vivienvalentino:

Sameer and The Chief quickly volunteer as their time with Diana have inspired them to fight for a cause. Charlie, however, hesitates. You see Charlie can’t shoot anymore. His PTSD is too overwhelming and he’s afraid he’s become useless. “Maybe you’ll be better without me,” he says, pained by the idea that he’s too “broken” to help.“But who will sing to us, Charlie?” Diana asks. It’s a simple question that brings a smile to Charlie’s face, a song in his heart, and the group continues on their way.

On the surface, it’s a tender moment. One that shows just how close this group has become since dropping onto the front lines of World War One. But with one simple line, Wonder Woman has redefined what it is to be a man.

Patty Jenkins’s Diana, doesn’t ask Charlie to continue to fight for her. She doesn’t need him to kill for her. She doesn’t try to encourage him or make him feel guilty for not being able to kill anymore, or turn him away because he’s can’t. She simply asks him to do what he can. She simply asks him to sing, and tells us that we don’t need to fight to be strong enough to stand beside Wonder Woman. - “But who will sing to us, Charlie?” The Defining Power of Wonder Woman

blueincandescence:

Wonder Woman is the story of a demigoddess who wants to save the world coming to terms with why it should be saved. In hero stories, the default is always that these are innocent people and therefore they deserve to live. 

But what if they’re not innocent? What if no one is.

That’s the complicating factor that Wonder Woman presents. It’s a beautiful, tragic/hopeful nod to the complex reality of war and peace. This is a long one but bear with me. I promise it goes someplace interesting.

Diana: Once I find and destroy Ares, the German armies will be freed from his influence, and they will be good men again, and the world will be better.

This is Diana’s mission statement. She believes the stories her mother told her about men’s innocent nature whole-heartedly and will do anything to return them to that state.

Diana: Who took this from your people?
Chief: [Guestures to Steve] His people.

Steve introduces himself to Diana as “one of the good guys.” But, as much as she comes to know his goodness and integrity, she also comes to know him as a liar, a killer, and a smuggler. Now he’s implicated in genocide. He’s the one of the bad guys in someone else’s story.

Luddendorf: Peace is just an armistice in an endless war.

The writers took some artistic license with this so-called quote from Thucydides, but it accomplishes two things. One, it shows that Diana has been well-tutored in ancient philosophies of war. Two, it sets up the idea of an armistice as a negative outcome of war. Since we have the benefit of history, as viewers we know the WWI Armistice is a direct cause of WWII. 

Diana: They don’t deserve our help, Steve!
Steve: It’s not about deserve! Maybe we don’t! But it’s not about that, it’s about what you believe. You don’t think I get it after what I’ve seen out there? You don’t think I wish I could tell you it was one bad guy to blame? It’s not! We’re all to blame.
Diana: I am not.
Steve: But maybe I am. Please. If you believe that this war should stop, if you want to stop it, help me stop it. Right now.

This is Steve Trevor’s mission statement. He understands that people can be evil, but he still doesn’t want thousands more to die. As a soldier, he has done horrible things in this war and others. He has perpetuated the endless fighting — an inch gained in WWI is two inches that have to be reclaimed. And yet. This war has to stop, and Steve will do anything in his limited power to stop it.

Chief: [Looking at the aircraft] What is it?
Steve: The future.

Steve looks at the plane full of explosive chemicals and describes it as, “The future.” The future holds more horrors than even The War to End all Wars imagined. He knows this. But he still believes in sacrificing his life to save today. To save the very people who will use these kinds of weapons in the future. That is goddamn tragic and beautiful and unsettling.

Ares: They start these wars on their own. All I do is orchestrate an armistice that I know they cannot keep in the hopes that they will destroy themselves. But it has never been enough. Until you.

Ares is not responsible for WWI. I don’t understand the confusion around this because the screenwriters say it blatantly. Diana is right that Ares is involved, but he is “not who [she] thought [he] was.” He isn’t to blame. He isn’t a mind-controller; he’s a whisperer. He hasn’t infiltrated human society to become an emperor, only an advisor. Humans are to blame, and humans will be their own undoing. Ares is trying to prove himself right, so, of course, he wouldn’t directly intervene whether or not he could.

Ares: Yes, Diana! Take them all! Finally, you see. Look at this world. Mankind did this. Not me! They are ugly, filled with hatred. Weak! Just like your Captain Trevor, gone and left you nothing. Pathetic He deserved to burn. 

Diana suffers loss, and she strikes out — a vengeful god. Ares is gleeful. He has to undermine what Steve means to her so that she will complete her transformation into Destroyer God, Hater of Humans. That, of course, pisses her off. So he tries another tact. Nevermind Steve, what about the worse possible vision of humanity? 

Ares: Look at her [Maru] and tell me I’m wrong! She is the perfect example of these humans and unworthy of your sympathy in every way. You know that she deserves it. They all do. Do it! 

A woman who kills in horrific ways for pleasure. Someone who poisoned herself, mind, body, and soul. She does deserve to die. She’s a psychopath with no redeeming qualities (props to the actress, though, for her epic villain laugh). And yet Diana chooses not to destroy her. 

