Western Animation / Harley Quinn (2019)

"I love my logo."^note Clockwise: King Shark, Clayface, Dr. Psycho, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, and Sy Borgman.

Ivy: Uh, I think they're gonna hate it, Harls.

Harley: No way! It's got comedy, action, incredibly gratuitous violence, and unlike that Deadpool cartoon, it's actually coming out!

Harley Quinn is an adult-oriented animated series based on the DC Comics character of the same name, developed by Justin Halpern, Patrick Schumacker, and Dean Lorey (Powerless). Loosely adapting the New 52 run by Jimmy Palmiotti & Amanda Conner, it stars Harley Quinn (Kaley Cuoco) after she has split from The Joker (Alan Tudyk) for good and sets out to become the new queenpin of Gotham. Joining her are her best friend Poison Ivy (Lake Bell), their fellow supervillains Clayface (Tudyk), King Shark (Ron Funches), and Doctor Psycho (Tony Hale), and her landlord Sy Borgman (Jason Alexander).

It was one of the first original series to be announced for DC's streaming service DC Universe, alongside Young Justice: Outsiders, Titans, and Swamp Thing. After two seasons on DC Universe, it was announced in September 2020 that the show would be moving to HBO Max (now referred to as Max) for its third season, as a result of the former's planned rebranding as a digital comics reader without the streaming video component. Season 3 released on July 28, 2022. Season 4 released on July 27, 2023. A fifth season has been ordered.

DC released Harley Quinn: The Animated Series: The Eat. Bang! Kill. Tour, a six-issue spinoff comic book that's set between season 2 and 3. Further spinoff comics have followed.

In April 2022, a spin-off series titled Noonan’s was ordered by Max. Early plot details indicate that the series will follow Kite-Man (Hell yeah!) as he takes over the titular Gotham bar that serves as a popular hang out for the city’s criminals. As of June 2023, the series has been retitled Kite Man: Hell Yeah!

The series had its first holiday special (parody), "A Very Problematic Valentine's Day Special", released on February 9, 2023.

Also has a Recap page.

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Tropes shown in this work:

