Dragon Ball / heroic adventure fiction / comics

[Buster's Uncle]

100% agreement on the second.  WW with a sword is very wrong, though.

[E_T]

WW with a sword is very wrong, though.

I kind of liked it, made her more realistic, especially in relation to the warrior thing...

[Buster's Uncle]

Siiigh.

Okay, I'll go find a couple CFC posts I made last week that thrash that out better than I feel like on a busy afternoon...

[Buster's Uncle]

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/superheroes.544614/page-29#post-15067766

There was a missed little moment in the Busiek/Perez JLA/Avengers, when in the merged timeline and in a pastiche to the old annual JLA/JSA get-together/crossovers they were doing it with the Avengers, and WW says something about having known Cap for many years from the meetings and his distinguished career going back to WWII --- and there was no reason, in that timeline, not to have her say they'd known each other since they punched Nazis together in WWII.

Modern Wonder Woman -and a sword is exactly wrong for her to ever be waving- has a notably weak rogues gallery, a situation the TV show underlined by not using any of them but generic Nazis in general the first season, and making up their own even-weaker villains for seasons two and three - and those latter seasons were nigh-infinitely not-as-good.  Henry Gibson as Mr. Mariposa, anyone?  Comics writers are never going to know what to do with her -a problem many of them have been talking about since I could first read- until they figure out how to make Dr. Psycho work.

Why would someone from an island of Amazon warriors NOT be skilled with a sword?  The first quarter of the movie, which seemed a fairly faithful follower of the origin story from the comics, had the entire population of the island training with swords pretty much constantly.  I thought the sword getting slagged was a pretty nice touch, and would think that since she would want to be more able to blend in she wouldn't want to get a replacement and then have to tote it around all the time, but I didn't have a problem with it.

It does a basic symbolic violence to her central nature, and my confidence that creator Dr. Moulton would passionately agree approaches 100%.  A sword is lingam, the magic lasso looped to tie is yoni, and while you may party on with your own bad self in finding such symbolism bull, it's pretty primal in-your-face obvious/inescapable.  Her central premise is girlpower-yay (ignoring all the bondage stuff in there originally because her creator was a freak, but I daresay most everyone is fine with overlooking that part) and the former is a wounding weapon; the latter a tool of restraint and peace, fighter for peace and bringing-Aphrodite's-love-to-Man's-World being right in there inextricably since her beginning.  It's gnawing at the roots, man.

Nuthin' wrong with a slashin', butt-kickin' powerful warrior princess, and that IS a very valid sort of girl-power-yay - but you want to create a new character for that -or perhaps put anti-Wondy Artemis in the Justice League or something- not have the Ambassador of Love to Man's World snapping Maxwell Lord's neck and running people through with a symbolic peepee, of all the things in the world.  It's like telling stories about being an old-fashioned authoritarian square taken to evil lengths and megaviolence and too-much-killing using Captain America instead of USAgent, who was created for exactly that.  Why Mark Waid, of all people, made the mistake of starting the sword crap, I'll never understand.

Gnawing. at. the. roots.

Well, given that at her roots we find Steve Trevor, superheroic spy guy with girl sidekick, followed by joining the JSA as their secretary I think taking a big chomp or two out of them was pretty much a necessity.

Naw - you deliberately distort Steve's role -as the love interest, he's pretty foundational, but he's Louis Lane falling out windows for her to rescue- and character premise not responsible for misuse in a team book, even the revered JSA.  -You know your stuff to bring that up, though.

Now, a better counter would be to point out the sheer incredible volume, in her original Moulton-Peter run, of how much she was tied up and helpless.  Not exactly gurl-powah-yay, especially having her bracelets being bound by a man canceling her powers being explicitly built-in.  -But I already mentioned a pretty universal consensus to ignore the bondage stuff to death, as indeed, everyone has done for far over a generation since the creators moved on.

She simply has no business killing any more than Superman and Batman, though coming at it from a different angle from them.  I surmise that the sword business in Kingdom Come, that afaik started that, was intended to show that she, like Supey and the other 'old-school' heroes, hadn't gone as wrong as the killer 'heroes' they fought, but they had gone wrong - rather explicitly the point of the ending...

Still wanna step up, playah?


