for him, and he’s probably going to still be reacting to it until the day he dies.

Incredible how some people are quite happy to dress things up in therapy speak, but not willing to give any energy to ‘hey King’s job was very traumatic and he’s still processing that’.

You can not like it, you can not want to read it, but it’s a perfectly reasonable response to his situation and there is a huge cohort of people who understand where he’s coming from.

[dilfdoctordoom]

Oh no! Was the violent white man traumatised by his active and willing participation in war crimes? Was the racist monster traumatised by what he claims is his greatest accomplishment? how sad! Let's immediately ignore the fact he's an evil war criminal because you personally inferred that he's sad from a comic he wrote while actively ignoring the fact that he's touted his war criminal past as "the greatest accomplishment" of his life.

[zahri-melitor]

Honestly, I really hope that you never ever have to deal with the aftermath of how working for highly stressful jobs including police forces, military and security agencies affects, traumatises and changes people.

You absolutely don’t have to agree with (and indeed can violently disagree with) what people have done to still have empathy for them. I guess one of the things my own life experience to date has taught me is that being compassionate towards even people who you think have made terrible damaging decisions that have led to harm to themselves and others has benefits.

It is of course also your right not to get yourself tangled up in this and have an ethical strict line that you don’t cross.

But if so I sincerely hope for your own sake that that you never find yourself in a position where you have to wrestle with this stuff in the course of your work or about someone that you know.

[captainlordauditor]

Going to regret this when people come whaling at me, but:

Tom King has been writing for DC Comics for longer than he worked for the CIA at this point.

I, personally, am a big fan of people realizing they did something awful and attempting to atone for that. King has pretty clearly changed his mind about the US military given the way his Wonder Woman reads.

If you do not show compassion towards veterans, if you treat them as inhuman monsters, you will never get anything done. You will drive them right back to the military (which has a high recidivism rate, wonder why that is) and towards conservative groups which practice performative compassion in order to recruit them. Trust me when I say you are not helping your cause.

[tomkingisaracistnepobaby]

Tom King has built his comics career on bragging about his participation in the Iraq invasion. He has bragged about submitting his comic book scripts to the CIA for approval. His years of this very cushy comic book job have been his reward for participating in the Iraq invasion.

Tom King is a real-life white American man who invaded Iraq to punish Arabs for a crime that they didn't commit and he didn't suffer. You can't make up the impact of this real-life adult man based on your wishful headcanons for his racist, bootlicking superhero comics.

What is "our" cause? How do we help our cause by giving up our basic human dignity? Is our cause to coddle people who hate us? What is your cause? Doesn't it sound like you're the one offering perfomative compassion right now?

Excerpts from the foreword of the recent graphic novel The Flavors of Iraq by Feirat Alani and Léonard Cohen:

Since I got out of the Marine Corps in 2006, I felt I owed a moral debt to Iraqis, and to the city of Fallujah in particular. Though it still stings to admit it, I was part of the assault force that laid siege to Fallujah in late 2004. Over the course of a month, we turned the entire city to rubble and left an estimated 4,000–6,000 civilians dead in our wake. I know the damage can’t be undone, nor the debt repaid. But as an acknowledgment of wrongdoing and a gesture of remorse, I committed myself to campaigning for withdrawal and reparations.

[...] Over the last twenty years, the story of the invasion and occupation has been told almost exclusively from an American perspective that is so full of myth and omission that the entire collection of novels, films, memoirs, and journalistic accounts belongs in the fantasy genre. Not only are they historically inaccurate across the board, but they also share a common narrative form. American soldiers are the protagonists of these stories. To the extent that Iraqis are included at all, it is either as victims or villains; and, in either case, the need for Americans to save the day is implicit. According to this narrative, the invasion is not an act of aggression but an attempted liberation gone wrong.

[...] If Iraq through American eyes seems more the product of wishful thinking than reality, it’s because the framing, omissions, and narrative tropes that have characterized much of the fiction and nonfiction on Iraq have flowed downstream from US military propaganda. One of the lesser-known aspects of Operation Iraqi Freedom is that the way the story was told—the controlled perspective, the characterization of the actors involved, the focus on strategic themes, the tactical use of language—was as much a part of the battle plan as was the use of bombs and infantry. New trends in strategic thinking at the turn of the millennium gave propaganda a more prominent role in American military operations during the global war on terror.

Soft power, it was believed, would allow the military to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis, reducing the need for deadly force. It didn’t actually work out that way. But the fact that our propaganda operations remain a lesser-known aspect of the war speaks to their success in constructing a popular (mis)understanding of the conflict that has been reproduced again and again in American pop culture.

[...] From The Hurt Locker (2008) to American Sniper (2014) and The Yellow Birds (2012), American pop culture has followed the model set by US information operations, pumping out story after story told through the familiar gaze of the American soldier. No matter that the invasion was a war crime. No matter that over a million Iraqis died in the course of the occupation. All ethical questions about the mission are, at most, a secondary plotline. And Iraq and Iraqis are just a setting in these stories about American soldiers and their struggles to heal the wounds of war.

That foreword was written by Ross Caputi, former U.S. marine, current anti-war activist. Not every veteran can do what Caputi does, but every storyteller can choose whether to use his platform for Iraqis, or to use Iraqis as his platform. And the people Caputi hurt still don't owe him forgiveness, or anything else.

Isn't it disturbing how Caputi's position—white, American, and a veteran of invasion—is leveraged to add credibility in a French Iraqi journalist's personal account of his own family's lives in Iraq?

