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psyclownsis-a-blog · 7 years

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LITTLE CHARACTER THINGS

just a fun little character game. fill in the below categories with 3-5 things that your character can be identified by.

repost & tag away !

tagged by: @nchntrss tagging: @bangflags @adrenalinesaint @puzzleborn @purrsuasion @bestvictim @looneyed @comegente (yes im tagging u twice bc ilu) and anyone else who wants to do it !!

EMOTIONS / FEELINGS:

001. love-- but like, the kind of love that’s just too big to keep inside, the kind you can’t stop thinking about, the kind that makes you smile like an idiot at random times throughout the day. doodling hearts and flowers all over your notebook margins love. automatically thinking of them when you see stuff they’d like love. romantic love. platonic love. all the love. so much love.

002. laughing really hard over something you find genuinely funny-- the simpler, the better. the kind of giddy you get after reading something random and stupid on the internet but it just gets you and you end up laughing about it for half an hour afterwards. laughing at dog videos. laughing at puns. laughing at a funny face your friend just made. snorting, spilling your drink out your nose, cackling, clutching your side. that kind of laughter.

003. looking at somebody and imagining what your life would be like if you fell in love and got married. wondering what they’re like in bed. wondering how it would taste to kiss them. wondering how they’d propose to you. the thought disappears as suddenly as it came in the first place, but it wasn’t unpleasant while it lasted.

004. everyone you love is so genuinely utterly good in your mind that you can’t fathom why anyone would ever dislike them. you sniff out sadness like a bloodhound and you want to track the cause and snarl scarily and sink your teeth into it and crush vertebrae. nobody hurts your friends. nobody.

005. a man has hurt you and you still love him. this is not in spite of him hurting you. this is because you hurt him back in equal measure. because he is the king and you are the queen. you are the queen. you carry sledgehammers and you sic wild dogs. you do not let people hurt you anymore.

GREETINGS:

001. a running jump into your arms or onto your back and her arms thrown around you carelessly.

002. a big long loud kiss on your cheek, MMMMMMMMWAH, usually accompanied by lipstick.

003. all five fingers wiggling and a childish giggle.

004. “hey, bay-bee!”

005. “hiya!”

COLORS:

001. red. bright red. coke bottle red, cherry on top of the ice cream red, candy apple red.

002. blue. the kind of innocent color you picture when you think of cloudless skies. in the right light it turns into the sterile and washed-out shade of hospital tiles.

003. pink. glitter confetti, scar tissue, sticky lip gloss. the most eye-catching highlighter in your backpack. feminine and cute and lurid and loud and impossible to ignore and sometimes painful to look at.

004. yellow. the sun with a smiley face in the upper corner of a child’s drawing.

SCENTS:

001. strawberry shampoo.

002. elephant ears. you’re at an amusement park and somebody just walked by with an elephant ear and you can’t remember the last time you had one and your mouth is watering and you’re feeling in your pockets for change to buy one.

003. cigarette smoke. hers? her boyfriend’s? her boy friend’s? nobody knows. it seems like a physical manifestation of the phrase “relying on the kindness of strangers”.

004. cake. maybe she was baking one, or maybe it’s her perfume, or maybe she was eating one. or maybe all three.

005. blood. more often than not it’s someone else’s that she gets all over her. she’s enthusiastic, not effective.

CLOTHING:

001. the harlequin costume.

002. a dark grey pullover hoodie with the letters GSU printed across the chest. it’s pilled and faded and even has a few seams starting to fall apart, but she refuses to get rid of it. maybe it’s the pride she has from getting her doctorate. maybe it’s something else from her college career. she’ll never tell.

003. fishnets stockings. you think you’ve seen her wearing an intact pair maybe once in the whole time you’ve known her. the knees are always missing.

004. a black combat boot on one foot and a red one on the other.

005. a man’s worn-out blueish-greyish-blackish t-shirt that can only cover one shoulder at a time and reaches halfway to her knees.

OBJECTS:

001. scented markers.

002. sledgehammers. pieces of things that used to be human body parts may or may not be present.

003. stuffed animals. every single one has a name and personal history.

004. heart-shaped glasses.

005. lipstick.

VICES / BAD HABITS:

001. popping gum and slurping soda.

002. sleeping around.

003. biting her nails.

004. falling for all the right people in all the wrong ways.