Plainly, I really could use Vishniac in here - CFC's got a lot of great people, but time spent somewhere else don't build activity here, and is sorta wasted.

[Buster's Uncle]

I reached the superman conclusion as I read the OP. Superman was my leas favorite superhero. I preferred to admire smart people. Bat man. I also liked the Flash because it dabbled in relativity science. Even Lex's schemes were more interesting than superman, who never seemed to learn from his mistakes.

The only thing you say about Superman that I agree with is that he could/should whip Goku, proper.

The Gene Hackman Luthor said, in Superman II as he was about to sic the Nuclear Man clone-thing on him and Superman had instantly worked out how Luthor trapped him: "That what I'm going to miss about you, my boy; you were the only one who could ever keep up with me!"

You've got Superman -a Super-Genius up to 1987, and always very bright- confused with what Luthor and any other mad scientists liked to claim as insults.

[Unorthodox]

The only thing I ever felt strongly about surrounding the man of steel is how they completely missed the boat with the death of superman.

How could you NOT have that be at Lex's hand? 

Wait, I lie. 

The grounded series, where they had the contest and made this big deal about him visiting real cities, they royally bungled my home town of Ogden.   

[Buster's Uncle]

Jesus, you should see the -early Rankin Bass, by the looks of it- bungle of Morganton, NC, my county seat, in a cartoon of Jules Verne's Master of the World .  The people making didn't know [poop] about North Carolina, let alone Morganton, a major regional center before the 20th century, the place where they took and tried the governor of Franklin when they caught him.  Cartoon had Morganton looking like a one-horse town in a western.  No trees anywhere in Victorian times; there's freakin' trees everywhere in Morganton now.


And holy crap you're right.  The biggest opportunity ever to build up cred for the most famous villain at DC to slaughter his arch, they're ver most famous single character, and they made up a crazy-lame spiked hulk knockoff instead.  Dang, are you ever right.

[Buster's Uncle]

the fat Chinese android (who had this creepy first-season-of-Wild Wild West thing going)

Uno, I don't recall that we've ever discussed that villains in the first B&W season of Wild Wild West often had that big tough monster with a tiny voice creepy thing going.  If you do not know the season well, run, do not walk, is my advice, and get familiar, and let's talk.

[Vishniac]

WW with a sword is very wrong, though.

I kind of liked it, made her more realistic, especially in relation to the warrior thing...

Comics canon Wonder Woman I don't know but yeah, I remember the TV-series with her bulletproof armbands and her lasso. A sword can probably make her as out-of-context as Captain America with a gun but let's consider...
Obviously this analogy shows that there's nothing particularly feminine in the fact of not using killing weapons since Cap refrains to kill. (it was even the reason for his first shift from Iron Man at the end of Operation Galactic Storm)

Now, you could kill with this shield (he almost did in Infinity Crusade while taken by religious fanaticism). So you could probably kill someone with a lasso (strangling or hanging. HANG'EM HIGH!  ) while fighting by sword is no assurance of seeing someone dead (the first Pirates of the Carribean being a perfect exemple  )

In the end, it all come down to who is WW's tutelar godess.
If it's Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, that would explain this disdain for sharp tools.
But that could well be Athena, a warrior herself though not as primary as Ares. Athena is known for her shield and her spear but sometimes she has more: you'll find down there the pic of an Athena statue of mine (in fighting pose) and at her left side...a sword.
Maybe it's the symbolism that shocks people from seeing women with swords, or modern pseudo-feminism advocating women into pacifism contrary to men's warmongering but history showed they can be equally tough and aggressive, like the real Amazons (https://www.amazon.com/Amazons-Black-Sparta-Warriors-Dahomey/dp/0814707726) and their current representation in western media


So maybe you think Wonder Woman shouldn't kill.
But General Okoye? Without question!

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, that's exactly right about Athena.

But WW was originally all Aphrodite, (though Dr. Moulton either didn't know his classical mythology -unlikely for an educated man of a generation when colleges tended to require Latin- or simply couldn't go there or NEVER wanted to, as the Greeks had no major goddess of Philos and/or Agape love, and Aphrodite was about Eros [screwing], but still closest/only famous goddess to fit at all what the creators wanted for a girls' role-model Woman paradigm, being Goddess of Love) all the time.

