Why I Think Harley Quinn Hacks

I love Harley Quinn, have for years, and I’m far from alone. Her cute, sexy, bad girl vibe has captured the enchantment of many, girls and boys alike. What I personally like most about her is the juxtaposition of her ditziness and clearly superior intelligence. As someone who takes pride in her brain, but is often referred to as ditzy by my peers, I am incredibly drawn to a character to which these are not mutually exclusive. She’s head over heels for a man that’s terrible for her, and is addicted to being his dumb little plaything, while simultaneously being one of the best medical minds in the country.

Harley Quinn is an invention of Dr. Harleen Quinzel. An outlet for the chaos that’s built up inside her, an intricate creation that allows her to be in love with a man that Harleen knows is bad for her and a tool she uses to keep Harleen grounded.

Now I know all of this sounds like a far cry from being a reason that Harley would hack, but hear me out.

Hacking is the ultimate real-world application of intelligence. When you walk into a hackathon, you see hundreds of kids who are taking hours of time spent on StackOverflow, learning algorithms, syntax, and APIs and using it to simplify their lives and the lives of those around them. Taking the mundane, the tedious, the boringly genius and transforming it into something glamorous, something pretty, something interesting. The ultimate presentation of a creation that’s so much more than a sum of its parts.

Harley Quinn is a hack. Harleen took the gymnastics, the one liners, the irrational infatuation, the insanity, and put her UX skills to use by slapping a pretty costume on it and calling it Harley Quinn. It’s like she sat down with all her knowledge acquired from years of having her nose in a book and in 36 hours made something glamorous that the world could understand. Good hackers make things that they think people want. The best hackers make things people didn’t know they needed. Harley was what people needed. She’s what the Joker needed, she’s what DC needed, she’s what comic book fans needed, and most of all, she’s what Harleen needed. Harleen as she was wasn’t allowed to understand the Joker’s motivations, not truly. So she created a solution.

I am not only a Margot Robbie Harley Quinn fan, I’m a comic book fan. One of the first times I pictured Harley cross-legged pushing to her GitHub repo was when I read one of the new 52 Suicide Squad issues for the second time. There’s a moment where Harley tries to escape and the Joker locks her in a basement [see panel below]

“Other Harleys! What? You thought you were the first one?! I can tell you this. You won’t even be the last.”

Harley isn’t just Harleen’s, she’s the Joker’s hack too. And judging from the number of skulls, she’s hovering around v 2.4. My first time reading this, my mind was focused on the story, I have a deep attachment to both of these characters and it was an incredibly jarring panel in the way only a comic book panel can be, but the second, third, fourth time around, you begin to realize how much Harley Quinn is really nothing but a solution created by a few very smart, twisted people. You really begin to see the Joker as a frustrated hacker playing bug whackamole and you kind of begin to understand his insanity on a different level.

Obviously not all our hacks are going to be as seductive as Harley Quinn, but it warms my heart to think that if Harleen was one of the other girls in my computer science class, she’d be sitting alongside me at Bitcamp in a Microsoft shirt with unwashed hair, sipping on Redbull, coding up something pretty.