• Acronym Confusion: When Ivy makes a crack about "L.O.D." standing for "Legion of Dildos" to Lex Luthor, he says that it's the name of a sex shop down the street that the Legion of Doom is in a legal battle with.
• Actor Allusion:
  • Ron Funches plays the amphibious King Shark. In DC's Powerless, he played a guy from Atlantis (and was presumably amphibious).
    • This also isn't the first time he's voiced The Big Guy in a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits with an intimidating appearance, but friendly personality.
  • Jason Praxis is not the first guy with electric superpowers Phil Lamarr has voiced.
  • Alfred Molina plays Mister Freeze. This isn't the first time he's played a scientist who loses his wife and becomes a supervillain.
  • "What's the point in having an elevator when it doesn't work?" - Kaley Cuoco's role as Penny - a normal girl living among comic book addicts who would have every comic Harley Quinn appeared in - in another TV show which featured an out-of-order lift. (Interestingly, Melissa Rauch, who starred alongside Cuoco on The Big Bang Theory, played Harley Quinn in Batman and Harley Quinn.)
  • In the episode Riddle U the Riddler (who is played by Jim Rash) Takes over a college where he becomes the dean. This is almost certainly a reference to another show where he’s dean of a college.
  • The series' take on Jim Gordon as an alcoholic and borderline deranged Cowboy Cop can be seen as a parody of Christopher Meloni's most famous role as Detective Elliot Stabler from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, crossbred with Meloni's next series role in Happy! as alcoholic and borderline deranged former cop Nick Sax.
  • Justina Machado's role as Bethany is one big reference to her role in One Day at a Time (2017), being a Latina single mother with two kids (an older daughter and a younger son) who works as a nurse practitioner.
  • Firefly star Alan Tudyk voicing a character named Firefly likely counts.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: In this series, Bruce and Selina are romantic with each other like in most other works. Unlike past works, Bruce is the one who's presented as being emotionally clingy, something that can drive a wedge between them. In other works, if any wedge is driven between them, it's usually more of moral/philosophical differences or the law coming between them.
• Adaptational Late Appearance:
  • In this continuity, Harvey Dent wasn't disfigured by the time Joker killed Jason Todd. In the comics, Two-Face killed Jason's father.
  • Barbara Gordon in this continuity doesn't appear or become Batgirl until well after Damian Wayne is established to be the current Robin, when most continuities (including the mainline comics) had her enter the picture sometime during Dick Grayson's tenure as the original Robin.
• Adaptational Modesty: Very weirdly so for this series (where Harley's butt gets exposed, and mosaic censoring is used to cover Maxie Zeus' genitals), Zatanna's cameo appearances still don't have her in the fishnets like the comics. Also, Poison Ivy is much less sexualized here than in usual depictions, and her default outfit is a leather jacket and green leggings.
• Adaptational Wimp:
  • Clayface is one of the more dangerous members of Batman's rogue gallery and very difficult to stop. In the show he's manhandled by Maxie Zeus, a normal human, even though his clay body should make such attacks quite pointless. But averted in "Lover's Quarrel" when he becomes a rampaging giant, to the point that Harley lampshades how often that ability would have been useful.
  • Compared to Son of Batman, Robin (Damian Wayne) is treated as a braggart and brat who is never a serious threat to Harley and her crew. The main conflict of the episode is that Harley does not want to be associated with a hero she sees as beneath her standing.
  • Parademons are normally depicted as being a serious threat that requires either serious superpowers or overwhelming firepower to take down. Here, Harley can easily kill them with nothing but a baseball bat.
  • King Shark may not be a world-shattering threat in the comics, but he absolutely delights in bloodshed. Here, he avoids it whenever possible.
  • Doctor Psycho is one of Wonder Woman's more serious threats, and was part of the inner council of the Society. Here, he's still one of the heavier hitters on Harley's team, but regularly gets shown up.
  • Amazons are normally exceptionally dangerous female warriors with super strength. Here, Jennifer, a health insurance agent with no superpowers or combat training, is able to kill them on her own (after she gets mad that the mimosas aren't bottomless).
• Adapted Out:
  • Harley's niece Jenny and nephew Nicky are omitted due to her brother Barry dying before he could have children in this continuity. Her other brothers Ezzie and Frankie are also left out.
  • The series is influenced primarily by Harley Quinn's current characterization as an Anti-Hero who's rejected her ties to the Joker that was established in New 52 and Rebirth, but, with the sole exception of Sy Borgman, noticeably omits several members of her supporting cast who were introduced during that point, such as Edgar Fullerton Yeung, Red Tool, the Gang of Harleys, Goat Boy and Big Tony.
• Affably Evil: Pretty much everyone not named The Joker, but especially King Shark and Clayface, are shockingly friendly and polite despite being murderous super-villains. Even the Joker slides into this trope after recovering from his amnesia in the second season, actually becoming respectful of Harley and giving her honest advice about relationships.
• Age Lift: Several of the characters are said or implied to be somewhat older than in the comics, where their age is intentionally left vague. The season 1 finale explicitly states Joker is 38, and in season 3 it's said Bruce Wayne's parents were murdered "30 years ago", meaning that he's in his late thirties too. And in "Riddle U", when Harley and Ivy disguise themselves as college girls, they dress up in turn-of-the-millennium style (the joke being they think the fashion of their own college years still looks youthful), which would suggest they're roughly the same age as Batman and Joker.
• Alcohol-Induced Bisexuality: Subverted with both Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn. While played seemingly straight in "Bachelorette", when Harley is hosting a bachelorette party for Ivy a week before Ivy marries Kite Man, as the two spend several nights getting drunk and waking the next morning having slept together, most of the second season is spent on the two trying to figure out their own feelings for one another, though Harley is much more open about her romantic feelings for Ivy, who ultimately reciprocates them in "The Runaway Bridesmaid".
• All Animals Are Dogs: The hyenas Bud and Lou once again, given their love of dog treats and showing affection to Harley by licking her.
• Anarchy Is Chaos: As of season 2, Gotham being destroyed by the earthquake and declared an exclusion zone with no-one in charge causes the entire city to devolve into dog-eat-dog chaos overnight. Harley thinks that's awesome, and subsequently makes things worse by refusing to let anyone impose any kind of order on the city.
• Animated Shock Comedy: At its core, the series is essentially a comic-book-themed take on this trope— crude, raunchy, violent, and completely shameless how all of it is played for laughs.
• Anti-Villain: While not as sympathetic as normal, Harley still counts. There's even a rather sweet moment in "The Line" where Ivy tells Harley she may be a bad guy, but she's a good person (i.e she's a supervillain, but isn't really evil).
• Anything but That!: Just before Joker reveals what he intends to do to Harley in the final episode of the first season. He would drop her into a vat of acid that would make her "normal" again. Harley is so terrified at the idea of being normal again that she offers to go back to working for Joker if he doesn't go through with it.
• Anyone Can Die: The series shows what happens when a villain who doesn't have a code against killing is the main character instead of Batman. Hardly anybody is dispatched without being murdered in the worst way possible, and other villains find out the hard way that the only reason they lasted so long was that their greatest enemy kept sending them to a revolving door asylum instead of the morgue. Just ask Scarecrow or Penguin. And in later seasons, not even iconic characters and allies to Batman such as Nightwing are exempt from getting killed off in humiliating ways.
• Apologetic Attacker: When Ivy has to fight off a group of mutated trees, she says "sorry!" before finishing each one of them off.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Harley is more upset that Mr. Freeze put his wife’s small business out of business than his numerous crimes and the fact that he kidnapped the crew.
  • Also, this:
  Harley: So, how have you been?
  Joker: Oh, you know, same old, same old. Murdering, hijacking WMDs, arson. Ooh, I've been rewatching a lot of Scrubs.
• Artistic License – Biology: Not getting into how Ivy's plant powers can spur such rapid growth, she seems capable of causing vines to grow out of any old plant she happens to have on hand, regardless of whether they're plants that grow vines.
• Artistic License – Medicine: In "Riddle U", Harley decides to infiltrate Riddler's university and suggests getting an HPV vaccine as preparation, which Ivy points out they're "too old" for the vaccine. While vaccination against HPV is highly recommended for all 11 to 12 year old children, the vaccine is also approved and recommended for adults — both men and women — above age 25, it just requires three doses instead of the usual two above the age of 15.
• Artistic License – Religion: The Penguin is seen eating shrimp served at his nephew's bar mitzvah. While not all Jews are observant when it comes to eating shellfish, religiously significant occasions such as bar mitzvahs are usually kept kosher even by secular Jews.
• Asshole Victim:
  • The rich white men in the series-opening, who celebrate their massive pile of money that was built on "fucking the poor", are all murdered and mangled by Joker and Harley.
  • Most of the main characters count. They're A Lighter Shade of Black compared to a lot of the other supervillains, but they're still supervillains. So they tend to end up on the wrong end of a beatdown or humiliating loss a few times, such as when Harley gets the crap kicked out of her by Batman.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Poison Ivy grows into a Giant Woman after drinking the same formula that made a group of trees mutate to about the same size. That makes her a big target for a harpoon through the heart from The Joker, where Ivy seemingly dies.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman get hit with Poison Ivy's love pheromones (which could also turn them into trees) in "Lovers' Quarrel" as a setup for hilarity, along with the situation of how to give those three the antidote. But by the next episode, "The Runaway Bridesmaid", it went nowhere and seemed swept aside without payoff or mention.
  • The end of "A Thief, a Mole, an Orgy" has Two-Face note that he and Gordon have blackmail photos of the richest folk in Gotham to help with Gordon's campaign for mayor. This never gets brought up again, and Gordon soon drops out of the running for mayor two episodes later.
• Batman Gambit: Ironically pulled off by Harley when she tricks Robin into confessing that she's not really his Arch-Enemy on live television.
• Batter Up!: Harley's giant mallet gets destroyed in the fight with the Joker's gang, so she trades it out for a baseball bat she steals from one of the mooks. Later on, she gets another bat with her playing card motif painted over it.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: The gang get through the front gate of Scarecrow's base by driving in a "Pretzel-wrapped-Hotdog" truck, fooling the guards into thinking it is a gift from the boss. The fact that they brought the actual food fools the guards into thinking its legit.
• Best Friend: Harley has this in Poison Ivy. Harley even calls Ivy her "bestie" more than once, which Ivy reciprocates. When Harley has nowhere else to go and no one else to turn to, Ivy's there for Harley. Which is why it breaks Harley's heart when she goes into Ivy's mind to fight off Scarecrow's fear toxin, and finds that Harley herself is Ivy's greatest fear. Specifically, the fear that Harley will turn her back on Ivy.
• Beware the Nice Ones: The show's version of Bane is quite affable and tries his best to be funny and friendly. Despite this, he is much stronger than his comicbook counterpart, overpowering Batman's Power Armor and breaking his legs.
  • King Shark is a big softie who loves internet memes, and regularly bites people in half.
• Beyond the Impossible: Dr Psycho calling Wonder Woman the c-word on national TV is so shocking it causes the Earth to briefly stop rotating.
• Big Bad:
  • Season 1: The Joker
  • Season 2: Darkseid
  • Season 3: Bruce Wayne (!)
  • Season 4: Lex Luthor
• Bisexual Love Triangle: In the second season, Poison Ivy is torn between a thrilling life of crime and fun with her best friend Harley Quinn and a stable life with the bland but kind Kite Man. As Ivy explains it, she loves Harley but can't trust her, because Harley is flighty and impulsive and Ivy fears being left behind. On the other hand, Kite Man is trustworthy and stable.
• Bittersweet Ending: Considering that technically, The Bad Guy Wins. Harley and her crew defeat the Joker with the help of a Not Quite Dead Poison Ivy, with some extra benefits being that Batman is nowhere to be found, the Justice League are apparently still trapped Queen of Fables' book, and the Joker's last act was to blow up Gotham, so they can all enjoy seeing the wreckage together. While the Joker obviously survives, he still fell into his own vat of chemicals that was meant for Harley, causing him to turn into a normal person.
• Black Comedy: Boatloads of it.
  • The Establishing Series Moment is a bunch of Corrupt Corporate Executives talking about getting their money by "fucking the poor," after which Harley kneecaps one with a graphic spurt of blood and broken bone, coupled with a lot of gratuitous cursing.
  • The Penguin's nephew Joshua has a bar mitzvah, but Harley ruins the party by killing all the guards at a fake heist. And it turns out the guards were an improv troupe, so nobody cares that they're dead. Later at the same party, Harley tells Joshua that he can't be a man because he's never finger-blasted a girl.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Frank the plant claims that the neighbor kid Ivy hired to keep her plants watered quit after a week, barfing up the kid's corpse a second afterwards.
  • Immediately after Harley breaks up with Joker, Joker claims that he wanted her to do exactly that, to "keep [her] safe".
  • At the Legion of Doom's lair, Joker says that he dumped Harley, and that he wishes her well. He says this while his hands are trembling with barely-concealed rage.
  • The Joker insists that he is turning 25 on his birthday. In response to Scarecrow congratulating him on how much he's accomplished in just 38 years.
• Bloodier and Gorier: As a cartoon aimed towards older audiences, the SDCC 2019 trailer already provides a couple of examples demonstrating the show's violence, such as Joker getting roughed up from Harley batting him in the face, Joker killing one of his mooks with a gun, a Harley-looking doll getting decapitated by a closing elevator door, and so on.
• Bloody Hilarious: Despite its Bloodier and Gorier nature, a lot of scenes are played for laughs, most poignantly when Bane got impatient and detonated a bomb King Shark was carrying, catching him in the blast and breaking his fin off. A fin which got a Japanese chef interested to purchase for a large amount of money.
• Brick Joke:
  • There are several throwaway lines in the first two episodes about Harley's grand plan of blackmailing the city into naming a highway after her. At the end of the third one, which is all about Harley getting a crew, a Coincidental Broadcast comes up about a high-speed chase on the "abruptly renamed Harley Quinn Parkway". Then in the eleventh episode, Harley's gang, Ivy, and Scarecrow's gang wind up being in their own high speed chase on the insanely redesigned (and renamed) Harley Quinn Highway, with Harley remarking she regrets some of her design choices.
