Chris Sims writes about Harley Quinn, Batman: The Animated Series, and the problem with getting Harley wrong. “See, that’s the tragedy of Harley Quinn, the thing that makes her so compelling underneath all the bright, poppy cheer. She’s in love with someone who will never, ever love her back. Someone who can never, ever love her back, because he’s thoroughly obsessed with someone else. It’s something that we’ve all been through, and that’s what makes her so easy to identify and sympathize with. But because it’s an obsession, an addiction, it’s phenomenally self destructive (something else we can all probably relate to), and because it’s playing out in the grand metaphorical stage of superheroes, everything about it is taken to its horrifying extreme.”