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Joker's Psychopathic Traits: Glib && Superficial Charm

There is an aspect to Joker's personality that can't really be defined because it's hard to pin down exactly what makes someone charismatic, but it's a huge part of her character that Joker embodies not only a constant level of intensity but also magnetism. This has very little to do with her looks, although I'm sure for many people that is an undeniable part of her appeal. It is much more about how she makes the people around her feel. It's the way that she takes command of any room that she's in and that she commands this attention almost entirely through impressiveness of affect alone; just her presence is electric and powerful because of her mood or vibe. One might even call this a "stage presence" that she embodies naturally and almost constantly.

Joker's magnetism is also a quality of being verbally disarming, in that she really has a way of using her wit and apparent affability to put people around her either at ease (or the opposite, depending on how she wants them to feel). She doesn't experience nervousness or any forms of insecurity, self doubt, or self consciousness, and this allows her to speak freely and without reservation or fear. Her level of honesty often creates a false trust or gives the illusion of trustworthiness because she'll say things other people wouldn't say. This is ironic because Joker also lies and manipulates, but that's another psychopathic trait for another post. A more obvious aspect of her wit and wordplay is that Joker is funny. She's entertaining.

More than that, Joker is able to maintain this very disposition under the most dire of circumstances. She is always almost always calm, sure of herself, and talkative-- even in disturbing or violent situations. This is not to say that Joker is entirely unflappable (she's not), but part of her charm is that she doesn't get upset about things many people would get upset about. She has a different set of priorities and reactions than most people would have that allows her to sustain her mood even in these more dire or serious situations. This can have an incredibly endearing effect on others but can also be employed to have a very disconcerting or threatening effect, which Joker is very aware of and often uses to her advantage, whatever that may be.

There is also something to be said for Joker's intelligence. While she is happy to let others underestimate her, Joker does possess an IQ within genius range, and this will consistently become apparent not only through prolonged conversation with her directly, but also given any close exposure to her lifestyle or how she operates her business. This can also have an effect on those around her in that her intelligence, especially when combined with her confidence, strongly gives the impression that she knows more than those around her. This can grant an air of intellectual authority that adds considerably to her aura for those who are consistently in her company because everything she says now carries the weight of genius, but this is likely only applicable to those who interact with Joker on a regular basis.

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Joker’s Hobbies && How She Spends Her Time

Cooking. Joker has no idea where she learned to cook, but it soothes her. She’s an extremely methodical person, and cooking is all about the process. Also she loves food. She makes a pretty spectacular cedar planked salmon with roasted asparagus, and her creamy pesto sauce is also noteworthy. A close third is her seared tuna with wasabi butter sauce– she serves it over angel hair, and it’s pretty great. Joker prefers to cook alone and to eat alone, and being invited to dine with her is a big deal. Most often, she cooks for Frost (and Noam Chompsky, of course). She’s a strict pescatarian and is extremely finicky about her dietary standards.

Collecting. Joker collects books, particularly vintages and first editions. Her tastes are eclectic and vary widely, but she’s interested in histories and philosophies, in political works, and largely Southern literature (particularly Southern Gothic). Her living room and study are full of books, and she employs a private collector to obtain works for her. If she needs to create a code of some kind, the cipher is invariably something from her collection. People also like to give her clown figurines as gifts, which she’ll keep if she likes them or if she cares at all about the person who gave it to her. She also has a fairly extensive collection of designer watches, many of which were taken from people she’s killed, and she owns way too many pairs of boots.

Fitness. Staying in shape is extremely important to Joker. While she is a fairly vain person, largely this is also a survival necessity. She emphasizes cardio and core strength and also is extremely advanced in krav maga (one of the most deadly martial arts in the world, developed by Israel). Part of her motivation lies in the fact that she’s very small for such an infamous criminal, and in constantly fighting for her life and her cause, she must be able to defend herself from a larger and likely stronger opponent. A majority of her fitness regime is geared towards fighting, and her specialty is knives, but she does know a fair bit about gunsmithing and employs a gunsmith.

