Apologies for getting distracted by current events last week; thus is the nature of the 24 hour news cycle, even for a humble content producer like myself. Two weeks ago I had promised to circle back to the Arkham Knight Harley Quinn DLC, and while I’ve heard tell of a new set dropping, I’d rather talk about Harley.
Now, it’s worth mentioning here that I haven’t beaten the Harley DLC or the main Arkham Knight game. In each part I ran into an annoyingly difficult boss fight. In the main storyline, it’s a complete bit of idiocy in which you have to outrace a giant drill tank in a subterranean tunnel, where all it takes is a tap and you’re dead. I probably could have beaten it, but the ratio of reset time to boss challenge was literally ten to one, and that’s boring. So fuck that. The last thing I have patience for is a video game wasting my time.
{ETA: Curtis, of the wonderful Planeswalker’s Guide to Earth, has informed me that the apparent death of Oracle is revealed to be a hoax in the end of the game. It’s our mutual opinion that such a reveal doesn’t make the character arc for Barbara any less awful. He also pointed me to 4:40ish in this YouTube, in which Harley’s ass is exposed because she’s been thrown over a shoulder and shot in an exploitative fashion. That’s awful, but so is Arkham Knight.}
With Harley, my boss difficulties are primarily an issue of not having enough time with the character to get a sense of how she controls. I ran up against Nightwing, and not only does he have electric escrima sticks, but he also has an unceasing legion of backup adds. I suspect this is one of those situations where a difficult boss fight is meant to disguise how short the DLC was; all told, the thing takes about two hours to complete, which is nothing when compared to the DLC from the Borderlands or Fallout properties.
Still, I don’t think there’s any ending that can change the fact that the Harley Quinn DLC is a terrible take on the character. I’ll lay my biases out; I was a latchkey child for a significant period of time, and I’d always come home, let myself in, and then watch Batman: the Animated Series in the hour that it took for my mother to make it home. She wasn’t a television fan, so there was an air of “forbidden fruit” around this practice, and I grew very attached to the characters.
My favorite character, by far, was Harley Quinn. While her initial appearances were somewhat off model, once they started developing her personality, I was hooked. Even from a young age I got the whole “sometimes you love bad people” thing, and the fact that she was smart, athletic, and still managed to be pretty and outgoing… it was cool. Harley was cool. And the way they wrote Harley was cool.
This was the Harley I grew up on.
After she got brought into DC main continuity, climbing out of a rocket and getting juiced up by her queer partner in crime, Poison Ivy, she started to lose some of her luster. Still, I read her stand alone comic, I read the more cutesy “Harley and Ivy” book for the like three issues that it got, and I even read through Gotham City Sirens, despite the irritating name.
And irritating cover art. The underlying story wasn’t as awful as it was made to seem, but this was definitely where the objectification of Harley and friends started to get bad.
Back then, Harley was still, for lack of a better term, a boss bitch. She ran a gang, went back to Arkham as a therapist, died and then got kicked out of Hell, and generally was more force of nature than malicious. She was never scared, though. Her bravery was inspirational. And she did it all in her goofy harlequin outfit.
Even in this page, where Harley has been drowned and a cop friend is chasing to save her, Harley saves herself. And she looks terrifying doing it. All while wearing her full-body outfit.
To be fair to Arkham Knight (an undeserved kindness, but I can be bigger than the writers for that piece of shit), part of the destruction of that version of Harley Quinn happened after Flashpoint. Barry Allen changed history and all of a sudden Harley was some punk with split-color hair and corsets a drag queen would die for. I stopped reading Harley during those years, but half the appeal of the Arkham franchise was it was supposed to be drawing primarily from the DCAU and the old DC continuity, which is why Arkham City had callouts to many different women that did not survive to New 52.
All the same, the Arkham Knight take on Harley Quinn feels particularly vile. Up until this point in the series, Harley isn’t portrayed as well as she had been in those other sources, but the main crime against her character involved her wearing inappropriately sexy clothing. And then this game comes along.
This is her in the main story. She looks like she might even be wearing appropriate clothing!
She isn’t.
Arkham Knight takes everything powerful about Harley Quinn and filters it through the male gaze. She’s not just crazy, she’s sexy manic pixie girl crazy. She’s not just a moll, she’s a prize to be claimed now that Joker’s dead. And she’s dumb! So very, very dumb.
