Case in point, Poison Ivy.
With some villains it works. The Punisher for example. Red Hood is borderline, I feel like if they could work out what they wanted to do with him, Jason could work. Especially if they stuck with his original motive of wanting to limit crime in Gotham by being the boss rather than trying to end it completely. Harley is also borderline because if they just stuck with the original incarnation, she works as a crazy hero. But everyone thinks that means she's a victim, so they rewrite her into a female Deadpool because they don't understand why Harley worked in the first place.
Red Hood works but the issue is that they want him to be in this weird status quo tension state with the Bat-fam.
Harley works in the right context but I think her stories should feature a lot more of the heroes just not trusting her, leading her to walk the line over and over again. Maybe she fails or gets screwed by misunderstandings, maybe it's hubris, etc. Let her fail and get back up again.
The most recent comic I read and liked was Transformers More than Meets the Eye by Roberts & Milne, the first half was stronger than the second but the latter did give us Autobot Megatron. It's a shame that the sequel was trash.
Harley's an odd case because her best case ending would be ditching the persona and giving up on costumed thuggery, but she's too marketable for that so she's just turned into a curaazy quipqween because god forbid they actually give any capeshit character a proper ending.
I think they could have her do a series where she actually does give up on it and gets roped into becoming a sort of therapist for costumed heroes [Sanctuary didn't work out and was compromised.]
Have her struggle to earn the trust of the heroes. Joker's rep is anathema. Make it an obvious struggle and make it clear a lot of heroes won't go to her or trust her. Let her fuck up and walk the line. It's something they keep doing with Jason Todd or even Wolverine/Venom at one point.
That is Victor, it’s the reason he’s almost never going as ham as he could against Batman.
Arkham showed it well, you can conversate and reason with Victor but god have mercy if the snowman’s wrath comes down on you. Remember that side mission where you have to find Nora and thugs holding her are entertaining thawing her out and having a gang-rape? Victor remembers all Batman has done for him and Nora.
It’s that whole “what the Trinity stand for” thing, Batman isn’t vengeance, he is justice. Victor is guilty of a lot, Nora isn’t and as shown in Knight, would’ve preferred to die with dignity.
Victor is someone that could be interesting if we ever went into the angle of him being funded by Kord/Wayne/Holt. I don't think we've gotten that far yet.
Speaking of which, I think people keep making a lot of villains out to be anti-heroic when it's really just giving them more sympathetic rationales. But a lot of shite writers and twitter people don't understand nuance. Magneto is pretty much written to be irredeemable at the current status quo, but we understand him and where he's coming from. Poison Ivy is similar. So is Mr. Freeze. What's fun is that we can see them being anti-heroes. It's not hard to imagine, and it's always meant to be sad when we see them choose to do evil even after seeing them do something good and understand where they're coming from.
Like, hell, there's a long list of these types. Hunter Zolomon, the Reverse Flash for Wally West, was very very sympathetic and the readers saw him get broken and turned into a villain. Or if you want a different "type" then there's the Man-Bat and The Lizard from the Batman/Spiderman Rogues Galleries that were both scientists that can transform into violent werebeasts. They've had a ton of ups and downs. This is always intriguing, but there's a pretty straightforward limit on these types too since there's only so much you can do with them in properly serious stories (I mean, Man-Bat is the definitive Batman rogue for this subset. There's probably been a lot more, but there's a reason Man-bat is kinda chosen over and over)
The appeal of the anti-hero in capeshit seems to partially be as a contrast to the norms. Jason's the obvious shoutout to compare and contrast to the "norms" of the Bat-family and Gotham. For a while, I'd say the more "heroic" Sinestro corps members were the same in contrast to Hal and the rest.