The Woman paradigm thing made Athena problematic; a spear is an even more obvious phallus than a sword.  Wonder Woman is supposed to be about the opposite of pee-pees, at least not doing the penetrating.

[Buster's Uncle]

Uno, you've met Guru; have you seen the advent of King Piccolo on Dragon Ball no-Z?

Namekians, wen they get really powerful and old, grow HUGE, and not very mobile at all.  King Piccolo was giant - maybe two whole heads taller than the very-tall Piccolo Jr. - no explanation for why Kami was the same height as plain Piccolo and still mobile, but maybe God power stuff.  King Piccolo apparently aged the 300 years he was maufba-trapped in the rice cooker.

Very first appearance, they'd skipped Emperor Pilaf and gang freeing him -that kinda writes itself, so Toryama didn't- and he's sitting in a big throne chair on Pilaf's flying fortress asleep.  His hands were huge drapped over the armrests.  His color was olive sorta, not the bright green Jr. is.  His mutant Namekian pterodactyl-looking son Piano worries constantly for his welfare, especially when he spit up another mutant son-egg to send out to kill the super-kung fu set.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?  Clearly, Namekians -at least superNamekians who've reached a certain power tier and aged naturally 300 years or so- get superpowerful and giant, but sedentary in their old age and have a strong instinct to spawn like mad before they die, even though it hastens their death.

Also?  You ever notice a majority of Namekians, sometimes Piccolo, too, wear something covering their necks? Check this:  though ungendered, they reproduce by vomiting eggs that distend their necks on the way up, and so -I figure this has to be- they cover their necks as their naughty-bits...

[Unorthodox]

Since I'm revisiting psychology (helping Kyle) lately, you're coming off like a freudian case study in this thread...

[Buster's Uncle]

Freud was -okay and often right- on abnormal psychology; he was an intuitive pre-scientific pioneer who nonetheless did a lot of harm insisting his theories were UNIVERSAL and applied to EVERYONE, not just sick freaks like he himself WAS and some involuntarily-committed, drooling, completely non-functional, actually-playing-with-their-own poop, clinically INSANE case-studies he found.  A lot of reasonably normal people with issues have been harmed by his dogmatism and cult following insisting on perpetuating his profound error that everyone shared his disgusting kinks for well over a hundred years.

Now, I have my issues, and I meet most reasonable standards of what people consider a broken person - but I'm not anything LIKE howling at the moon crazy, and I'm absolutely not a severely sexually-twisted SICK freak like "Dr." Freud most assuredly was - and that's insulting as hell.  Pick another shrink next time, please.  He was contemptible and wrong.

[Unorthodox]

Phone, bear with me. 

I’m sorry. Freud seemed most appropriate when you’ve spent most the thread talking about sexual symbolism. I wasn’t trying to calm you crazy. Just point out the seeming fixation in discourse.

Speaking of the symbolism, however, I think you are wrong on WW.  Specifically as it’s the origin story.  Extending your own analogy, she ultimately loses the sword and finds that she is stronger without it. In fact taking in the entire story you could argue her early reliance on the sword was all part of her innocence/naivety.  As comics are representative of the time they are written, this journey of her thinking she needed the sword and discovering she doesn’t is particularly poignant.  She doesn’t need to be equal to a man by grasping the phallic symbol. She can be her own strength.

(Caveat, I have only seen WW, not any team up movies. If they’ve continued the sword theme beyond the origin story, that is indeed stupid)

[Buster's Uncle]

Your WW point is excellent - I haven't seen the movie yet, but if she starts with a sword and decides that's off-model for who she is and wants to be, no violence is done to her premise/purpose as a character - indeed, that underlines the Woman (ultra-violence-is-for-men-I've-got-a-better-way) Paradigm thing and enhances it.

Sexual symbolism IS everywhere, Freud wasn't wrong about that, just about the details.  We are a sexual species.  It's hard-wired into our brains.  I'm speaking as a writer in many of my remarks, thinking about underpinnings of the story - surely unintended stuff for asexual Namekians, but there on the page anyway, and the most FOUNDATIONAL, PRIMAL element of Wonder Woman being that she IS Woman; it's what she's for.