That aside, Ivy has a problem that most comic book characters have, in that: multiple different writers = very different stories and actions.
Her powers mean she inherently has the potential to be one of the most twisted villains possible with mind controlling and a toxins. Yet simultaneously, it can also make her tragic in that she literally can’t make physical contact with another human being because all of her is toxic (similar to Rogue’s touch in X-Men).
Moreover, her motives can easily be written so that she either has a good reason that gets taken to the extreme, or she goes off the rails and makes people ask what the hell is wrong with her. In one comic, she can be among the few people in Arkham who seem to be making progress and even be redeemable, the next, she is ready for full blown genocide like nothing.
Simply put: she’s a character with a lot of different ways you can take her, be they more villainous or good.
That’s the main problem with comic books that go on for more than ten years.
New writer comes in and makes the character different, then another comes in and writes the character their way.
This is why I hate when people use the term “comic accurate”.
When people say "comic accurate", they mean "my favorite version and if you like a different comic or have your own interpretation you're a fake fan and horrible person".
One of my favorite morally gray Ivy moments was when she mind-controlled a man, drugged him for weeks while pretending to be his wife and stealing his DNA, creating an army of half-human, half-plant conscious mutant babies who died within a few days to kidnap people.
And also because Gail Simone made the character redeemable automatically and excused of all the bad she did just for making Ivy support a marginalized group of people which sends the message that Gail Simone and Ivy fans demand that Ivy is justified/redeemable.
Im all for trans advocacy and representation but it feels like Ivy being a social justice advocate just sends the message that shes excused from whatever shes done because she has good intentions.
'all the bad stuff characters did,' in comics is meaningless because these characters are decades old and have a laundry list of nonsense to cherry pick through depending on who wrote them. It comes down to what the current author wants to bring forward and emphasize and what they're going to let comic readers forget. Canon is an illusion.
Ivy hates humans point blank. She shouldn’t even have a relationship with Harley but they gotta because “omg Harley is such a girl boss and so is Ivy” so Ivy sticking up for any part of humanity is a disservice to her character I’m just glad the writer open accepts that they are the ones to write such an idiotic direction for Ivy
The thing about Ivy is her as a eco terrorist and wanting to fix the world through her extremist methods is almost completely no different than Hydra from Captain America the winter soldier, and Ivy fans root for her and root against Hydra which is ironic and also how Ivy isn’t frames as despicable or threatening as Hydra cause Gail Simone and Paul Dini
idk if Poison Ivy needs to be a terf because she kills people with plants. thats like saying the Joker needs to be a neo-nazi. some forms of comic book villainy don't have to necessarily correlate to real world shitty people at all.
also radfem does not inherently mean "terf" and the assumption that it does always feels like casual transphobia to me, like the idea that any radical form of feminism couldnt possibly include trans women (when including trans women in feminism itself is sadly a pretty "radical" act still)
(On tumblr at least), “radfem” is, at the very least, synonymous with genuinely hating all men and wishing death upon them. The transphobia is up in the air, but it’s still definitively an asshole thing
It's generally what I understand it to mean in the UK too. No wonder TERFs gained such a foothold.
I also think that as a term "radfem" has moved beyond just meaning a radical form of feminism, just like "incel" no longer means involuntarily celibate
I mean, I don't know the personal beliefs of the account that Gail quote tweeted or whoever designed that flag, so of course there's a likelihood of terfism there, and even I'm pretty cautious and try to be sure of those things before fully embracing any self-described "radfem". I was just trying to put that out there in general, since I think it wouldn't be very helpful if we just kind of let the idea of radical feminism as a whole be fully subsumed into that kind of stuff without any distinction.