Joker can also juggle and is fairly talented with a ukulele. She very much enjoys chess and card games. She has a strong interest in explosives engineering.

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Joker’s Custom Colt Gold Cup Trophy

Joker carries a custom Colt Gold Cup Trophy as her primary sidearm. It is heavily customized with a purple-finished slide and frame and all other parts gold plated. It has custom gold inlaid engravings on the flats of the slide and frame, and textured faux ivory grip panels with gold Joker emblems. The Gold Cup Trophy is purpose-built for improved accuracy, reliability, and handling in competitive shooting and features a beveled magazine well for easy reloading and an adjustable rear sight.

Joker’s gunsmith has adjusted a hair trigger and generally made it very smooth to handle, reload, and take apart. Joker has it with her at all times, including in the shower. She generally carries in a shoulder holster and will throw a coat or blazer on to conceal if she feels the need. Joker’s Gold Cup is a .45 ACP that carries 8 rounds (plus one in the chamber). She typically carries at least two 8 round magazines in her shoulder holster, and often keeps magazines squirreled away in various caches around her home and club. She favors overpressure ammunition and more often than not has +P rounds loaded.

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Shipping with the Joker && Joker’s Sexuality

Joker essentially views people as mostly objects (she possesses very little if any human empathy), and therefore any person is a potentially sexual object insofar as they fulfill certain prerequisites (ie: physical attractiveness, flexible morality, willingness to take direction, threshold for violence, etc.). Subsequently, Joker can instantly become sexual with any person who hits these particular buttons for her– it doesn’t necessarily mean she plans to fuck this person, or even wants to fuck this person. I mean, it could mean she wants to fuck them, or it could mean she’s using her sexuality to manipulate them, OR it could mean she’s briefly considering how they might look suspended from the ceiling in a studded leather harness getting publicly gang banged by men in clown masks for her viewing pleasure. Who can say?? Joker’s sexuality is a bit like Schrodinger’s cat, in that she both does and does not want to fuck someone… until the time comes to open the box, and it is what it is.

Hence, Joker is likely to be sexual, or sexually intense, or say dirty things, or inappropriately touch (with the mun’s permission, ofc) another muse. It doesn’t necessarily mean she’s trying to get with them or start a ship or what have you. So I guess heads up (pun fully intended).

This brings me to my next point: on shipping. Joker may take a shine to someone and start fucking them regularly, but it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s developed any sort of emotional attachment to them. Often, her sexual partners are just talking sex toys to her.

If she does develop affection towards another human being (which does happen on occasion), sex does not necessarily have to be involved (it can, but it isn’t necessary). It really only means that this is her person now, and if anyone fucks with her person, it would be like someone threatening to key Joker’s car. I mean, can you imagine if some asshole was like “heyo, I’m gonna key your car”?? They’d have about six bullets in them before they hit the ground. Don’t fuck with her shit. Don’t fuck with her people, don’t fuck with her business. It’s not really out of a sense of chivalry so much as it is a bizarre ownership, and it may often extend to people within her employ.

Joker is capable of loving someone. It would be a very shallow love, though, and it would never, ever be healthy. I did originally develop this blog to ship with a Harley Quinn that no longer exists, so I do largely have that understanding of how a relationship, a real romantic relationship, with the Joker could theoretically work. Joker could love someone: if they were persistent, if they were absolutely devoted to her, if they would do ANYTHING for Joker and still were smart enough and deadly enough not to have to rely on her. But it would take a very twisted mind with an appetite for (self) destruction in order to get there.

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The Joker && The Death of Jason Todd

There is no DCEU canon for Jason Todd, only an allusion in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The above Robin costume is in a display case in the Batcave for Batman to gaze at with intensity. There is no dialogue or follow up to this detail, but the implication is that Joker had something to do with Robin’s death.