005. flirting with death. or, at least, giving death a hand-job in the back of the movie theater.

BODY LANGUAGE:

001. kicking her feet.

002. puckering, chewing, sucking, biting. her lips, i mean.

003. twirling and twirling and twirling and twirling.

004. propping her chin on her hand.

005. everything is open. her heart, her arms, her legs, her mouth. somehow she still makes it look innocent.

AESTHETICS:

001. 90s glitter glam.

002. sweet girl, but her mascara’s smeared and you saw her smoking cigarettes on the fire escape last night.

003. neon at night.

004. sunlight streaming through the window and making her blonde hair glow.

005. lay among the flowers. wonder what they’re whispering about. be content to know it is too beautiful for your human mind to understand.

#dash meme

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psyclownsis-a-blog · 7 years

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Can you elaborate a little on how Joker helps Harley because given their canon history it really doesn't seem like he does more than stunt her mental growth and harm her

okay well the thing you have to keep in mind when i’m talking about this stuff is that i’m talking specifically about my interpretation of harley and my interpretation of her relationship with joker, not harley in general as a character, and you also have to keep in mind that there is a difference between harley being emotionally stable and happy and harley overcoming her mental illness and living a healthy life with healthy relationships. as for canon interpretations of her relationship with joker, they’ve had just as many fun moments as they have un-fun moments, and the way their relationship is written varies massively from series to series. you can argue all day one way or another about their relationship using nothing but canon evidence and you won’t get any closer to having 100% agreement on whether it’s good or bad (“bad and acceptable/enjoyable” or “bad and must be stopped immediately” are probably more accurate terms). something else to keep in mind is that i am talking specifically about joker helping harley come back to baseline after some kind of mental breakdown or upset, as opposed to joker helping harley become a better person or something (he doesn’t). so i’m? not? really sure if you’re genuinely asking or trying to be passive aggressive? but either way i’m gonna give you a genuine answer¯\_(ツ)_/¯

harley is delusional, her delusions are extremely pervasive and warp her entire grasp of reality, reality as she knows it is built on the concept of Good Guys and Bad Guys that joker instilled in her when he was her patient, okay, we’ve established this. the factors we have to look at to answer your question are:

harley’s mental illness and how it affects her daily life

joker’s relationship with harley/joker’s feelings for harley/the revenge arc

how being around joker affects harley’s mental health

how people other than joker tend to handle her mental illness and emotional needs

1. okay so! we’ve already talked about that first one a lot, but i’m gonna talk about it a little bit more just to clarify. the Good Guy/Bad Guy delusions were shaped and fostered by joker when she was his doctor (however, they did not originate with him; the best way i can explain it is that she/her pre-joker trauma planted the seed of her own delusions and he watered those seeds until they bloomed), but i don’t think he intended for them to become so strong, and he certainly didn’t intend to have to deal with her delusional ass for presumably the rest of his life. regression as a coping mechanism is also something joker tends to encourage in her, but it is something she was already doing before she met him. both of these things contribute to her inability or unwillingness to fully comprehend death/her inability to fully understand that she is hurting people, but that issue was initially shaped by trauma that occurred mostly outside of her experiences with joker (guy kopski’s death and arnold wesker’s death). these issues manifest as a regressed and childish persona: she has a very simplistic, childlike worldview, and a very simplistic, childlike resistance to unhappiness. on the level of daily life, this puts her at odds with some people, because they require her to act like an adult and take responsibility for her actions (ie, batman telling her she needs to be serious because “this isn’t a game” or something like that). joker is perfectly content to let her act however she wants as long as it doesn’t interfere with his own work/plans/whatever, so in that sense, he “helps” because he doesn’t challenge her worldview. this is not a healthy dynamic at all, but it’s a dynamic that allows harley to function happily within the parameters of her delusions and psychosis.