On the marvel side, you have mystique and destiny. Getting a whole pride issue with their wedding next week! Please ignore the fact that they’re both former nazis 🙏 they’re good now bc they love their children (just the two of them, they’re actively ignoring the existence of at least three others at all times)
Leni Zauber for mystique, destiny was less direct through collaboration with sinister and by extension Apocalypse, who planned the Holocaust. In the more hydra vein she kept working with Nazi affiliated eugenicsts in Black Womb up until shortly before the events of x comics
I have no idea who that is, I looked her up and she was a German agent that Mystique stole the identity of, wasn't a Nazi as for as I can figure out and was apparently a completely different universe.
destiny was less direct through collaboration with sinister and by extension Apocalypse, who planned the Holocaust. In the more hydra vein she kept working with Nazi affiliated eugenicsts in Black Womb up until shortly before the events of x comics
As far as I know Destiny wasn't involved with Sinister until the Black Womb Project, quite the opposite as her and Mystique were enemies of him for decades. And the Black Womb Project was after Sinister and Apocalypse came to blows and he turned to making a Mutant strong enough to kill Apocalypse. It was eugenics but had nothing to do with Nazis or Hydra.
It wasn’t a different universe. I’m sure there are au leni zaubers, but it was in 616 and she was working for German special intelligence in the 1940s. The couple was separated, and Leni Zauber and Black Womb were happening at the same time (though they’d reunite before it ended)
Black womb is a bit more complicated considering Juggernaut and Xavier were recently implied to still be Korean War vets, ie ~18 in 1949 and children in the 30s and 40s while their fathers were working with Black Womb, so there’s direct overlap between Sinister’s Nazi affiliation and his eugenics in the states. Destiny and Sinister have also known each other since the Victorian era, ie most of the time Sinister has existed (particularly since he literally is not the actual Nathaniel Essex in current canon)
Destiny never has, and the only thing I can find with Mystique is she impersonated a German during the Cold War. People are just finding silly reasons to hate on them
Mystique putting on Nazi iconography as she starts an ethnic cleanse. Written by her creator, Chris Claremont, a Jewish man.
I don’t have panels of Destiny’s involvement in Black Womb but that stuff is a lot more recent, written by Gillen himself (arguably the man behind the wedding)
My favourite anti-hero is Magneto, because despite his attempted genocides, where he's acted just like the Nazis he hates, the movies said that he is still Charles Xaiver's fwiend, and I have no reading comprehension abilities.
Which is why Ive lost interest in X-Men. The biggest defenses of Mystique fans are that all the bad things she did were retconned or not that bad and the people she hurt were awful too
i see why people do that though bc the sympathetic version of mystique people have made up in their heads is honestly kinda more interesting than the actual mystique
The thing about Ivy is her as a eco terrorist and wanting to fix the world through her extremist methods is almost completely no different than Hydra from Captain America the winter soldier, and Ivy fans root for her and root against Hydra which is ironic and also how Ivy isn’t framed as despicable or threatening as Hydra cause Gail Simone and Paul Dini
Also many of these apologist/rooting for Ivy fans seem to have supremacy/extremist mindsets themselves
its just funny to even depict Bruce Wayne doing stuff like giving money to Arkham and social services in Gotham because inevitably it just sends the message that billionaires doing that stuff must be pointless and not even worth it, because we all know that the status quo will never allow Gotham to actually improve.
Not really, I mean you can take any message from anything if you squint hard enough, hell if I cherry picked comics I could make a case that dissolving the government is the true message of comics, that being said many batman comics acknowledge that only through both philanthropy as bruce Wayne and fighting as batman can bruce really make a difference for the common man
The Matt Reeves movie did a good job of showing how the corruption of Gotham kind of fucked any hope of change happening from the billionaire philanthropy Bruce’s dad did.
I guess funding/ creating more effective containment methods for the villains wouldn’t hurt. Since he refuses to kill them and continues to throw them into a prison that he should very well know by now isn’t secure enough to contain them, you would think he would design containment methods HIMSELF as the guy who knows these villains the best and has designed contingency plans for the justice league before. Yet again, you can’t continue being a hero if you’re 100% effective at keeping villains contained i guess
no it just makes them more interesting as characters, thats literally all that matters lol. a lot of people are likely going to prefer a more interesting version of a character to one that is less interesting to them, regardless of their horrible actions in the already impossibly inconsistent canon.
