Movies/TVRants

Harley Quinn is a terrible character

Harley Quinn is one of the most annoying characters ever created.

Am I the only one who genuinely can’t stand this bitch?

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall of the boardroom meeting where the character of Harley Quinn was first conceived. I imagine the conversation went something like this:

Executive: We need a new character for Batman: The Animated Series. What do you guys have?

Writer: Well, I’ve got this idea for a hired gun with psychic powers. His name’s Tommy Monaghan, and-

Executive: Nobody’s gonna go for that. Next.

Retard: What if we give the Joker a girlfriend?

Executive: I’m listening…

Retard: We give the Joker a girlfriend, and we call her “Harley Quinn”. It’s like a play on the word “harlequin”.

Executive: I like it so far. Keep going.

Retard: She was the Joker’s therapist at Arkham, but she fell in love with him.

Executive: Good, good! Anything else?

Retard: Her nickname for the Joker is “Pudding”.

Writer: Yeah, and maybe we can give her a shrill New York Jewish accent too.

Retard: Hey yeah, that’s a great idea!

Writer: Wait no-

Executive: Magnificent! Get to work on it ASAP!

Writer: I was being sarcastic…

Then I’d fly down the executive’s mouth and make him choke to death. You know, being a fly and all.

I can safely say without any doubt in my mind that Harley Quinn is the single worst comic book character ever created. If there’s someone worse than this shrill obnoxious bitch then I’m not aware of them (and I’m sure Harley’s defenders will try to make me aware).

I’ve hated this obnoxious harpy ever since her first appearance on Batman: The Animated Series. I was 6 years old, watching my cartoon and eating the marshmallows out of the Lucky Charms box while my parents freebased crack in the basement. Joker was doing his thing, terrorizing some guy who yelled at him on the road. Then out of nowhere some stupid bitch with the most irritating voice I’d ever heard in my life shows up with the Joker like she’d always been there. I screamed “Who the fuck are you, bitch?” and threw the cereal box at the TV. My parents heard me and beat my ass for cursing. I’m talking closed-fist blows to my face like I was in the ring with Mike Tyson. Because of Harley Quinn, I received an orbital fracture and broken jaw from my cracked-out parents. Her voice was so obnoxious that it caused child abuse.

I was kidding about that last part. I wasn’t eating Lucky Charms, it was actually Trix. And my parents weren’t high on crack, they were actually smoking meth. They were methed up, and when they heard me cursing at Harley they methed me up too.

But I couldn’t stand Harley Quinn even from her first appearance. Her nasally voice irritated the shit out of me and her schtick got old fast. Her debut was September 11, 1992. Exactly nine years before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Coincidence? I think not, Harley’s character was like a terrorist attack on the Batman franchise.

The real rub is that she wasn’t even created as a regular character. Her appearance in “Joker’s Favor” was meant to be a one-off thing. But for reasons that totally don’t involve people having strange sexual fetishes, Harley Quinn became a popular character, and she not only became a recurring character in TAS but also a recurring character in the comics.

For years after, Harley Quinn continued to rape my eardrums and generally piss me off with her grating personality (or lack of). Every time I picked up a Batman comic or watched a Batman cartoon, there Harley was squawking away with her nasally New York Yiddish accent like Fran Drescher dialed up to 12. She’s so perfectly irritating that I can’t even read her speech bubbles without reading them in that god awful voice. It would be almost commendable if it didn’t make me want to slam pencils into my ears.

Then in 2016 someone decided to give this bitch even more of a presence by including her in the live action Suicide Squad movie. Margot Robbie was cast as Harley, but because it was 2016 and the entire world decided this was the year to become even more irritating, suddenly the character was being promoted as some symbol of female empowerment, a tortured soul trying desperately to move on from her relationship with the Joker.

I’ll give Margot Robbie a lot of credit here, she opted not to do the obnoxious accent. Harley Quinn sympathizers attacked Robbie, accusing her of being untalented and being a hack, but they can eat shit. Margot Robbie saved us all by not doing that ridiculous accent. Thanks for caring about my eardrums, Margot.

Unfortunately, they made up for this by trying to turn her into an image of female empowerment. Apparently the best way for them to do this was to dress her up in booty shorts and fishnet stockings, give her neon hair and makeup, and a shirt that alludes to having daddy issues. They then marketed this outfit to preteens. Because sexualization is what female empowerment is all about I guess. I get that there’s a huge double standard in society when it comes to women and sex, in that we reward men for being promiscuous but put down women for it, and I could go into what I think the subconscious reasoning for this is, but this isn’t an analysis of human evolution, sexuality, and psyche so we won’t go there. I just don’t see how further sexualizing Harley Quinn empowers women, and I definitely don’t see why her outfit gets marketed to preteen girls.

I understand what they were trying to do with her. Almost every woman has “that ex” who was abusive and manipulative, and having Harley break off from the Joker and go her own way was something many women could relate to. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this idea, you want your audience to be able to relate to and sympathize with the main character. They were going for a redemption story.

Harley Quinn is the wrong character to do this with though. Harley has aided, abetted, and assisted one of the deadliest and most deranged characters in comics. You can change her outfit, you can remove the accent, you can have her dump the Joker, but at the end of the day she still shares responsibility for the murder of thousands of people over the Joker’s criminal career. For fucks sake, she herself murdered innocent children by planting bombs in toys. Is this the kind of character that we should be sending a message of redemption and empowerment with? Is this the kind of person that young girls should be inspired by? Some people are beyond redemption, and Harley Quinn is one of them.

There’s no good iteration of Harley Quinn. You can partner her up with the Joker, Poison Ivy, Deadshot, whoever. It doesn’t matter, her character was, is, and always will be annoying, and that stupid accent will forever be ingrained into my skull. She’s basically a fan service fetish character that went too far, and proof that audiences will enjoy literal shit if you force-feed it to them enough. There are plenty of good female characters in comics, and this obnoxious bitch isn’t one of them.

Last Updated on January 13, 2025

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Angry_Jerk

Adam "Angry_Jerk" Baker is the CEO of the AJnet Organization, and the Editor-in-Chief of AJnet Magazine. He hails from the fine village of Northeast Philadelphia, where he lives with his wonderful and amazing girlfriend, who definitely isn't looking over his shoulder as he writes this.