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Apparently Wonder Woman is Artemis, daughter of Zeus

Kyriakos

Kyriakos

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Link to video.

Artemis, huh?

I suppose there is no mention of the boar-slaying business for which she killed a number of heroes including likely the most famous heroine in greek mythology: Atalante (edit: rechecking the myth, it seems she was only indirectly responsible, given she sent the Calydonian boar which triggered later events) :D

From the trailer it looks like they are also fusing this with the popular ww1 myth of the 'Angels of Mons', archer-angels protecting the british troops (seems they took a leave during a day in Somme).

-You can discuss the new superhero film, which is set to appear with some other ones like Dr. Strange, since there aren't many superhero films out already.
 
I don't think she's Artemis. What they mention in the trailer is part of either her classic or current backstory (in one version she was made from clay by Queen Hyppolita and animated by Zeus, in the other she's outright the demigod daughter of Hyppolita and Zeus). In both versions, Artemis is a distinct character. :p
 
Artemis is the Goddess of the Hunt. I have never seen Wonder Woman use a bow.
Nor have I ever seen Artemis fly an invisible jet.
 
Well that would be the part where they were the bad guys for like half the twentieth century, and managed to firmly wedge themselves into the "Historical Supervilains" seat with that little 33-45 thing.
 
She's not Artemis. DC Comics classical mythology is adjacent to, but not exactly the same as, actual Greek and Roman mythology. The Amazons are a mishmash of Greek and Roman stuff (no Skythians?) on Themyskira, which is an island. Zeus is more or less a Good Guy god instead of a lazy, rapacious douchebag; Ares is an actual threat to people instead of a whiny, wimpy wuss. Wonder Woman/Diana has like three or four different origin stories at this point, which range from halfway decent to rapey and gross.

Also, the only funny moment in Batman v. Superman Board of Education was when Diana was heading home from America on a Turkish Airlines flight.
FriendlyFire said:
Also Germany are the bad guys again :mischief:
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Okay, so. I adore Gal Gadot as Diana. I like her theme music. I like what they're doing with the character. I like having a major film being headlined by a competent actress with a good character to play. I love that it's set in the First World War, which is only, y'know, my primary focus as a student of history.

I can get behind the Central Powers being the bad guys of a Great War movie, especially by 1917 when Hindenburg and Ludendorff were in charge. It's a war movie. You gotta have good guys and bad guys. But I can't get behind the Central Powers being the bad guys of a superhero movie. If the Central Powers are the bad guys, then by process of elimination the Entente Powers are the good guys, because Diana is fighting on their side. Her character is a paragon of morality, unlike the normal focus of war movies on normal soldiers, but she's taking sides in a war where neither side had any sort of moral advantage over the other. The Entente Powers were inextricably tied to terrorism, to atrocities against civilians, to attacks on neutral countries that were every bit as bad as what the Central Powers were accused of. It's extremely disappointing to see an actual hero take that side.

I mean, look at how the Germans are portrayed in the trailer. The only one whose face you even see is that German general in the ballroom. Pretty much all you see of them is helmet, coat, and rifle. They are barely even human. Compare that to the scene of Entente infantry going over the top - those look like actual people.

At least in the original stories, Diana left Themyskira to fight Nazis. It's hard to impeach the basic morality of a hero going to war with the most evil regime in the history of the planet. Whatever atrocities the Allies committed during the war, and there were many, the Second World War at least had clear good guys and bad guys. As much as I like setting films in the First World War, which is an underutilized setting for fiction in my opinion, I would rather Diana be fighting in the Second World War (a definitely not underutilized setting) just so she'd be fighting an actual evil villain.

I hope that what actually happens in the film is that the Amazons go to war because of, say, an attack on Themyskira (there's a scene in there that kinda looks like Turks vs Amazons on Paradise Island) but then, after fighting alongside the Entente for awhile, Diana gets super disillusioned with just how awful both sides are and the Amazons return to isolation for a hundred years afterwards.

