CW: Referenced past noncon and torture, victim-blaming language

They have to sit with something between them, and it’s fucking ridiculous, but Vince wants to have this conversation more than he cares about how absolutely stupid it is that he can’t even look the younger man in the eyes when he says it.

“Look, I know that you blame me-”

“I don’t blame you,” Kauri says on the other side of the large piece of posterboard, a science-fair trifold, like one of them is a priest and the other is confessing their sins. Only neither of them is pure enough to preach anything to the other.

Kauri’s voice is flat, and empty. Vince closes his eyes and wishes he had a drink in his hand. It’d be easier to do this that way.

“Yeah, you do. Because I left.”

“You ran,” Kauri says, a little softer. “I talked to... to Nat about it, a little. She says you didn’t leave, you ran away... too. Like I did.”

Vince licks at his lips - they feel so weirdly dry - and leans slowly forward, putting his head in his hands. “Yeah, kid. I ran.”

“I... I loved him,” Kauri whispers. “They made me love him. Because you didn’t.”

Vince feels the words like needles under his skin. “... I know that.”

“Why-”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Vince snaps, and Kauri flinches - he can hear the sound of his sudden movement on the other side of the board. “Shit, I’m sorry. It’s just. I’ve never talked to anyone about what he did to me, not really, other than my therapist...”

“Did he... did he tell you that you were too stupid for anyone else to love you?” Kauri asks, and his voice is small.

Vince is caught in the memory, all at once. It washes over him like a wave pulling him to the riptide, ripping him under the surface where there’s no more air to breathe. “Yeah,” he breathes. “Not... not just like that, but when we were friends, he would say things... that always made me, made me think-”

“That you were stupid.”

“Yeah.”

There’s silence, from either side of the board, for a second.

“Did he tell you that you were so lucky-”

“That he loved me?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.” Vince laughs, bitterly. There are tears lacing his voice. “He used to tell me I was so fucking lucky he was my friend. Kauri, listen, I know nothing I can say can fix what he did to you, but... but I’m so fucking sorry. If I had just stayed-”

“You’d be dead.” 

Another silence.

Quirky Starter Challenge.

The Image is HERE.

“Lilly ....” Ivar started and then sighed as his beautiful woman shot him an angry look and continued to count out the money she would need for her ticket. Ivar was not a good man. Ruthless, intense and frequently too rough, he was still leaps and bounds ahead of her father. A man so vicious and cruel that he made Ivar look like a puppy. Although she was better now than when they first started dating, she could still be insecure and a little clingy. They had argued earlier when Ivar caught her agreeing to go see her father again. He had hung up the phone on her and banned her from going to visit. The argument had lasted a few hours, her convinced her father was better now and that he only wanted a chance to apologize. 

Ivar was not so persuaded. He knew men like Lucian. The two were very similar. If he had a cruel family, then Ivar could have been exactly like Lucian. But his family was good if imperfect. And it had shaved off some of his rough edges. Lilly was too sweet, too good, and she believed in Ivar. Ivar appreciated that. Unfortunately, she also believed in her father, which Ivar did not appreciate. “You can look at me all you want, but you are not leaving. If you push this, you are going to end up over my knee. I am not willing to compromise. You are not going to visit your father. Period.”

Rhyia was a contradiction - both soft and gentle and yet a fierce shieldmaiden. It had taken time, for the pair to grow into friends and then something more. A soft kiss one night had become something more, slowly, gently. But she had been too nervous for it to go much further. She flushed brightly at every gentle touch. It was only when he finally saw them. The scars given to her by her father that he understood. He lifted the length of soft fabric and used it to cover her eyes. He tied it gently and then kissed her shoulder, a brush of beard against the pale skin. “It is me ... just me ... remember.” he murmured quietly as he slowly pulled down the fabric of her gown, tugging at the ties that held it together.

It not only adds nuance to the more...duplicitous nature of Harleen but it does so without turning her into a well-meaning psychiatrist driven mad by the hubris of trying to understand the Joker. The two modern trends I’ve seen when it comes to recontextualizing Harley’s origin story in a time where “problematic” and “toxic” is (overused) in media analysis is to make Harley a total victim or to just quickly handwave it away. Stjepan did neither of these things, but instead turned the origin story on its head.

For example, that affair with her professor. It’s referred to as a fling that tainted her reputation. For those of you who don’t know, because you know, I’m not going to expect everyone to have watched B:TAS (or read that old comic) because it’s only recently been easy to stream, in her origin story episode, Harley is shown as someone who wasn’t especially interested in working hard for her grades and instead flirted (or slept with) her professors in exchange for passing marks. (Side note: Incredible that B:TAS was considered a kid’s show but it had a lot of implicit references that were pretty adult.) There’s a subtle grace to the way that script got flipped. Harley still has that nasty reputation when it reality. she just ended up making a very poor decision.

Harleen is soaked in a thousand little reasons she broke, not just the traditional “she fell in love with Joker” narrative. She’s been emotionally isolated since college and doesn’t have a lot of people close to her (ie: no real support system), shortly after the traumatic first encounter with Joker she’s clearly suffering from symptoms of PTSD. She has horrible nightmares, has trouble sleeping, has daily conversations with Arkham’s inmates including Joker, who acts increasingly familiar with her as time goes on, all against the backdrop of Harvey Dent’s transformation into Two Face and a violent vigilante group taking crime into their own hands. 

She’s working on proving a hypothesis that living in Gotham is like living in a warzone and the barrage of violence and fear erodes at the empathy in the minds of its citizens, which exacerbates the criminality in the city. The tragic irony of Harleen is no longer that she’s a “therapist that fell in love with the Joker”, the irony becomes that she exemplifies the end point of her hypothesis.

Ugh, it’s so good.

I will briefly touch on the Jarley content at the core of the story, and yeah, it’s romantic. Although it’s broadly implied that Joker got a file on Harley to study in order to manipulate her and used her growing empathy/lust for him against her, Stjepan seems to lean in that Joker loves Harley in his own way. Much as I’m not a fan of Jarley, I don’t mind this. An abuser doesn’t come right out with the terrorizing. Even in Mad Love, even in SuSquad 2016 it portrays Joker as winning her over with expressions of softness. So yeah, it doesn’t bother me that Stjepan isn’t coming out the gate portraying his abject cruelty to her. She’s the anomaly, the one he spared on a whim. Sucks to say in this case, but what drives a romance is being able to show how and why a couple might want to be together. Stjepan did a very good job writing the relationship, sorry, but I stand by my assertion that it wasn’t romanticized. Thankfully, he appears to endgame Harlivy, which perhaps makes it a bit more palatable.