Seeing those BatFam webtoons of Steph and her dad issues makes me annoyed about One Bad Day: Two-Face all over again. One of the big reasons that issue was popular was because of how Steph didn’t trust Harvey for one second, didn’t feel any sympathy towards him, and criticized Bruce’s own sympathy for Harvey as being stupid and dangerous.
And in the end, the plot vindicates her skepticism when Harvey destroys his noble father for absolutely no reason. Just evil for the sake of evil.
Which only worked because the author went out of her way to create a whole new backstory for Harvey, turning his abusive monster of a dad into a kind, loving, successful man. “All the best parts of me are my father,” Harvey says at one point. This Harvey is written expressly to be exactly the person Steph says he is, just to prove her right. He is just rotten to the core, playing up a “good” side that isn’t really there to manipulate Bruce and others. And there seems to be no reason for it in this story other than to make Steph look like the only sensible person who can see through it.
It wouldn’t have worked the same way if the author had actually incorporated Harvey’s canonical abuse. I still wonder how Steph would react to that Harvey. How much empathy would she have for what he went through? Would she condemn him for not pulling himself up by his boostraps the way she did, choosing to become a hero instead of a monster? Would she take his mental illness into account, or the extent to which he tried to be heroic and was torn down by forces without and within? Or would she be like Dick, and flatly condemn him as a psychopath, unworthy of any sympathy and unable to be salvaged, if not redeemed?
And for that matter, what would that Harvey make of her? Even if she didn’t empathize with Harvey, what if he empathized with her? What if Two-Face decided to pay Cluemaster a little visit, to mete out some justice of his own, and how would Steph react to that?
There’s a far more interesting and troubling story to be written about Harvey with Steph (and/or Cass, for that matter), but it would require a writer who was willing to dive into these complex questions about what makes a monster. Someone willing to acknowledge that Two-Face is both villain and victim, an abusive “survivor” who arguably didn’t actually survive. A walking scar, still seeking out some sense of justice and fairness in his own broken way.