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philippos42:

Seriously?

ragnell:

Oh, lighten up Phil. This post was meant to be a good-natured joke.

But if you must open the argument, EVERY Silver Age character was illogical to a point. They used to have a webpage based entirely around how sadistic Silver Age Superman seemed. Comic fans shudder at the old Batman stuff. Wonder Woman was no more absurd than Superman or Lois Lane. That’s because the writers and artists pushing out multiple titles every month no matter what. That’s why we make jokes about the results. That doesn’t change that there was actually this intense optimism and creativity to the time.

When people talk about bringing back Classic Wonder Woman, they talk about the classic setup, the classic adventure, and complex characterization for modern audiences like we just barely started to have in the Bronze Age before the reboot set the freaking franchise on fire.

See, I get upset when people talk about how horrible Classic Wondy was, and how much better the Post-Crisis version is after so many amazing ideas with incredible potential were tossed aside, after stories with a entire race of incredible women who can do incredible things because they weren’t held back by sexism were traded in for a heavy-handed High Fantasy morality play where the Amazons make NO decisions without direct orders from the gods, Diana’s religion seems to just worship a bunch of squabbling super-beings that she can punch in the face whenever she wants, Wonder Woman is fated to forever wage a no-win battle where every individual failure drives home just how little hope our culture has, and a society of pagan women that worship a goddess of Wisdom and have the equivalent of the library of Alexandria at their fingertips twiddle their thumbs for 3000 years without even coming up with a fucking steam engine. Oh, and every villain but Circe and Dr. Psycho got rewritten from scratch (whether they needed it or not), and each writer feels the need to completely change the setting because they need room to create new elements that she already had set up in the Golden and Silver Age.

Damn it, Classic Wonder Woman had super-science, a bright outlook, hope, love, and humor. The men were actually decent human beings, the women were the active players in the story, the Amazons were a truly advanced society (showing both pagans and women as rational human beings) and Gods were of such power and presence that Diana’s religion actually made as much sense as that of the Christians she worked with. All that AND a unique supporting cast in the military (aside from Diana, only Captain America has always had a heavily military supporting cast so that’s actually one of her rarest aspects) that would allow writers to explore Amazon culture vs American culture, traditional masculinity and femininity, heroism, thoughtful war vs savage war, the Law of Armed Conflict, service and selflessness, being a warrior vs being a soldier, personal loyalty vs. country loyalty, and sexual harassment. (The Gen. Darnell-Diana Prince contrast to Wonder Woman-Steve Trevor was amazing for the 80s, and they missed a grand opportunity to revisit it in the 90s when there was a surge of sexual harassment awareness, particularly of military sexual harassment.)

I used to be fine with Post-Crisis Wonder Woman, then I started reading back issues and found out the rich history they thoughtlessly threw away before they really had a chance to update it.

Eh.

Yes, Lois Lane was salvaged. Maybe Steve Trevor could have been. And DC may be missing a bet by not having a hero with a military secret identity. There are ways it could be done well.

But a lot of the old series was JUST. LIKE. THIS. It reads as low camp, & I think it went away for a reason. So the nostalgia for it freaks me out.

One again, EVERYTHING back then was camp. Bringing back the classic settings will not turn things into camp. In fact, I’d say the writers today are INCAPABLE of camp. They will make it as deadly serious as they can, and it may work or it may not. But that amazing story potential will return.

In any case, the fact remains that pre-COIE and post-COIE versions of Wonder Woman are as different from each other as Jay Garrick and Barry Allen, & I don’t want to see them blended together into some new strange stew.

Okay, here you’re flat out wrong. I notice EVERYONE seems to feel that the pre and post-Crisis characters are different versions, but that seems like a really superficial reading of the Pre-Crisis stuff. Edit out the era sexism and lack of logic, and you’ll see her consistent traits.

I’m going to go in-depth on my own blog, but it should be sufficient to note that Diana’s basic personality is laid out by her actions in her origin story. If the origin story contains her two major actions (saving a male character, defying her mother by hiding him and/or hiding her identity to enter the tournament) she’s the same person.

