Wonder Woman/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

* Sometimes she has a daughter, sometimes she has a wacky sidekick, sometimes she has an invisible jet, sometimes she can fly, sometimes she can sense magic, sometimes she can only trust women, sometimes her arch villain is a were-cheetah, sometimes it's just a woman in a cat costume, sometimes she has a love interest but sometimes he's a father figure, sometimes Wonder Girl is a ascended fangirl... nothing is ever consistent in the series. It's in a constant state of reboots and retcons, the only thing that seems to stay the same is that Wonder Woman inexplicably dresses up in her American flag swim suit, and even then there was a time when she didn't even wear THAT. How can one of the most well known superheroes have practically nothing that stays sacred about her?

** If you want a somewhat sociological answer, I think it's the fact that she's one of the most well known superheroes as well as the most well known ''female'' superhero. Each version of her reflects the time it was made in and what was expected of women at the time, and each author that comes on to the title has their own idea about what the "ultimate woman" represented in her should be, which also shows how much in flux the idea of womanhood in itself has been for the last century.

*** I call your Supergirl and raise you [[Power Girl]]. Fun fact: sometimes she's from Krypton, sometimes she's an alternate universe version of Supergirl, and sometimes she's a time traveler who gets ALL her powers from her outfit.

** I've made a thread on this; apparently there's been about ten zillion 'New Direction for Wonder Woman!' comics and none of them stick. Writers as a whole seem to have no agreement on how to write Wonder Woman nowadays.

** She keeps hitting the "Unlock" button on her alarm fob.

** Holy [[Fridge Brilliance]]! I think that you solved the mystery!

** Don't you think you're being a bit ridiculous here? You're applying real-world laws to a setting where human clones can be grown to adulthood in (at most) a single year.

* Why in the hell was she made a Star Sapphire in ''Blackest Night''? For those of you who don't know, Star Sapphires are basically Green Lanterns, but in regards to love, not willpower. I'm asking this because of her attitude towards Nemesis. So, he loved her, she loved him, but not enough to care about him any more than having kids? And she's made a Star Sapphire?!

** Just how is that supposed to be the same love as what powers the Star Sapphires? "Loving Earth" seems too platonic...

*** While I agree that it was stretch of logic done only because they wanted her to get the ring, not because it actually made sense (especially because the ring had to bring her back from being a Black Lantern to do it!) that much at least can be explained (whether it jibes with what the writers would say or is strictly fanwanking, though, I can't say). The Violet Rings are attuned to love in general; it's the Star Sapphire Corps that chooses to recruit based only on romantic love. When the rings were looking for bearers in ''Blackest Night'', they were acting independently of their Corps, so the Violet Ring just looked for love, not romantic love. By the same token, the Indigo Ring looked for someone compassionate even though the Indigo Tribe specifically recruits people who ''lack'' compassion and let the ring force it on them. And the Orange Ring sought out a bearer even though Larfleeze forbids Orange Lantern Corps rings from doing that. Atrocitus actually mentions being upset that the Red Ring was allowed to find a bearer without his input because that meant it would just search out someone filled with rage while he only recruits people whose rage is directed at someone who's done them injustice, but once he meets Mera, he approves of her. Presumably, if Ganthet hadn't claimed the Green Ring, it might have sought the nearest person with great willpower even if they didn't necessarily have "the ability to overcome great fear", like someone with a really strong work ethic, or even someone like Deathstroke or Ra's Al Ghul.

* The excessive violence in the Wonder Woman film raised a question for this Troper. Didn't Wonder Woman have a no-kill code? Or is that only in some incarnations? Because I was under the impression that her murder of Max Lord in the Comics was so huge BECAUSE she'd never done it before.

** Apparently, the idea was to make her distinct from the other big two superheroes (Superman and Batman) in that she can and will kill if absolutely necessary (the one time the Post-Crisis Superman consciously killed someone — when he executed the three pocket universe Kryptonian supervillains — it was ''huge deal'' to him and haunted him for a long time afterwards, which doesn't seem to be the case with Wonder Woman). Even if this was a [[Retcon|retcon]], it kinda makes sense, as (unlike Superman and Batman), WW was raised in a [[Proud Warrior Race Guy|warrior culture]]. During Gail Simone's run, WW explicitly states that she can kill to save innocent lives, but not for selfish reasons, such as revenge.

** George Perez made it explicit very early in his post-Crisis reboot of the character that she will kill, without remorse or self-recrimination, if the situation requires it, though she can usually manage to find less drastic solutions. The problem with Max Lord, for the fans, was that the situation was nowhere close to requiring it. In-universe, the problem was the wide-spread belief that superheroes [[Thou Shalt Not Kill|never kill]].

*** Nowhere close? The creative team powered up a telepath to create a rampaging mind-controlled Kryptonian situation, with the threat of recurrence if the telepath lived. However much one may want Diana to be so overpowered she can work around that, that's still pretty close.

***** "Wipe his knowledge?" How? I don't recall Diana having mind erase powers. And if you say Zatanna or Martian Manhunter, I'll point you to [[Identity Crisis]], a series that (whether is succeeded or not) showed that mind-raping supervillains into forgetting things is a very grey & unreliable area. Besides, at that point, Max was sure that Checkmate & the OMAC army he created could handle any alien invasion off, New God or not. There may have been options (though I've been remiss to see any that actually could have held water) but Diana didn't have time since she was in a room with a mind-controlled Superman who was in danger of attacking her again.

****** Furthermore, Maxwell Lord was, and is, a complete monster. While Zatanna got vetoed and banned from mindwiping anyone because, last time she did, she turned Doctor Light into "Rapist McRape, the Rapist Therapist", Maxwell Lord proved during the [[Brightest Day]] storyline to be not above killing superpowered children, getting Magog explode in a crowded city just to get a [[Kingdom Come]] thrown at the JLI and sending his creations to get some petty revenge over [[Wonder Woman]] herself while claiming to be the world's savior. Basically, he was in Diana's eyes a deeply disturbed man handling the most powerful humanoid on Earth. And she doesn't seem pained by killing him, but rather by the realization that Brother Eye, broadcasting her actions without relaying the context, actually turned her mission to spread peace in the Patriarch World into an instant failure.