For those who don’t know, ‘Rule 63’ is the term used by fans to describe the act of switching a fictional character’s gender.

  For example, during the ‘Superman/Batman’ comic-book series, Batman met his Rule 63 counterpart and that of Superman’s from another universe:

  And now that Rule 63 has been explained…

  I’ve personally always found Poison Ivy to be one of the most disturbing villains in comic-books.

  I’m serious, I find her more disturbing  than many of her counterparts in Batman’s Rogues Gallery. For those who are unfamiliar with the character, she’s a man-hating eco-friendly villain who has control over plants, can create toxins from her body and can emit pheromones that allow her to control men, causing them to artificially feel love for her. (And depending on the writer, sometimes she can affect women too.) Even a hero like Batman has to use all of his willpower to resist her effects when they meet.

  So what makes her more disturbing (to me at least) than say, Scarecrow? Well, let’s have a look at THIS scene, where not even Robin is safe from stuff like that happening to him:

  So we have an established hero mind-raped, humiliated, laughed at and leashed. Still don’t think she’s that disturbing? Okay, here’s where Rule 63 comes in to prove my point.

  Imagine the scene we just saw, with Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy…

  Except instead of them being women, they’re men…

  And instead of having a male Robin, we have a female one…

  Now, replay the scene I showed earlier with all three of them, with the exact same dialog, but with the characters all under Rule 63.

  And I hope Rule 63 helps me illustrate how Poison Ivy has been getting away with a lot of stuff as a character in mainstream comics for years, just because gender roles seem to blind people to certain things. Now I’m not saying male characters are treated unfairly in comic-books, I know it’s the other way around, super-hero comics have often been a male power fantasy, with heroines often wearing little more than bikinis. I’m just pointing out how Poison Ivy is basically a character centered on molesting and degrading her victims and hating the opposite sex. Sure, Dr Light was extremely disturbing and controversial as a comic-book villain when he raped Sue Dibny in ‘Identity Crisis’. So what made Dr Light so disturbing? That he seemed to hate the opposite sex and sexually abused his victims, and all that in a mainstream comic-book. But I would dare to say Poison Ivy has been getting away with that for years and no one complained about it, many women cosplay as her even. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing at all against women cosplaying as Poison Ivy, the same way I won’t tell people they shouldn’t cosplay as the Joker because of the graphic novel ‘The Killing Joke’.

  Again, this isn’t a comment on gender roles in comic-books, far from it. I just wanted to point out how creepy Poison Ivy really is, because I feel like no one else seems to notice. I simply figured Rule 63 was useful to explain my point of view.