#wholesome because they deserve better (not wesker)

[belchka]

Coming back from the grave with a freshly published fanfiction… this time for the Resident Evil fandom!!

If you, like me, wanted some good lighthearted fun with the S.T.A.R.S then this story is for you🙏🏻

Summary

“Happy birthday, Captain!!”

The entire squad cheered as Albert Wesker crossed the threshold to the S.T.A.R.S. office. A rather shocking greeting, that was, especially as he barely had time to register what was happening when a piercing honk made the poor man stumble backwards, taking his hearing out.

[juspeczyk]

Do you have anything else to say about your "Harley+Jason" Arkham Knight AU? I thought it was pretty interesting and I wouldn't mind knowing a bit more about it.

THIS IS SO SO SO LATE AND I APOLOGIZE..................... i’ve been replaying the arkham games recently though and it has cleared a few things up/helped me solidify some stuff so here we go

jason wasn’t kept on arkham island until shortly before the events of arkham asylum. it’s stupid for him to be kept on arkham island. batman has a fucking cave on arkham island. of course he would find jason there. joker is stupid but he’s not that stupid. so he and harley kept jason somewhere in gotham, or maybe even in metropolis or bludhaven, possibly switching locations every once in a while so batman wouldn’t get wise. they eventually moved jason to arkham island for the titan party intending to pit him and batman against each other, but obviously, bats defeated joker and that never happened.

talia al ghul and the league of assassins found him and picked him up from arkham during the events of arkham asylum. if you go to the morgue during story mode you can find ra’s al ghul’s corpse, but if you go back to the morgue after completing story mode, ra’s corpse is gone; it follows that talia and a couple league ninjas came and got him so they could put him in a lazarus pit, and when talia ran into jason on the way, she picked him up with the intent to nurse him back to health (maybe as a sign of good will/peacemaking towards bruce). talia trained him and helped him build the militia for his activities as the arkham knight. she may not have agreed with him entirely, but she recognized that it was his thing to do, his closure to get, so she didn’t stop him.

harley loved jason. she saw him as a son. that doesn’t excuse the abuse she willingly watched and participated in, nor does it mean he owes her anything. she couldn’t handle the idea of hurting a child in cold blood, but she could handle the idea of giving a child “tough love” with the goal of breaking his ties with batman (which she saw as abusive and endangering) and making him into his own person who could stand up for himself. in her mind, she was helping jason to become a better, stronger version of himself, one who didn’t need batman telling him what to do or using him as a pawn. as such, when jason went missing and was presumed dead, it was a huge blow to harley. she was a complete mess during arkham city and most of it can be explained by shitty writing but it can also be explained by the amount of emotional trauma she had been through/was still going through at the time. to expand on this:

arnold wesker, the only friend she had who was interested in reforming and thus her only non-villain support network, had been released from arkham with a clean bill of health prior to the events of arkham asylum, and it’s almost certain that one of the conditions of his parole was that he couldn’t associate with criminals like harley. without him, she reverted to being a villain for the sake of villainy, leading her to justify extremely horrible actions-- like habitually torturing and brainwashing a child-- and robbing her of the only stable, rational, grounded person she could turn to for help or guidance throughout the entire game.

jonathan crane, who is implied in much of paul dini’s work (dcau + arkham asylum) to be a father figure to harley, is presumed dead after arkham asylum. she has now lost both of her father figures, scarecrow and ventriloquist, and thus has lost any option for unconditional support.

jason todd, her surrogate son, is presumed dead after arkham asylum. she was locked up for a large part of arkham asylum’s plotline. had she been free, maybe she would have found jason and kept him safe. for the entirety of arkham city and its prequel material she is living with the idea that she is responsible for her own son’s death. however subjective and flawed it is, it still eats her up.

during arkham city, every single one of her remaining friends and associates deserts her. just take a second and think about that. every villain that harley has a decent relationship with is in arkham city and not one of them is trying to help her. she is watching her family die, one by one, and she is trying to singlehandedly save the man she loves-- in her mind, the man who functions as the father of her child, jason-- and nobody is helping her. in fact, some people she probably thought she could trust are actively sabotaging her.

poison ivy refuses to get involved with anything.

catwoman has no intention of staying in arkham city longer than it takes to get her own things back from hugo strange.

scarecrow is presumed dead.

riddler is too preoccupied with his own plans (and possibly helping scarecrow make a comeback*).

killer croc is nowhere to be found.

sure, clayface is hanging around, but he’s not really trying to help joker get better. he’s just doing it so he can impersonate joker.

deadshot doesn’t give a rat’s ass what happens to joker.

