Today I watched the Poison Ivy episode of Batman The Animated Series; Pretty Poison. And I gotta say, Ivy was right.
Harvey Dent spearheaded a project to use Wayne Foundation funds to turn a field of wildflowers into a penitentiary. The twist: That field contained the last surviving specimens of the Wild Thorny Rose. Poison Ivy, a chemical botanist, saves the last rose and uses it for revenge. She kisses Harvey with a poison made from the rose on her lips. Batman grabs a sample and tried to synthesise an antidote, but doing so requires a sample of the origin of the toxin: the wild thorny rose, extinct. So he goes and fights Poison Ivy for the antidote and saves Harvey.
But I think Harvey is the bad guy here. He destroyed a piece of nature to build a prison. And he didn’t even conduct an environmental survey to look for ecological damage first! If he’d have hired Ivy, she could have warned him about the rose, and he could have come up with a plan to save it. Also, prisons are bad! Harvey is the district attorney, he’s part of the power structure. And he has Bruce Wayne’s money behind him. Ivy had nowhere to turn for justice other than vigilantism. I stand with Ivy.
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Harvey was wrong; that doesn’t make murder right.
To the writer’s credit, this is a great moral dilemma directly showing the results of Harvey’s choices.
In the end, neither one was right, and Batman is (laudably) attempting to resolve it.
With Wayne money, city beaurocracy, and Dent’s law skills, he’s untouchable. Murder was the only remaining option for justice.
Murder is still murder, you’re just justifying it for your own feelings.
'You’re only allowed to fight oppression through electoralism, the Warsaw ghetto uprising was morally wrong! John Brown was evil for his actions! How dare you, Sir!"
that’s not such a popular take any more. luigi shows that murder is not the worst, it just depends on who and why
Almost no one says murder is the worst crime. (There’s a reason murderers aren’t as scared of their fellow prisoners as child molesters.) The person above is saying murder is still murder, regardless of justification, which is true. However, many, if not most, people will say there are circumstances which justify murder. Not to make it not murder, just make it ethically acceptable.
murder is murder, the implication of the post was that there was no justifying it. but that is not the popular opinion.
It is right and just to destroy men who have sold their souls to evil.
That was probably the last show that consistently had morally grey situations that children could understand. Entertainment is so black and white now with clear good and bad. It creates the expectation that people are only good or bad and one bad choice forever dooms a person to being bad. “Good” becomes an unattainable goal that fewer and fewer people can become until people stop trying.
Batman was one of the few shows that explored the consequences and recovery after bad choices.
You should watch Infinity Train. It’s an animated series from 2019 about a train. I’d say more, but it’s best to go in blind. And it shows the recovery after bad choices.
it’s generally the archetype that villains are right, some just do messed up things while at it
Especially in Batman: TAS.
Ivy is more and more an overt antihero. She basically, lowkey, always was.
I also doubt it’s an unpopular opinion, but it’s good to find these things out.
Likewise, Magneto was right about humans and mutants.
I liked the episode, but it was unrealistic even by animated superhero standards.
The realistic version would have had Ivy going to Bruce long before construction began and proving the field had to be saved.
Now you’ve got a love triangle. Bruce is one of the few [the only?] guy she’s met who takes her seriously and never looks below her eyeline. She’s nuts about him, and hates Harvey, who is smitten.
And then Harvey’s face gets burned…
