Well, you might as well not reply to anything about Wonder Woman, because from what I've read, William Moulton Marston seems to think the same about women as I do.
Wonder Woman animated DVD
- Thread starter CaptainCanada
- Start date
Hermiod, I hope you'll stay in this thread. I think you have some very valid points to make.
I think an important thing to keep in context is that a lot of the ideas behind the Amazons being a 'superior' civilization were created at a time when it was still shocking for women to be a part of the workplace, and was designed to suggested (perhaps, in an exaggerated fashion) that women could do anything if they put their mind to it.
That said, I agree there are fundamental flaws with suggesting that their civilization is perfect simply because there are no men, despite how the movie seems to suggest. According to one version, aren't the Amazons supposed to be reincarnations of slain women through time, created by the female Olympians to counter atrocities committed against women by men at the behest of the Olympian males? In that regard, isn't the vendetta really more between the Olympians in the first place?
Or did I just make that up?
I think an important thing to keep in context is that a lot of the ideas behind the Amazons being a 'superior' civilization were created at a time when it was still shocking for women to be a part of the workplace, and was designed to suggested (perhaps, in an exaggerated fashion) that women could do anything if they put their mind to it.
That said, I agree there are fundamental flaws with suggesting that their civilization is perfect simply because there are no men, despite how the movie seems to suggest. According to one version, aren't the Amazons supposed to be reincarnations of slain women through time, created by the female Olympians to counter atrocities committed against women by men at the behest of the Olympian males? In that regard, isn't the vendetta really more between the Olympians in the first place?
Or did I just make that up?
No, they're not (well, Marston might have been; he had a very interesting personal philosophy about gender and bondage).
I rewatched the movie; hasn't much changed my opinion, it's both enjoyable and flawed in a lot of places (Artemis is great).
Oh, and also, I don't know who the hell that woman they call Etta Candy is supposed to be, but that's not Etta Candy.
I thought the movie showed that the Amazon society was flawed, and that problems were caused by closing off their society to the outside world.
I thought the Steve Trevor / Wonder Woman relationship kind of played like Han Solo / Princess Leia's relationship in "A New Hope" and the begining of Empire. I think that is what they were going for, and missed it a bit.
-Chris
^I didn't think so in the movie either, I was more responding to the general suggestion that their society was meant to be a utopia and that it had something to do with their exclusion of men. Also agreed regarding the Leia/Han dynamic they attempted.
And Captain Canada, thank you for reminding me about Etta Candy. I did NOT like that.
And Captain Canada, thank you for reminding me about Etta Candy. I did NOT like that.
I'm really not sure of the creative process that takes you from "Diana's spirited plump female sidekick" to "Cat Grant".
Gail Simone apparently talked to Jelenic about that after seeing the movie, and he admitted that she could have been done better (Simone said in her drafts she was "fun and useful").
The Greek gods in general aren't the good or heroic types. Most of them, including Zeus, are completely selfish killers, or at least assholes. 
WW is best when kept far away from them.
The DCAU tried to stay faithful to the all-woman concept, which is pretty much impossible to paint in a good light when they did actual episodes centering around it. It's the sort of concept that really only works when it's kept as a sort of vague background detail. Trying to make them some sort of enlightened ambassadors of peace is really hard when pretty much everything about them boils down to manifest destiny and keeping their master race uncontaminated.
WW is best when kept far away from them.The DCAU tried to stay faithful to the all-woman concept, which is pretty much impossible to paint in a good light when they did actual episodes centering around it. It's the sort of concept that really only works when it's kept as a sort of vague background detail. Trying to make them some sort of enlightened ambassadors of peace is really hard when pretty much everything about them boils down to manifest destiny and keeping their master race uncontaminated.
I've said my piece and I'm not going to waste my time with people who defend and support misandry on this board anymore.
A lot of the ideas around any fiction come from the time it was written. Doesn't mean it's right in 2009.
But that's not what they're about.
That's "not what they're about" in the story arc you prefer.
