... See the character I most associate with you already swerves wildly back and forth between the two, so uh-

Erika. Gimme the take

raven

YonFellow: faith? i can do a heroic spin of her original heel turn and a villainous spin on her redemption

I was thinking Damian

But I'd be down to hear Faith takes

oh damian is a pretty clear cut hero

just kind of a dick about it often

Is he? I thought he kept having murder impulses and sometimes actually acted on them

it's a nurture vs nature kind of thing. he was trained from birth to be a bloody tyrant and assassin who would force the world under his heel. so he has to unlearn all of that to become a hero, and whenever he acts on them it's universally against people that are at least joker level in terms of "how justifiable is it to leave this guy alive to begin with."

anyway i'll start with erika

(Not sure anybody is "joker level" except Joker in terms of sheer unrepentant and unrelenting desire to cause as much brutal and unrestrained violence as possible by any means necessary, but I get what you're saying)

chaiteacup:
Erika is the arrogant detective who arrives in the storm, exactly where she's needed when she's needed. She has her quirks, her faults, and she can be abrasive in the pursuit of truth and justice. Her battle against magic and the fallisies of magic is a simple matter of a pretty lie versus the ugly truth. The ugly truth is that these people are

dead, murdered at the hands of a deranged psychopath that has seen fit to trap them in a prison of magic where she can do as she pleases. It is the detective's job to break her free of that delusion, and allow them to pass into the next world, to reclaim the realm that she has taken for her own in the name of the heavenly court, and to bring peace to

the real victim who has had her pain overshadowed by this farce, her charge and partner, Ange Ushiromiya, the sole survivor of the family.

erika is kind of easy because her being a villain is in and of itself a subversion and in any other story the idea that the detective is the bad guy because she's not respectful to the serial killer's posthumous legacy would be a bit unginged

so erika being a kind of avenging angel for the victims left behind by this giant glorification of what amounts to a mass murder suicide works pretty easily, especially since she does have the authority of heaven and featherine behind her.

YonFellow: i can think of a bunch of them lol. even just in terms of comic books, he's only special because he's popular and he was made out to be some kind of cosmic god of death and destruction rather than an annoying serial killer with a clown motif. there's actually been several stories where joker sat on the edge of having a moment of clarity and

there are alternate universes in which the joker does actually kind of show repentance and try to change as a person. and there's a lot of canon storylines where he tries to stand up to the bigger bad out of bizarre and incomprehensible moral principles.

like after killing jason todd, joker kind of spirals as he realizes he's gone way too far and that there's no coming back for him after this

Huh. I mean I definitely think the weird reverence and elevation of Joker to any sort of cosmic significance (or even elevation to being, like, the other half to Batman's whole) is cringe trash, but when he's beating up Red Skull and all I can think is "Joker is one of the only people who genuinely can't claim moral superiority over a supernazi" it's like...

I've never liked the Joker, full disclosure, because almost every iteration of him his entire personality is just the words "FOR THE EVULZ"

It's so tedious

i mean i don't like him either

but part of that is also like... he's not any more evil than someone like brother blood or darkseid or trigon or black mask, and even more sympathetic characters (poison ivy, r'as al ghul, scarecrow) have at times had long term goals that were far worse than joker's endgoals which are always loose and largely revolve around batman killing him.

Eh. I just sort of chalk that up to "Joker wants anybody and everybody dead because it amuses him, he just lacks the focus and abilities to really get the job done like those other guys."

ANYWAY I'M SORRY I didn't mean to hijack your plurk I meant to hear Faith headcanons

I do think the joker can be entertaining and a useful villain with the caveat that both harley and batman have to be funnier than him

(agreeeed)

it also depends on which iteration you're talking about

my dream bruce batman pitch is that the joker forces him to do standup comedy in order to prevent a bomb going off or something and he crushes it

harley's canon introductory comic actually included joker getting salty because she was funnier than him and so he betrayed her and kicked her out

he's a good batman villain but he's not the embodiment of pure evil, he's just good for making deranged plots happen with some real horror beats thrown in for dissonance

yeah.

he's interesting bc he could be any guy, but also he's always wrong. anyway that's too much about the joker. love the jokester tho

the dark knight is shit

The best iteration is the Jonkler because he dips his fries in ice creme. Nobody can comprehend a mind that twisted tbh.