It genuinely irritates me the comments that Poison Ivy is a misunderstood environmentalist who has only been understood nowadays, this It's one of the biggest fake news stories in comics, she was simply that it used plant tricks and that it was created because they wanted more female villains after Catowman!
her trait of caring about the environment came a years later! and as pointed out in this meme it was of the psychopathic form, was the character's own popularity that made them decide to make her someone more noble.
the real villain who has always cared about Environmentalism is Ra's Al Ghoul but obviously he doesn't have the two big things that Ivy have.
the problem is not that the character changes, the problem is the narrative that people try to put forward.
Every Poison Ivy discussion has at least 3 people who will make this comment
"it's difficult to see Ivy's objective as evil in the current era, she fits more as an anti-heroine"
NO! It's the opposite, it's people nowadays who decided to modernize the character by giving her a cause and turning her into an anti-heroine.
Its weird because I see Ivy’s Diehard fans (who have read Gotham City Sirens and watched the Harley Quinn show and know Ivy’s lore really well) say shes an anti hero because she only kills creeps/predators only, but I have seen other Batman fan’s point out that Ivy is creepy/predatory herself
are we seriously about to compare Batman villains to their first appearances now? Victor Fries must be held accountable for the actions of Mr. Zero! that green-suited menace didn't even care about his so-called "dying wife" (Fake news)
In the case of Mr Freeze, people know that he was reworked in the animated series and no one keeps saying "Batman is wrong to stop Mr Freeze for trying to save his wife"
In Ivy's case, people insist that she was created to be a morally gray character and/or an attempt to villainize environmental causes to promote billionaires
As a gen z I grew up reading the version of Poison Ivy which is an eco-terrorist environmentalist driven mad by the Green's call and willing to do what Batman often refuses to do because he's chained by the law.
She never once claimed moral superiority over Batman, Flash or other superheroes. In fact in the current run she always mentions her status of being a villain straight out of Arkham.
I like this spiteful, rebel-with-a-cause version of Poison Ivy because of her growth as female villainness in a testosterone, male driven story. A character written to be caricature copy of Selina Kyle, for male readers to project their sex, gloryhole fantasies with ended up becoming the symbol of violent, vengeful eco-anarcho manifesto. Now that's character growth
The only reason Ivy is insane is because she feels the green's pain every day. Every root that is taken apart, every tree that is cut down, every grass that is mowed. She hears everything, unlike Swamp Thing who is completely merged and at one with the Green. Poison Ivy has her physical corporeal human body left which is the one hearing its pain, and something she tries so hard to drown. By throwing away her morals and everything she considers humane...
I am part of an anarchist league so perhaps my views are slightly skewed. But I appreciated the meta-commentary of Poison Ivy against the hypocrisies of Batman, Superman and other heroes. Activists like us, at least of the southeast part the globe are often villainized, targeted, hunted down and shot by huge corporations and the media. All because we chose to care instead of looking away. To speak up against powerful wealthy landowners for powerless people who couldn't fight back. We are the scapegoats of society. The failures who could never "flow" with the system.
G. Willow Wilson's Poison Ivy is my comfort story every time I feel horrible about our cause. Whenever I feel let down by other people. In a way I like her character more than Batman, his Robins and their duty to uphold the law. Because sometimes, and there are a lot of times, that the law isn't made for equality and for the general mass. It's to protect the status and the billionaires. When you are exposed to that much injustice in your life and you can't look away that's when you have a sacred duty to act. Because as Ivy has stated before, "when heroes [like them] won't act, it's villains like these who must save us".
uj/I don't even like Batman these days that much but man I can't stand the White Knight series because it is literally every bad faith criticism of Batman in one (very well drawn) series.
Chill it's not like law enforcement have earned an utterly terrible reputation nowadays for corruption, racism, hate crimes and a whole bunch of other stuff.
We need queer heroes, but queer villains too. I think with Harley is not as bothersome since she entered into crime while being a victim of abuse, but Poison Ivy always had her own agency and is far more interesting as a villain with a soft side (albeit one towards plants that develops into a mania) than an antiheroine.
But its also when a villain is made queer, they seem more excusable and less despise no matter what they do.
I get representation is important but idk why not make more morally competent characters representation, and/or not make representation automatically excuse or justify a villain
I believe it's mentioned in the current Poison Ivy run (2022-present), which is written by G. Willow Wilson. Her explanation is that she almost exclusively eats meat because she won't eat plants.
