joan_of_bark | Infopost: Poison Ivy AKA Pamela Isley AKA That Plant Lady From Your Nightmares (Reply)

Look, let's all be honest: if you've touched Batman fiction at all in the past thirty years, you've probably heard of Poison Ivy, the half-human half-plant ecoterrorist with the killer lips who makes the robber barons of industry cry themselves to sleep at night.

Pamela Isley, AKA Poison Ivy, is an iconic Batman villain, appearing in everything from Batman movies to television series to animation. Sometimes sympathetic, sometimes not; sometimes a temptress, sometimes an angry feminist, sometimes both; a lover of nature with a disregard for humankind.

I love all the Ivys. But I love some Ivys better than others. This is a particular Ivy, from a particular comic series, currently being published by DC Comics. So let's dive into her...

In the years before G. Willow Wilson's incredible solo series Poison Ivy (2022), Pamela Isley was adrift. She tried to take over the world in grief, got killed off in a crossover event, brought back in pieces, and one piece nearly brought Gotham to its knees as the immoral Queen Ivy. Harley Quinn and Ivy's ex Bella Garten managed to shove Pamela back together, at the cost of her powers.

Wilson's Poison Ivy begins right there, with Ivy on her knees as she feels her connection to the Green fall away from her. She had had godlike power, like a vengeful Mother Nature; now she had nothing, even the green flaking from her skin. Even Harley couldn't understand the enormity of that loss. And so Pam leaves her and everyone else behind, full of pain, to enact a murder-suicide plot on the world.

In order to do so, she absorbs a bioengineered strain of Ophiocordyceps, the zombie fungus; this strain will kill all it infects peacefully, bathing them in hallucinogenics as it takes their life. Pam intends to seed Ophiocordyceps Lamia as she roadtrips around the United States. When it has spread enough, she intends to lay down in a shipping container and let it take her.

This doesn't happen, of course. Instead along the way, Pam meets humans worth caring about. It becomes harder to believe they all deserve to die. And then there's Janet-from-HR, who seems to pop up everywhere, deeply human and always in need of saving, and yet seemingly incapable of not picking the side of the scary plant lady time and time again...

Perhaps, then, what Pamela needs isn't the end of the world. Perhaps she needs a new purpose, or rather a new way to accomplish what she's always sought: to protect nature from the excesses of humanity. But thanks to her, the lamia is now at large, and so is Dr. Jason Woodrue, the monsters who made her what she is today. And the lamia is still killing her, too, and she misses Harley. What now?

Well, she'll fall ass over teakettle into the mycelial network and wind up in the apartment above Pick Your Poison, that's what.

The Pamela Isley we meet in this series is searching. She's a scientist, a student of nature, someone who looks at the world in terms of of ecosystems, chemicals, cycles, spores and leaves and photosynthesis, and the cycle that sees growing things die and then renew themselves. She's also wounded, insecure, afraid that her actions as Queen Ivy made her a villain, obstinately inclined to live up to that just to punish herself. She steers away from the worst in the nick of time, but she doesn't know what to do next.

She can be deeply arrogant about her scientific knowledge, when she sets her mind to something, or when she believes others are behaving unethically. She longs for connection, both with the Green (losing that connection for a time is what sets off her crisis at the start of the comic) and with other people, but she does not believe she is loved or understood by most. She wants to save the world, to find a way to restore balance to it so that all things big and small can grow and thrive, but her sense of proportion about the means has... gone slightly out of whack.

...She is also exactly that person who will explain to you at length that she is not vegan because do you know what industrial agave farming does to the long-nosed bat population?

When she was a young, genius student, a narcissistic professor took advantage of her and convinced her to let him infuse her with toxins as he attempted to make a viable plant-human hybrid. He succeeded, and succeeded too well; besides giving her powers (more about that), he also inadvertently plugged her into the Green, the elemental force that binds all plant life. Hearing the planet scream nearly drove her insane, and sits at the root of a lot of her efforts to bring polluters to their knees. It has also made her just a touch inhuman; it's hard to fear death when you are as plugged in to the cycle as she is.

Or well, was. This Ivy is still recuperating and recovering her powers. Regrowing them, though she doesn't fully know or understand that this is going on.

And on that note...

Right now, Ivy is considerably weakened compared to her natural state: for a while she could no longer speak directly to the Green and has only just started to regain that ability. How is she regaining it? She doesn’t know. But she'll definitely be able to speak to and hear from the Green at Fandom to some extent (and may have some opinions about what's been going on with it).

In practical terms, Pam is a human-plant hybrid; she has chlorophyll for blood and can regrow lost tissue as a plant would. Her blood otherwise generates deadly toxins, while giving her an immunity to almost all other toxins. So uh, don’t let her bleed on your open wound. She also has the ability to manipulate pheromones, which makes her - if she wants to be - walking sex pollen, but also allows her to communicate with all flora.

She can assume a full, terrifying plant queen form - this comic series loves its body horror - and speaks with a stranger voice when she does, echoing the sound of nature. At full strength, she can command plants to grow however she likes; she is beginning to get that back and actually manages to turn an evil CEO into a giant plant mass on the CEO’s own weird bio-engineered field right before arriving at Fandom. For Fandom, what's most relevant is that if she tends a garden or a forest, it will thrive.

Finally, specific to this era of Ivy, she has deliberately dosed herself with a deadly fungus, Ophiocordyceps Lamia. It gives her a limited range of her usual powers, tied in to fungus rather than plants, and allows her to sense what’s going on in the mycelial network of her fungus. The lamia is contagious, deadly, and capable of turning people into zombies, but she has it under control.

Well, for the most part. Spending a long morning in bed with Ivy is, erm, not recommended quite yet.

And that's about it.