he wants to watch the world burn and he thinks everyone else does too but he's wrong. god it's hard to stop talking about the joker I get it now

yeah i agree with that take lindsey

the entire point of the dark knight is that he's wrong, the real heart of the story is when the guy on the prison boat throws the bomb thing off the boat

ehh it's more common than you'd think. and like. as an example, trigon is a genocidal mass rapist

well darkseid

actually make darkseid a hero. antimatter darkseid

o7 on it boss

trigon is a teen titans villain. raven's dad. there's lots of other incredibly evil dc villains is my point. some of which damian killed or otherwise tormented

i don't really value motive tbh

yeah it's just like, the guys who killed the dead boy detectives had similar motivations and they were in one arc of sandman

dc is full of chaotic evil

mhm. listen i have to deal with comic fandom (made up of people who actively don't read the comics and just run off of assumptions made through fanfic and tumblr posts) and this is a subject that comes up A Lot

anyway

faith

YonFellow:
Faith is selected by a cabal of human supremisists to be The Slayer, an instrument used in a neverending war against the native denizens of the so-called human realm, creatures that have been referred to as Demons. She's a complicated girl with complicated feelings, a lot of rage and unaddressed trauma that makes her too unruly for the council

to control. Except there's another, much more suitable Slayer that everyone values more than her. It's the jealousy that condemns her more than anything, and the desire. While brutally dispatching the "demons" she accidentally slips up and kills a corrupt executive who was selling the resistance's information to the council. The council's latest puppet

Wesley, disavows her and brands her as a criminal. It's there that the underground demon resistance finds her. They created Sunnydale to be a safe haven for their kind, where they could live without harming anyone, and the humans have been wiping them out because they decided that the demons expressed emotions that were too ugly and incomprehensible, and so

they needed to be destroyed. Faith finds a father figure in the mayor, the face of Sunnydale who has put a lot of money, resources and effort into protecting the native population of the town and keeping the Slayers from destroying them just because of an ancient war that forced them into hiding. Faith starts working for the resistance as a proper agent.

She makes one last plea for Buffy to join her and Buffy says no, that she won't ever betray her mission like Faith has. The final battle between Faith and Buffy is this heartbreaking confrontation where Faith is trying to show Buffy that they're not that different and that she can be more than a weapon for the council's brutal suppression, and that vampires/

demons are people too, as evidenced by the fact that Buffy wants to save her vampire boyfriend, and Buffy finally realizes this just as it's too late. The council kills the Mayor and his organization, driving the demons into hiding, and Faith is dragged to prison where she's subject to brainwashing by Wesley and his vampire puppet. She breaks free briefly to

beat the shit out of Wesley in a righteous rage but eventually they used Angel's vampire powers on her and mind controlled her into going quietly where she could be reeducated into a perfect killing machine once more.

this one's a little more complicated because faith has a clear throughline with her actions and i wanted to make all of them justifiable somehow. the bodyswapping was another effort to reach out to and redeem buffy, the heroic pro bono law firm hired her to take down the human supremisists, etc.

odasaku: so funny thing about raven is that there have been multiple stories where she's been a "villain" because from the start, evil has been with her since she was born. so rather than a tragic hero tormented by inner demons (literal) and brainwashed by catholic guilt, i'm gonna go with a tragic villain tormented by inner demons (figurative) and

brainwashed by catholic guilt

Raven was the daughter of the ancient god Trigon, an entity of conflict and chaos, and she was told from a very young age that she was evil as a result, and that the only way to redeem herself was to sacrifice and bring about an apocalyptic battle that would allow the true god (which is i guess Azarath) to triumph over chaos and strife (and freedom).

dc was my high school fandom and it was rough

I can confidently say euron greyjoy is worse than the joker tho

(i would also say that)

weren't you seeing yourself out

Visions were sent to her from her religious order that demanded she infiltrate the Teen Titans and brainwash them to help her achieve her end. She followed them without question, and she set about infiltrating them. She used diplomacy to not show her hand and then mind controlled those who were too suspicious to go along with her, making them fall in love

with her (she did do that in canon but it's a lot more complicated and sympathetic). Over time, she began to genuinely care about all of them as friends, and they started instilling doubts in her when they encouraged her to express herself and her emotions. Little by little, she started opening up as the day of reckoning came closer, and her self control

GOD DC HAS ACTUALLY DONE THIS SO MANY TIMES

I'm having flashbacks of indigo in outsiders but that's original terra too isn't it

waned. It got so bad that she felt she couldn't contain her father's influence and she started having doubts and undoing the conditioning. In a panic she cuts herself off from them all, but not before her father is able to reach them and beg them to help her. They try reasoning with her but she's completely severed her emotional connection to them and she

what if the girl u like............was EVIL

mind controls them all into puppets, summoning and killing her father, bringing about a battle where the world would either become a shallow utopia with no conflict, no variety, just regimented order without thought, or a world of nothing but chaos and destruction. The heroes reach her at the last minute and she stops the battle, sacrificing herself to save

her father who is a really nice guy after all apparently.

i will get to damian and darkseid in a bit. damian has an easy route (the one that's semi discussed in canon/fanon) and a more complex route, while darkseid i need to think about

if anyone can do it!!!!

bitterends: i'd say beast boy be like but i hate bbrae, so in my heart of hearts it'd be terra be like, because she too has had her morality swapped

thinking about the cartoon, realizing it's dcau shiera too lmao. at least she gets a real redemption arc.........

oh raven.... lays down

yeahhh