dc comics
There Are So Many Things to Say About Wonder Woman, I Don’t Know Where to Start
On Saturday night, I finally watched the Wonder Woman movie. It’s been highly anticipated in general, both because of Gal Gadot’s short but redeeming performance in last year’s appalling Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but also because of the revolving-door rumors about a WW movie, and its many years in so-called development hell. It took me a long time to become a fan of the character myself, given the nature of creative work on a shared universe like DC Comics’ universe. Writers and artists come and go, each one wanting to leave their mark on the character. With each change in creative teams, you never know what version of your favorite character you’re going to get next. At the end of the day, every fan has their own idea of what Wonder Woman is, or should be.
Fortunately, this is an idea that the movie takes a strong stance on. Wonder Woman is a character full of contradictions. She’s a superhero, a princess, a warrior, a mythological figure and an ambassador for peace, and none of these roles, no matter how conflicting they might seem, can be elided and still remain true to form. An explicitly feminist character from her inception, Wonder Woman was initially conceived as a superheroine who fights evil, “not with fists but with love”. There’s a great deal that might be said about William Moulton Marston and his ideas of gender, and how they gave rise to the Diana we know. Whatever else might be said, though, what persisted is a profile of a heroine combining strengths stereotypically both masculine and feminine.
Search Terms Q&A
If my search terms are any indication, there are a lot of frustrated people skipping over my blog. As a writer I aim to entertain and inform, so I took these suggestions to heart. And so I present, answers to questions I didn’t know people were asking:
- “sunless sea warrant of redemption” – try Gamepedia’s Sunless Sea wiki, they have an article on legacies in the game. Personally, I recommend against the Correspondent legacy, no matter how badly you want to raise your Pages skill. Starting with a blank zee chart might seem like a pain, but the fragments that you earn from exploring convert to secrets, which are hard to earn otherwise early in the game. If you’ve created unique engines or cannons, go for those. You should know that 50% of a skill means accumulated skill, which doesn’t include the background-specific bonus at the start of the game.
- “dark parables game order” – TV Tropes lists the games in order of release. If you’re a new player just trying the series out for the first time, skip The Curse of Briar Rose and start with The Exiled Prince or Rise of the Snow Queen. They showcase the games’ strengths much better, I think.
- “barbara gordon porn comics” – uh, all right. I guess try scans_daily on Dreamwidth, they’re the best source for fancomics.
- “that which yields is not always weak” – I assume this caught me because of my meta about diplomacy skills in Long Live the Queen. This is actually a quote from Jacqueline Carey’s delightful Kushiel’s Legacy books. I don’t have a review of these up, but I read them years ago and found them delightful.
- “who is oracle in dc universe” – excellent question, anonymous Google user. Oracle is the second persona of Barbara Gordon, the Silver Age Batgirl. Along with Dinah Lance (the Black Canary) she founded a team called the Birds of Prey. As a world-class genius and master-hacker, she became a networking nexus for superheroes small and large, and maintained an absolutely alarming database of secret identities. She’s the best.
- “how does dialogue develop hazel’s character” – I think I’ll leave this as a reader participation question. If you mean the character from The Fault in Our Stars (which I have never read) try SparkNotes.
- “queen at arms romance” – well, I romanced James the first time around, and it was pretty cool.
[Image by Alexis Wilke via WikiCommons.]
The Depowering of Barbara Gordon
This is the story of how DC comics depowered Barbara Gordon.
For twenty five years, Barbara Gordon played the role of Oracle, a master-hacker and world-class information broken, leader of the Birds of Prey and a revolving roster of superheroines, and one of the smartest people in the DC universe. This Oracle persona was developed by John Ostrander and Kim Yale after her spine injury in the famous (or notorious) storyline The Killing Joke. This storyline was rightly criticized for treating Batgirl as a prop in a story that focused on the relationship between Batman and the Joker. The Killing Joke is commonly included in lists of “fridgings”, brutal plots visited on female characters, for the purpose of providing motivation for male characters.
The double standard is driven home when compared to the Knightfall storyline of 1993, where Batman has his spine broken by the supervillain Bane. Bruce Wayne is briefly replaced as Batman but, to no one’s surprise, he quickly becomes magically healed and resumes activity as the one and only Dark Knight in perpetuity. Barbara Gordon remained paraplegic. She also remained a master hacker and information broker, and developed a dedicated following of fans in her incarnation as leader of the Birds of Prey.
It’s not easy to find positive representation of disabled characters, let alone specifically paraplegic characters. Paralysis seems to strike most people as being beyond tragic. Paraplegic characters are often described as “wheelchair-bound” and relegated to pity porn. Or else cured, magically or otherwise. Oracle was an unusual example in that she manifested a journey of recovery. Not always explicitly, but Barbara Gordon’s inner world was one in which a spinal cord injury didn’t end her life or strip it from meaning, didn’t make her unwhole, or less-than.
I wouldn’t say that her spinal injury was the best thing that ever happened to Barbara Gordon, as I’ve heard some fans say. But maybe that’s because I think the coupling between her paralysis and her career as Oracle is entirely optional. A long string of writers put their minds into making the ex-Batgirl into something new and marvelous, and Oracle is flat-out one of the best characters in the DC universe. For twenty-five years Babs was a global-level player and for the last four years she’s been a street-level fighter.
Babs was rebooted in the New 52 and returned unceremoniously to being a character defined by not being Batman. The rebooted Black Canary in the rebooted Birds of Prey offered her a spot on the team that she built and she used to run. Kicked back to a cutesy adolescent story of social media and artisanal microbreweries, Batgirl’s Babs taps on a smartphone and uses Instagram to track low-rent villains where her adult counterpart used to run an entire farm of military-grade servers. Drawn in an art style that makes her look barely fifteen, obsessing over fashion and dating, she blends in with a dozen other post-Buffy superheroines.
Oracle was one of a kind.
Throughout the process of supposedly correcting the injustice represented by the Killing Joke storyline, the reversion to a Batgirl persona was treated as automatic. After all, if Babs can walk, why wouldn’t she want to return to a world of high kicks and spandex unitards? None of the writers seemed to consider that it was possible for Babs to be a top-tier mastermind without losing the use of her legs. Oracle is unquestionably a more powerful character than Batgirl could ever be. If DC is determined to give us a superhero world where injuries have zero consequences, at least they could do us the courtesy of not undoing the character development that these injuries provided.
Well and good for Batman to be stuck in eternal stasis as a thirty-five year old emotionally stunted manchild. He’s too iconic to ever experience any lasting character development. But Babs Gordon is not Bruce Wayne, and it’s grossly unfair for her to be relegated to glorified teen sidekick to preserve a non-existent continuity. Selling red-haired Batgirl action figures is not a good enough reason to depower one of the most compelling intellectual superheroes in the modern age. Leave the Batgirl mantle to some teenage girl on her first hero gig. Babs Gordon has bigger fish to fry.
Crossposted to Dreamwidth.
Hazel Gold 