This is an issue that isn't as annoying to me as the length of the post might seem. It's one that takes awhile to explain, but it probably won't prevent me from actually seeing the movie or anything, because, hey, Wonder Woman.
 
Oda Nobunaga said:
Well that would be the part where they were the bad guys for like half the twentieth century, and managed to firmly wedge themselves into the "Historical Supervilains" seat with that little 33-45 thing.
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You know that a certain country that is located next to Greece that actually carried out Genocide during WW1, It starts with T, and ends with urkey. And was also the bad guys, but no body cared.

Unless wonderwomen came from Atlantis and it was located in the pacific ocean instead of the med.
And Wonderwomen was told by the orcale of dephi to kill a young Hitler ? That would make more sense
 
I know, but from a western popular history perspective...that's how the story stands.

I'm well aware that the historical truth is far more nuanced. But historical truth has little bearing on the legends cultures make of their history.
 
Re: The First World War thing, does that have any basis in the existing Wonder Woman mythos? I know she was involved in a lot of straight up Nazi-fightin', but this bit is new to me.

If not, it's a strange choice. There's the moral aspect, as Dachs says, but even from a purely creative perspective, it's not clear why they don't just go with a more familiar Second World War setting. Are they trying to avoid comparisons the first Captain America? Those are inevitable, so long as it's a wartime period piece. And the audience are probably going to think of it like a Second World War film, so long as you're asking them to imagine it as Heroic Allies vs. Dastardly Germans, and not the more usual perception of the First World War as mud, misery and death. (Perhaps Americans don't take quite such a gloomy view of the conflict as Europeans tend to?) As Dachs says, it's not as if it's an overused setting in this genre: we've got one Cap film and, what, the first five minutes of Hellboy?
 
Contrary to WW2, WW1 actually did have concurrent myths about super-heroes/angels taking part in the fight, as in the Angels of Mons story, popularised by british writers of the time (including Arthur Machen, an important writer in the fantasy and horror genre, influencing Lovecraft heavily).

Not sure how common this is with massive wars. I do know there were some stories of strange heroes supposedly taking part in the expedition of Alexander against Persia.
 
Traitorfish said:
Re: The First World War thing, does that have any basis in the existing Wonder Woman mythos? I know she was involved in a lot of straight up Nazi-fightin', but this bit is new to me.

If not, it's a strange choice. There's the moral aspect, as Dachs says, but even from a purely creative perspective, it's not clear why they don't just go with a more familiar Second World War setting. Are they trying to avoid comparisons the first Captain America? Those are inevitable, so long as it's a wartime period piece. And the audience are probably going to think of it like a Second World War film, so long as you're asking them to imagine it as Heroic Allies vs. Dastardly Germans, and not the more usual perception of the First World War as mud, misery and death. (Perhaps Americans don't take quite such a gloomy view of the conflict as Europeans tend to?) As Dachs says, it's not as if it's an overused setting in this genre: we've got one Cap film and, what, the first five minutes of Hellboy?
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Setting Wonder Woman in World War I is a new development. It was always WWII before. My theory - based on nothing more than "this is what I would do" - is that the real villain is Ares or Eris, who has interfered in mortal affairs and caused a giant war that nobody wanted. Wonder Woman has fought both of them in the comics.

 
Kyriakos said:
Eris is a nice word, and i suppose also some deity-kin had that name. It literally means 'Conflict' :)
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In the comic, Diana calls her Strife. According to wikipedia, her Roman name is Discordia and she's the sister of Ares and Hephaestus.
 
Dachs said:
I can get behind the Central Powers being the bad guys of a Great War movie, especially by 1917 when Hindenburg and Ludendorff were in charge. It's a war movie. You gotta have good guys and bad guys. But I can't get behind the Central Powers being the bad guys of a superhero movie. If the Central Powers are the bad guys, then by process of elimination the Entente Powers are the good guys, because Diana is fighting on their side. Her character is a paragon of morality, unlike the normal focus of war movies on normal soldiers, but she's taking sides in a war where neither side had any sort of moral advantage over the other.
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Excellent points. Perhaps the atrocities of the war and its moral issues gave her the reason to retire from the World of Man.

