Despite its strategically deployed light touches of comedy, Wonder Woman is not actually all that optimistic. In fact, itâs pretty dark. Diana and the team heroically liberate the village, but everyone in the village dies in the subsequent gas attack anyway. Her heroâs arc is leaving home on a quest to defeat an enemy and save innocent lives, only to find out that she faces a lifelong fight that cannot ever be completely won, and therefore cannot end. What she learns is that we do all the terrible things to ourselves and each other, and that there is darkness in all humans which each person must battle for themselves. Thereâs only so much she can do.
What Diana has is not optimism so much as a grim determination, a commitment to herself to fight for her vision of what can be true. Ares offers her a simple path to justice through vengeance and destruction, and itâs impossible to argue that we would not deserve that. The supposed âgoodâ guys committed genocide against Chiefâs people, prevent Sameer from doing what he chooses because of his race, and create weapons to kill from a distance so we donât have to face the consequences. We kill each other, we kill people we canât see, we kill children. We see Diana learn all of that, and we see her capacity for rage and destruction, and then we see her choose to fight for goodness and love anyway. Because Diana believes we should get the chance to be better. She may have been created as a weapon to kill a god, but she forges herself into what she chooses to be.
And sometimes we do live up to her ideal of us. Sameer, Charlie and Chief each purport to be out for themselves, because each has lost so much to injustice and war. But when offered the chance and leadership, they easily join in the efforts to save others. They start for profit, they forge on out of friendship, and then they become heroes in the village. From then on, they keep acting like heroes, fighting to protect others without regard for what it will gain them, even being willing to die together for it. And Steve knows all along about senseless human cruelty, but sacrifices himself to save thousands of people he doesnât even know anyway, because thereâs no one else to do it. We go to great lengths for love.
Diana believes in love because she herself is a radical act of love, formed by Hippolyta and the Amazons. Born, in whatever fashion, from a partnership between Hippolyta and Zeus, she grows up surrounded by fierce women who love her and teach her to fight for the defenseless. The Amazonsâ stories about humanity were simplistic and have to be replaced with the complexities of reality, and their mission has drifted because of it. But whatâs still true is that the women who raise Diana are leaders and generals, healers and scholars, who teach her love, honor, duty and courage, who give her a warriorâs heart.
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