Given my inclination to avoid comic canon, I wrote my own version of the death of Jason Todd. This is my blog’s canon in the absence of DCEU content. It is also the only real detail I pull from a source other than TDK or SS (2016). It is a joint headcanon with @comicbooksans. 

Upon discovering the secret identity of Robin, Joker enacted a plan to turn him against Batman. The first part of her plan was staging a fake shoot out where some of her men posed as Black Mask’s men in which Jason Todd would come across her being brutalized and be forced to intervene out of costume in order to save her life. Pretending that she had no idea who her savior was, Joker would then rely on her savior to get home, showing a side of vulnerability that Jason had not previously seen in her.

After inviting him into her home and forming a personal connection with him as Jason rather than Robin, Joker would insist on repaying his kindness, insisting that he saved her life and that she always pays her debts (a deliberately crafted line designed not only to remind him of his father’s debts as a child growing up in an abusive household, but also to instill a sense of nobility and integrity as the Joker). She makes this offer knowing that Jason will be forced to decline on principle, allowing her to continue to pursue him under the guise of her apparent gratitude.

This instills the beginning of a dichotomy between Jason’s relationship with the Joker versus Robin’s relationship to the Joker. She reinforces this dichotomy by treating Jason kindly and being candid with him, especially when the subject of the Batman inevitably comes up. Joker pretends to think that Robin is Batman’s son in order to put more pressure on Jason’s issues with his own father, and offhandedly says that she feels bad for Robin because he’s caught in his father’s fight, and no kid deserves to be conscripted for someone else’s reasons.

At the same time, she turns up the heat on Batman by goading him into more violent reactions toward her in order to create more cognitive dissonance in Jason’s mind and further undermine his relationship with Batman. She continues the relationship with Jason outside of his identity as Robin until she’s sure that he’s in love with her and his issues with Batman have come to a boil. Then, she pretends to discover Jason’s secret identity as Robin. She feigns horror and betrayal at this discovery, telling Jason that they can’t be together now that she knows who he is because she’ll never be able to trust him now. How does she know he isn’t in this relationship at Batman’s behest? How does she know he didn’t stage everything in order to manipulate her into turning herself in to Batman?

This forces Jason to choose between his love for her and Batman, whom she’s convinced Jason is another abuser that took advantage of his disenfranchised childhood in order to recruit and mold him into a soldier to fight in a war against the crimes of Gotham City that Batman declared for his own purposes. Faced with this conflict, Jason decides that the only way to prove his love and loyalty to Joker is to kill Batman. This, of course, was the Joker’s hope all along, knowing that Jason could never best his mentor in combat and that he would not give up when his heart and integrity were at stake. Sending him into an unwinnable fight which would eventually, whether deliberately or accidentally, force Batman to kill Jason Todd.

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The Joker’s Club && Base of Operations

Joker’s club is called Feste (after the jester from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night). It is a hugely popular nightclub in Gotham and I headcanon that the club featured in Suicide Squad as well as the one in Rick Ross’ Purple Lambo music video are simply different areas of Feste. The vibe is essentially Mardi Gras meets BDSM, and Joker fosters a culture of all misfits being equally welcome, so long as they play by the rules. The club plays predominantly trap music and anything featuring a heavy and addictive beat, and often features a variety of displays on stage as well as hired dancers stationed throughout the club. Most nights, Feste is open to anyone willing to pay the cover fee, and one can often pay one’s way into the VIP lounge as well, but the club does regularly host fetish nights, invitation-only parties, and can even be rented (at exorbitant expense) for private events. Although Feste is not a strip club, it does have a highly sexual and fetishized reputation (as well as strongly sapphic), and attendance is not for the faint of heart. It’s even rumored that the basement floor houses a dungeon, and that some of the dominatrices who regularly perform on stage are available there to fulfill some of the more wealthy patrons’ darker fantasies.