    • A sign on the Highway reads "Tax dollars well spent - Literally no one" and later in the same episode, Dr. Psycho gets a rocket launcher from a supply drop hovering above a pit that has to be jumped over by a car and comments, "Tax dollars paid for this?!"
  • In Season 2, Commissioner Gordon in his crazed state demanded a codpiece that fires missiles. Bruce's reply was that it doesn't exist. Later on, when Batman fought Bane, his armored batsuit actually had a codpiece that fires missiles.
  • In Episode 4 of the first season, Harley and crew hear for the first time about an obscure hero named Tommy Tomorrow. In Episode 13 of Season 2, the guy actually appears and gets a Key to the city along with the Justice League.
  • In season 1, Bane makes a joke about the ocean being the world's toilet. In season 2, ocean critters do a song and dance number for King Shark, all about being able to poop wherever you want in the ocean.
• Bullying a Dragon: Harley's good enough to be in the Legion but its members keep shitting on her. This puts her at odds with them when she would have otherwise been a resourceful ally.
  • Everyone gives Bane nothing but grief and treats him like a joke. Despite him being more than capable of tearing most of his fellow supervillians to pieces.
  • Invoked by Harley. Harley's crew warned her that messing with Lois Lane would bring Superman's wrath after them. But that's exactly what Harley wanted, to pick a fight and have Supes as her nemesis and increase her villain rep. Unfortunately for her, Supes sicced Robin at her, seeing her as beneath him to deal with personally.
• By Wall That Is Holey: After killing the Joker's goons and wrecking his lair, a triumphant Harley grins over the chaos while a wall falls at her, a hole in the wall leaving her unharmed as it crashes.
• Camera Abuse: Intense bursts of gore often end up with blood getting splattered onto the screen.
• Cardboard Prison: Partially averted, as the guards are more focused on keeping the prisoners from escaping resulting in Harley being stuck there for a year. While not shown when she was brought in, Poison Ivy was also there for almost as long. However Harley is able to escape easily at the end of season two to save Ivy. Season three split the difference and, while not incredibly difficult, still required a distraction from outside to break Clayface and King Shark out.
• Card-Carrying Villain: All of the supervillains, from the main cast to the Legion of Doom, actively embrace their status as the bad guys and make it part of their public image.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: A regular occurrence on the show. For example, Ivy and Harley have a conversation about how Harley can do better while Harley is curb-stomping a group of Arkham Guards ganging up on her to give her her shot.
• Celebrity Casualty:
  • In "A High Bar", Howie Mandel is blown up by the Joker.
  • Billy Bob Thornton is mauled to death by Catwoman's pet tiger in "The 83rd Annual Villy Awards".
  • Queen Elizabeth II is implied to fall to her death after Harley pushes her out of a plane in "Harlivy"; though Harley claims she had a parachute.
  • Both Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are killed while attending MalCon in "The First Person to Come Back From a Business Conference Without Chlamydia".
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • Catwoman takes somebody that Clayface claims to be Tim Burton as her date to Poison Ivy and Kite Man's wedding, though she calls him Phil. Burton directed Batman (1989) and Batman Returns, the latter of which featured Catwoman.
  • James Gunn voices himself in season 3, he also previously wrote and directed The Suicide Squad which featured both Harley Quinn and King Shark.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The first several episodes are light, comedic, and mostly standalone; there is an ongoing story, but mostly the show is Monster of the Week-type fun antics as Harley builds her crew and makes plans. Once she joins the Legion of Doom, the show becomes far more serialized and much darker, and previously established plot points and characters return and convene to demonstrate a larger narrative they were building towards.
• Chekhov's Gun: The nuclear bomb that Joker steals in "So You Need a Crew?" is likely what Joker detonated that unleashed the earthquake that devastated Gotham in "The Final Joke". In the same "Need a Crew" episode, Harley mentions purchasing a nuclear device and using it for her highway-renaming extortion, but that Gun hasn't come up again since... yet.
• Cluster F-Bomb: This show is notable for being the very first DC cartoon that uses the F-word, and they take advantage of it. The Establishing Series Moment drops an F-bomb in the first few seconds, along with a couple more F-bombs dropped throughout the rest of the scene.
• Composite Character:
  • The show's version of Batgirl takes elements from all three women who've held the title. Her name, appearance, and background come from Barbara Gordon, her personality is similar to Stephanie Brown's, and her debuting during the No Man's Land equivalent is from Cassandra Cain.
  • The Calendar Man has the appearance of his modern incarnation established in The Long Halloween while also wearing the costume of his original Silver Age incarnation.
  • The Condiment King resembles a chubbier version of his original depiction in Batman: The Animated Series, but his real name is Mitchell Mayo like the mainline comics' interpretation of the character.
  • Mr. Freeze is based for the most part on his pre-Flashpoint characterization of actually being married to Nora and becoming the way he is as the result of cryogenic experiments he conducted to try and cure her of a terminal illness while she was frozen, with his physical appearance based on his controversial New 52 incarnation.
• Contraception Deception: Harley talks about her girlhood crush on Frankie Muniz and admitted to Ivy that she had planned to lie about being on the pill so that she would have his kid. Ivy is understandably disturbed by that.
• Cool, but Inefficient: The giant glider that Kite-Man uses is pretty cool and gives you a nice view, but when it comes to long distance travel, cars are still a much faster way of getting around.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: In the first season finale, the Joker tortured Dr. Psycho by forcing him to... watch scenes of feminist rallies.
• Country Matters: Dr. Psycho calls Wonder Woman the C-word during a fight (notably, it's the only obscenity in the show to be censored) and Poison Ivy remarks that Dr. Psycho has just made himself a pariah among the villain community. It's so bad that even the Earth briefly stops spinning.
  • Hell, even an overlord like Darkseid, who defines evil and tyranny, claims not even he utters such a word.
• Cranial Plate Ability: When Dr. Psycho betrays the crew, he uses his powers to brainwash King Shark and Clayface. He also attempts to do the same to Cy Borgman, but it doesn't work due metal plates in his skull. Psycho isn't phased by this issue.
  Dr. Psycho: Why didn't it work on the old timer?
  Cy: Same reason I can't go to the airport. Metal plates, baby!
  Dr. Psycho: God you're old! Whatever. I'll kill you too.
• Crapsack World:
  • While Gotham has always been portrayed as your standard Rotten Apple, here it acknowledges how much of a crime-ridden hellhole it is and is Played for Laughs in as black of humor as possible. While many of the villains present in the series are portrayed as normal people talking about relationships and acting as though they work an office job, people on the "right" side of the law are constantly on edge, years on the force leaving Jim Gordon a barely coherent mess and the guards at Arkham reacting to the slightest security risk with extreme prejudice.
  • There is a stigma on female supervillains in this show, according to Poison Ivy and the Queen of Fables, though they could be exaggerating since they're psychotic sociopaths and misogynist . However, an undeniable fact is that the Legion of Doom has only one female member (Cheetah) whom they don't care enough to even remember her name and are a bunch of misogynistic and manipulative males.
• Cruel Mercy:
  • Harley leaves Joker alive when the clown prince was trapped underneath the ruins of his hideout, because she wants to rub it in Joker’s face when she takes over Gotham.
  • Joker's ultimate punishment for Harley is to make her normal again and not actually harm her at all. She considers this such a horrifying idea that she immediately offers to wholeheartedly work for him again and begs him not to go through with it.
  • When Harley kidnaps Lois Lane, Superman shows up, but refuses to fight her, because he knows that Harley wants the cred that would come from having Superman as a nemesis. Instead, he brings Robin (Damian Wayne) over to fight her because he knows she's offended and embarrassed by the idea that a child could be her nemesis.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • While Batman is portrayed as The Comically Serious in this show, he's still The Dreaded among Gotham's supervillains for a reason; anytime Batman fights in this show, it's a one-sided beatdown in his favor. Harley gets trounced by Batman on live television, and Ivy is only able to briefly even the odds.
  • Also King Shark versus the police in episode six. He gets crushed, arrested, and imprisoned so fast the rest of the team can only stare in awe.
  • Aquaman manhandles the Legion of Doom on their own turf before Harley bursts open their aquarium and forces him to choose between the brawl and saving the sea life.
• Dating Catwoman:
  • Naturally, since this is DC and has both Batman and Catwoman appear. Selina breaks up with him, but she still wants to support him.
  • Discussed by Harley and Ivy in "The Horse and the Sparrow." By this point, Harley's stopped being a villain of her own volition and only really does evil things if that's what Ivy wants, but Ivy isn't thinking of pulling a Heel–Face Turn herself and is outright interested in taking up Lex's offer to lead the Legion of Doom. Harley wants to stay a villain because she's afraid that the two will be separated if Harley drops being a villain, but Ivy assures her that they'll still be together even if they're on opposite sides of the law. To this end, Harley stops being a villain and is more on the side of good, even joining the Bat Family in Bruce's absence after his arrest, but is still Ivy's girlfriend.
• Deadpan Snarker: A lot of people, but primarily Ivy. You can count the number of lines Ivy has that don't fall straight into this on one hand.
• Deconstruction: The show essentially picks apart the idea of what it means to be a villain in the DC Universe. Here, villainy is treated like a career, and every bad guy from Lex Luthor to Bane is trying to carve out their own little niche. Harley, having struck out on her own, is forced to make her own niche, which proves to come with its own set of challenges seeing as she's seen as little more than a sidekick to the Joker.
  • The series also Deconstructs the concept of the No-Respect Guy by showing that being considered small fry in the villain community really sucks. Villains who are just looking to make a dishonest day's work can barely get by, have to put up with being treated like henchman by other villains who are far craftier and more cunning, and they eventually get fed up with being treated as little more than disposable idiots. All of Harley's gang gets no respect in the Legion of Doom, Bane is eventually mistreated rather horribly in the Injustice Gang to the point that he goes ballistic on Batman and nearly does Two-Face in, and Dr. Psycho feels that Harley isn't going far enough to being a real villain and joins with Darkseid to get the respect he feels he deserves. And keep in mind, this all started because he gets kicked out of the Legion of Doom for calling Wonder Woman a...well, a word that even Darkseid wouldn't use.
  • Additionally, all that trauma that the Joker did from years of emotional and physical abuse have really screwed her up big time. While she seems well adjusted to her fellow foes, she's too traumatized to really understand the harm her actions are causing on her friends and allies, resulting in her crew disbanding for a time and Ivy refusing a relationship with her at least at first because she's too unpredictable and unstable to prove herself trustworthy. In truth, she's not doing this on purpose, since she really is a good person deep down (or at least as good as being a super villain gets); it's just that she can't really understand the harm she's doing since being Joker's punching bag had made her Innocently Insensitive without her realizing it. Part of the show's plot is Harley learning to realize the mistakes she's making and work to become a better person.
• Deconstructive Parody: Being a Supervillain isn't just about villainy, it's about building a brand! And unless you go solo, you'll need a crew, for which you'll have to contact the local bad guy agency or go to the Bad Guy Bar. And your lair reflects your vibe, so make sure they match. Having a nemesis can help promote your brand, but having a bad or lopsided one would hurt it instead. And if you're female, there's also the glass ceiling to consider.
• Denser and Wackier: While it does have its occasional serious moments, the show is far more zany than other Batman properties, leaning heavily into Black Comedy.
• Didn't Think This Through: At the end of the episode "B.I.T.C.H.", Alfred manages to rob the bank - and gets arrested for it. He was expecting to reunite with Bruce Wayne at the Blackgate Penitentiary... until he notices that he arrived at Arkham Community Center instead. As Victor Zsasz clarifies seconds later, Alfred lacks the stock portfolio required to be interred at Blackgate.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Having a nemesis is both a metaphor for romantic relationships and sex.
• Domestic Abuse: The Joker and Harley have always had this relationship before, but the plot really explores it. The show goes into detail about just how hard it is for Harley to dump the Joker, even when she knows how horrible he treats her and that he never loved her. While some of this is played for Black Comedy, most of it drives the central narrative. Even months after the break-up, Ivy can tell that Harley still acts in a way that shows she cares about what Joker thinks. And Joker forces Harley back into her old get-up when she tries to get her crew back from him, which she clearly hates doing.
• Don't Create a Martyr: Joker refuses to kill Harley in the season 1 finale for fear that it would make her into an emotional martyr in his mind. Instead, he plans to throw her into a chemical vat and turn her back into her old self so he won't care about her anymore, something she fears a lot more than dying.
• Do Wrong, Right: Bane yells at Joshua for putting a hit out on Harley and using a credit card for the down payment, insisting he pay in cash next time.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?:
  • It's a running theme of the series that Harley and her crew want to be taken seriously by the rest of the supervillain community (specifically the Legion of Doom), but nobody respects them. They gradually start to work their way up there after performing legitimately impressive feats that catch the Legion's attention.
  • The stigma against female supervillains also gets brought up quite a bit, with Harley having to work twice as hard to get half as much respect. When Harley asks a bunch of thugs at a bar to join her crew, they all make lame excuses as to why they can't, with one mook even jumping into a Hell dimension rather than join Harley. But the moment Kite Man shows up, everyone leaves to join his crew.
• Easily Elected: In season three, the Joker — one of the world's most feared supervillains who managed to take over Gotham City back in season one — becomes the mayor. While he has reformed, he should still have a criminal record, which is usually enough to disqualify someone from running.