penguin and mr. freeze both have good reasons to actively work against harley. so does two-face.

batman-- who harley is desperately counting on to save the day, even though his failure to rescue jason has put a massive dent in her faith in him-- lets joker die. yes, it’s joker’s fault for being a dumb-ass, but harley’s never gonna admit that. in her eyes, batman practically murdered joker. batman. the guy who’s supposed to save everyone. that fucked her up, yo.

penguin killed bud and lou? like? she doesn’t even have the simple basic comfort of her beloved pets? what the fuck? it was so unnecessary and i’m still upset

*in arkham city, one of riddler’s trap rooms has fear toxin in it. you can’t physically approach it, but you can zoom in and clearly see the upside-down batsymbol/jack-o’-lantern face painted on the canisters. this leads to two possibilities as far as harley is concerned: first, that nobody told her scarecrow is still alive and she’s been operating this whole time thinking he’s dead and mourning him, or second, that somebody did tell her, and she’s trying to help scarecrow make a comeback as well as save joker, which would make her even more frazzled. i’m leaning towards the first option because it makes more sense within this narrative, and i’ll talk more about that in a bit.

it’s possible that scarecrow and jason somehow met post-asylum and teamed up. in arkhamverse canon, this doesn’t work because jason was already the arkham knight when the events of arkham city happened, but that’s dumb and makes no sense given the timeline, so i’m scrapping it. however, canon did give scarecrow and the arkham knight a weirdly close relationship, one that went beyond simple business. (i’m not saying ~*~*~they were “close”~*~*~, i’m saying that they seemed to have a mutual personal investment in defeating batman that overruled their status as enemies. don’t make this gross. if you try to make it gross, i will come for you, and i will not be happy.) so maybe scarecrow and jason teamed up for survival in arkham city without realizing who exactly they were working with, and then once that revelation hit, they already felt somewhat indebted to each other. it’s also possible that they hadn’t met at all and that jason contacted scarecrow after becoming the arkham knight. idk. it’s a mystery so far.

talia is alive during the events of arkham knight. the league came and got her just like they came and got ra’s. there is literally no reason for her to still be dead given that we have the canon precedence-- three times over-- of ra’s being killed and then brought back. the concept that talia is dead in arkham knight is stupid and misogynistic and serves no purpose whatsoever other than to give bruce More Manpain(TM). it’s bad, and the writers should feel bad, and whoever approved that writing should feel bad, too.

it was scarecrow’s idea to bring harley into their plot. jason was just fine leaving her to die in arkham city or letting her rot in jail, but scarecrow has One Single Redeeming Quality, and that quality is his Good And Wholesome Platonic Love For Harleen Quinzel. he knew that he owed her big time for not being around in arkham city and he also recognized that she deserved to be a part of their plot to take out batman.

harley cried like a baby when she realized the arkham knight was jason. it was ugly. she was ugly. he was kind of uncomfortable and reeling from the sudden return of the person who (intentionally, by the way) caused him to develop stockholm syndrome. but they dealt with it and everybody came out kind of friendly.

the plot of arkham knight would not have happened without harley. she operated as a buffer between jason, who is fundamentally trying to do the Right Thing, and jonathan, who is fundamentally trying to do the Wrong Thing/His Own Thing And Screw Rightness. their infighting would have made the scheme collapse if harley hadn’t been there acting as the glue to hold it all together.

harley also kept the other rogues out of their way as best she could. it was super lowkey and the rogues probably never realized it was her. one would think she’d want revenge against them for deserting her in arkham city, but no-- by this point, she’s tired. she’s tired of fighting over meaningless things like territory and money and reputations. she doesn’t even have much of a will to live past exposing batman as a fraud who doesn’t save everyone and then killing him. so she’ll set up the people she cares about to be safe, even if they don’t necessarily care about her anymore. she arranged for selina to be taken by riddler before the arkham knight or scarecrow could get to her, because she knew selina would figure out a way to escape eventually. she conveniently forgot to mention that scarecrow’s fear toxin wouldn’t affect poison ivy. she also arranged for two-face’s bank robberies and hush’s attempted takeover of wayne enterprises to happen on the same night as the arkham knight takeover so that batman would be extra busy.

