What's your preferred version of Poison Ivy?

[Tzigone]

Either a particular depiction/writer/media or just a build-your-own?

Anti-hero or villain? If a villain, tragic or not? Green skinned or not? Plant powers or drugged lipstick? Any ecological interest? Does she use seduction? Does she like kids?

I'm just curious as to which version people like best.

[Elmo]

Villain. She's not the same character when they make her an anti hero obsessed with saving the planet/plant life. What always made her appealing to me was her ability to control others in a malevolent fashion while appearing as a beautiful and benevolent figure. Even the name Poison Ivy represents that idea, because poison ivy itself is hard to spot if you don't know where/how to find it and can lead to some bad reactions. I see no reason for her to be an anti hero. Then again I care way more about Poison Ivy than Pamela Isely.

[Batknight]

Tragic villain femme fatale eco-terrorist with plant powers. I prefer her skin being pale white with a very light green tint with floral patterns. So something like this https://imgur.com/a/j8Tzk3U or this https://imgur.com/HaEsPpS. The version of her that's closet to my own is in the Arkham Asylum game, in that I pretty much see her as plant Magneto. To her, plants have as much right to live as people, probably more. Ivy sees humanity as a threatening blight the planet would be better without. She really only ever experienced the worst mankind has to offer and has been abused and taken advantage of her whole and desperately wants to separate herself from it. She has a connection to the green, the collective consciousness of all plant life on earth. She feels its emotions and pain. To her, plants are just as much people as human beings. The plant world treated her a lot better than mankind ever did and she has much more of a connection to plants than she does humans due to her being tortured and experimented on by Jason Woodrue who turned her into a plant/human hybrid which has given her a direct link to the environment on a telepathic level. When she sees the environment being harmed, to her it's no different than murder. If anything it's worse because she feels it all happening all the time, everywhere due to her mind being connected to the green. She really just wants to stop being in pain all the time and end the genocide of what she considers her species. Creating a perfect green world free of man's evil is the only way to do that.

[Starter Set]

I liked her fine in the Arkham games. Very cool version of her.

[Tzigone]

For my own part, I can't say I have strong feelings, which is one of the reasons I wanted to get a feel for what others thought.

I lean towards the villain end. I'm particularly fond of her controlling others, though less certain particular methodology. I less of a fan of the using plants-in-physical-fights bits, but I don't hate it. Just don't prefer it.

While the floral patterns look great, I have to think about whether I want her mixing with society (undercover in her schemes) and the degree to which an outside-normal-human appearance would hamper that.

[Jim Kelly]

The Poison Ivy that I fell in love with when I was a little kid-- in BATMAN 181 (June 1966) and 183 (August 1966). She is a villain but a very sympathetic villain--both Bruce Wayne and Batman do what they can to rehabiltate her. She has no super-powers--she just is an expert at using chemicals to enhance her attractiveness and get folks under her spell. Those two stories are pretty kinky (being written by Bob Kanigher) and Poison Ivy challenges the norms of society--which makes her an outsider and maybe that's why she is considered a Public Enemy. I never cared for making her into a plant or changing her appearance to that of a plant.

[Confuzzled]

Misunderstood and feared anti-hero coz as a villain, writers just dumb down her motives. Prefer the human skin tone with nature goddess level powers, though the fact that she can shrivel up without sunlight is an interesting element to make her vulnerable, as was her suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) as established by Gail Simone in Batgirl Annual #2.

Prefer her as seductress, scientist, Cassandra-like soothsayer when it comes to natural disasters, mother, tragic abuse victim (of Woodrue), feminist, activist, and as Harley's true soulmate (as long as she is ALL of the other things when in a romance with Harley, vs. the clown girl's sidekick/love interest).

As somebody said in her appreciation thread, Ivy is DC's most political character by a mile as she covers an astounding number of sensitive issues.

[Green Ghost]

Either a particular depiction/writer/media or just a build-your-own?

Anti-hero or villain? If a villain, tragic or not? Green skinned or not? Plant powers or drugged lipstick? Any ecological interest? Does she use seduction? Does she like kids?

I'm just curious as to which version people like best.

Definitely prefer her in the grey area, if I have to label it it’s probably more anti-hero. Straightforward villain/genocidal psycho makes her boring imo. She should be lethal, but only for people who deserve it in her view (polluters, greedy CEOs, abusers etc).
Protecting the plant life is her #1 goal. But she cares about all weak and defenseless (like Harley, the orphans and also animals) because she knows how it feels to be alone and helpless.

She should have plant powers and a connection to the Green, but she’s also a brilliant scientist. She’s of two worlds and struggles to keep the balance especially with humanity threatening the environment.
She can use pheromones to manipulate people and create poisons with her body chemistry, but the poison kiss seems a outdated and a touch will also do the trick.