• Easily Forgiven: It's fairly frequent to see villains that were once friends try to kill one another and then go back to being friends - such as being invited to a wedding, as was Bane's case. It may be because the villains sorta expect this backstabbing behavior and dish out as much as they take it, so they don't really take it too personally.
• Elemental Zombie: Ivy's attempt to make a serum to aid plant life has the unintentional consequence of creating plant zombies. These zombies also puke a slime that causes people to become plants.
• Establishing Series Moment: The first scene has a yacht of white billionaires toasting all the money they made "fucking the poor" before Harley drops in and declares it belongs to her now. The others laugh at her since she's just the Joker's girlfriend, and in response Harley whacks the nearest guy in the leg with her mallet, and he collapses screaming in pain. And then a few moments later, the Joker reveals he had infiltrated the party and hijacks the attack to Harley's frustration. In its first two minutes, the show sets up its tone, style of humor, and central conflict — Harley is trying to establish her own profile as a supervillain but gets no respect and has to break away from Joker to make it herself, and we can expect to see a lot of hilarious and gratuitous violence and cursing, as well as on-the-nose jabs at topical subject matter.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Harley and her coterie of supervillains really do care about each other (with Harley and Ivy having an on and off relationship), which goes a long way towards making them more likable despite being villains, as most of their enemies are just one dimensional bad guys with no humanizing traits.
  • Joker with Beth.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Lots of 'em, too.
• Evil Is One Big, Happy Family: Subverted. During Season 1, the Gotham rogues seem to get along and cooperate together, first at Arkham Asylum and then at the bad-guys bar. At the Legion of Doom, they act like friendly coworkers. That all ends by the end of the first season, and in Season 2 it's all dog-eat-dog between villans.
• Evil Power Vacuum: Season 2's main conflict is that the remaining villains took over Gotham after Joker's defeat.
• Evil vs. Evil: The protagonists are ruthless murderers who want to get high in the supervillain league by causing chaos and mayhem. The antagonists are also supervillains, but unlike the heroes, they have lower standards about killing innocents and backstabbing their allies. The superheroes oppose both, and effectively form a third side, but the two sides of the supervillain conflict aren't willing to team up against them.
• Face/Heel Double-Turn: A downplayed version occurs between The Joker and Dr. Psycho. They both start off and end as unrepentant villains, but their relationship with Harley definitely changes compared to how they previously started. The Joker is Harley’s abusive ex-boyfriend who becomes her main enemy in Season 1 around the time Dr. Psycho joins Harley’s crew as her ally to better his image. However, in Season 2, Psycho decides to betray Harley and carry out his Evil Plan around the time The Joker decides to help Harley stop Dr. Psycho after having a Love Epiphany for his new girlfriend while parting with Harley on (somewhat) better terms.
• Fate Worse than Death: In the first season finale, the Joker plans to drop Harley Quinn into a chemical bath that will erase her memories and identity, also reverting her back to a normal average person. Harley Quinn was horrified and preferred death instead. It would seem that the Joker agrees with Harley on this too, given that he too pleaded for mercy when he became the one dangling over the chemical bath instead.
• Flowery Elizabethan English: Aquaman loves this trope, but drops it when his fish friends are in danger.
• Foe Romance Subtext:
  • In the first episode, Riddler gives Joker a Sadistic Choice between Batman and Harley, to save one and let the other drop into a vat of acid. Joker chooses Batman, and as Harley drops, she remembers the Joker proposing to her on a rooftop; only he wasn't holding a wedding ring, it was a grenade, and he said "til death do us part" over Harley's shoulder, to Batman. She realizes in that moment that the Joker loves Batman, not her.
  • Having an Arch-Enemy is treated identically to a romantic relationship. There are websites that match heroes and villains based on their powers and how often they'd like to fight, talk shows treat a villain "stealing" a hero from another villain like celebrity couple gossip, and Bruce's discussion with Damian about the importance of finding the right nemesis is framed as The Talk.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In episode 9 of season 1, Lex Luthor turned down the Joker's request for funds to build a tower in his own image, telling the Joker that he "came up with the frosting before baking the cake" and that he should do the latter before the former. The Joker darkly promised to do so, and made good on his promise to do so in the penultimate episode of season 1.
  • Doctor Psycho originally joined Harley's crew for pragmatic reasons, after he was excommunicated from the Legion of Doom. In the latter half of Season 2, he quits the team when Harley's interests no longer align with his own.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Tawney's screen crawls provide hilarious commentary on events. For instance, when Dr Psycho shouts the C-Word on live TV for the second time, the crawl reads: "Man says terrible thing again! Will probably get a third chance." When Harley and Ivy find themselves in an awkward, romantically suggestive pose, the crawl reads "Kiss ya? Ive Harley even known ya!"
  • In "Inner (Para) Demons," the US president reads Harley's file; her file number is 09111992. September 11, 1992 is the air date of the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Joker's Favor", Harley Quinn's first appearance. Also, the titles of several episodes she was in are hidden on the report paper about her, along with mention of "Suicide Squad". And Harley is giving a middle finger on her mug shot.
• Friend-or-Idol Decision: In Season 3, after a plant-zombie apocalypse gets unleashed, Poison Ivy takes control of it and decides that it isn't exactly what she wanted but she can use it to turn Gotham into a green paradise by infecting everyone and making them plant zombies. Harley is horrified because Ivy's crossed the line and is hurting innocent people, so she dives in front of a zombie that's about to infect Bane. Ivy is stuck choosing between letting plants take over Gotham or saving the love of her life. She chooses to save Harley.
• From Roommates to Romance: Poison Ivy lets Harley move into her apartment after the latter breaks up with the Joker. Harley eventually gets Ivy evicted when the Shark Man member of her crew triggers the no pets clause on Ivy's lease, so Harley lets Ivy live with her and her crew at an abandoned mall. Starting from halfway through Season 2, Harley and Ivy's relationship turns romantic after years of friendship. By Season 3, they're now a couple and move into Catwoman's apartment together.
• Funny Background Event: The scene in the Arkham Asylum mess hall when Harley, after months of waiting, still insists that the Joker will come to break her out:
  The Riddler: [Nadia Comenici] broke a record. Which is what you sound like: A broken record! He's. Not. Coming!
  Harley: That is just one person's opinion.
  Every villain and guard in the background: HE'S! NOT! COMING!
• Fun with Acronyms: Alfred is aware of the special techinque called B.I.T.C.H. (Breathe, Identify the Problem, Tea Break, Consider Your Options, Handle It). Which comes in handy later for Harley in the eponymous episode.
• Gang of Hats:
  • The Joker’s henchmen all have sickly gray complexions not dissimilar to that of their boss; they also share his purple-and-green clothing, but usually with striped sweaters and purple jackets/pants instead of the Joker’s tailored suits.
  • The Penguin’s male goons wear tuxedo-print t-shirts, while his female devotees wear skimpy leotards with bowler hats — a clear sign of how Wicked Pretentious their boss is.
  • Two-Face’s henchmen wear the same black-and-white-split-down-the-middle suits as their boss, albeit with matching fedoras.
  • Bane’s minions wear elaborate lucha libre outfits, signifying Bane’s Hispanic heritage and penchant for wrestling moves.
• Giant Woman:
  • Giganta, who is Dr. Psycho's ex. They even have a kid together. When Ivy asks how that works sexually, Dr. Psycho just says "not great."
  • In the penultimate episode of Season 1, Poison Ivy grows to giant size after drinking the same formula that made a group of trees mutate. That makes her a big target for a harpoon through the heart from The Joker, which seemingly kills her. She gets better. Dr. Psycho offers Ivy thirty bucks to put him in her pocket; as everyone stares at him, he simply says, "What? I have a type!"
• Girly Bruiser: The star protagonist evokes this with her baseball bat and tights. Blugeoning people and being adorable. One example being when she finished off Penguin in "New Gotham" and innocently asked her crew if they want to go get coffee.
• Gorn: Holy shit. Clearly overlapping with Bloodier and Gorier, this show is incredibly violent and extremely bloody, and is presented in a way that's clearly not for the faint of heart or stomach by featuring countless gruesome deaths accompanied with copious amounts of blood and gore, including people getting torn to shreds by gunfire, people exploding into Ludicrous Gibs and splashing their organs all over the place, people getting graphically dismembered with gory results, etc. This is without a doubt one of the most violent cartoons ever made, and it goes on par with the likes of Metalocalypse, Superjail!, Mr. Pickles, South Park and even the likes of similarly violent live-action TV shows like The Boys, Game of Thrones, Hannibal and The Walking Dead.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: The conflict of season 3 is built on this trope. Harley and her crew are still criminals, but it's all but spelled out that they're not as bad as they claim to be. Meanwhile, Batman, while still a Hero Antagonist, has become unhinged by his trauma, and is trying to bring his dead parents back to get over his guilt, and is willing to kidnap and experiment on Frank in order to do so.
• Groin Attack: Harley tries this on an Arkham guard in the first episode. It doesn't work because the guard is an extremely butch woman. Harley ends up having to headbutt her into submission instead (she's locked in a strait jacket at the time).
• Hate Sink: This version of Two-Face was not only a scumbag politician even pre-disfigurement, he's partially responsible for Harley becoming a villain in the first place, namely, the Joker said he had planted a bomb that would explode in two hours. Dent demanded Harley try to get him to talk, despite being explicitly warned she wasn't qualified yet. This could be a Well-Intentioned Extremist moment on his part (better to put her at risk than risk a bomb killing a bunch of people), except the same episode makes it extremely obvious the only reason he cares is he might not get reelected if a bomb kills a bunch of people.
• Heal It With Fire: Harley tries to cauterize a gunshot wound using a hot tea kettle.
• Heel Realization:
  • Seeing Mr. Freeze’s selfless love for his wife that culminates in him giving his life to cure her makes Harley realize that she’d been letting her own toxic relationship with Joker skew her perception of love.
  • Commissioner Gordon gets this in season 3 after running for mayor of Gotham and picking Two Face as his campaign manager leads to Joker running for mayor against him but being willing to give up his political ambitions when Two Face threatens Joker's stepson. Seeing that Joker, of all people, was being a better person than he was led to Gordon dropping out of the election.
• History with Celebrity: Harley and Joker killed Zach Braff, while Harley has a restraining order from Frankie Muniz.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In the first season finale, the Joker planned to subject Harley to a chemical bath that would revert her back to normal. A revived Poison Ivy rescued Harley at the last moment and the Joker was thrown into the bath instead.
• Hollywood Acid: The first episode has Riddler suspend Batman and Harley over requisite vats of bubbling green acid. Harley even asks if it's the kind of acid that gives people superpowers. It is not. Except this ends up subverted; it was all a ruse, and the "acid" was just 150 gallons of margarita mix.
  • The acid Joker squirts out of his trademark corsage completely melts through his target's head in seconds, not even leaving a skull behind.
• Homage: All of the characters' appearances (except for Catwoman, who is referencing an older version of herself) and voices (except for Bane, whose voice is based on Tom Hardy's version of the character) are styled after their counterparts from Batman: The Animated Series.
• Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: Dr. Psycho had a child with Giganta, you do the math.
  Ivy: Quick side bar. How did this work... sexually?
  Dr. Psycho: Not great!
• Hypocrite: While the Legion expels Dr. Psycho from the group for his blatant sexism, this doesn't stop them from continuing their own sexist practices, with no female members of the group shown before Harley is brought in... just so Joker can emotionally manipulate her again; the lot of them leaving the Queen of Fables to rot in a tax book for years; Lex Luthor gaslighting Ivy at the Joker's behest; Scarecrow kidnapping her, drugging her, and stealing her blood; and other terrible behavior.
• Hypocritical Humor: In “Bensonhurst”, Bane tells Joshua Cobblepot that he needs to learn to be less impulsive. He also tells him not to worry too much about it because he’s just a kid and wisdom will come with age. As soon as Bane turns away, he trips over the office chair. He gets so mad that he freaks out like a child and throws it through the window and into the lake.
• I Have No Son!: When Harley's parents sell her out for the second time, they drop the act and tell her how they really feel. Revealing that they've always disliked the choices she made and are both disappointed and furious with her. Harley, utterly shocked and outraged by their betrayal, treats them likewise and does not even bother killing them.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: After saying that she's always been a rotten, psychotic person even as a little kid, Harley says she suddenly understands why her mother recycled so many wine bottles.
• Informed Judaism: There are plenty of references to Judaism throughout. Sy Borgman speaks with a Yiddish accent, the second episode is centered around the Penguin's nephew's bar mitzvah, and, of course, there's Harley herself. Both of the creators are Jewish, incidentally.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • That's Dr. Psycho, thank you very much!
  • Harley: "I want a nemesis with some hair on their chest!"
    Ivy: That rules out Batman. Catwoman says he waxes everything.
• Joke of the Butt:
  • "Being Harley Quinn" and "Batman Begins Forever" both have comedic emphasis made on the characters' buttocks clenching when they hold hands to travel inside Harley's mind and Bruce Wayne's mind.
  • In "A Very Problematic Valentine's Day Special", Clayface gets cut in half. His bottom half develops his own personality and essentially becomes a talking butt.
• Joker Immunity: The Joker himself may have his usual tendency to avoid death, by the skin of his teeth, but no such assurances are made to other characters in the DC canon, as Scarecrow finds out after getting his face melted off and his head exploded.
• Killed Off for Real:
  • Scarecrow bites the dust in season 1, followed by Penguin, Mister Freeze, and Condiment King in season 2. They all stay dead.
  • Averted by Cy Borgman who had a backup of his brain saved, though he only appears this way twice after his physical death.
• Lame Pun Reaction:
  • Harley and Robin both groan when Superman tells Lois they're still on for a sushi date because that's "how he rolls."
  • Clayface's notable enjoyment of one in episode seven is remarked upon by Dr. Psycho.
  • Poison Ivy's reaction to Condiment King's Hurricane of Puns taunting his nemesis, Kite Man:
  Poison Ivy: I think he's my nemesis now, too.
