0223 @jk0223 - Tumblr Blog

Superman fans praise Gunn's white savior fantasies as "anti imperialist". TVL fans salivate over their favourite lynchers being "queer representation", Marvel fans treat Namor's racist writing as a "feminist win", and Batman fans claiming ableist caricatures of asylum patients as "mental health representation".

The solution? Kill fandom.

#superman #batman #fantastic four #the vampire lestat #tvl critical #james gunn #DC #marvel mcu #iwtv #sue storm

Batfam fans fully buy into the myth of asylums being well meaning, but underfunded institutions, unless it's Tim/Jason/or any batfamily member. Suddenly they understand why institutionalization is wrong.

Always forgetting that the Batfamily works as unpaid orderlies. Instead of reckoning with the inherent ableism of its premise, we get lobotomy jokes.

#batfam #arkham asylum #why is Tim Drake and Joker Junior always at the scene of the crime #anti batfam #DC #jason Todd

Why is the show and fandom so obsessed with Louis being a pimp but not Lestat being a John? Why does Louis have to apologize for not being "emotionally available" to his lynchers? Why is Armand far more violent to show!Louis than book!Louis?

#the vampire lestat #iwtv #tvl critical #louis de pointe du lac #lestat de lioncourt #armand

If Lestat's songs are intentionally bad, why then would you blow your budget on an album? You chose to sacrifice Lestat's backstory for lines like "uwu anime eyes"?

#the vampire lestat #iwtv #lestat de lioncourt #tvl critical #the best song was from Magnus

tawked-deactivated20260714

So, a medium-size frustration I have with Harley Quinn is that she is in fact a cop. Or she was, whatever. She was someone who completed her education and immediately went into one of the last remnants of the institutionalist system. Just fuckin bee-lined for it. Should I open my own practice? Should I sign with a clinic? No, I've "always been attracted to extreme personalities," haha, so I'm either going to embrace the belief that treatment in institutionalist criminal contexts works, or I'm going to pretend to believe that so that I can hang out with the "criminally insane."

Girl. lol.

And then fandom of course doesn't really want to sit with this. Writers don't want to sit with this. When we pretend that Harley Quinn is a brilliant psychologist, we accept the conceit that Arkham as an institution and systemic reality attracts brilliance, and not the kind of mediocrity and / or outright incompetence that this attache to the prison-industrial complex attracts in real life.

Of course, writers, both of fanon and canon, love treating her as having some kind of magical Dr. Phil insight where she can understand everybody and decipher their traumas through patterns of behaviour. You know, you come away with the impression that Harley Quinn is one of the characters who would not be shocked to learn that Batman is Bruce Wayne, because she'd look at his childhood trauma and be like, oh! of course! When actually Harley Quinn is the kind of person who despite her doctorate was shocked to realize institutionalist treatment doesn't work, after being subjected to it as a patient.

This was always treated as irrelevant to her character. The DCAU, where she originates, is an explicitly pro-institutionalist text, to the point where it has a single episode devoted to acknowledging abuse in institutions where the answer is, well this one orderly is really fucked up, but it's because he's mentally ill! So now he's one of the inmates, too! Haha isn't that poetic. Even up to the Justice League cartoons, we're seeing characters openly embrace institutionalist concepts, ie. Flash sitting down with Trickster and basically saying, "take your meds and turn yourself in at the psych ward, buddy."

This is in part because Americans did not have a successful deinstitutionalist movement. There is no community care model in America, Reagan took that from you by federally shutting down institutions and then expecting the states, including such bangers as

the entire south

especially the devil's state, utah

to actually implement these systems without any real guidelines or financial support to do so.

So, on a very real cultural level, a lot of Americans see Arkham Asylum as an absolute necessity, and the only problem with it is that the patients are sooo fucked up that of course they make their asylum really really bad, which is itself an ancient trope of institutionalist / ableist media.

In the contemporary sense, Harley's background is simplified to "she was abused and then she escaped that abuse let's not dwell on it." We aren't invited to see her as a participant in a broken and fundamentally abusive system because we're supposed to see this time in her life as her being a victim.

It's just not explored. It's not discussed. You're not supposed to remember that about the character or perceive her in that way, the text doesn't lead you to those conclusions. Working at Arkham Asylum is a neutral act, unless you're like that fucked up doctor from A Serious House on Serious Earth, or you're one of the occasional doctors who like Harley Quinn fall into the trope of "aaah but instead of her making them sane, they made her craaazy!" It's so frustrating.

Personally, the only version of this character I really like is ironically from the Gotham Knights videogame, where she immediately becomes some kind of Jordan Peterson, Dr. Phil conwoman / cult leader, because that read on her seems more aware that no this is a bad person actually. She started as a bad person, presented as morally neutral because the people who wrote her consider the abuse of the mentally ill a morally neutral act provided they do a crime first.

I wanna see a Harley Quinn from Earth One (as in, the 2012 Geoff Johns setting) after Arkham's modernization, with its specific, more modern, nuanced and ultimately human take on mental illness, institutionalization, and the future concept of Arkham Asylum. But it won't happen because Detective Comics is demons and they fight me personally.

Anyway last time I said anything about Harley Quinn someone accused me of being a straight dude who wants to fuck her in her clown onesie era so rest assured that is not the case, I just want complex women to be written with complexity and for the fucked shit they do to not be smoothed over for the sake of creating a more marketable image.

I strongly believe that there's a pattern with fem characters who are able to access this sweet spot of appealing to horny teen boys and women at the same time, whereby their moral character is always massaged to keep said character from being confrontational or unlikeable to their audience, thus creating a more neutral and boring version of her. It's very Catwoman of East End, my beloathed, and I don't like it.

I especially don't like it in the form of Harley Quinn, because she's part of this broader frustrating copaganda element of the Batman conceit and setting in a way that could produce very interesting stories, but doesn't because DC can barely tolerate progressive or even critical narratives.

#harley quinn #Arkham asylum #ableism in batman #DC

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