Joker runs a lot of her business from the VIP lounge (overlooking the dance floor below) where she has her own designated booth (as seen in SS), although she also has an office with a proper desk in the back that she rarely uses. Admittance to the VIP area is either very pricey or by reputation only. Certain figures in Gotham city keep regular booths there, but no one gets to Joker’s table without passing through at least three security checkpoints. The building that Feste occupies is in almost the exact center of downtown Gotham, and Joker’s penthouse apartment takes up the top two floors. One could go down to the county office to look up what businesses the other floors are leased to, but even government records aren’t that reliable. The structure is widely known to be Joker’s primary base of operations, although its host isn’t always in attendance. Even so, security is tight, bordering on extreme. There are cameras everywhere and nothing happens in that club that Joker doesn’t know about. Rest assured, if someone notable walks through the front door, security will be notifying Mr. J within the minute, regardless of her presence within the club itself.

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The Joker’s Criminal Organization

Joker’s criminal organization is collectively referred to as Clown Alley and is divided largely into three main branches: laundering, smuggling, and terrorism.

Clown Alley is one of the leading criminal banking organizations in the northeast. Particularly in Gotham City, where there are many competing criminal organizations producing dirty money, there is a strong demand for reliable laundering services to convert dirty money into legal tender. Thus, Joker does business with many if not most criminals in the area as an integral part of their operations. Her laundering is done primarily through cash intensive businesses owned by Clown Alley (such as dungeons, sex shops, parking structures, and even Feste), as well as through trade-based laundering largely done through auction. The latter of this is tied to the second branch of Joker’s organization in that many of the items that see their way through the auction house (art, antiquities, etc.) have been obtained through less than legal means. For example, Clown Alley is heavily involved in robbery and heists, which obtain high value and rare items and sell them to Gotham’s rich and elite. Joker also uses bank capture and occasionally bulk cash smuggling to diversify the means of cash so that the organization isn’t dependent on any one method.

Aside from laundering, Clown Alley is well known in criminal circles as an arms dealer. A good portion of their smuggling operation deals with the sale of any and every kind of weapon imaginable. Weapons trafficking, robbery, counterfeiting, and extortion make up the bulk of Clown Alley’s self-generated revenue, all of which is cleaned through their own laundering organization and is accompanied by the percentage profits made from cleaning the money of other criminal organizations. Clown Alley also offers loans at an exorbitant rate of interest, adding usury to their lineup of criminal endeavors. Because of Joker’s banking services and arms dealing, she has solid relationships with most of the larger criminal organizations in the surrounding areas, which means she is often viewed as an impartial third party in disputes between these organizations. For a fee, Clown Alley will broker negotiations between organizations and also offers dispute resolution, for which they have an excellent reputation (in fact, dispute resolution and brokering accounts for one of Clown Alley’s top five renevue streams).

The third branch of Joker’s organization deals exclusively in terrorism. Some of the activity in this branch has an overlap with her other business dealings, but for the most part, everything else Clown Alley does is a means to this end; that is, to realize Joker’s political aims through murder, arson, blackmail, bribery, and the insane public stunts she pulls on a regular basis. She manipulates the systems in place to her own end, or to destroy them or their integrity as it suites her and whatever purpose she pursues at any given time. It is often very difficult to understand what her machinations are aimed towards because her motivations tend toward a state of absolute chaos. However, this chaos is often a mask for removing competition, solidifying her power base (typically through fear), eliminating threats, etc.

When it comes to putting together a criminal empire, one can’t just hire anyone to get the job done. This is a lesson Joker learned very early in her career– if your people are only motivated by money, then they can be bought. The foundation of her empire, therefore, is information. Don’t mistake Joker for a broker, she’s never willing to sell, but always willing to buy. She keeps spies everywhere and hackers on retainer. If she hires someone, she knows exactly what their situation is, their talents and skills but also their weaknesses. It’s the weaknesses that are the most interest to her, if she has a man who can be threatened, who owes debts or has certain dependencies (chemical or otherwise), this is what’s important. She makes it certain henchmen’s jobs to keep an eye on everyone’s wellbeing, because any weak link can be exploited. Whether Joker chooses to exploit this herself to ensure loyalty, or conversely to fix the issue in what might be perceived as an act of beneficence, is entirely up to the person’s usefulness to her or potential threat to her long term. Of all the criminals in Gotham City, Joker pays the best– but it’s the benefits of her employ that keep her people in line. Nobody fucks with Joker’s clowns without her say so. If she hires somebody only to kill them later, it’s because they cannot be of any further benefit to her. If someone is in trouble, it’s taken care of. It might not be health insurance, but it’s a guarantee.