• Latex Perfection: Gruesomely exaggerated: the Joker at the beginning wears an actual face, and yet it still looks perfectly real.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: This is what Harley and her friends are compared to the more "professional" supervillains in the Legion of Doom. They have just a few more moral scruples than their fellow villains, making them easier to root for.
• Likes Older Women: Harley brings up in "Gotham's Hottest Hotties" that Captain Boomerang goes to the senior center because he loves "mature women", implying that he's a gerontophile.
• Limelight Series: While Harley is obviously big enough to have her own show, her supporting cast is made up of lesser-known DCU villains like Dr. Psycho, King Shark and Clayface^note known as part of Batman's Rogues Gallery but overshadowed by bigger villains in mainstream pop-culture. Ivy gets a recurring love interest in Kite Man, whose very existence is otherwise used as a joke.
• LOL, 69: Kite Man’s apartment number is “66” but he turned the second one upside down so it’d be “69”. When Ivy comes by, she fixes it and when it gets knocked back down when the door shuts, he says “Nice!” After they have a fight at dinner, Ivy brings a “9” with her when she comes to apologize so he can have a proper number.
• Magic Pants: When Ivy deliberately drinks tainted water that makes her grow to giant size, the tattered remains of the shirt and leggings she was wearing grow with her.
• Magic Skirt: In the episode where Poison Ivy has been taken prisoner to extract her pheromones and turn it into a lethal city-killing poison, she is seen strapped to an operating table in a modesty-preserving but very short hospital gown. When Harley and the crew turn up to rescue her, that hospital gown has to do a lot of work to keep her covered as she performs acrobatic kicks and does a lot of leaping between vehicles on the insanely multi-level Harley Quinn Highway - this includes a prolonged fall from a very great height.
• Malicious Misnaming: Harley and Ivy regularly call Gordon "Gordo", which in other languages means "fatso".
• Mock Headroom: After Sy Borgman sacrifices himself to defeat Doctor Psycho, it is revealed that he has a copy of his brain saved. He is portrayed inside of a television screen with Max Headroom's glitchy manner of speaking.
• Mundane Utility:
  • After Batman is unmasked as Bruce Wayne against Joker's wishes, he decides to use the opportunity anyway to complain about an electric car promised by WayneTech which he put a deposit down for that he hadn't recieved.
  • Unintentionally, an amnesiac and normal Joker reads the magical storybook with the Justice League trapped inside to his new girlfriend's children, thinking it was just a normal book that was buried with him.
• Mythology Gag:
  • In the promo trailer with Harley and Ivy talking to the viewers, blink and you'll miss it but the magazine that Ivy's reading is actually The Batman Adventures: Mad Love comic, opened to the page with the "HAARLEEY!!" panel.
  • Harley wears her classic jester costume from Batman: The Animated Series, but switches out to a new look combining her New 52 outfit with her hairstyle from the Suicide Squad film in the first episode after deciding to dump the Joker for good. She ends up wearing her classic look again in the finale, and she hates it.
    • Harley believed she was forcibly thrown into acid/chemicals by the Joker like her New 52 incarnation; in fact, she dove in willingly, like her Suicide Squad incarnation.
  • The Joker and Harley Quinn's assault on the rich pieces of shit leads to a huge pile of money getting torched, which the Joker doesn't seem to care about. Probably because this attack was about sending a message.
  • Bane's voice is an impression of the one Tom Hardy gave him in The Dark Knight Rises.
    • Ivy mentions Bane blowing up Gotham Stadium like in the film, though this Bane did it after getting a question wrong during a trivia game night at a bar.
    • Bane once again throws people into a giant prison pit in the desert.
  • Riddler's "ultimate riddle" in the pilot is revealed to actually be a cruel either/or decision meant for Joker — his nemesis and his girlfriend, both suspended mid-air in glass chambers, where only one can be saved and the other will fall to their death. After cackling at the whole situation for a bit, Joker immediately and predictably decides on Batman, ending his relationship with Harley for good. He then sends a "Jokergram" to Ivy's apartment to apologize — in other words, a henchman with a cell phone bomb in his stomach.
  • Kite Man's Catchphrase ("Hell yeah.") is from Tom King's Batman run.
  • Queen of Fables' ridiculous fate of being cursed by Zatanna to live out the rest of her life as a copy of US Tax Code is taken straight from JLA #47. In the comics, she was trapped in that book (instead of the storybook she was originally trapped in) because her power is drawn from imagination, and there is nothing imaginative about a book of tax codes.
  • During the Queen of Fables flashback, Batman is seen pulling a Batbreaker on Pinocchio.
  • Batman subdues King Shark with the "Shark Repellent" spray from the Adam West film.
  • In the comics Sy Borgman is a resident in a nursing home where "Dr Quinzel" works. Here he owns the apartment building where she lives instead.
  • During the scene in season two when Joker emerges from the acid that Harley shoved him in, he laughs maniacally and looks up, clutching his hair like his original origin scene in The Killing Joke... right before Harley slaps the piss out of him.
  • A "Suicide Squad" is mentioned to exist in this universe and is completely seperate from the Squad (and Harley) of the other DC animation continuity, just like there is Harley in both her own solo comic and the Suicide Squad comic running at the same time but occupying completely separate continuities.
  • One of the prisoners from episode six’s inmate number is “011285” which is the date of the giant squid attack from Watchmen.
  • Once again, Scarecrow is the one to unmask Batman, just like in Batman: Arkham Knight.
  • Season 1 ends with a massive earthquake leveling most of Gotham, in a reference to Batman: No Man's Land, the story arc in which Harley debuted in the mainstream comics canon, after previously remaining limited to Animated Series related continuity.
  • Penguin gets his nose bitten off by Harley in Season 2. The Penguin himself also violently bit someone on the nose in Batman Returns.
  • Mr. Freeze's intro in "Thawing Hearts" - entering from the shadows as his glasses turn on - is a visual nod to his typical entrances in Batman the Animated Series, best seen several times in "Heart of Ice," and the title card of "Deep Freeze."
  • Harley’s incorrect assumption that Mr. Freeze is some sort of creepy stalker who doesn’t really love his wife Nora is probably a reference to the unpopular re-tool of their relationship in the 2011 New 52 Batman series.
  • The file about Harley that the President looks at in "Inner (Para) Demons" are entirely references to many of her Batman:TAS episodes.
  • Batman's interrogation of Joker in "All The Best Inmates Have Daddy Issues" is pretty clearly patterned after the one in The Dark Knight. The issue at hand is getting Joker to divulge the location of a ticking bomb, and it begins with Batman emerging from the shadows once 'conventional' interrogation fails. In the flashback, Joker even has long stringy hair and messy lipstick like Heath Ledger's incarnation of the character.
  • In "It's a Swamp Thing":
    • The Music Meister has the same gap tooth and glasses he had in Batman: The Brave and the Bold, but otherwise looks different.
    • Swamp Thing creating a giant version of his head that emerges from the swamp, looks like the Legion of Doom HQ from Super Friends.
    • After challenging the girls to a drinking contest, Constantine is out cold the next morning wearing a shirt that says, "I tanked a shark", a reference to his old fling with King Shark mentioned in Justice League Dark: Apokolips War.
    • Ivy notes that the exact nature of Swamp Thing is "complicated", a nod to how Swamp Thing was initially established to be Alec Holland mutated into a plant creature before Alan Moore's run made the retcon that Holland died and that Swamp Thing was actually a plant elemental who believed himself to be Holland due to obtaining his memories, with Brightest Day eventually having Swamp Thing corrupted as a Black Lantern so the real Alec Holland could be resurrected as the new Swamp Thing and New 52 going with Holland truly being Swamp Thing all along.
  • "Batman Begins Forever":
    • When Harley's group enters Bruce's mind, a portion of the Batman: The Animated Series opening theme plays.
    • Batman's memories include a scene of him carrying a cartoon bomb past a group of nuns and fighting an army of mind-controlled penguins with rockets strapped to their backs.
• Never a Self-Made Woman: This is the impetus of the show, and a major point in Harley's Character Development. Her desire to be her own person and not just the Joker's sidekick girlfriend are major reasons for her dumping him, and it takes time for her to emerge from his shadow and establish her own profile as a villain. In "Being Harley Quinn", a major epiphany for her is that she thought the Joker pushed her into the vat of chemicals that turned Harleen Quinzel into Harley Quinn, but a repressed memory reveals she jumped. This serves as an empowering moment for Harley as she had blamed the Joker for what she'd become but now realizes she's always been in control of her own choices, and she triumphantly declares to the Joker in her memory that her real origin story was when she left him and became her own person, not when she jumped into the vat.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The trailers have a habit of adding bleeps over dialog even when the speaker isn't actually swearing.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Damian Wayne shows interest in seeing a dead body in "Gotham's Hottest Hotties", expressing disappointment when he has to miss out on it to visit his father in Blackgate and commenting "Cool" after seeing the aftermath of Harley bashing in Professor Pyg's head.
• Nonstandard Character Design: Robin’s big eyes and Shonen Hair are much more Animesque than the rest of the characters’ designs. Likely a nod to his Teen Titans incarnation.
• Noodle Incident: Joker apparently "paralyzed" Commissioner Gordon's "partner" sometime before the show, which is why the commissioner has lost it.
• Not Quite Dead: Ivy takes a harpoon through the heart courtesy of Joker, at which point Harley and her crew bury her body on the spot that she died. Or at least, supposedly died. Ivy comes in to save Harley before she hits the vat of acid that would have turned her normal, then dunks the Joker into it.
• Not So Above It All: Batman initially appears to be the only hero not affected by the show's portrayal of super villains as pop culture, but even he reminisces fondly over having found his first nemesis.
  • He also seems to follow Tawny's show.
• Not Worth Killing: Harley tells her parents this after they sell her out to the mob's hit men and try to kill her to collect the bounty on her head.
• Oh, Crap!: The expressions on Harley and Ivy's face after they kiss shows that they fully understand the gravity of what's happened.
• Once More, with Clarity: Joker’s “proposal” to Harley. Harley believed it to be a romantic scene of her dancing with Joker until Joker takes out a ring and says “till death do us part”. Harley is then forced by the mental image of her past self to confront the reality of what happened. They were actually on the roof of a building, the violinists were actually Joker’s henchmen, Harley wasn’t dancing with Joker but actually holding a grenade, and Joker wasn’t saying “till death do us part” to Harley, he was saying it to Batman just before ditching Harley as an explosive distraction.
• Only the Leads Get a Happy Ending: In the Season One finale, Harley defeats Joker with the help of her crew and Ivy is resurrected. The Justice League is also presumably still stuck in the Queen of Fables' book, Batman has disappeared and Gotham has been blown up by the Joker, presumably killing countless civilians. Since the main characters are Villain Protagonists, they consider it a happy ending.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: King Sharks calls Mr. Freeze, “the most woke ice themed villain in New New Gotham”.
• Parents Suck at Matchmaking: When King Shark returns home, he finds out his father has arranged for him to marry Tabitha of the hammerheads. He doesn't actually want to marry her, and he makes this clear once he finds out Tabitha feels the same way. In the end though, they get married anyway, but agree to an open relationship.
• Pink Is Erotic:
  • When Harley and Ivy start having feelings for one another, pink lighting always appears, and the pair have sex for the first time after drinking under a pink lit environment.
  • When Poison Ivy's pheromones make Batman and Wonder Woman sexually attracted to each other, Batman's hallucination shows Wonder Woman in a pink filter (with a Sexophone riff and slight Hair Flip included).
• Politically Correct Villain:
  • Mr. Freeze tells Harley that he stopped the Injustice League from killing her and that he was only able to because he knew heterosexual, cisgendered, white men would love nothing more than to make an object out of a woman put on display like a trophy. ^note He is obviously glossing over Bane, who is Hispanic but has no respect amongst his peers and whose opinion would not have mattered.
  • As part of his Character Development in the third season, the Joker becomes more progressive while still being a maniacal criminal. He is disgusted by Debbie Shirley's racism, he wishes for his Hispanic girlfiend's children to have a bilingual education so they can be in touch with their cultural roots and he successfully runs for mayor of Gotham City on a socialist platform, his policies focused on helping the working class and providing more humane treatment for the incarcerated. In addition, he's considerate enough to acknowledge the existence of non-binary people after saying "Ladies and gentlemen" in "The Horse and the Sparrow", plus the tie-in comic miniseries Legion of Bats shows him officiating an interracial gay wedding.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Dr. Psycho calls Wonder Woman the c-word. Additionally, in the first episode, Joker declares to his henchman Stan that "women aren't funny".
• Pragmatic Villainy: When Harley says she's going to kill Damian Wayne, the rest of her crew talks her out of it. Not necessarily because they're opposed to killing kids, but because it would make it seem like Harley had acknowledged him as a valid archnemesis for herself.
• Precision F-Strike: Albeit bleeped, in the trailer, Harley says that if anyone does not enjoy her show, she will "bash their fucking heads in!" There are two unbleeped s-bombs in the SDCC trailer. Cue the actual series premiere and f-bombs dropping in the very first minute.
• Properly Paranoid: Arkham has a rule of no plants within 50 yards of Poison Ivy... but the inmates are able to get around this by using a seed from an orange.
  • A season two flashback scene shows her rampaging and nearly escaping, as she was served a salad that was fresh enough for her to use some of the lettuce.
• Punch-Clock Villain: The show appears to take place in a universe in which being a supervillain is a job like any other, and supervillainy is a major contributor to the economy. Supervillain lairs have realtors, and henchmen can be hired from temp agencies, and earn points on "Goon Review".
• Put on a Bus: Kite Man and Doctor Psycho both eventually leave the story. Psycho is locked up in Arkham after betraying Harley and crew at the conclusion of season 2. Kite Man shows up early in season 3 at the Villain Awards with a new girlfriend who also calls the DC D-list home and bearing no ill will toward Ivy, but isn't seen again after. Though The Bus Came Back for Psycho late in season 3 when Harley busts him out to go inside Bruce Wayne's mind. In Kite Man's case, this is likely because he's getting a spinoff.
• Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic: Frequently averted, especially with Poison Ivy. Characters often stumble, stammer and interrupt themselves.
