An alternate history to Wonder Woman
From what I have been studying, Wonder Woman is a difficult character to write for, probably the most difficult in the DC stable. DC, especially the characters from the Golden Age are more archetypes than people. While that sorta puts the characters at arms-length from the reader, they're easier to understand and to adapt. They're more timeless. Wonder Woman however is much more rooted to the time in when she was created (World War II) and the mindset and philosophy of the creator, William Marston. Marston, to put it at most simply, was a staunch feminist. Yeah, it's more complicated than that, but this is a blog post, not a research paper. So he was a feminist. A feminist in the 40s. Thus this character is very much mired up in the society of the 40s, where it's only slowly dawning that women were no more inferior to men than believed, but still unsure as to what that means; plus there was a war going on as this Grecian inspired character became the patriotic personification of the U. S. of A.Thus the discussion here that Wonder Woman is Detective Comics' Captain America. Unmoored from her time of conception, her stories are lost. This wouldn't have been so terrible had it not been for Marston's death from cancer in 1947. Had he lived on, he could have possibly smoothly evolved the characters and the stories and carried them forward. Unfortunately, it was left up to others to try to decipher this character, and as complex as the often-times competing ideas that forged this Amazon, it's no wonder so many people failed to figure out the character.
This probably explains why so often fans (as well as the profession writers tasked to write WW) try to reinvent her.
Thus in the discussion linked above, one poster gives Wonder Woman a new origin story, but like the woman I linked to below.
posted by Wes @ 3:41 PM
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