By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff
When women show an interest in nerdiness, it’s constantly challenged. Someone — usually a man, but sometimes another woman with internalized sexism — will give us a pop quiz on whatever it is we like. We have to name five superheroes that aren’t “mainstream” or answer incredibly specific questions about Game of Thrones lore to prove ourselves.
The first time I took the “nerd test,” I was 9 years old. My older cousin and his friends didn’t want me to play Xbox with them, so they told me I had to name the main trio in Pokémon. To their credit, when I said, “Ash, Misty and Brock,” they actually did give me a turn on the game.
That was when I first encountered LEGO Batman: The Videogame, which would become my obsession for years to come.
I love video games — from my first session of Rayman 2: The Great Escape in my cousin’s trailer to my most recent Baldur’s Gate 3 binges. LEGO Batman was special, though, because it was the first game I owned with playable female characters. I was especially entranced by Harley Quinn, with her magical, Italian commedia dell’arte-inspired costume, acrobatics and giant cartoon mallet.
I even dressed up as her for Halloween in fourth grade (in her original suit, not the Suicide Squad sex doll outfit), despite the fact that I attended the Sandpoint Waldorf School and no one in my class even knew who Batman was.
I wanted to know everything there was to know about Harley Quinn and her morally questionable, if not downright evil, companions: Poison Ivy and Catwoman. My mom was so excited that I’d shown an interest in reading that, when we passed my first-ever comic book store on the way to Spokane, she didn’t need any convincing to make a U-turn at a busy intersection.
The store was located in one of those rundown “shopping centers” off the truck routes, where half of the buildings were permanently closed, and only the Navy recruiters’ office looked clean. When we walked in, the man behind the counter — who looked oddly similar to Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, if memory serves — was immediately ticked off. Moms and 10-year-old girls were not his preferred clientele; and, though he invited us to browse, he hovered behind me as I walked around, hoping that if he scowled hard enough, I wouldn’t touch anything.
I wasn’t going to touch anything, because in those few minutes I discovered the truth that bulky LEGO bricks had hidden: The badass women I idolized were, to most of the world, mere sex objects. Around the shop, all my favorite characters were plastered on pinup posters and sculpted into figurines that were 50% breasts and 100% anatomical tragedies. It was clear to me, then, that comic book culture was not made for girls. We were not wanted.
As quickly as I’d come in, I made for the door, only to hear my mom ask, “Do you have any Harley Quinn comics?”
“They don’t make those,” said Comic Book Guy.
(Quinn got her own comic run in 2000, beginning with #1 All Aboard the Roller Coaster of Love, not that he would have told me that. It wouldn’t have been much of a comfort, anyway, since her third comic featured a sexy pillow fight with Poison Ivy and Cat Woman.)
I put away my interest in comics after that visit. It wasn’t until I saw Peggy Carter in Captain America: The First Avenger in high school that I had any hope things were changing. Still, I didn’t pick up a comic until college, when I found books like Superman Smashes the Klan, which honor and center marginalized groups.
Over the years, I’ve slowly regained the joy I found playing LEGO Batman, bolstered by the fact that more and more women, people of color and LGBTQIA+ people make it into writing rooms to create stories that truly speak to the human experience — not just a hypersexual, chauvinistic, white worldview.
I’d like to don Quinn’s red-and-black diamonds again in a more accepting world and fulfill the dreams of little me, who just wanted to be a geek and a girl, not just a “geek girl.”