Of course, she’s also a firm believer in employing both the carrot and the stick. Anyone out of line or who can’t keep their shit together, anyone who might be taking advantage of clownly kindness is an opportunity for her to make an example, and she does. Creatively. Everyone in Gotham knows when someone’s crossed the Joker because it’s usually a public spectacle aimed at a particular and relevant audience.

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The Joker's Methods && Motivations

The Joker is an insurrectionary anarchist, an egoist, and perhaps most importantly, an illegalist. Her views are largely anti-statist and support armed rebellion against the established order; however, she also believes that she does not owe humanity anything and therefore does not hold these views to a larger good. In other words, she supports overthrowing the government because she does not recognize its right or authority to have power over anyone, but she also doesn’t feel that it is her responsibility to free the world from what she views as an oppressive military regime. 

Subsequently, Joker has embraced a lifestyle of illegalism– criminality as an act of revolt and propaganda. Illegalists argue that their actions require no moral basis– illegal acts are taken not in the name of a higher ideal, but in pursuit of one’s own desires. While Joker’s nihilist views are a foundational part of her personal point of view and motivations, her desire is ultimately power. 

Alfred Pennyworth has a great line in TDK where he talks about how none of the usual criminal motivators are applicable to the Joker, and that’s what makes him an enigma to Batman. “Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” He is partially right, in that Joker cannot be bribed with money or sex or lesser physical luxuries-- the only thing that appeals to her is the intangible concept of power, and every manipulation of chaos that she employs is engineered towards that end. 

Joker’s absolute last resort is employing violence. If it comes down to it, she’d never shy away from blowing everything to smithereens (in fact, you should see the glint in her eye as she admires all that raw destructive power in its purest form), but typically whatever violence she employs is always part of a manipulation. Joker doesn’t come at a problem head on; she doesn’t confront any issue directly. That doesn’t work. What works for Joker is a thorough understanding of cause and effect.

For example, if she were to provide GCPD with direct evidence of mob money that had been previously unattainable to them, then Johnny Law will take a bite out of the powers that be and effectively destabilize the criminal map of Gotham City, creating a vacuum of power ripe for seizing. So she robs a bank. Loudly. She ties up all loose ends, and leaves the cash with a bow on it for the cops. She gets away with it because usually when someone robs a bank, they want money, not evidence against a criminal underground.

Unfortunately, she cannot plan for every possible outcome-- life is chaos. The criminal banker runs to Hong Kong and the mob boss puts a hit out on her? That’s fine. Don’t chase the banker, don’t fight the mob boss. Instead, manufacture your own kidnapping to make the mob boss think he has what he wants. Who’s going to hunt someone down if they’re already caught? The only thing she needs for that is henchmen. So she’ll convince mob men to swap sides by promising them what they want, whatever that is.

She also plans twelve steps in advance. For example, when formulating a new criminal empire, it’s important to make sure that the growth will remain unhindered. After eliminating all potential competition, the next adversary will be the very powers she used to take out the mob: Johnny Law. So she takes a three pronged approach: the commissioner, the district attorney, and the judge. The people who apprehend, prosecute, and convict criminals, all equally and very publicly represented. Instead of fighting the cops, a publicly deranged execution of their commissioner will do the job. Why go to trial when you wage psychological warfare against any lawyer who would ever be in the position to take her to court? And judges are the last bastion of our justice system. Destroy one in front of everyone. Remind them that they’re all human, all vulnerable. If she kills these three symbols pre-emptively, the law would think twice about coming for her. Weaponized fear. You get the idea.