2. which brings me to the second point: joker and harley have been together on and off for about seven years at this point in my blog-canon timeline. they know each other better than anyone else. they can rely on each other. it hasn’t always been pretty, and it has certainly never been a healthy relationship, but they are more or less constants in each other’s lives. the fact that they have a relatively stable relationship at this point is entirely due to the revenge arc. the revenge arc takes place after the events of mad love and after harley’s recuperation time with poison ivy and catwoman. once she had recovered to mostly fighting-fit, harley took off, kidnapped joker, and spent several weeks methodically torturing him and inflicting every wound on him that he’d ever inflicted on her before dropping him off half dead at the gcpd. she was doing this out of anger, yes, but it wasn’t just anger. if it was just anger, she would have killed him. she still loved him. (is that healthy? no! this is fiction! relationships in fiction do not have to be healthy or unhealthy to be well-written or well-developed or interesting or even enjoyable! you can enjoy something in fiction while recognizing that it is unacceptable in reality and not wanting it to ever be reality! for example: zombie apocalypse scenarios!) her reasoning was that if he could go through all that and still want to be with her– if he felt the same way about their relationship as she did– then she would go back to him and they’d figure things out. if not, then she’d leave him in the dust. after some time, he did come back to her, and they’ve been (mostly) equal partners in crime ever since. their relationship is tumultuous and unhealthy, yes, but it’s more or less a constant in both their lives. they’re used to relying on each other and working with each other– they feel at home with each other in ways they rarely feel with other people. so in that sense, joker “helps” harley because they have a very well-established rapport, and he provides her with (relative) constancy and the sense of having a home she belongs to.

3. harley thinks and acts differently with joker than she does with other people. harley desperately needs to be liked and accepted, and in order to achieve that, she often compartmentalizes and puts on different “faces” with different people. (every human being on the planet does this, whether they realize it or not; it’s called facework and you probably have it to thank in part for getting your job, starting your relationships, and a bazillion other things). being with him, and thus being exposed to his mindset and manifestos, pushes her to adopt a more violent and less empathetic face. that being said, being with him encourages her to fall deeper into her psychosis, to view the world in extremely simple and child-like terms. she doesn’t have to think about who she is as a person or what she deserves or what she’s truly capable of doing; she can just fall into this old familiar role. and this role fits her. this role was created for herself, by herself. so in this sense, joker “helps” her by not putting her in situations where she feels some kind of internal struggle, which can lead to mental upset as i have discussed before.

3.5. note: being with poison ivy pushes harley to be a better person and adopt a less destructive and more empathetic face. joker may “help” harley by not challenging her at all, but ivy could help harley much more by constructively challenging her. however, their relationship (again, as i interpret it) does have obstacles to this end, and those will be discussed in the next bullet point.

4. people other than joker tend to react to her mental illness and emotional needs very poorly. they often expect her to be able to support herself completely on an emotional front, to function perfectly fine when alone on a mental front, and essentially seem to believe that harley is under some kind of evil influence from the joker which will magically remove itself with zero fallout once they break up. let me make this perfectly clear: harley had mental health problems long before she met joker. he did not somehow “make her crazy”; she had been prone to neuroticism and dramatic mood swings ever since she was a child, and the more severe psychosis she has today had been developing from the time of guy kopski’s death, several months before she ever met the joker. while the joker did influence the final shape and nature of harley’s mental illness, he was not at all the cause of it, and thus, his presence in or absence from her life is not going to dictate her ability to function. it is also worth noting that, due to her mental state, she would have fixated on anyone the way she fixated on joker-- she needed for someone to take care of her and make her feel part of something the way guy kopski did--, developed the same type of delusions and psychosis, and turned to a life of crime. all joker did was provide harley with an opportunity to act out the way she wanted to. so! that addressed, let’s move on to how people other than joker tend to handle her mental illness and emotional needs: most notably, batman, bruce wayne, poison ivy, and catwoman.