And yet not as ill-served as Ivy is, since it seems like all Ivy ever does in the Arkham series is get poisoned and manipulated by men. But hey, it’s a woman saving her this time, so… progress?
This was shocking to me, since her entire pre-Flashpoint characterization was that she was brilliant and subtle… like a less malicious Hannibal Lecter. But now she can barely sneak, and she makes a unique amount of noise when she takes out a Bludhaven police officer.
Anyway, the next section of this article is just going to be stills from the game with explanations of why I found them to be fucked up. So, enjoy?
This is Harley’s madness vision, by the way. It’s her version of Detective Mode, only there’s glowing writing everywhere and it’s that sexy Malkavian sort of crazy. You stupid mug.
Anyway, one irritating thing involves the Penguin trying to buy Harley. This is the start of a series of terrible snippets of dialogue in which the Penguin is bad at taking no for an answer.
Harley is pretty clear about saying no. Also, this is one of the random and fairly nonsensical phrases that her crazy-eyes project on the wall.
The prostitution/sexual conquest thing really comes out in the voice acting. It’s pretty awful. Also, look at that terrible costume! She’s wearing a fluffy skirt!
But even then, she has to rely on Joker as a reason to avoid jumping to moll for Penguin, because that was the only way the writers could picture Harley standing on her own.
Anyway, I stopped screenshotting these things after the two million mark, but Penguin continues to be pretty fucking skeevy as he talks at you for the duration of the entire DLC.
While Penguin talks at you the entire time, half of his shit involves some sort of misogyny directed at the player’s avatar. So… that was fun to experience. SO. MUCH. FUN.
There is also an additional annoying thing where “Harleen” will occasionally also talk at you, and then Harley will yell at her. Because… multiple personalities?
The Harleen voice is usually not helpful. Here, the Harleen voice is like “I’m scared,” and it’s like the only time Harley agrees with it. Because Arkham Harley is a coward.
Harley isn’t the biggest fan of Harleen.
But considering Harleen basically calls her an attention whore here, I really can’t blame Harley. Which is part of the frustration! The best Harleys all had the ability to pass as normal in public, something this crass manic pixie would have major difficulties doing.
It’s pretty horrible. Worse, they’ve announced a Batgirl DLC, and between the shittiness of the Harley Quinn product and their fridging of Barbara Gordon, I have no reason to think it’ll be less of a train wreck.
A fridging that they seem to realize they should be ashamed about, and yet still seem to be bragging about in the DLC. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BATGIRL, ROCKSTEAD?
It’s a shame… I’d love to play a real Harley Quinn game. The one I’d make would play more like Saint’s Row crossed with Deus Ex than anything from the Arkham franchise. Manipulation would be just as, if not more, important as combat. Poison Ivy would be a major supporting character, not just some damsel in distress, perhaps playing a role similar to that of Elizabeth in Bioshock Infinite, crossed with Kinsey from Saint’s Row. The game would start with Harley getting rocketed out of Joker’s gang, a la her comic book origin, but over the course of the game the Joker would be revealed to be the big bad, his completely anarchic philosophy clashing with Harley’s pragmatism and Ivy’s conservationist tendencies.
Their toxic relationship was one of the only abusive dynamics I saw called out as such when I was a kid. So… that spoke to me.
Maybe Batman would even be the damsel in distress in that game, with the Bat Family reaching out to Harley to try to broker his release.
That’s the type of thing I think would be an interesting use of the property. Instead, there’s three levels of you creeping through a police station, except for all those times you’re not sneaking, as Penguin propositions you on some sort of encrypted radio. Rocksteady should lose their licensing agreement over this one, and frankly I’d be quite happy if DC would just stop pissing on the characters I grew up admiring.
Women read comics. Women game. And yet, apparently women don’t get hired for the writing staff on major game franchises. It’s just a sad waste, and Harley deserves better.
Characters like this one. Characters who stand on their own two feet.
That was always the moral of her character though. Harley always deserves better, only without thinking she’s better than other people. That’s a good lesson. This was not.
Jess Stirba also wanted to see Renee Montoya’s Question, but god knows how awful that would have turned out to be.
PS: I recognize there was a trailer released over the weekend for this Suicide Squad abomination. I’ve always been more of a Secret Six fan than a Suicide Squad booster, but considering they seem to be drawing from the post-Flashpoint comics and the gritty, tone-deaf take on Man of Steel, I don’t even want to add a click to what I fear is going to ultimately be a doomed project.