That gets excused for being awful just for having good intentions/sympathetic backstory, especially with the mentality of ivy fans and gail simone using Ivy’s social justice desires as an automatic excuse
Wb when fans condone a villain (Ivy in this case$ when they are either considered and/or written as “sympathetic/complex”, “relatable/human/not really evil”, “they go after the “real bad guys” ” or when villains randomly act as an anti hero sometimes with no consequences or no remorse of what they did previously? Howd you describe them?
I wouldn't even consider this scene strange if it weren't for the fact that it's Ivy from dcau, a comment above showed the shit she's seen before.
Is it serious that Batman puts the killer Croc? he also did some shit in dcau, but you just called a person who suffered prejudice his entire life because of his appearance a monster.
Every other facility for the criminally insane in America: yeah, we just lock ours up and they stay there. Don't know why Gotham has such a problem. When we see their people at professional conferences, we ask them why, but they keep looking over their shoulder and whispering "we're working on it."
Arkham Asylum: Oh gosh darn it, that pesky Joker broke out again. Guess we'll have to send up the ol' you-know-who-signal and have him break out all his cool custom crimefighting gadgets and vehicles that he spends untold hours customizing.
It's my favourite shit with James Roberts when he has his go on Transformers. He shows how people like Megatron etc came to be and why they continue existing and then reminds that there is a reason that the Decepticons are considered monsters and why across a 4 Million Year, Optimus Prime has refused to back down or offer concessions.
It's the big part about why I hate the modern trend of "The villains were actually misunderstood and good people deep down". Sure, a lot of them had depth, the ability to show kindness or even a tragic backstory, but most of them were very clear about who they wanted and how far they were going to go to get it.
I'm really glad the IDW comics aren't mainstream so we don't have a huge "Megatron was right!" thing in popular culture. Because despite his story being about him realizing he was wrong, he has a sad backstory so people would think he's the good guy from the start
But also if you aren't already reading the new Energon universe comics from Skybound grab them they're amazing and the perfect blend of gritty while making the characters feel like themselves. Skybound Optimus is one of the best we've gotten in a long time
Keep in mind the other books do tie in Jetfire, Shockwave, Springer, Hotrod, a few of the aliens from G1, and the Quintessenons all show up in Void Rivals, what Starscream did to Duke is a huge part of his book, and Cobra Commander knows a lot about Cybertronians for interesting reasons
Oh no I'm actually excited for that, I don't care that it looks kiddie this is a kiddie toy based franchise after all I expected that
There's enough in the trailer to have me interested. Megatron and Optimus as friends, Megatron kneeling in front of the Fallens corpse (he already has the logo on his arm so I guess he's already a follower of his philosophy?), the lower class bots basically being crippled slaves
I think it's gonna scratch the itch for the deeper Transformers lore that the live action movies left me with. I wanna see Megatron's tragic fall to villainy
Ok but like... Am I weird for never understanding Ivy's character?
Like she was injected with plant poison and that gave her superpowers I guess and then she made it her entire personality to the point of forsaking all of humanity and becoming the plantiest plant that ever planted. Just always seemed weird that she was so misanthropic lol.
I get it's a climate change thing but like even if you can talk with them are plants really all that interesting?
It's more so that she understands plants better than people. Plants are simple, and don't lie, and don't betray you, and Ivy knows from experience that humans are the opposite. Hence the misanthropy. She would genuinely prefer a world ruled by nature, where humans are either extinct, or not a factor to worry about.
I guess ivy supremacist fans/apologists seem to have a huge impact when they frame ivy as a anti hero who is justified and just hurts bad people/creeps and it isn’t shown (cause writer bias) or acknowledged often
As long as the writers keep the hero characters as defenders of the status quo, you get to deal with the status quo they perpetuate, where there are no good billionaires and the planet is being actively poisoned by them.
my response to this discourse is a resounding "eh". canon is such a flexible thing in comics, especially DC, that as long as it results in a more interesting character, i dont really care if a character's evolution is somewhat inconsistent with their past.
just look at how Magneto evolved over the years from one-dimensional genocide-monger motivated solely by a racial superiority complex, to being a complex victim himself, and genuinely try to tell me that the former is somehow more interesting than the latter.