batman. batman constantly exploits her mental illness and her emotional weaknesses. while this is understandable as a way for the hero to get the upper hand in his conflicts with the villain, that does not make it okay, and it certainly does not do anything to make harley’s lifestyle healthier. batman does not come from a perspective of wanting to help harley. batman comes from a perspective of wanting to hurt and disorient harley enough that he can take her out quickly and easily. this happens so often that his go-to method for handling harley at this point seems to be “if i can’t take her out within the first three hits, i’m going to start pushing buttons until she breaks down”. it’s cruel. it’s unhealthy. it pushes her further and further down the rabbit hole of “i am just a Bad Guy doing my job and the Good Guys take things way too far and make everything hard for everyone else”. batman reacts in incredibly negative ways to her mental illness, and he dismisses her emotional needs entirely in order to reach his end goal of catching joker or ivy or whoever harley’s working with, seemingly with no care over how his actions are going to affect her mental or physical health. additionally, he justifies these actions-- which, personally, i classify as going past the realm of standard hero/villain damage and into the realm of straight up abuse-- by victim blaming her for her own psychosis and drastic emotional needs (both of which are almost entirely the result of some kind of trauma or neglect in her life), essentially, if not literally, saying “normally, i wouldn’t be this mean to somebody, but since she’s boning my greatest enemy, she must be insane, and we’ve been doing this for so long that she must be a lost cause, and since joker’s not here, i’m just gonna take out all my rage on her, and like, if she didn’t want me to do this, she should just stop being mentally ill and doing things in ways that are dictated by her mental illness and unfulfilled emotional needs”. (see: mad love, where he manipulates her into calling the joker even though he knows it will certainly result in her being hurt, and then does absolutely nothing to address the fact that joker pushed her out of a 4-6 story window which probably killed her. like, i’m not trying to be a villain apologist here, that’s the last thing i want, but that is? a really shitty thing for batman to do? and if he didn’t treat harley like that over and over again i would say it was super out of character for him to (a) let it happen in the first place and (b) not seem to care if it killed her at all? but he does treat her that way? repeatedly? constantly? i’ve made a post about it before and this is already getting super long so i’m not gonna list all the other times he pulls this shit on her but like. trust me when i say “batman exploiting harley’s mental illness in ways he knows will get her hurt and then not caring about how badly hurt she gets and justifying it with the grossest victim blaming logic” is pretty much the go-to routine for their fights now.)

bruce wayne. yes, bruce and batman are the same person, but harley doesn’t (consciously) now that, and the two personas react to her mental illness in drastically different ways. batman comes from a perspective of violent and impulsive exploitation, but bruce comes from a perspective that’s... well... almost a calmer and more calculated exploitation. does bruce want to help her shape up re-enter society? yes. does bruce put personal investment into helping harley do that? sometimes, yes. is he doing it more or less out of the goodness of his own heart? yes, absolutely. but here’s the thing: bruce only tries to help harley once harley is no longer perceived a threat to batman. bruce’s good will towards harley is entirely conditional. he has left her to rot in arkham just as much as, if not more than, he has come to her aid about parole. he follows the fallacy that joker has some kind of evil influence on her, and that once that influence is removed, she’ll be perfectly normal. that’s not how it works. a good example of this is in the detective comics issue where harley and batman team up to defeat ventriloquist ii: bruce, as a member of arkham’s board, denies harley parole at the beginning of the comic, despite her being clearly desperate to prove she’s ready to re-enter society. later, as batman, he has no sympathy for her mourning of the original ventriloquist or her anger that his title and m.o. has been taken by someone else-- not even with the knowledge that the original ventriloquist was her only friend in arkham, and were it not for him, she probably would have committed suicide. it’s not until the very end of the comic, after harley has acknowledged that arnold wesker was a criminal and turns herself back into arkham-- essentially, after she submits to batman as the moral standard who is always right in his eyes (not “after she admits that she has made poor decisions and is trying to atone for her actions as a criminal” or “after she explains to him that her perception of morality may be different but that does not mean it is entirely wrong and invalid”, both of which she does if i’m remembering correctly, but “after she submits to him as the moral standard who is always right in his eyes” by acknowledging wesker’s villainy and not resisting when he brings her back to arkham). again: bruce’s actions do fall into a pattern that is more or less default for hero/villain dynamics, but given the context of these interactions and the way they repeat over and over again, his actions begin to move outside the realm of standard hero/villain interactions and into the realm of abuse.