• Recurring Extra: Cheryl, a Gotham cop who later switches over to Bane's side and then back again; voiced by Poison Ivy's Lake Bell with a Southern accent, a Creator In-Joke to Ivy originally having a Southern accent in the comics.
• Reel Torture: In "The Final Joke", Joker tortures Doctor Psycho by strapping him to a chair and forcing him to watch videos of feminist rallies.
• Relative Ridicule: When Harley's parents reveal to her their intention to kill her for her bounty, Harley attempts to reason with her mother by pointing out that she is their daughter. All this does is get her mom to rant about how people mock them for being the parents of a psychotic criminal with a bad taste in men. Harley feels the need to point out how neither of them are any better due to her father also being a criminal that her mother hooked up with.
  Sharon: When you became "Harley Quinn," we became the laughingstock of the neighborhood.
  Harley: I'm the reason you're a laughingstock? What about Dad being a fucking deadbeat?
• Reused Character Design: The woman anchor of the Gotham News Network (GNN) — which later temporarily became the Joker News Network (JNN) — closely resembles Kathy Duquesne.
• Right Behind Me: Immediately after declaring "women aren't funny", Joker is told that Harley is standing right behind him. He doesn't seem to care.
• R-Rated Opening: The opening scene of the first episode showcases the Joker and Harley graphically and bloodily beating and murdering a boat full of wealthy people, dropping plenty of swears every few seconds.
• Ruder and Cruder: This series uses a lot more profanity, violence, and mature themes than any other DC Animated Universe series or film. While most of the profanity is bleeped on television airings, some of the harsher swears are just barely censored.
• Running Gag:
  • Gordon frequently peppers what he says with mentions or descriptions of anatomy and internal organs — often his own, to gross effect.
  • Harley constantly claims Batman fucks bats.
  • Like a broken record, Batman keeps saying, "You're going to Arkham," to Harley.
  • Harley has a tendency to destroy Ivy's furniture and appliances whenever she gets angry, which occurs about Once an Episode.
  • Any time Kite Man unveils his kite, it always knocks someone over.
  • Kite Man drops a "Hell yeah!" a few times.
    • Later subverted with Ivy's inner mind version of Kite Man being completely incinerated by Ivy's worst fear while instead saying "Hell... Nah..."
    • And later, he breaks up from Ivy by telling her, "Hell... No," when she asks to continue their interrupted wedding.
  • Clayface repeatedly reminds everyone that he's a professional actor, imagines elaborate backstories to go with all his disguises, but his acting always stinks.
  • Bane wants to blow up anything that upsets him, literally muttering, "I'm going to blow up X", including Gotham Stadium, bar mitzvahs, and a kid who keeps messing up his smoothie order. The last of which is even funnier because not only is The Joker paying the kid to do it, but after Bane actually goes through with it, he finds out that the specific staff member he wanted to blow up (Todd) had changed shifts and wasn't there anyway.
• Screen Tap:
  • The trailer begins with Harley tapping on the screen, complete with the traditional "glass" sound effect.
  • Spoofed in episode 1 when Ivy sprays Harley out cold during the Arkham breakout, showing Harley fall face down as if pressed onto a glass floor.
  • Repeated in another episode when Harley fights Batman on live-TV and gets face-slammed into the camera lens, looking and sounding as if pressed against the TV screen.
• Secret Identity Apathy: Averted. There's an unmasking of Batman, but Joker hates that it happened. Scarecrow only unmasked Batman to try and be more like Harley but Joker takes it so badly that he melts Scarecrow's head with acid.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • "Batman’s Back, Man" ends with the two viewers saying the DC Universe distribution model of releasing episodes weekly sucks. In the US, the show used to premiere on the DC Universe service. This joke was made just as the misogynistic nerds were starting to come around to the show.
  • At one point, Doctor Psycho quips that possessing Ivy while surrounded by the Trinity and Harley has the drama of a CW show except "if the cast were less hot". The CW makes live-action shows for DC and is known for casting talented and/or attractive actors while having a mixed reception towards other aspects of their shows.
• Shock and Awe: Jason Praxis gained the power to control electricity after he was shocked by the fences outside S.T.A.R. Labs.
• Shout-Out:
  • Ivy has a maneating, talking plant for a roommate named Frank.
  • Harley angrily does the Floss in season 1 episode 2.
  • While inside Harley's head, the photo of her family resembles the Bundys.
  • Kite Man (real name Charles Brown) falls for a redhead.
  • Lex Luthor's 'cultural attache' is named Esteban.^note Technically speaking he's nicknamed Esteban; his real name is Steve and he has no idea why Luthor keeps calling him that.
  • Clayface in general provides many of these due to his passion for acting, even mentioning where he references from. Special mention goes to Poison Ivy's funeral, before she eventually comes back to life, Clayface directly quotes Star Trek II The Wrath Of Khan in saying Poison Ivy was "the most human" person he met.
  • The Frieses Meet Cute of having met online while Victor was trying to buy her family's mom & pop business is a reference to You've Got Mail. The reference is driven home when Clayface asks if the person Fries met online was Meg Ryan.
  • Pamela Isley's middle name is revealed to be "Gertrude" here (in the comics it's "Lillian"), the same as Phineas and Ferb's (also a redhead) sister Candace. And just like Candace, Ivy reacts in embarrassment when it's spoken out loud in front of others.
  • Harley demands, "What's the point of having an elevator that doesn't work?" - an Actor Allusion to Kaley Cuoco's other big role, where there was a famously non-functioning elevator.
  • The title card for the Season 3 episode "Batman Begins Forever" is a nod to Frasier. It even uses the same style of music.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The trailer released for SDCC is set to Joan Jett's cover of the theme from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The second trailer features Aretha Franklin's song "Think" from The Blues Brothers soundtrack.
• Special Guest: Comedian / Game Show Host Howie Mandel and actor Frankie Muniz guest voice as themselves in short appearances in Season 1. George Lopez does this in Season 2. Season 3 brings in James Gunn and Billy Bob Thornton.
• STD Immunity: Defied; in season 1 episode 2, Joker claims that Harley has HPV. Bane responds that most sexually active adults have it. In episode 3, Harley informs Maxie Zeus that calling him a "creepy dick" for exposing himself to her wasn't just an insult, but a concern. Note that trained psychiatrists such as Harley do know medicine.
  • This continues in season 2, episode 2, when Harley declares that she and Ivy get HPV vaccinations since they're going to infiltrate a university, and Ivy reminds her that they're both too old for those.^note Science Marches On, as the recommended age range for the HPV vaccine was increased in 2020. As noted previous, Harley would already know that and so was being sarcastic.
• Stealth Pun: At a few points Harley and Joker are given the Portmanteau Couple Name "Joquinn", which is pretty much a phonetic pronunciation of the name "Joaquin" (which is usually pronounced "Waa-Keen").
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • When a rich jerk insults Harley, she bashes his leg with her hammer. Instead of the Amusing Injuries typical for a cartoon, it causes a severe compound fracture that kills him after he goes into shock from massive blood loss.
  • Superman gets a piece of rock in his mouth when he flies through a wall and admits that he should have kept it closed.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: In Episode 9, when Clayface asks Dr. Psycho what he said to make Black Manta so angry at him, Psycho liltingly replies, "Nothing raaaaaaacist..."
• Sweet and Sour Grapes: Its only when Harley gives up trying to get Ivy to openly reciprocate her love and instead tries to protect Ivy's wedding with Kite Man that Ivy is convinced that Harley has become trust worthy enough for her heart.
• Systematic Villain Takedown: In season 2, with the Justice League out of commission and Gotham in chaos, a group of villains composed of The Penguin, Bane, The Riddler, Mr. Freeze and Two-Face creates the Injustice League, sharing Gotham between themselves and freezing Harley when she poses a challenge to it. The first half of that season sees Harley going in a revenge quest by taking down each of them one by one. While she kills the Penguin, the others have varied fates, she takes the Riddler as prisoner, traps Bane in the bottom of a pit, Mr. Freeze sacrifices himself to heal his wife, and Two-Face is arrested by Gordon, with Harley having no part in his take down.
• Take That!:
  • In the very first teaser, Harley Quinn says that unlike Donald Glover's ill-fated Deadpool cartoon, her show is actually coming out. Deadpool is considered Marvel's equivalent to some of DC's characters, including Harley Quinn if not also Lobo and Deathstroke.
  • In the same teaser, Poison Ivy asks why Harley's show is a comedy when DC's movies are known for being bleak, gritty, and depressing. A visibly nervous Harley responds by saying that while that is an excellent way to make a movie, everyone on her show will have fun.
  • The second episode has Bane guess that the Dallas Cowboys have won the most games at Gotham Stadium, only to be corrected that it’s the Pittsburgh Steelers. While it’s primarily a Mythology Gag to the third Nolan film ^note where the Steelers not only play themselves but also the Gotham City Rogues and Gotham Stadium (which Bane blows up) being subbed by Heinz Field., it’s also a potshot at the Cowboys who have infamously gone nearly thirty years without having advanced to the Super Bowl as of the 2020s, let alone having won a ring.
  • Queen of Fables's brutal telling of Superman with Harley Quinn saying "there is no way Superman did that" can be considered a take that to the Injustice: Gods Among Us where Regime Superman infamously kills Shazam with his heat vision.
  • Sy suggests calling up his old friend Henry Kissinger for pointers when the gang briefly considers becoming war criminals to get into the Legion of Doom.
    • He's brought up again in season 3, with Gordon considering his continued existence as proof that God doesn't exist.
  • When the gang goes to Apokolips and Harley is ordered by Darkseid to fight Granny Goodness to death, King Shark says he doesn’t want to kill old people because the American healthcare system already does it.
  • "Inner (Para) Demons" takes several shots at Game of Thrones's much maligned final season.
• Take That, Critics!: A misogynistic Straw Fan who shows up in the episode "Batman's Back, Man" is shown wearing a "Release the Snyder Cut" T-Shirt and refuses to watch Harley until he sees the episode doesn’t have her in it (although he had secretly already seen it and written reviews). His "Release the Snyder Cut" shirt ended up ironic as that did come to pass.
• Taking You with Me: In the first season finale, the Joker was thrown into the chemical bath which will erase his memories and revert him back to normal, a fate both he and Harley deemed to be worse than death. His last act of terror was to blow up his fortress along with Gotham hoping to kill off Harley and Poison Ivy before he reverts back to normal.
• Terminally-Ill Criminal: Defied. After Harley zaps a criminal with a cancer ray, the crook decides to drop everything he is doing and go to his kids for his remaining time on Earth.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: Word of God had said that this Gotham City is shown through Harley's eyes. In her original incarnation in Batman: The Animated Series, Harley always saw the very dangerous villains of Arkham Asylum as her eccentric friends, while the heroes and the police were humorless killjoys. How untrue that makes this version of Gotham, especially in the scenes where Harley isn't present, is another matter.
• Took a Level in Kindness: This is the major character arc for Harley for the first two seasons. In season 1, Harley is shown to be impulsive and self-centered, putting her immediate needs above the promises she's made to her friends. This backfires when her entire crew gets mad at her for not being there for them despite having promised so. Ivy is especially disappointed and saddened at Harley continously breaking her promises to her, as Harley is her only real friend. While Ivy eventually forgives Harley, she clearly still feels she can't depend on Harley's support when she would most need it. Because of this, when Harley confesses her love to Ivy in season 2, even though Ivy is shown to have similar feelings for Harley, she says she still can't trust Harley to be there for her, so she chooses to go on with her marriage to Kite Man, which she feels is a safer and more dependable choice. It's only after Harley shows that she can put her own needs aside and do selfless things for Ivy that Ivy opens up to the possiblity of starting a romantic relationship with her, which happens in the season 2 finale.
• Too Much Information:
  • Apparently Catwoman likes to overshare about her and Batman's love life. When Harley says she wants a nemesis with "hair on his chest" (talking about Robin), Ivy responds that eliminates Batman because Catwoman told her that he waxes everything.
  • Jim Gordon especially in nearly every conversation will digress about his own health, marital, and sexual problems.
• Unreliable Narrator: The show occasionally suggests (and the creators have confirmed) that the events of the show are heavily colored by Harley's interpretation. This even affects Harley herself as she finds that she has altered some of her own memories.
  • Not at all surprising considering our titular character and protagonist is shown throughout the show to be a violent, anarchistic, co-dependent, sociopath with borderline personality disorder. To such an extent that entire episodes are based around her grappling with her delusions. The characterizations of the Justice League members are a great example, as well as Harley's views of the Joker and the chaos in Gotham.
• Vicarious Gold Digger: Harley's family keeps pressuring her to marry a doctor and live a comfortable life on his dime. Harley's rebuttal is that she is a doctor and could make that money if she wanted, but she has more fun being a criminal.
• Villain Has a Point: Queen of Fables definitely shouldn't have murdered an entire family reunion just to avoid leaving witnesses. But her insistence that any survivors would come back to get revenge is proven right when Jason Praxis shows up to do just that.
• Villains Out Shopping: A large portion of the show has the villains in utterly inane settings that have nothing to do with super-villainy, like being roommates, talking about their relationships over lunch, having morning coffee together, attending a bar mitzvah, and so on.
• Villain Protagonist: In spite of the fact that she's A Lighter Shade of Black than the Legion of Doom, Harley is still a career criminal. Her goal is to get into the LOD, she regularly clashes with superheroes, and she gleefully commits horrible acts. The show still paints Harley sympathetically by showing her bonding with her crew (especially Poison Ivy), and showing that there are a couple of lines that she won't cross.
  • By season 2, the crew seems to lean more towards being heroes than villains. Batgirl even points out that even though they claim to be bad guys, they sure seem to end up saving the day a lot.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Harley has her pair of hyenas early in Season 2, only for them to disappear completely without mention. The Eat Bang Kill Tour comic tries to fill in that plot hole, but Series Continuity Error makes the comic dubious to canon.
• X Meets Y: The DCU meets The Venture Bros..
• Yandere: As a child, Harley loved Frankie Muniz so much that she dreamed of kidnapping him, forcing him to marry her, and having his kids.