She will fully convince you that she’s a dog chasing cars, a deviant who just wants to watch the world burn, a deranged clown-- and these things may all be true as well, but they mask her true motive: power. Joker wants to own herself, she wants to own Gotham City and everyone in it. She will find the very heart of what you want and either offer it to you, or put a knife in it. Why kill you when she could seduce you with money, power, or force you with fear? It’s more fun that way, and Joker is safer every step of the way.

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The Joker’s Health && Toxic Encephalopathy

Joker’s health and backstory are aspects of her character development that coincide with one another, in that the onset of her character takes place in a vat of unidentified chemicals: thus the Joker was born. This acid bath birth not only accounts for a large portion of Joker’s appearance (bleached skin and hair), but also her physical and psychological wellbeing. Despite the fact that she had only been submerged for (presumably) the amount of time it took Batman to rescue her, the toxicity of chemical matter that she was exposed to was acute, and the time it took to get her rescued and rinsed off prolonged this exposure. The result was toxic encephalopathy.

“Encephalopathy” is a general term describing brain malfunctions and “toxic” asserts that the malfunction is caused by toxins on the brain. The most prominent characteristic of toxic encephalopathy is an altered mental status; however, symptoms of acute toxic encephalopathy do not resolve with cessation of exposure and can include memory loss, small personality changes/increased irritability, insidious onset of concentration difficulties, headache, seizures, and depression.

The first and foremost symptom of Joker’s encephalopathy is isolated retrograde amnesia, a loss of memory-access to events that occurred or information that was learned in the past. It is caused by an injury or the onset of a disease (in this case, toxic exposure). That is to say that Joker remembers nothing before the acid bath and has no recollection of who she used to be. She does, however, retain her procedural memory and therefore still understands how the world around her works, including any and all skills she possessed before the inciting event. Because her memory loss is so targeted and specific, it is very likely that Joker has a thalamic lesion that has gone undiagnosed.

Another notable neurological symptom that could be related to her encephalopathy is synesthesia. This is perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. In Joker’s case, certain stimuli (particularly emotional stimuli) will cause her to perceive colors that only she can see. The colors she sees are directly related to the stimuli, and generally speaking she sees cooler colors in relation to positive emotions and warmer colors in relation to negative ones. Little is known about how synesthesia develops, however, so it is possible that Joker experienced this prior to her toxic exposure.

The headaches, seizures, and depressive episodes that Joker experiences can occasionally be debilitating for her. She’s been known to take curious steps in order to alleviate her symptoms when modern medicine has failed to do so. On one such occasion, she immersed herself in an ice bath for an afternoon, on another, she attempted to cut away a piece of her own scalp before Harley stopped her. In some instances, she will keep a physician on retainer to treat her in home, but largely Joker refuses to return to the hospital or have any major testing done to diagnose or treat her symptoms.

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The Joker’s Origin && Her Relationship with Batman

A lot of people ask me about my thoughts on who the Joker was before she was the Joker, and my answer to that is twofold: Firstly, I think what people want out of this question is to unmask Joker, to reveal her humanity in a way that would take power away from the idea of the Joker, which is the reason V never removes his mask in V for Vendetta– you can’t kill an idea. Ideas are bulletproof. Secondly, I understand that in a superhero genre it’s customary to have a secret identity, but given Joker’s retrograde amnesia, she’s been essentially robbed of hers. She doesn’t know who she was before she was the Joker, which renders that entire personhood ultimately irrelevant to her as she is now. Subsequently, I’m disinterested in revealing any ideas I have regarding whomever Joker used to be before she was Joker.