poison ivy. ivy loves harley! harley loves ivy! that does not change the fact that they both have their own individual problems that can foster an unhealthy relationship dynamic at times! ivy wants harley to break away from joker entirely because ivy has been in an abusive relationship (jason woodrue) and broken out of that abusive relationship and understands both how difficult it can be and how much better your life will be if you do get out. that’s awesome! that’s great! ivy loves harley and she wants to see harley grow as a person, to be more independent, to be stronger emotionally. those are all honorable and good and altruistic and healthy things for ivy to want for harley. however, in order for harley to achieve that, she needs someone who understands that the joker isn’t just her partner, he’s part of her backstory that cannot be erased. she won’t ever be able to leave him behind and say “i wish i never met him” or “i am what i am because of me and he had nothing to do with it”, and she would never want to, because it simply isn’t true. but, that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t ever want to leave him behind, period. the problems with harley and ivy’s relationship stem from ivy’s inability to understand the full extent of harley’s relationship with and feelings for the joker; thus, when harley expresses something to the extent of “this man was a huge part of my life and it wasn’t super horrible and it made me who i am so i’m not going to dismiss it and may even remember it fondly”, ivy hears something like “i owe this man my life and because of my perceived debt to him for ‘creating’ me i am reluctant to completely break away from him”. so ivy tries to force harley to cut joker out of her life, which harley can’t do, and since ivy does not understand the full extent of harley’s relationship with joker, she can’t provide adequate emotional support if harley needs it in the process of breaking away from him, and it is just. a huge mess. and i hope and pray with all my sapphic heart that one day harley and ivy will sit down and talk frankly and get this all out in the open so they can live happily ever after without joker coming in to fuck everything up. or ivy/harley/joker happens. like-- i’m not picky. i just want harley to be happy. but yeah, anyway, back to what i was saying: ivy reacts to harley’s mental illness and emotional needs pretty well, except when it comes to stuff about joker, which comes up a lot, and so whenever they come close to making any progress they kind of sabotage themselves and it all falls apart.

catwoman. selina and harley’s dynamic here is pretty similar to ivy and harley’s in this sense, i think, except that selina seems generally content to live and let live wrt harley and joker as long as he/his relationship with harley doesn’t become a problem in her own life. the problems with selina and harley come from harley being unable to reconcile selina’s gray morality with her own Good Guys vs. Bad Guys worldview. selina may not understand harley’s psychosis or her relationship with joker entirely, but she doesn’t have the same bias that ivy does about it, and that allows selina to be more supportive of harley emotionally. however, selina and harley have had various fights and falling outs over the years, and given harley’s mindset, it’s easy for harley to convince herself that selina is either 100% A Bad Guy And Safe To Be Around or 100% A Good Guy Who Is A Traitor And Deserves To Die. it also doesn’t help that harley sees selina’s relationship with batman almost the same way selina sees her relationship with joker: acceptable as long as the man remains at arm’s length, because if he gets too close, the woman will choose him over her friends. the basic issue between selina and harley, i think, is that selina does not address and often does not acknowledge harley’s relationship with joker until it becomes a problem, and by then, it is no longer a discussion, it is selina telling harley what her options are. harley sees this as a double standard, given selina’s relationship with batman, and from there it is very easy for her to see selina as a Good Guy in disguise and deem them enemies. it’s not something selina does; it’s harley’s inability to process what selina does in a healthy way. (note: imo, selina has every right to handle harley and joker’s relationship this way, and she is one of very few people in harley’s life who provide her this kind of “me or him” discipline in a way that’s not an ultimatum. she lets harley do her thing and she doesn’t want to be involved in that thing and when that thing is over she and harley can get back together again, and as long as that thing doesn’t infringe on selina’s life, she doesn’t really pay it any mind. compared to harley’s other relationships, that’s actually a pretty healthy dynamic.)

so! wowza! this got really long! now you see why it was in my drafts for months on end! to summarize: i am talking here specifically about joker helping harley return to baseline operations after some kind of mental upset, not about joker helping harley on a more holistic level, because he really doesn’t. however, there is a difference between him not helping her and him actively sabotaging her. he does not actively sabotage her (anymore). joker and harley have known each other for the better part of a decade, and they know each other better than anyone else; they have an established rapport and they are essentially each other’s home. because of this, joker often understands her mental illness and emotional needs better than others, and is better able to give her what she needs in regards to grounding and support after a mental breakdown. many people in harley’s life react to her mental illness and emotional needs very poorly or even exploit it for their own ends, or they may unsuccessfully try to support her because they do not understand her needs. this is not to say that everyone except joker is terrible at helping harley recover, nor is it to say that joker is the only one who understands harley’s mental illness and emotional needs-- for example, jonathan crane has known harley since she was in college, and given his profundity in psychiatry, he’s probably better at helping her recover than joker is. arnold wesker, when he was alive, also helped her just as much if not more than joker does. ivy could help harley much more than joker-- on all levels-- if she and harley addressed the miscommunications and misunderstandings between them.

i hope this makes sense and i hope it wasn’t too hard to read orz and thank you for sending this question and the other ones before it, they were very involved and have made me delve into harley’s character much deeper than i have been lately. peace dude ✌

#Anonymous #answered

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