Originally Posted by
Arctic Cyclist
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.