#the thesis of this post is that sometimes a 30-year-old cartoon character will fuck a 50-year-old cartoon character and that's okay

[aprofessionalwithoutstandards]

Funniest (and worst) kinds of tf2 Shipping Discourse I have encountered just by opening the tag, like two ships passing in the night but one of them is on fire:

It's problematic for Sniper (a thirty-year-old cartoon character) to fuck his fifty-year-old coworkers because "power imbalances"

It's also problematic for Sniper to fuck Scout who is basically his age because Sniper LOOKS old

Sniper x older men is okay but Scout (basically the same age) x older men is "uncomfortable" because he owns funko pops or something

Literally making up ages for characters like Demo or Engie to make something "problematic" instead of just saying you think swordvan is dumb

Every possible pairing is abusive because they're mean to each other in their domination lines

Medic/Pauling (which I hate btw) having a "power imbalance" that comes from Medic being old and not yknow. Pauling literally being everyone's boss (which I still don't think creates a "problematic power imbalance" btw it's just funny that people forget about that)

Adminpauling discourse

Adminsniper discourse which actually isn't from the tag it all comes from my inbox

Acting like Zhanna existing negates your ability to post boots n bombs yaoi in 2023

"Let men be friends"

[doctorharley-md]

So I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how old Harley is and I’m going to bore you with the details right now 

 The age of Harley Quinn is a somewhat debated topic, since neither her actual birthday nor her actual age have been specifically mentioned in comics. She’s also frequently depicted as somewhat childish, both mentally and physically (a conversation for another time, maybe). Largely, I consider her birthday to be September 11, but that’s just the day she first appeared as a character (in Batman: The Animated Series). In cases where her birthday has been celebrated in comics, the date isn’t stated. But whatever, she’s a lady, and nobody needs to know how old she is. Aside from her family, and Batman, I don’t think anybody does know how old she really is. But I have been known to do math from time to time.

The Beginning

    Harleen Frances Quinzel was born at zero years old.     Lol jk I’m actually gonna start with her graduating from high school. In general, Americans graduate from high school at 18. She was a good student, and an even better gymnast, and she got a scholarship for that to go to college. Most people graduate college at 22. But I think there’s an argument to be made for her graduating college a year early. Harleen was an exceptionally driven student with a poor home life. She needed her scholarship to be able to go to college (thanks dad!) and at that point in her life, she was motivated mainly by two things – she wanted to be out of her home situation, and she wanted to be able to understand why her family was so messed up. This made her not only education-oriented, but career-oriented, and suggests a compelling reason that she may have pushed herself to graduate a year early (particularly once she was in college where students choose their course loads).    That’s all to say, I believe Harley was 21-22 years old when she graduated college.

The PhD Problem

   Sometimes when Harley mentions her post-graduate education, she says she has a PhD, and sometimes she says she went to medical school, which would give her an MD. Regardless of the degree she says she has or studied for, she always describes herself as a psychiatrist.    Psychiatrists need to have an MD to practice, since they are medical doctors who treat mental health issues. It’s easy to think that this means there’s some inconsistency in either what degree people attribute to her, or what degree she claims to have. But I don’t think so.    I think that directly after she graduated college, Harley went to an MD/PhD program. Teaching hospitals have MD programs, but a lot of them also have PhD programs that focus on translational science, and an option which combines the two, called an MD/PhD. They’re fucking grueling degrees, and I don’t envy anybody who’s doing that, but Harleen Quinzel would have graduated college in the perfect position to get an MD/PhD.    She had no money, and her goal was to become a psychiatrist. She did undergraduate research which would have given her the experience required to impress a PhD program, she was on the gymnastics team which shows dedication, and she is incredibly smart so she would have had a great GPA and MCAT scores. MD/PhDs are also often paid a stipend during their schooling equivalent to what a PhD student makes in the same program (this is a salary which is enough to cover living costs), which makes this a great way to get two degrees while supporting herself.    MD/PhD programs take six or seven years. The first two years are medical school, the second two or three years are spent doing the PhD thesis, and the final two years are the last two years of medical school. It makes complete sense that this is what Harley would do since it’s time and cost effective, and she’s both driven and intelligent enough to do it.    (Also you don’t graduate with an MD/PhD, you graduate with an MD and a PhD. So if your medical license were to say…be revoked…you would still have a PhD, motherfucker.)    When Harley graduated from graduate school, I believe she was 27 or 28 years old.

Residency and Arkham

   A residency is a requirement after graduating from an MD program. That takes two years, and you don’t get to choose where you do it, aside from being able to request to do a residency in a specific place. So this could go one of two ways – either Harley got accepted to do her residency at Arkham, or she did her residency and then started her job as a full-fledged psychiatrist at Arkham.    I think the second option is more likely, considering Arkham’s institutional profile. So I think she was 29 or 30 when she began working as a doctor at Arkham Asylum. I’m consolidating this to a round 30 years old.    It’s pretty clear from the comics about her origin that by the time she began working at Arkham, she was already very interested in the Joker (the path that led her to a Joker fascination is a story for a different time). It’s also well-established that shortly after she started her job at Arkham, she got herself assigned to work with the Joker. At that point in her life, she already wasn’t entirely mentally or emotionally stable because she’d thrown herself into her work to avoid dealing with her own mental health issues. For the Joker, that plus her already-present obsession with him made her an easy target. By the time Harley helped break him out of Arkham, she very much thought that saving him was the only way to prove herself.    I think Harley was 31 or 32 when she really became Harley Quinn. For the sake of giving my girl the benefit of the doubt, I’m gonna go with 32.

Relationship with the Joker

   Obviously, over the course of her existence as a comic book character, Harley has been with Joker for a long time. But the more I think about the actual timelines of those comics or cartoons, the more I become convinced that it was only a few years. Their relationship started rapidly – it was hot and heavy and a total whirlwind because of the lives they led.     I think it was less the time, and more the quantity of the crimes they did together and her devotion to him which established them as Gotham’s criminal power couple very quickly. In Gotham, bad things happen in such rapid succession that it bleeds time of real meaning. It would be easy to have the Joker freshly out of Arkham, suddenly with a very in love girl tagging along and making herself just as much of a threat as him, and then to think that that just made sense, and so it must always have been or would always be that way.    But their relationship could never last, for a whole laundry list of reasons which probably everybody knows.    So I believe that by the time Harley and the Joker break up, she’s around 35. She’s also in fantastic shape, and jumped into a pool of acid that fundamentally changed some aspects of her physicality, and is extremely mentally nimble but also insane and acts like a child a lot of the time. Which is why it’s really just a number – and it’s not one that any other character is likely to know unless they can get the information out of Harley or Batman. But she’d just as soon lie as anything else, and he knows better than to comment on a lady’s age.