The Flavours of Iraq was adapted into a series of animated shorts, officially uploaded to watch for free in English.

Flavours of Iraq

French-Iraqi journalist Feurat Alani has observed and chronicled the changes that have swept Iraq, first through the eyes of a child, and la

[ilynpilled]

From CIA To comic books: The secret origin of Tom King

From an intern at DC and Marvel, to a CIA operative in Iraq, back to a writer at DC

“It was the greatest honor of my life. I very much enjoyed the job.”

[geniusbee]

it’s ok batman we all make mistakes

[freckledandspectacled]

edward nashton's origin story in The Batman illustrates the dangers of forming a parasocial relationship with the masked man in your city who dresses up like a bat to punch criminals at 3 am. in this essay i will-

[freckledandspectacled]

three months after she submitted this dissertation she took one look at the guy who dresses up like a clown to fuck with the man who dresses up like a bat and decided that just a little parasocial relationship couldn't hurt, actually-

[itsaubreylmfao]

i have a PhD in getting myself into really bad situations 

[stratfordsympathizer]

rewatched the batman 2022 again and holy shit i forgot how cringe and pathetic that brooding little freak is. love him. the hottest coolest motorcycle-driving, safe-cracking, justice-loving woman you've ever seen in your life is standing in a head to toe leather catsuit in front of you with her mouth like four inches from yours asking "are you just...hideously scarred under there?" while carressing your lame ass cowl for clear wanting to kiss you reasons, but unfortunately your emo third eye splits wide open and overrides your horniness and you physically cannot pass up the urge to just go "yeah :/" in the most "dejectedly kicking a pebble down the road with your hands jammed in your pockets" tone you can muster because you're the most cringefail cellar dweller in the fucking universe. but fortunately your jawline could cut glass so she kisses you anyway. incredible stuff.

[getanshi]

wears a big t-shirt that says I ♥️ WHEN CHARACTERS ARE NASTY AND FLAWED AND ANNOYING AND HURT EACH OTHER AND THEMSELVES

[harleenfrances]

i prefer pre-52 Harley not only because i feel strongly that she should be a villain out of choice instead of circumstance, but also because i see her life as a reverse 'choose your own adventure'. no matter what other decisions she makes, she'll always ultimately end up choosing to put on the clown makeup and terrorize Gotham.

see: The Batman 2004, where she achieves her dream of being a famous psychiatrist (mind you, the entire reason she chose to work at Arkham/be Joker's doctor according to Dini and Kesel) without ever having met Joker... and still ends up in the same place, because the type of success she dreamed of is still not fun enough.

of course, whether or not Harley did actually choose villainy when Joker manipulated her into it is up for debate, because like, consent. but in the Kesel run, we see she is the one who came up with the name Harley Quinn. it's how she introduces herself to Joker, in their very first session, after already becoming obsessed with him before even graduating. to me, even without his outright manipulation, she would have still ended up making the same choice, it would have just taken longer.

and I find that so much more compelling instead of just having her be another victim (obviously JxHQ is abusive but I mean in relation to the villainy). I find it especially compelling because of how radically different people read her, even when we're all looking at the same source material. there's the victim of an evil man, who is now on the path to being a hero. there's the complex figure who's made some bad choices under duress but has been rehabilitated to an anti-hero. and there's the irredeemable villain who entered into a relationship with her patient.

this, plus the very first skill we see her having as being the chameleon who can pretend to be a policewoman (technically speaking, I think it's implied they think she's a stripper dressed as a cop, but it's a kid's show so...) and then moments later she's gassing people, is so tasty if we consider her an unreliable narrator even when she's not the narrator. it helps me not get so angry at writing i disagree with when i imagine her just having like, a veil over the narrator's eyes because she's tricking them like she's tricking the people in the story. this especially makes sense when we think about the times she breaks the 4th wall.

i also just like, do not like that people have made her into the face of domestic violence survivors in DC when she's done so many truly unforgivable things (various sexual assaults & torturings across continuities).

[toddsolondz]

batman: who are we to judge who deserves to live or to die. to murder one person is to go down a dangerous path. where does it end?

the gotham subway takes guy: 100% disagree

[reddy-bear]

Bourgeois class traitor Sofia Gigante

[ciricearts]

she's hereee<3

[nayx-deactivated20200109]

hello officer, it seems youre arresting me *therapist voice* so why do you think youre doing that

[yienbread]

every time i draw starfire i feel an urge to make her hair so big it takes up the entire page

theory that her hair is that big because the entirety of the teen titans is stuffed inside it (obviously for ambushing purposes)

[harleenfrances]

Fletcher's Black Canary vol 1 was fun. the art style kind of grew on me & I liked Maeve, but I wish we would've learned more about the actual band (maybe in the later volumes?). it was my first Black Canary comic & I think I'll see if my library has any other ones before I commit to checking out vol 2 though.

Batman: Year One was excellent, I can see why people talk about it so much & why it's like, seen as The origin story. I thought it was very interesting they had Gordon cheat on Barbara because he's like, imo the moral core of Gotham in spite of being a cop. something something even good people make mistakes (like joining the most corrupt police force in the country). ACAB, I love stuff that digs into how bad the corruption is in Gotham and this showed exactly that. The cursive for Batman's pov got screwy at times but I did like the idea that he's so rich he has fancy words in his mind vs Gordon's blunt words.

next up on my reading list are Batgirl Year 1 and The Long Halloween.

[romanceofcrime]