Adult satire cartoon Harley Quinn is getting a third season and the showrunners reveal the focus is how Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy handle their romance after becoming official at Season 2’s end.
Discussing the show and the couple with Entertainment Weekly recently, Justin Halpern and Patrick Shumacker mentioned the toxicity in Ivy and Harley’s past relationships is a big thing the writer’s room is chewing on.
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“That’s the big thing for us to chew on,” said Halpern, leading things off. “The thing we have discussed preliminarily is the idea that these two characters have had a lot of toxic relationships in their past.”
He added Ivy and Kite Man, who was good for Ivy to a fault, weren’t toxic together but they weren’t equal either, if that’s even possible.
“Although Ivy and Kite Man wasn’t toxic, it also wasn’t an equal relationship, you know?” Halpern clarified, “He loved her a lot more than she loved him.”
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He elaborated that the relationship is a first for both female rogues and comes with a responsibility to learn from their past flings.
“So this is the first time they’re both going to be in a relationship where they really and truly have affection towards one another,” Halpern explained. “They have a lot of responsibility.”
He continued, “So I think like, ‘what is it like to be in a good relationship after you’ve only ever been in bad relationships with abusive people?’ is a big theme we want to play with.”
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In a side note, Halpern hinted at DC FanDome there will be less of a focus on Joker’s love life. They are “less interested in if the Joker gets a new girlfriend or not than I am in [deepening] this relationship that [they have] spent two years building,” he said.
Halpern revealed earlier in the summer to Syfy nothing will obstruct the Harley/Ivy dynamic they were careful to build over two seasons and not rush.
“But we wanted to make sure the characters were in a mentally healthy place where we could do a Season 3 and not have to make it about, ‘Are they going to break up? Are they not going to break up?’ and just have them be together,” he said at the time.
“Putting Harley and Ivy together in our show was always going to be messy, and so we didn’t want it to be something that happened quickly, ” Halpern detailed further.
“We didn’t want anyone to say, ‘Oh, they just threw them together just to throw them together. They didn’t do the work’,” he continued.
Halpern also mentioned to ComicBook.com the next season will dig into Poison Ivy’s origins. “I think we’re going to see… we’re going to dive a little more into Ivy’s life and then history,” he stated. “Origins. I think we’re going to do that.”
With DC Universe transitioning to a comics-only service in 2021, Harley Quinn becomes an HBO Max exclusive as of Season 3.