Now, Diana does kill. It’s part of her character. But she does not kill when she doesn’t have to. If she were in a dire situation where Maru has to be killed to save others, you betcha she’s going down. But Ares is asking Diana to be judge, jury, and executioner. The thing is, she can be. She is not to blame. But she won’t. Because Steve, her representative of humanity, loves her and believes she can save the world. It’s a promise between them. And a promise is unbreakable.

Diana: You’re wrong about them. They’re everything you say but so much more. 
Ares: Lies! They do not deserve your protection!
Diana: It’s not about deserve. It’s about what you believe. And I believe in love.

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room here. This screenplay has taken Greek mythology and twisted it into a Christian parable. Turn the other cheek. Love thine enemy. All that jazz. But separate from that, Diana’s choice to love is the right one because of what it represents about our own history.

At the end of WWI, the Allies win. They believe with everything they have that the people of the Central powers deserve to pay for the carnage and destruction. Despite people like Vera Britton advocating for both sides to realize that war itself is the evil and an armistice at such a steep cost cannot possibly lead to lasting peace, the Allies take their pound of flesh. And so the German people let a genocidal maniac take over their country. That’s a bit of simplification, but do some Googling and the gist is there.

Now, what happened after WWII? The Allies rebuilt East/West Germany. The Allies rebuilt Japan. WWII was objectively more horrible and deadly than WWII, but, afterward, there was no armistice. (There wasn’t peace, either. The deconstruction of colonialism in the midst of the Cold War saw to that.) But WWIII hasn’t happened yet. Nuclear weapons haven’t been used again. Chemical weapons use is treated as a horrific act, not an everyday incident. That’s huge. 

War is perpetual as long as we perpetuate it. Everyone has a justification. And, yes, no justice, no peace. Sometimes you have to go to war to make things right. But at some point, the passing along of blame has to stop or there will never be peace. The hardest thing in the world is to love your enemy if they have wronged you. The hardest thing on this earth is convincing people to love each other enough to share their wealth, their privilege, their protection, their lives. It seems impossible to teach people who hate to love. But, in the end, that’s only thing that will save us.

Ares represents hate. He hates humans for reasons even Diana acknowledges as valid. But Diana can know and understand that hatred without giving into it. She has a complex view of human nature that allows her to retain her idealism. Hate doesn’t have the power here. Love does. That’s why she can destroy Ares. That’s why the German soldiers can breathe fresh air and hug strangers from the other side. In that moment and for a time after, love wins. 

As for the rest of this “century of horrors”? That’s “a different story altogether.”

Diana: I used to want to save the world. To end war and bring peace to mankind. But then I glimpsed a darkness that lives within their light, and learned that within every one of them there will always be both. A choice each much make for themselves. Something no hero will ever defeat. And now I know that only love can truly save the world.

The thesis of this film is that war makes everyone complicit. Everyone is to blame. There are no innocents for a divine hero like Diana to save. But she does what she can because she believes in us and our better angels. Yeah, this is just a superhero movie. But that is an important message, and, sadly, an all-too-rare one.

lierdumoa:

raedmagdon:

rainfelt:

careforasmoke:

iamthedukeofurl:

One thing that makes Steve Trevor work in Wonder Woman is that they manage to hit the “Tries and fails to be protective” angle, but without any of the normal sexism you see in that trope. 

It’s not “No honey, this is a job for a MAN, You can’t do that!” it’s “Diana! Stop! No! PEOPLE DIE WHEN THEY DO THAT! You can’t do that! I CAN’T DO THAT! NOBODY CAN DO THAT…Except You, apparently” 

Yes! Exactly! And not only that but there’s no wounded pride scene where he goes like “How could she do that?”, “Why didn’t you tell me you could do that?” blah blah blah. Instead, he’s more like “Woah, can you show me more?” and “Hey guys, you know that thing we haven’t been able to do? SHE’S DOING THE THING! LET’S GO!”

I feel all of this exceptionally strongly for having Whedon'a script floating around out there, showing so starkly how to do all of this only wrong, only awful.

I hate most hetero relationships in films but honestly Steve’s romance with Diana was not only bearable but enjoyable to me in those moments.

After the first few times she shows him her abilities, he totally rolls with it and just lets her charge on ahead. He wants to protect her, but he trusts her skills and he’s practically giddy when she succeeds.

Steve never assumes Diana she can’t do things ‘because she’s a woman.’ He assumes, rather, that Diana has the same vulnerabilities as her fellow Amazons, a number of whom he personally watched get felled by bullets whilst battling gun-weilding fascists on a beach. 

This is an entirely fair assumption to make considering even Diana, at the beginning of the film, does not realize that she is a god among mortals. Her mother raised her to think of herself as human.

Steve starts off assuming Diana is a highly competent, albeit human warrior, because she introduces herself to him as an Amazon, and he’s seen the Amazons in action. He knows what the Amazons are capable of. He’s seen them die from bullet wounds. He’s also seen them win a battle against technologically advanced fascists using only bows and arrows and parkour.