The original basis for Greek myth was not feminist or egalitarian. It was equally patronizing (just woman being patronizing instead of men) it was chauvinistic, it was violent, it was isolationist.
The Greek myths themselves were about a male-dominated culture's worst nightmare, and this from culture that happily wrote comedies about women going on a sex-strike. But that "worst-nightmare" wasn't egalitarian Feminism, it was a mirror-image where women were a violent, repressive, emasculating counterpart to Greek men.
The original Wonder Woman was fun and comical and lighthearted with some bondage undertones. Maybe more than "some" and maybe more than "undertones" depending on your perspective. It wasn't feminist, and it wasn't egalitarian. Whatever you think of "WW 2 culture" the reality is, Feminism was well thought out, written and demonstrated in Western society long before WW 2. It obviously hadn't made huge political strides by then, but it existed in a recognizable form, and Wonder Woman wasn't that form.
I like George Perez, and I liked his WW run, but it wasn't realistic, it wasn't based on actual mythology, and it wasn't a logical world. A single gender isolationist culture isn't going to have any means of being egalitarian. They weren't even democratic. And while it would be nice if Perez' version had been the definitive orginal from decades earlier, it wasn't. It's just one version among many.
The choice to make the Amazons something less than enlightened is the author's choice, and that's the choice they made. It's not a betrayal of the main character's history, because that history is so varied.
Making a superior culture that's enlightened is very difficult because the writers probably aren't the Dalai Lama, and they aren't enlightened themselves and wouldn't know enlightened if it bit them on the toe. It's also boring. I'd be fine with making the Amazons perfect, if we never bothered to go back there. There's no drama in perfect.
Well, just because it's difficult doesn't necessarily mean it should be outright abandoned. I myself never considered the amazons to be perfect in every incarnation, just a heck of a lot better! Trying to make the amazons flawed, prejudiced and arrogant just for the sake of comparing them to the real world is just too easy to do.
It's very very easy to make something flawed than not flawed. But remember, you may say there's no drama in perfect, but that's part of the whole conflict about Wonder Woman. She is from a better society, a better place. Why would she want to leave it to go to a much more flawed world? Because she wants to make things better. That's the Wonder Woman I know.
The perpetrators of that violence are the writers, though, lazy writers who've demonstrated time and time again that they feel the only use for a woman character is as a prop to kill in a horrible fashion so that it motivates the male hero.
The original Amazon myths have really no relevance to the property; Marston totally changed them up.
The character has a varied history, but the Amazons as an enlightened culture dates to their creation by Marston, and has been at least lip-serviced in all the comics incarnations since, even when the writer clearly struggles with it a bit.
Well, are they an all female society or warriors that isolates itself or not? Because if it is, there's no way to really set that up as some sort of ideal society and then have it work in any real-world situation. It kind of works if it's kept in the background and you don't think too hard about it.
Of course WW isn't the only hero whose origins lack plausibility. How many decades did Bruce Wayne spend learning to be an expert in everything? Why did Jor'El have this very complex escape route planned that only involved saving one baby? The origins work if you sort of paint them over and move on to the punching ASAP. But while Bruce's parents are dead and Krypton is destroyed, Wonder Woman's plotpoint from hell of an origin is still hanging around alive and well in the form of a magic island.
This is the point I'd like to address. We're judging a society based on today's standards, not the standards of what society was like to the Amazons who lived there all those years ago. We're modernizing their their flaws when they shouldn't really be there.
So just because Wonder Woman's history lacks tragedy makes her being who she is implausible? This is Wonder Woman. She's not the type of character who waits for something bad to happen in order to sum up the courage to go out and fight it. She does it because she just wants to make the world a better place.
Well, they're a fantasy civilization, for starters.
Since they exist in modern times, that really should be the basis for comparison, imo.
No, that wasn't my point. My point is, Batman and Superman's origins are buried in the past, whereas WW's origins are under the harsh light of scrutiny since her people are actively involved with the whole DC universe. So the flaws in WW's premise stick out more.
They would work a lot better in the Silver age, but modern comics tend to try to go for realism, which leaves the Amazon concept in an awkward position.