Tropes shown in Harley Quinn, The Animated Series: The Eat. Bang! Kill. Tour :

It's got action, romance and everything in between.

• Adaptational Sexuality: Vixen has a girlfriend in this continuity. Nightfall and Livewire are exes.
• Affectionate Nickname: Besides the "Harls" and "Ive" from the show, Ivy calls Harley "sweet pea" and "orna".
• All Animals Are Domesticated: Catwoman is able to instantly get Harley's hyenas to take orders to stay.
• Art Shift: Volume 4 has a different art style than the volumes before or after.
• Amplified Animal Aptitude: Harley's hyenas must be pretty intelligent to understand and laugh at Ivy teasing Harley.
• Asshole Victims: Even Vixen admits the CEOs Ivy poisoned for polluting the waters of Michigan had it coming.
• Auto Erotica:
  • Harley and Ivy's first date ends with them making out with more implied to follow on top of Ivy's car.
  • Vixen tells the driver to roll up the partition so she and Elle can get busy in the backseat.
• Badass in Distress: Harley ends up a captive of Mephitic in order to draw Ivy out.
• Bathtub Bonding: Played With. It's only during their bath that Harley finally confronts Ivy how she's refused to emotionally open up and how she's blown up at Harley over every small thing. But when Ivy asks her to drop it, Harley leaves the bath telling Ivy if she wants to talk, she'll be at the strip club.
• Best Friend: Batgirl and Clayface-as-Stephanie have become besties.
• Beta Couple: Vixen and Elle. After seeing their relationship, Ivy sees it as a goal for her and Harley.
• Big Damn Heroes: Livewire leaps down and blows up the weapon loaded with dirty needles Mephitic is threatening Harley with just in time. Vixen and Zatanna show up immediately after to defeat Mephitic.
• Blatant Lies: Harley claims her hyenas are vegetarian.
• Book Ends: The comic begins and ends with fourth wall breaks telling the reader to watch the show.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Harley addresses the audience directly and talks about her show while recapping how they got there. Eventually she gives up and tells the reader to just watch the show.
• Bridal Carry: Harley carries Ivy into her mall base this way, invoking the trope as Ivy is still in her wedding dress.
• Bullying a Dragon: Two "Karens" follow Harley into the bathroom and openly talk about how they're going to call the cops for a reward. Only Ivy's intervening prevents Harley from breaking all their teeth.
• Call-Back:
  • The opening chase scene is on the Harley Quinn Highway.
  • Harley and Ivy look out at the smoking ruins of Gotham and call it beautiful like the end of Season 1.
  • Ivy refuses to go back into Harley's mind again.
  • Withdrawing into her own head, Ivy comforts and inspires her younger self during her birthday.
  • Harley once mocked Catwoman as having so many cats that she can't go on vacation. So of course she goes to Catwoman to watch her hyenas while Harley and Ivy go on their roadtrip.
  • Ivy creates a little walking, "talking" dandelion to assist her in another rescue.
• The Cameo: Nightfall is glimpsed in pictures at her house, and other members from her team of villains are either in pictures with her or appear at the hotel where Harley and Ivy relocate to.
• Canon Foreigner: Big Bad Mephetic is an original creation of the comic.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: Harley and Ivy happily flirt in a highspeed chase while being shot at by cops.
• Enemy Mine: Ivy convinces Vixen to team up against Mephitic first despite how she wants to arrest her. The offer of the antidote to Ivy's pheromones helped.
• Even the Girls Want Her: Not only does the "distracted boyfriend" meme show up when Harley and Ivy get dolled up to go to dinner, a female patron looks equally interested.
• Everyone Is Related: Turns out JT and Reign, two civilians who helped out Harlivy during their road trip are the kids of gossip queen Tawny.
• Ferris Wheel Date Moment: Harley and Ivy enjoy a Ferris wheel while Hush who interrupted their date night is strapped to it.
• Forgiven, but Not Forgotten: Harley eventually makes it clear to Ivy that while she's accepted all of Ivy's apologies for snapping at her, she hasn't forgotten how often it is. She even says that if she wanted to be put down every day, she'd be with Joker.
• Full-Name Ultimatum: Harley bursts out Ivy's full name, including her middle name, when telling her to never fight alone again.
• Grew a Spine: Showing off the Character Development that Ivy herself encouraged, Harley avoids the Mad Love she showed when in a relationship with Joker despite being heads over heels for Ivy and stands up for herself to make it clear that she doesn't consider constantly being put down by Ivy acceptable.
• Growling Gut: Harley calls the growls from Ivy's stomach enjoyable tummy music.
• Grow Old with Me: Harley invokes this trope when she sees an elderly lesbian couple and Ivy's lack of enthusiasm about such long term thinking is the first real spat between the two.
• Hearing Voices: For the first time, Ivy sees the Dr. Harleen Quinzel figment that Harley's talked to throughout the show. When Ivy asks how its possible, the good doctor speculates it could be her PTSD or a dissociative episode.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Batman criticizes Gordon's actions to bring in Harley and Ivy as being so destructive and terrifying to the normal people of Gotham that it makes him no better than they are.
• Immediate Sequel: The comic begins where Season 2 ends, with Harley and Ivy in a car chase being pursued by Commissioner Gordon.
• Immune to Mind Control: Mephitic tests which superheroes and supervillains are immune to his stench based mind control.
• It's All My Fault: Ivy blames herself for hurting Kite Man and ruining the wedding, with her villainous friends being arrested. While the former is pretty true, she had nothing to do with the latter as it was Gordon's plan.
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: Ivy travels to the same mental castle Harley and the crew traveled to in the show as she begins to finally wrestle with her inner demons.
• Leaning on the Furniture: Harley immediately puts up her feet on Catwoman's couch which she does not tolerate.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Ivy rushes into Mephitic's lair without planning or waiting for backup to rescue Harley as soon as possible.
• Minor Flaw, Major Breakup: It's implied Batman and Catwoman broke up because he doesn't like cats.
• Mood-Swinger: The normally sardonic Ivy is an emotional mess after the disastrous wedding, wildly oscillating between being lovey-dovey with Harley, wracked with guilt for hurting Kite Man and her friends, taking it out on Harley by snapping at her and then quickly apologizing again.
• Mood Whiplash: Ivy and Harley's romantic vine swinging is interrupted when Gordon shoots out the vine.
• Mr. Fanservice: Nightwing's first appearance is working out shirtless in a gym with quite the emphasis on his butt. Every other sentence Harley says to him references his butt and even Ivy comments positively on it.
• Mugged for Disguise: Harley orders room service to knock out the staff for their uniforms.
• Mugging the Monster: Hush very aggressively and rudely hits on Harley while she and Ivy are disguised for their first ever date. Him saying he'll sell Ivy's organs is what escalates it into a fight. Without Falcone's intervention, he'd be plant food.
• My God, What Have I Done?: After Harley confronts Ivy over how she's treated her over the course of the trip, Ivy realizes that she can't keep pushing her emotions down and is appalled by how she's treated Harley.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Livewire zaps out of a toaster like another time she appeared in front of Harley and Ivy with Livewire explicitly referencing the episode.
  • One memory that Ivy views within her head is her and Harley with Bruce Wayne's credit cards from "Holiday Knights".
  • Barbara mentions the Burrito Bucket, which is her favorite fast-food place in a different DC animation universe.
• Never Mess with Granny: One of Gordon's ambushes is ruined when two old grannies yell at the disguised cops and ran over one of their feet with a walker to still cross the street.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Harley is shocked that Ivy's motivation to stop Mephitic is to help people considering her misanthropic nature.
• Outside Ride: Harley leaps from cop car to cop car to break up their pursuit.
• Pheromones: Ivy's attempt to use her love pheromones on Vixen accidentally combines with her animal spirits to make Vixen irresistible to animals.
• The Pig-Pen: When Zatanna uses a spell to clean Mephitic, he's revealed to be a normal person underneath his disgusting, monstrous exterior. Apparently he went without bathing for so long that he turned into a Blob Monster.
• Power Fist: Harley busts out brass knuckles spelling out BOOOOM to help level the playing field against a pack of goons.
• Power Perversion Potential: Vixen uses her totem ability to mimic animal abilities to copy a giraffes tongue for backseat time with her girlfriend.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Played for Laughs. A cop overhearing Harley's recapping is horrified that Harley destroyed Gotham with parademons all because she was friendzoned. Harley punches him in the face and complains she already said she was sorry with the story moving on with her.
• Rabid Cop: Gordon's desperation to get Harley and earn payback for all his humiliations, drives him crazier and crazier, endangering civilians to the point where Batman calls in Nightwing and Batgirl to help restrain him.
• The Rival: Mephitic brands himself as the best poisonous villain and better than Poison Ivy in his first appearance.
• Road Trip Plot: Harley and Ivy go on the run from Gordon as part of their "honeymoon", with Harley deciding that the lairs of the arrested villains from the wedding are the perfect place to hide for a few days.
• Running Gag:
  • This time it's Ivy who chucks the remote to destroy a TV.
  • Gordon's habit of Too Much Information continues, as the fellow police in the stakeout van do their best to ignore the spiel of personal facts pouring out of his mouth. His mentioning of ass boils while they're eating is unwanted.
• Save the Villain: More like save the increasingly less Heroic Antagonist, but Ivy does reluctantly prevent Gordon from dropping to his death.
• Sequel Hook: Mephitic's refers to joining a mysterious Cadre and Gordon was sent messages on how to find Harley from an unknown source.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • In the show, Kite Man says Ivy's middle name is Gertrude. Here, Harley says her middle name is Lillian, same as in the mainline comics.
  • Retroactive examples to the show's Season 3, as the comic came before the season did. In the series, Catwoman lets Harley's group use her house, which Selina would likely never allow after what happened in the comic. Also, King Shark and Clayface are free and clear in the comic, but the show had them apprehended and locked up since the wedding.
• Shipper on Deck: Batgirl is all in on Harlivy, even betting on them staying together.
• Shout-Out:
  • Nightfall has A Christmas Story style "leg lamp" in her house.
  • The Frank in Ivy's mind says he's been ready since 1986 and starts singing, all obvious references to the 1986 musical movie Little Shop of Horrors.
• Sickening Sweethearts: When things are good between Harley and Ivy, it's very, very sweet. So much so that it seems like it literally sickens Hush, until it's revealed he's strapped to a Ferris wheel.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: Without time to go back to her own place, Ivy ends up picking up more revealing clothes from a millennial store. Fitting for a "honeymoon".
• Silent Treatment: Ivy makes plant headphones to block out Harley after she's mad at her.
• Slasher Smile: Ivy and Harley sport broad smiles of sadistic glee when they're about to drop Gordon's cop car off a highway.
• Stalker Shrine: Harley has a wall covered with pictures of Ivy with the words "Harley loves Poison Ivy" crossword style in the middle.
• Supervillain Lair: Though Harley describes them as lairs, the residences of the supervillains we see are relatively normal looking apartments or houses.
• Taking the Bullet: Ivy puts herself between a chained up Harley and thousands of dirty needles so that if she can't beat Mephitic in time, she'd take them instead.
• "Test Your Strength" Game: Harley and Ivy strap Hush who interrupted their date and threatened to sell their organs to one these with his groin where the bell is.
• Thought Caption: Every character's thought captions reflect them.
  • Gordon's have coffee stains.
  • Batman has the bat symbol taking up the entire background.
  • Ivy's are a spectrum of green.
  • Harley's go black to red with a star and diamond decoration.
  • Nightwing's are black with his blue logo in the corner.
  • Batgirl's are purple with a yellow bat symbol in the corner.
  • Hush's are as bandaged as he is.
  • Vixen's are yellow with the totem coming off the box.
  • Mephitic's are the same white with green outline as his speech bubbles and are crooked.
  • Even Peaches, the stripper Harley and Ivy talk to gets her own unique thought caption, a mottled grey and tan.
• Trash of the Titans: As Ivy says, Harley's room is "definitely on brand" by being a disaster zone with clothes, roller skates and bags of cash just sprawled everywhere,
• Trespassing Hero: Harley's not exactly a hero, and she says technically it's not breaking and entering if the home owner said they could come over at any time.
• Unlimited Wardrobe: Being a model, Vixen has a massive collection of stylish outfits that makes Ivy breathlessly awestruck.
• Unperson: Dr. Psycho is scratched out from any group pictures in Harley's room for betraying the crew.
• Victoria's Secret Compartment: Harley feeds her pet hyenas — as Ivy puts it — "boob jerky".
• Weaksauce Weakness: Mephitic is defeated by a bath essentially.
• Weaponized Stench:
  • Mephitic smells so bad that it not only knocks people out, it can mind control them.
  • Vixen uses her skunk funk in an attempt to repel Ivy's pheromones. It also drives off Harley and Ivy.
• Wingding Eyes: An incredible proportion of the panels where Harley looks at Ivy have her beaming with heart eyes.

