YAAAASSSS!!!
Fucking drag her Harley
Wow, the facial movement is really really impressive!!!
Hmm.
On the one hand, I love Harley being this over the Joker and his bullshit. On the other, Wonder Woman doesn’t kill because she’s trying to impress some dude.
She kills for the same reason she has such a shortage of iconic enemies: Batman and Superman were created as crime-fighters, Wonder Woman was created to fight injustice. Batman and Superman’s enemies are individuals who break the rules; Wonder Woman’s enemies are the rules themselves. Batman can’t kill anyone because then it raises the question of why he doesn’t kill the Joker. But no matter who Wonder Woman kills, it doesn’t raise the question of why she doesn’t kill the patriarchy: she’s trying.
Turning to diegetic reasons, Wonder Woman comes from the perspective that there are things worse than death, and hence killing is permissible to fight those things.
As stupid as Wondy/Supes is as a pairing, it has no bearing on her willingness to kill. (Frankly, if she were trying to impress him, she’d QUIT killing.)
Pretty sure this is from Injustice, in which Superman is a homicidal dictator.
(Also claiming Wondy’s always been big into killing villains is a bit of historical revisionism, reforming her villains used to be a huge thing with her, but because that reform came in the form of, as @waitingforthet calls it, “peace, love, and softcore lesbian bondage”, it’s been quietly swept under the rug over the years. The simple reason why she doesn’t have a huge rogues gallary is simply because no one’s been very good at coming up with villains for her. Which is not to say I’m not okay with her killing patriarchal dickheads; rather, I’m sad we live in a world where redeeming evil people is a stitch too far optimism-wise.)
I mean, Bats didn’t always have no-gun and no-kill policies, either, but they’ve become defining parts of his character.
Anyway, extradiegetically speaking, reforming a villain isn’t that different from killing them; it takes them off the board as villains. That’s why reforms tend to stick about as well as deaths, which is to say they usually don’t.
The impression that I get is that Wondy-as-killer is far more recent than Bats-as-anti-killing, though, arising sometime in the last 10-15 years.
I’d say that while reform and murder serve similar narrative functions in comics, they radically change the message (intended or otherwise) put forward by the work, especially when dealt with by Wonder Woman, a character built around material social critique.
That’s fair.
And yeah, I think you’re right about the timing–I wouldn’t be surprised if it mostly goes back to her killing Maxwell Lord in 2004-ish. Nonetheless I think it’s a correct aspect of her character, that it’s stuck at least in part because Wonder Woman being willing to kill where Batman and Superman aren’t is right for the character. It’s an acknowledgment that thinking systemic injustice can be reformed away is excessively optimistic.
I think there are a lot of problems with applying it to Wonder Woman, not least of which is the continued shift towards making all her virtues traditionally masculine ones.
To say nothing of the fact that, if you can’t apply excessive optimism to a character as rooted in utopianism as Wonder Woman, where can you put it, exactly?
Monsters' Queen 