For her look I like New52 black/green suit with light skin. It is sexy, badass but also functional because she can grow things like vines from it, kinda like a symbiote. When she’s more disconnected from humanity the near nude plant goddess with light green skin will also do.

Some references for interesting & balanced (non black or white) Ivy characterizations:
Batman: Poison Ivy by John Francis Moore
No Man’s Land/Orphan storyline by Greg Rucka
The first issues of the New52 Birds of Prey (especially #3) by Duane Swierczynski
Batgirl Annual #2 by Gail Simone
Poison Ivy: Cycle of Life & Death by Amy Chu
All Star Batman #7 by Scott Snyder

In other media, the Arkham Knight game has done a pretty good job with giving Ivy a more layered personality...

[kcekada]

Classic version. No inherent powers, no green skin -- all bad, all-the-time.

[Arctic Cyclist]

Classic version. No inherent powers, no green skin -- all bad, all-the-time.

I mostly agree. It's interesting to realize that Ivy is one of the few villains that meets the definition of a serial killer, everyone else is a spree killer or mass murderer. She's scary because, even with the modern more heroic takes on her, she needs to kill. She has cool down periods, and then a build back up until she finds a victim. (Most notably Detective Comics 823) It's just that she's good, as the successful serial killers are, at portraying herself as a misunderstood victim who is trying to do what is best for the world.

However, she's not. She's not even trying to do what is best for plants. Take "Cycle of Life" for a case study. It starts with her going to an African country to seek out a rare and endangered plant that is thousands of years old. Ivy tells her assistant that she's saving the plant, cuts off its roots, and takes it back to Gotham to utilize in creating her children.

Stop. Think this through based on what we currently know about plants.

First research keeps showing over and over again that plants, even the solitary appearing ones in extreme environments, have relationships from familial to friendships, with other plants, fungi, and animals. We now know that trees parent their young, or in the cases of secondary growth and pioneer species like birches, they will parent other species. Individual plants will have friends with other plants. They will develop interspecies relationships that run the gamut from parasitic (like most orchids) to commensalism to symbiotic. A healthy ecosystem like the one the poor plant that Ivy tortures, mutilates, and enslaves is from may not appear to have dynamic complex relationships, but it does. One of the more fascinating studies that has come out in the past twenty years is the fact that Hardwicke's Wooly Bats will form specific bonds with the pitcher plants they use as homes, to the point where other bats will not roost in the plant and the offspring of both plants and bats will roost together. Yet we have Ivy, who should know this if she's come out of a plant science degree program in the last twenty five years, saying that this plant that has thrived for thousands of years, has a root system that extends for hundreds of feet in all directions and then a mycorrhizal network that likes goes for miles connecting it to other plants, is lonely and wants to go with her.

No it does not. Even houseplants hate being moved.

From there she violently slices up this defenseless innocent, shoves it into a case, tears it from the home it has known, the one it knows from the genetic memories of its ancestors, a place of spare beauty and bright sunlight, with the quiet songs of distant friends and relatives, to the crowded, dim, violent, humid awful place that is Gotham. Again, why, as we and the plant must scream out, is she doing this? It would have survived the war and the burning, it has before, it could again. What it couldn't survive is being poached, which is what has happened.

As everyone who has read the series knows, Ivy did it because she needed to harvest the chemicals in order to create bioengineered creatures to serve her.

Do you know who does this? DO YOU KNOW WHO DOES THIS?!

Monsanto.

Poison Ivy is no hero. She is no anti-hero. She's Monsanto. She's one of the greatest villains the world has ever seen.

Never forget this, nor that she tortures plants and enslaves them to serve her at the cost of the environment. This is why you only see her caring about invasive species, and the ones that have already been enslaved. She does not hear the songs of healthy plants, of healthy ecosystems which we now know are a constant. She probably doesn't even hear the heartbeats of trees, which researches have successfully recorded.

She hears what she wants to hear, and has successfully convinced people that what she does is good, just as Monsanto has successfully managed to convince us that what they do is good and has created a stranglehold on plant science and agriculture. Pamela Isley is not a misunderstood environmentalist. She a self absorbed monster who tortures plants and forces them to do her bidding instead of protecting and caring for them.

No wonder her creations and plants are constantly turning on her.

That's not even going into the fact that she raped Bruce Wayne via vines in The Long Halloween, Clayface during the Court of Owls storyline, attempted to rape Time Drake in Superman/Batman 62, that the arc with Hush about the kids she "helped" during No Man's Land all came down with incurable illnesses and PTSD from from her touch which is one hell of a metaphor, or the fact that she does derive pleasure from humiliating and demeaning people.

So even with the current canon and writing, she's 100% an evil monster. It's just that people can relate to her...not so much plants. They keep trying though. Plants are pretty noble like that.