Tropes shown in Harley Quinn, The Animated Series: The Real Sidekicks of New Gotham Special one-shot :

• The Bus Came Back: Lois Lane and Clayface's separate-&-sapient hand reappear for the first time since their one-episode Season 1 appearances.
• Closet Key: Vixen claims to have always been attracted to women before being open about it when Tawny asks her about her previous relationships with B'wana Beast and John Stewart, hinting that her girlfriend Elle made her realize she was a lesbian and encouraged her to come out of the closet.
• Luke, You Are My Father: In the "Showtime" story, Clayface gets reunited with Annie, his "daughter" who he created from part of his clay, then forgot about and abandoned.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Annie is based on — and spoofs — the Annie character from the Batman: TAS episode "Growing Pains".
  • The story in "Two Jokers" is a parody of Geoff Johns' Batman: Three Jokers. Besides Mayor Joker, the other two Jokers introduced are modeled after Joaquin Phoenix and Jared Leto's respective portrayals of the character.
• Take That!: "Two Jokers" shows a photo of the deceased third Joker who was once friends with the other two featured in the story, whose design is a clear parody of Jared Leto's version of the character from Suicide Squad (2016). After looking at the picture, Joker #1 quips "Thank God that asshole's dead."

Tropes shown in Harley Quinn, The Animated Series: Legion of Bats! :

• Amazon Brigade: Ivy decides to make the new Legion of Doom that she will create and lead into the Ladies of Doom, an all women ("and nonbinaries") organization. Knockout is the first new recruit.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Like in Eat. Bang! Kill. Tour, the comic begins with Harley addressing the audience and recapping what's just happened in the latest season of the series.
• The Bus Came Back: Frank's stoner friend Chaz is back for the first time since Season 1.
• Call-Back:
  • The opening continues from the rooftop scene in the final Season 3 episode.
  • Bane is still mad at Todd the barista from the "A Seat at the Table" episode from Season 1, and still wants to kill him.
  • Harley and Ivy are told for the first time that they had won the Best Couple Villy Award.
  • Ivy and Harley find Peaches from Detroit has moved to Gotham.
  • Issue #5 ends with Ivy doing an Atomic F-Bomb like she did at the end of "Climax at Jazzapajizza".
• Cheap Costume: To go crimefighting with the Bat Family, Harley puts together an outfit with a Bat-logo shower-curtain for a cape, a cowl (with bat-ears taped on) and one of Catwoman's old catsuits both re-colored dark red, and wears body paint to make her chalk-white skin look regular white-skin color.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Bane gets beaten to a messy pulp repeatedly, first by Harley and the Batfam working together, and then by Knockout all by herself.
• From New York to Nowhere: Bane reveals that he's getting transferred to Tempe, Arizona.
• Immediate Sequel: The comic's opening is on the rooftop with Harley now with the Batfam who are swinging down on their lines with Harley left to curse at them and having to take the stairs down.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Harley and Ivy first encounter Knockout while she's beating up Bane. Knockout and Bane (and King Shark) were teammates in the Secret Six, and Harley was very briefly with the team.
  • Knockout is a strip dancer at a club called the BoomBoom Room, which is how she debuted in the comics in 1994.
  • Nightwing tries monologuing, "What I am is VENGEANCE. I am the NIGHT. I...AM--" then is stopped by Damian citing copyright infringing.
• Series Continuity Error: In the series, on becoming mayor the Joker declared that he was firing Gordon as police commissioner. Gordon turns up here seemingly still in charge of the police.

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