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Cheshire
🕑 Added 2017-05-06 01:19:01 +0000 UTC If you've been following my Tumblr, you know I'm slightly weirded out by the comic book tendency to make Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy softer and gentler characters, considering that for years they've been murderers, abusers, rapists, child killers, torturers, what have you. Even if you toss the worst ten percent of canon out onto the pile with Spider-Man hitting his pregnant wife and Teen Tony and all that, there's still a scumminess baked into the characters that I think only gets white-washed because they're women and they have a yaoi relationship. The same kind of stuff fandom is hypercritical over with male characters.But it's what the audience wants--Harley and Ivy to be amoral heart-of-gold antiheroes who never do anything too bad, even if that doesn't square with like... any canon. Unless you want to say that DC Superhero Squad is the only valid take on the character.
BUT HEY, taking a stand on this is just about exactly like insisting Peter and Mary Jane shouldn't be married. So we'll go with it--Ivy and Harley are pretty much erstwhile members of the Batfamily. They fit in better than Clayface anyway.
But my compromise is that Cheshire is an absolute cunt who only cares about Lian Harper in a 'I spent nine months making this" sort of way and will unhesitatingly use her as a bargaining chip to make Roy Harper go all Fate of the Furious. In my plotting, she'll even kill children just to prove to Roy that she'll snap Lian no problem if Roy doesn't play ball with her. So a whole story arc about Roy being under Cheshire's thumb, trying to secure Lian's freedom, and none of that Artemis 'Cheshire has a heart of gold' shit. Lady Shiva's already doing that with Dinah anyway. Not to mention Dick Grayson and Deathstroke. One of these villains has to be an all-out cunt when you come down to it, honestly.
Comments
Shendude
I agree with ya, but as a nerd, I must make a minor nitpick; yaoi is boy-on-boy, girl-on-girl is called yuri.
Mobofair
Of course, Slade nuked Bludhaven himself, but that one doesn't seem to have stuck. Maybe in the Didio/Tumblr era, continuity is just a lot looser. Once we started getting continuity resets every few years, it's hard to maintain a canon that's not pick and choose.
Mobofair
Ivy was the rapist, Harley was the child murderer. It's very odd they've ended up as borderline feminist icons. I can kinda see Harley getting away with her worst deeds being discontinuity, but Ivy has a habitual pattern of murder, torture, and abuse. I'd say maybe the Nu52 wiped the slate clean with both of them, but if anyone's been unable to see the writing on the wall, it's DC.
Jack Charlotte
Wait, Harley raped people? Jesus... I feel like, in spite of your befuddlement, you still hit the nail on the head of Harley & Ivy's dynamic in "Marry the Knight" and any other works featuring them: They're both been victims of abuse in the past, took to supervillainy, but found solace in one another in an empowering Thelma & Louise kind of way, thus bending them closer to misunderstood anti-heroes than anything else. I know next to nothing about Chesire, save for her being Liam's mother. It certainly would be plausible under her character and livelihood as to why she might hate her own child and use her as leverage against her enemies. After all, being a mercenary, she was essentially put out of work for nearly a year. I recall she was genuinely distraught over her daughter's death in "Cry for Justice," but any goodwill was lost for me at that scene once Roy stormed out because he couldn't get it up.
Zechs
Cheshire also kind of nuked an entire country, used her teammate to spawn a new child so who cares if the other is killedThere's no good in there. She's so deplorable that Shiva and even Slade hate her. There's a special kind of evil when those two actually hate you.
