A/N: I'm going to play Harley Quinn this Halloween, and in order to play her well, I've been doing a lot of research. But I'm finding her personality extremely difficult to get the hang of, or even relate to. So I tried writing a character study to integrate the pieces I found into something that I could understand. Please do give me your comments and opinions - especially if you think I'm wrong. That would really help! :)
Why, the doctors ask her, why the Joker? Why let him play his fucked-up games with her? They tie their sheepish brains in knots over it and Harley giggles her best purplish lollipop giggle at them.
Some suggest she's suicidal. That she wants him to do it. Sometimes they call it masochism, or delusion of love. Harley likes that last one the best: delusion of love. That has just the type of acid romance flavor she digs the most. Delusional, fantastical, splendiferous love; doesn't that just sound like the best kind?
But Harley Quinn is no more in love than she is suicidal. She's just broken. A haywire watch hand spinning restlessly round and round. A cackle in the night, a perfect shot fired from the top of a racing car.
Instability is everything. Every single thing around her, even inside her, keeps changing. Sometimes Harley is in control of her mind, her words, her actions. Sometimes she's not; they simply happen to her. Sometimes Harley sees and hears reality, sometimes memories, or fantasies, or random images, and she never knows which. Sometimes she feels, sometimes she's homocidal, sometimes she wants things, sometimes she doesn't recognize her face in the mirror.
The one constant is him. Him, she never forgets. Him, she always wants, always knows, to him she always returns. Every raging flood, every scrambled, mangled, scattered roller-coaster of thought leads back to him eventually. Even when he's gone - for months, even - he's always in her head, speaking to her and laughing madly, so she is never truly without him. He is the axis of her universe, the only fix point. He is there even when she isn't, when she forgets that she exists. In the darkness, in the chaotic whirl of colors, in the throes of madness she remembers his name.
It's only natural that Harley prioritizes his needs over hers, spells out her needs through his. His is the face, the name, the identity that defines her. So she becomes him. And she kills, and she laughs, and she hurts, and she paints her face just like him. Harley is more Joker than she ever was "herself". When she sees her reflection, she smiles.
As for the pain - there has always been pain. There will always be. Life is full of pain, Harley knows, and perhaps death is not - yet no "sane" person choses death over life. It's not about avoiding pain. It's about what you chase instead. Harley knows that people do not chase what is good and run from what's bad - it's the other way around: Whatever they're chasing, they will call 'good'.
Harley chases Joker.
Yes, he has pain for her, never-ending stores of it. Yes, he may kill her in any second of any day. But what is pain, when you keep forgetting it's a bad thing? What is death, when you forget you're alive, when you're killing people for fun? Harley laughs merrily in the faces of her doctors when they tell her that Joker abuses her - as if she didn't know that (Ha!). It's them who don't know: that the only 'bad' Harley knows is being away from him, and the only 'good', the only goal, is to be closer.