The Joker was born like Athena, fully grown and aware of the world. She came into existence in a vat of mystery acid in an Ace Chemical plant, and her first memory is being fished out of this vat by the Batman– which, without context, is kind of a terrifying first memory. She doesn’t remember it well. Her first clear memory is waking up in the hospital. No one was able to identify her or explain how she came to be in Ace Chemical, and obviously Batman isn’t available for comment. I’ve written a separate but relevant headcanon previously about Joker having toxic encephalopathy resulting in various symptoms and health problems, all of which she was experiencing acutely in the hospital while doctors asked her a million questions she had no answers to. She has no idea who she is, where she lives, or who her emergency contact is.

Following an arduous recovery, the hospital releases her with anti-seizure meds and a huge medical bill. Joker has no identity, no money, no place to go, and no one to turn to. From the second she left that hospital, she was homeless and in tremendous debt. Not only that, but she was obviously bleached, and her albino-like appearance was extremely off-putting for others, making it difficult for her to make friends or form allies. Life in Gotham has never been easy, even if you’re the Waynes, you could get shot point blank outside the opera house, so for a homeless outcast, life was intense, merciless, and increasingly violent. In order to survive, Joker had to toughen up and toughen up quickly.

One can see direct parallels between Joker’s general psychology and this time period in her life: the all-importance of power and control, the unwillingness to ever be a victim again or to be powerless or at someone else’s mercy, and the idea that she owes the world nothing. Joker learned to fight and steal when the stakes were basically to learn this and learn it well, or you go hungry and can’t defend yourself. All the while, she’s increasingly isolated and coping with brain damage, so she’s strongly motivated to apply all of her intelligence and ruthlessness toward becoming an accomplished criminal and manipulating others into helping her. As soon as she makes any headway, she starts hearing about a masked vigilante called the Batman who is beating the shit out of anyone trying to commit crime in Gotham City.

Joker knows that she is supposed to fear Batman, she’s aware that others fear him and that she should fear being caught by him, and she resents the hell out of this, just as she resents any fear in general (or any other emotion that attempts to control her). The stronger she becomes, the more traction she gets in the criminal world, the more settled she is in her new identity– that of the Joker, in which she uses her physical deformity to channel fear in others, and also uses it as a tool to help others underestimate her. She is building this concept from nothing, and sees Batman as her only link to a past she doesn’t know or understand, which is extremely disturbing to her. She knows she literally would not exist if he hadn’t pulled her out of that acid bath, but she also has no context or explanation for that memory. Furthermore, she’s afraid to even ask about it (although she would never admit it) because she’s afraid to know who she was before she became the Joker. There is an identity crisis there where the thought of being someone else before being the Joker directly  threatens her current sense of identity and self because she is only able to build the concept of the Joker specifically because she lacks any societal ties (no family, no teachers, no friends), and therefore has nothing anchoring her to reality.

This means that Joker’s first connection with Batman is one based in fear: the fear that Batman represents, the threat to herself and others like her, and the fear of herself and her true identity. Confronting Batman is a surrogate for confronting Joker’s fears, and in that confrontation, she finds something that she can respect: another psycho acting out of the courage of his own convictions. The more he doubles down on his pseudo-noble nonsensical bullshit, the more Joker wants to challenge and derail those beliefs, to see how tightly he holds onto them. If he had buckled and realized his own folly, she could have dismissed him outright, but it is his firm belief that what he is doing is not only necessary but compulsory that really fascinates Joker. She respects his commitment and therefore sees him as the only real force in Gotham City to contend with, the only real equal she has.

Secondarily to his ties to her identity-related fears, Joker also recognizes that Batman essentially birthed her, and therefore blames him for her own pain-filled existence– which is reason number two that she would never let him die, and why she would certainly never kill Batman herself. She wants to punish him for bringing her into the world and for simultaneously making it impossible to live through his crusade to fight the disenfranchised for just trying to get by however they can, and on a more personal level constantly getting in her way. Letting Batman die at any given time would still be too quick for Joker because her goal is to inflict the maximum possible amount of pain on him, to torture him slowly. To her, death would be an escape she can never allow him. So long as she has to live her own tortured existence, so must the Batman. For her, it is a kind of suicide pact, or perhaps even the opposite of that.