This character’s been published consistently since the 40s until now, with television adaptations. All of the evolution is continuous. Yeah, Kanigher’s Wonder Woman will react differently from Rucka’s but that’s not because Rucka is writing a different person. It’s because Rucka is a different writer writing in a different time for a different audience. He’s still doing an interpretation based on the character traits laid out by writers before him, just as Perez did an interpretation of an existing character based on everyone before him. She did not spring fully formed from George Perez’s head, she was already there. Writers, unless they have NEVER read Wonder Woman before and are surrounded by editors and artists who haven’t, will be informed by the previous writings, which are informed by the previous writings, and so on back to Marston.

She is the same damned character as long as they at least try to keep to the same origin and story role and no, the secret identity is not a big enough difference to argue that she isn’t.

I wish we had a real multiverse back, so silly old campy Wondy could be in one reality, and big butch Pérez Wondy could be in another.

Wait… you think Perez’s Wondy was “butch”? Umm… You might wanna reread those issues. She was soft as hell. She was a kid. We’ve seen her grow up post-Crisis, and writers have folded pre-Crisis characterization into post-Crisis characterization and added their own impressions, but she was receptive, expressive and emotional after the reboot, not big and butch. She was just able to get a hard edge for when she was needed as a warrior, a character trait emphasized in the Bronze Age but something subtly established before then. They couldn’t make her a complete hardass in battle in the Golden and Silver Age (they couldn’t with Batman or Superman either), but they did show her as focused and no nonsense in a fight.

And you can’t mean “big butch” sexually, because Perez was the writer who replaced her beta male love interest with a crush on Superman, the only man physically stronger than her. He didn’t establish her as a dominant lesbian, and he didn’t establish her as a dominant heterosexual woman.

Once again, Perez was not as special as you think he is. Her dominant personality is something that shined through from earlier works, including the Kanigher run you deride so much. Amidst the camp and illogical Silver Age stories, Diana was always the decision maker Pre-Crisis. From the very first page she was in in All-Star Comics #8, she was the one who took the lead and made the decisions whether she was with Mala, Etta, or Steve. When she and Steve were in scenes together, Diana got the be the rational one and Steve made decisions based on emotion. As just about everyone spent the Golden and Silver Ages a few cards short of a deck, Diana usually turned out to be the most rational person in her stories. Except, of course, for her mother (and during the motherfucking white suit era when the old man was the rational one, women’s lib makeover my ass).

Among women she took the lead but because Steve and Darnell were regular characters we got to see something rare. We got to see her leading macho military men on a regular basis. She was such a strong personality dominant military men (a freaking GENERAL in Washington and a FIGHTER PILOT as well as whoever else was there) stood quietly while she spoke to them, and deferred to her wisdom and expertise. They listened to her like she outranked them. That was a big deal (it still is, find me a female GENERAL in fiction who commands the attention of her male colleagues the same way Wonder Woman commands the attention of high ranking military officers Pre-Crisis), and said a hell of a lot about her presence. That is where “big butch Wondy” came from, not Perez. Diana of Themiscyra is not a different character from Princess Diana who was pretending to be Diana Prince.

At this point, I’d let your camp (no pun intended) have the Wonder Woman trademark so long as some reasonable analogue of Diana of Themyscira could be maintained without people trying to turn her into the USAF’s resident poster child for totally implausible secret identity.

This? Offends the fuck out of me. I have been military for 11 years of my life. Writing a story in a military setting does no automatically make it propaganda, it reflects an aspect of life that actually applies to some people. It’s a perfectly valid setting for a story or background for a character, but across fandom I keep seeing this utter rejection of the military as a place where real people work and it pisses me off.

Y’know what? I don’t like the secret identity in the military either, for her or Hal. I don’t feel a USAF officer should have divided loyalties or be lying like that. It is implausible. But I really like that her love interest was an Army or Air Force man. It opens the story for character dynamics that reflect my own life, and gives her a setting that is not normally found in other places. Not only that, if we’re going to play up the Amazons as a warrior nation, then it just plain makes story sense to contrast them against the masculine US military culture by way of her supporting cast.

Still, I’m actually personally offended when people think a story like that would simply turn her into a “poster child” rather than be a valid human experience people could relate to.

(Source: amazonboytoy)

Via fourty-two for tea too