#golden age joker noir AU

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i know it's actually just another word for property damage but the fact that "criminal mischief" is a crime that exists and that you can be charged for is so funny to me as a concept. jailed for having a laugh.

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Established casting for female characters in the Golden Age Joker Noir AU

Rita Hayworth as Poison Ivy:

Marylin Monroe as Harley Quinn:

Bette Davis as Fem!Riddler

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The Joker’s gang in the 1940s

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@residesatshamecentral thanks to you, whenever a Marilyn gifset passes my dash now, I immediately think of Harleen...

River of No Return (1954) dir. Otto Preminger

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Golden Age Jonny Frost meeting the Joker

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So, I’ve been thinking more about the Golden age joker AU.

1940s Harleen Quinzel is the underappreciated girl in the office who ends up at the local bar after work hours. 

@gonothingtosee suggested that Harley could be the prison librarian, and I think that works. I like a version of her story that mingles the plots of Harleen and the Joker Blogs: She’s a repressed person, engaged to someone safe and dull, so bored with her life that she could almost scream sometimes. She is attracted to the Joker despite being terrified of him - maybe because she is terrified of him. And he seems to reciprocate. She gets too involved, and starts to let slip personal information.

Soon he knows all about her. Their flirty chats are the high point of her day. He gets her to help him break out, shortly before the wedding, after promising to mend his ways. She tries not to think about the fact that he knows when and where she is getting married, and REALLY tries not to think about why, exactly, she told him that. Then Joker turns up at the ceremony. Bang, she is once again single. Harleen has a choice. She can shoot Joker, avenge her fiancée and cling to her old life, or she can run away with Joker and become a new person. 

She chooses the latter.

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1940s Selina Kyle/Catwoman

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1940s Poison Ivy

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1940s Harley Quinn aesthetic

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So, more thoughts about the Golden Age Joker AU: Is a 1940′s Harley Quinn possible? Or is Harley’s story too dependent on a particular set of circumstances? 

I have seen two great versions of her origin story (both loosely adapted from the Mad Love comic) that take it in rather different directions. I’m going to go into both, because they’re both great, and might be adapted differently. 

Harleen  was essentially  a sick, twisted gothic romance meets psychodrama. Idealistic, repressed Harleen sets herself to ‘saving’ Joker despite being terrified of him and having some growing mental health problems. Sadly, this is the Joker we are talking about: he does not really do redemption and getting close to him sends her sense of reality into a nosedive. 

The Joker Blogs went another way, almost the same way as Hannibal. In this version Harleen is engaged. She tells Joker the date of her wedding and the name of her fiancée, knowing how often he breaks out of Arkham. Predictably, Joker turns up at the wedding, and returns her relationship status to ‘single’. Is she culpable? Did she know what he would do? Was the death of her fiancée what she wanted, without admitting that she wanted it? The answer to all these questions is yes. This does not stop her being devastated, or hating him. In this version, Joker represents everything she wants, but can’t admit, not even to herself.

Harleen is the Joker’s psychiatrist. It’s how she gets so close to him, and it establishes her as relatively intelligent (I have zero patience for Bimbo!Harley). It gives things a power dynamic that shifts: Doctor-patient, with the patient gaining more and more control as time goes by. But in the forties, it would have been a man treating the Joker. Could you adapt the story with Harleen as a nurse, or maybe the psychiatrist’s secretary? And which story would be a better fit?

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Harleen Quinzel becoming Harley Quinn

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The thought of dorky, neurotic Fem!Riddler attempting to femme fatale and failing horribly :-D

She’d probably just end up doing something like this:

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@me-fish you asked for it girl so here’s my messed up backstory for Golden Age Jonny Frost:

My alternate Jonny doesn’t start out as a gangster. He steals when he thinks he can get away with it, but only to pay the bills. Life is tough in Gotham, and he has kids, so hey, you do what you can get away with. But one day, he gets caught.

A few days in prison take a serious toll on his personal life. Shelley (remember her?) uses it as an excuse to break with him, he’s sacked from his job with no advance pay or warning, and his landlord tells him to get out. His level of stress has skyrocketed, all at once.

He goes to a bank for a loan (not sure what sort of loan he could get, but he needs to be in a bank now, okay?) Standing in line, he thinks that he has never felt so invisible and unregarded in his entire life. And then he hears the  pandemonium behind him. 

Right there, guns in hand, in the Joker and his gang, shouting for everyone to get down. Jonny freezes, while everyone else falls flat.

Joker, at the forefront, turns to look at him, and levels a gun at his forehead. And in one long moment, Jonny feels that this terrifying stranger can see every though he has ever had.

Whatever’s going through Joker’s mind, he lowers the gun. “You’ll carry the bags” he says. When one of the henchmen return from the vault, Jonny is the one who lugs the very heavy bags full of money into the stolen van. After that, he’s just the new guy as far as Joker is concerned.

Whenever the police pick up Jonny Frost, they know better than to question him. His loyalty to Joker is unbreakable, because Joker saw him. It is Joker who gave him a chance at a new life, and even better, something to live for.

His new life though... well in practice he has a fresh chance. But his criminal career involves rather a lot of this

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