(note: she knows bruce wayne is batman. she has known since she and joker unmasked jason and figured out who he was. however, she keeps convincing herself that There’s No Way Bruce Wayne Is Batman, There’s Got To Be Something More To It Than That because knowing who batman is tips the scales in the bad guys’ favor, and that goes against everything she knows. the Good Guys are supposed to win! they’re supposed to save the day! that’s why they’re Good Guys! that’s why Bad Guys show up and do Bad Guy Stuff! that’s How It Works! except now batman has shown his true colors, and she wants everyone to know that he’s not really a Good Guy after all, because he didn’t save jason and he didn’t save joker, and he didn’t save scarecrow, and he didn’t save her. now that she sees him this way, she has no problem taking advantage of the knowledge of his secret identity.)

hush has been involved in the arkham plot from the very beginning. harley has a lot of practice patching people up, but she’s no doctor, so she eventually turned to tommy elliot in order to help her with jason’s more severe injuries. tommy was the one who operated on jason after joker shot him in the chest. (joker intended to kill jason, but what was left of the robin costume slowed the bullet enough that it didn’t kill him immediately; he would have bled out and died if harley hadn’t convinced joker to go get hush and save the kid.) he confirmed that bruce wayne is batman and later helped harley, scarecrow, and the arkham knight form a plan that struck at batman from every angle.

the events of batman: hush have taken place prior to the events of arkham asylum, but it makes no sense to me that batman, who goes to arkham all the time and has a batcave on arkham island and is supposed to be the world’s greatest detective, somehow didn’t know that one of his greatest enemies was working at arkham asylum and/or didn’t do anything about it, so i’m scrapping that and keeping the hush subplots from arkham city and arkham knight only.

speaking of hush’s subplot in arkham knight? HE ALREADY KNOWS BRUCE IS BATMAN? THAT WAS LITERALLY THE WHOLE POINT OF BATMAN: HUSH, WHICH HAS ALREADY HAPPENED BY THE TIME ARKHAM ASYLUM TAKES PLACE? IT’S LITERALLY MORE DIFFICULT TO JUSTIFY HIM NOT KNOWING BRUCE IS BATMAN THAN IT IS TO JUSTIFY HIM KNOWING AND USING IT TO HIS ADVANTAGE? hush tried to take over wayne enterprises and was going to hack the batcave and maybe become batman himself in order to run around doing dumb shit and smearing batman’s image or at least send all of bruce’s computer-operated machinery out against the city. none of this “whAT dO YOU MeAN BRUCE WaYNE IS bAtMAN?/1//1/!????!?!?!?!?1///!!!!??/?!?!1?” nonsense. not in my house

harley and what’shername who got infected with joker virus? christina bell? gay

but on a more serious note christina bell was literally harley’s last hope for happiness again and LOST CHRISTINA just like she lost EVERYONE ELSE

@DC/ROCKSTEADY: WHAT DO YOU HAVE AGAINST HARLEY QUINN BEING HAPPY AND LOVED

wayne manor didn’t blow up. that’s angsty. that’s way too angsty. or at least, if it did blow up, nobody was inside and there were already at least 3 different contingency plans for every batkid/bat-associate ensuring that they have nothing to worry about money-wise and that they have a place to live and plenty of school/career options

yes, every batkid. they’re all here except maybe damian. dc/rocksteady can get the fuck outta here with that 3 robins and 1 batgirl BULLSHIT

me? pulling the one good thing chris nolan gave us and sticking it in the arkhamverse, allowing bruce to fake his death and run away to france or italy or wherever with selina or talia and both of them living a quiet, relatively civilian life? more likely than you think!

there may not be a batman anymore but that just means more attention for all the batkids and various bat-associates that have popped up over the years and lemme tell you if you thought gothamite criminals were scared of one batperson running around just imagine how terrified they’d be to find out that there’s like 30 more who’ve just been waiting for a chance to step up their game

scarecrow never gets better. good. serves him right. i have no legitimate reason to believe that becky albright exists in the arkhamverse but you can’t tell me she doesn’t and that she isn’t sleeping like a baby after seeing scarecrow get dosed with his worst ever batch of fear toxin on live tv

idk what happens to harley. maybe she becomes the red hood’s partner in crime (fighting). maybe jason calls her out on her abuse and they never speak again on friendly terms. maybe she also runs off to italy or france or back to brooklyn. maybe christina bell never actually died and they get together as Clown Idiots 2.0. idk! it’s painful to try and imagine her in a post-arkham world! it’s painful to imagine a post-arkham world in general!

so yeah in short nothing is the same after the events of arkham knight but you know what. i’m sick of bat-stories that maim and kill and emotionally brutalize women and children for the sake of making bruce suffer and mask it under narrative progress. he’s suffered enough. they’ve suffered enough. you can make a plot happen without seriously hurting anyone. so how about instead we just let bruce retire and live the happiest life he can and let everyone who’s part of his legacy step up and shine and make him proud and make themselves proud!!!