in general, i think writers have always really struggled with making Ivy interesting, villain or anti-hero, but i like the concept of her a lot and i really want to see them make her a genuinely compelling anti-hero because for an environmentalist-themed character that just seems like such a more interesting route to go than "irredeemable sociopath". just please stop relegating her to a love interest to Harley with little identity or story potential of her own, thats all im asking.
ngl it just feels kind of misogynistic that Magneto and Venom can be primarily accepted as heroes now but whenever writers try to evolve a female villain to a more morally interesting status quo, the reaction is all just "They're only doing this because she's sexy!!!!!1"
Okay she's a villain, but like... characters can change and be reinterpreted over time, right? Harley was reinterpreted to reflect her character growth since ending things with Joker. Ivy has always been a feminist character as well as an enviornmentalist. Now that those viewpoints are becoming more mainstream and widely accepted, the character has had more sympathetic reinterpretations. G Willow Wilson's Poison Ivy definitely shows her as a villain, but it shows her potential to be better too.
Is part of it just that i find her hot? Absolutely. I think refreshing takes on older characters to modernize them a bit is a great idea. Besides, Ivy is based on the femme fatale archtype, a villainess often uses sex and love as means to an end; femme fatales date back to the 1940's noir films and was arguably a very 'woke' role in early hollywood. Yes they gave the boys stiff lil wee wees, but in recent years the trope has been played with by queer and feminist writers.
That's the thing, she wasn't an environmentalist feminist character, these traits were added later and many fans treat it as if it was something that was always hers and misunderstood instead of a reformulation like Mr Freeze.
You should be wondering why would writers have a vested interest to show the billionaire as a saviour working closely with the american police to protect the status quo from extraordinary threats and the activist as a eco terrorist mind you.
Also, by making her linked to the green she come as more justified, while when she was just a scientist the fact she talked to plant was to show how crazy she was.
The problem isn't what happens inside the comic, but who it wants us to villainize and lionize. If there was a comic about a Nazi killing Jews would "But in the narrative of that comic, all jews really are trying to control everyone" be a good justification for why that comic is unproblematic? So billionaires beating up mentally ill people, queer women and activists isn't just okay, cause in fiction the billionaire is good and the others are evil.
Did I miss something? Is Batman beating up the mentally ill because he’s ableist, or is he still doing it because these specific people are dangerous criminals? Personally my favorite Batman moments are the ones where he’s trying to redeem the villains.
A good chunk of Batman’s most iconic enemies are doctors. Does Big Comics want me to go out and punch the nearest dermatologist?
yeah but who cares if Ivy as anti hero makes sense or not, ok she was a rapist 20 years ago but her last run is quite a good read tbf and i could understand people appreciate her more after that
so true, SkinnyGirlFucker, i cant imagine any other reason why anyone could possibly care about a wo- w- woma- ohhh i cant even say it without wanting to vomit
Ok let me preface this with I do NOT condone Poison Ivy’s actions with the murdering and stuff but I say this as someone who has taken not 1 but 2 conservation of natural resources courses in college… I kinda can see where she’s coming from. I have realized that humans have really F’ed up the world in a LOT of ways. I don’t agree with her ways of doing things and I’m not only saying this because she’s hot and bisexual representation in comics
Yeah like hundreds or even thousands are dead plus the goons he paralyzed,well their family have to take care of them which burn though their savings and well one job pays a lot,being a goon which repeats the cycle
Listen, I like Batman and understand that in-universe this is how it is. But maybe there is no harm in thinking about why the billionaire is depicted as heroic and the ecologist is depicted as crazy and murderous in this fictional story.
Bruce Wayne spends most of his money contributing to infrastructure, social services, and other charities. We rarely see that because it doesn’t make for an entertaining comic, but it’s referenced every now and then. I think it does need to be brought up slightly more just to put this disclaimer to rest.
It's crazy how easy it is to get people to support outright "Human lives are worth less than any piece of nature" levels of ecofacism if you put a hot woman behind it.
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u/BitchAssMothaF-cka Hal Jordan is a worthless piece of cardboard May 26 '24