As soon as Steve realizes that Diana has godlike powers, he adjusts his expectations accordingly. He no longer expects her to have the vulnerabilities of a human warrior once she’s proven otherwise.

.

The thing about Steve is, he’s not consciously trying to be a feminist ally. He’s just reasonable.

He makes logical conclusions based on his observations. He draws new conclusions when he observes new phenomena that contradict his previous assumptions. 

He uses basic common sense.

And that’s the beautiful thing about this screenplay. It does a great job of illustrating how illogical sexism is, and how diametrically opposed sexism is to common sense.

If you discover someone you were flirting with yesterday can repel bullets, the logical reaction is awe. A reasonable human being would be awestruck. It would be absurd to get defensive. Yet we, the audience, expect the male protagonist to get defensive because that’s what we’re used to seeing from male protagonists. 

We are so used to male protagonists with comically inflated egos, that it’s shocking to see a male protagonist put common sense ahead of his ego. We are so used to seeing male protagonists make sexist assumptions that we are surprised when they instead draw logical conclusions. 

The opposite of a sexist is a reasonable human being.

ewan-mcgregor:

heart-eyes-santiago:

i was talking to some friends about wonder woman today and one of them said how she didn’t like steve, bc wonder woman didn’t need a man, it was supposed to be an empowering film about women and not men 

and here’s the thing, we live in a patriarchal society, yet we’re told by women and feminists everywhere that a woman doesn’t need a man, and that’s is entirely true. women don’t need men! but loving a man doesn’t make a woman weak! it doesn’t make wonder woman any less empowering for loving steve! the problem is that female characters are so often lost in the ‘love interest’ trope that they aren’t empowering characters, and are hardly characters at all outside the relationship. but wonder woman, and many more films and tv shows today, aren’t like that anymore! so let’s stop aligning powerful women as not having a man, and non-powerful women as having a man!

a woman loving a man doesn’t make her any less powerful and independant, and we need to stop portraying and seeing it in that light

softwedge:

wookiees:

i can’t even begin to tell you how much hypermasculinity almost utterly ruined star wars for me growing up

Ok sorry but this post spoke to me so strongly and i’m just gonna rant for a bit.

It wasn’t until pretty recently that i even started calling myself a star wars fan, or even truly thought that i “qualified” as one. Which is weird when you consider that I’ve seen the movies countless times and was so young when I first saw the original trilogy that i don’t even remember it. I spent half my childhood swinging around toy lightsabers and pretending to be a jedi. I genuinely cannot remember a time in my life without star wars. And yet, for years I didn’t feel like I had the “right” to call myself a star wars fan because of the way the fandom’s culture was for a long time.

It’s sad, because my friends and I have talked about this and it’s seems like this is the case with a lot of girls who are star wars fans. Especially as a preteen and teenage girl, i always felt like there was such a culture of toxic masculinity to the star wars fandom that really turned me off from wanting to participate in it and caused me not to feel like a real part of it. There was always this underlying fear for me that if i called myself a fan, or wore a sw shirt or something like that, then some rabid fanboy would jump out of a nearby bush and quiz me on the knowledge of boba fett’s entire family tree.

And I think a lot of what this boils down to is affirmational vs transformational fandom. For the longest time, the star wars fandom was dominantly an affirmational fandom, where participation and status revolved around having the most knowledge of the source material, knowing trivia, debating the plausible mechanics of the world, etc. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that school of fandom, but it is typically a type of fandom participation which appeals overwhelmingly to male fans. By itself, affirmational fandom isn’t bad, but it can quickly lead to things like gatekeeping based on petty trivia and excluding those who are “lesser fans”, as i often saw with the star wars fandom. 

This is one of the reasons i have very little patience for people who hate/complain about the sequel trilogy and new disney canon. Because for me, the release of The Force Awakens is when the star wars fandom started feeling like a welcoming and accepting fandom for me. Because with the new movie came a lot of new fans, and a LOT of those new fans were teenage girls, as well as members of the LGBT community, which are demographics that tend to favor transformational fandom practices, such as fanfic, fan art, shipping, character metas, etc. Obviously there are men who prefer transformational fandom and women who are geared towards affirmational fandom, but i’m just talking about fandom trends. And star wars still has many parts of the fandom which are affirmational, which isn’t bad! But bringing a more diverse fanbase and diversifying fandom practices to those that are less based on rote memorization of details and more focused on personal interpretation of source material has caused the fandom to be more accessible for a lot of people, myself included. 

Sorry that this got pretty long, but it’s something I’ve just been thinking about for awhile. I’m sad that I’ve loved star wars for so long but didn’t start openly calling myself a fan until recently. I’m sad when i think about all the time i missed out being a part of this fandom because I was afraid i would be judged for not knowing every model of ship or ancient jedi master’s name. And I’m sad that i know a lot of women and teenage girls and other people who aren’t straight cis white men who have had the same experience. But I’m also so grateful for the sequel trilogy for being the catalyst that has led fans like me to feel more empowered and shifted the fandom culture to be more accessible for all, rather than just a boys club.