also: the shield strategy. when he sees antiope do it, he's watching what must rank into the weirdest things he's ever seen after a near-death experience and there's a part of him that's still memorising how the amazons fight well enough to repeat the trick later with diana.
ah, god, yes?? this is one of my favorite things! he’s so perceptive. there are a million new things happening around him on that island. he’s on that island and that, in itself, is pretty distracting. then a fleet of german soldiers roll up and he’s the only soldier ( the only man, as well, which means where he comes from he’d be the only one trained to fight ), and then amazonian women in armor show up on horseback with flaming arrows to fight the german soldiers.
once the fight starts, there’s not only a war happening around him, but there’s fighting techniques he’s never seen before. the amazons don’t fight like humans, and most of it he couldn’t pick up on if he wanted to.
so it’s sort of amazing to me that in all that, he notices and pays attention when antiope leaps off that shield because it is something that he can implement and benefit from.
steve picking up on amazonian war techniques is killer to me