While Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey did not exactly set the box office on fire, and the Joker got a new girlfriend in the comics, his ex, the demented Miss Quinn, is having much better luck in the cartoons. The animated series Harley Quinn recently closed out its second season to universal acclaim after placing Harley in a loving romantic relationship with Poison Ivy. In an interview, executive producers and showrunners Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker spoke about their plans for the two characters, with Schumacker declaring that the Harley/Ivy romance is here to stay.
"If we're lucky enough to get a Season 3, and we truly don't know yet, but if we are we're not going to walk it back. They're a couple. Any stakes that we want to build into the season moving forward are not going to involve [the question of] "Will they be able to stay in a relationship?" They're going to be a couple."
The first two seasons of Harley Quinn saw the titular anti-heroine attempt to distance herself from her Mistah J, in the process reuniting with BFF Poison Ivy to establish dominion over Gotham. After a near-miss in season 2 of Ivy almost marrying Kite Man, Harley and Ivy finally acknowledged their romantic love for each other, and, just like Schumacker, Halpern is also adamant that there is no turning back from that relationship for the two.
"When we were talking about where a third season could go, the first thing we both said is, "We don't want to do a third season where it feels like the stakes are [whether] Harley and Ivy stay together." It's much more interesting to do a show about how you navigate these very different personalities being in a relationship. And what are the fun things that can come out of that? What are the outside influences that can make that relationship tough but without the stakes being, "Are they going to break up? Are they not?" So yeah, if there's a third season, which I hope there will be, the stakes will not be "Are Harley and Ivy going to stay together?" They're a couple."
Of course, any attempt on Ivy's part to find happiness elsewhere is crushed by her deep-rooted need to run back to the Joker. Fans were afraid that just such a thing might happen yet again when the Clown Prince of Crime reappeared in the show's second season. But Halpern explains that the reason for bringing the Joker back was to enable Harley's story, rather than have him take over it yet again.
"We bring the Joker back for the first time in Season 2, but we bring him back almost as a plot device to tell the story of when Harley really fell in love with Ivy for the first time. And somebody in the writer's room, I can't remember who it was, made the point that in so many Harley stories she's the plot device for Joker. So it was a fun thing to do in this show, to have him service her story and be a plot device in a more important relationship for her."
These quotes were first published on Syfy.com.