Another character that kind of has a fucked up premise
is Wonder Woman.
Imagine you’re raised in this utopian, women only warrior society (this part isn’t fucked up) and you’re taught all about how outside of your society which is magically shielded by super-science/magic
there lies “man’s world.”
Man’s world is just horrible and fucked and violent place you hear stories about and the people who inhabit it and you reach a point growing up where you probably think “okay mom, it’s probably not that bad. Shit I bet men don’t even really exist you’re just fucking with me.”
And then a fucking man shows up on your island. He’s not at all like the ones that you’ve heard about. He’s not some violent monster who wants to ruin everything he touches. He’s a good dude. You decide you want to go see man’s world, you fight for the right to become your peoples champion and ambassador. It’s your job to share with man’s world the wonders of Amazonian society.
You get to man’s world and it’s fucking astounding. There are crazy tall buildings and cars and ice cream and all these different cultures and music and it’s just fucking mind blowing.
And there are lots of men. They’re walking down the street side by side with women. They aren’t murdering them, they aren’t reducing things to cinders. Obviously all the stories your mother told you were horse shit.
But then you start to pull back the curtain. You hear and see men disrespect women on the street. You go to the mall and wonder why all the mannequins are the same size if all the women clearly aren’t. You see all these magazines telling women what’s wrong with them, what they have to do to please men. That’s when you start wondering what’s up with this world.
You find out women are paid less then men, that no woman has ever been the leader of the United States, you see crime statistics, and you find out that this Steve Trevor, who you really thought was a good person, is an agent of a government that has declared the assaults on female soldiers “occupational hazards.”
Then you realize it’s not just the United States, it’s all over “man’s world.”
It hits you that this place is even worse than all the stories you heard.
And the worst part about it is: the gods that you’ve been raised to worship and fear, the gods that you know fucking exist, don’t want to do shit about it.
Imagine what that would do to you?
I wanna read about that Wonder Woman, the Year One Wonder Woman who’s like jesus in the temple flipping shit over. I wanna read about the Wonder Woman who’s so appalled by the conditions of man’s world she marches into the UN and tells everyone off. The Wonder Woman who meets a crying girl on a street corner, finds out that her boyfriend just laid hands on her and then goes and cuts off his hands.
Writers too often fall back on all that mythology shit as if Medusa and hydras and gorgons are the worst monsters that Diana can fight.
The monsters Wonder Woman should be fighting are the ones her mother told her about as a kid
Real.