(Although it's probably a stretch too far to expect that sort of introspection from the DC Murderverse.)

Also, wasn't it Hippolyta rather than Diana who fought in WWII?
 
Kyriakos said:
Contrary to WW2, WW1 actually did have concurrent myths about super-heroes/angels taking part in the fight, as in the Angels of Mons story, popularised by british writers of the time (including Arthur Machen, an important writer in the fantasy and horror genre, influencing Lovecraft heavily).

Not sure how common this is with massive wars. I do know there were some stories of strange heroes supposedly taking part in the expedition of Alexander against Persia.
Click to expand...
Side note, because I love talking about the First World War: the Angels of Mons story is hilarious.

The officers of the BEF were not very good at modern warfare, but they had a working knowledge of the Hundred Years' War. Before they even made contact with the Germans at Mons, they were mythologizing about the anniversary of the Battle of Crécy (26 August 1346): once again, a small-but-plucky British army would fight on the Continent against a vast host and win through the requisite amounts of good old fashioned derring-do. Reality was different. The BEF's atrocious reconnaissance and terrible tactical positioning lost them the Battle of Mons, where despite massive advantages in terrain (positioned behind a canal with open fields of fire to the front) they were defeated by equal numbers in a frontal assault with casualties relatively even on both sides, at which point the army began to disintegrate on the retreat.

Two days later at Le Cateau, which happened on the actual anniversary of Crécy, the British possessed superior numbers due to poor leadership at the German field army level (which redirected troops where they were not needed) and were again able to stand on the defensive, but superior German troop quality and inferior British coordination led to a total disaster for the British, who suffered at least twice the Germans' casualties. The BEF's II Corps was rendered incapable of military operations for three days and took a further two weeks to even get into proper marching order. By any metric, the BEF suffered a major defeat from 24-26 August 1914.

The mythologizing began immediately.

First, the British claimed that the Germans had cheated. A common feature of Mons accounts is that the British thought the Germans were bringing up stretchers for the wounded when suddenly it turned out that they'd actually been bringing up machine guns. Two-man stretcher carry was standard for the German MG 08 over short distances and it is hardly the Germans' fault that British infantry could not tell the difference between a stretcher and a machine gun. (Poor British training is a likelier explanation. The non-Europeans that British troops were used to fighting generally didn't possess machine guns.) One recent author has even said that the Germans hit the British so hard that the British literally did not understand what had actually hit them. Some British accounts also claimed that the Germans used little girls as human shields, which is both really hard to believe and also not substantiated by the majority of accounts on both sides.

Then, the British claimed that they'd actually won by vastly overestimating both the Germans' total numbers and their casualty count. This was accompanied by farcical stories about officers mowing down Germans with their pistols and keeping score, and infantrymen claiming that the Germans were so close together that they were plinking away with their rifles at targets a kilometer distant and "hardly a shot was wasted". One account of Le Cateau asserted that the German artillery formed a gun line several miles long, which is an actual impossibility given the nature of German doctrine and more importantly the number of guns that the Germans actually had there.

Finally, the British started bringing out the mythology. They claimed that Plantagenet longbowmen had been at the battle "in spirit", which later metamorphosed into divine intervention by angels. This had a clear connection to the stories that were already going around; it only required a hysterical public to turn what was intended to be a short story into a true-to-life newspaper report. The funny thing about the Angels of Mons is not that a large proportion of a credulous public believed the story. The funny thing is that the participation of angels isn't even out of place in most of the ahistorical British accounts.
 
I have been told repeatedly that the first World War was a clear fight between good and evil. It's to do with a story that I keep being told about John Harvey Kellogg's visit to Germany sometime around the first World War. He wanted to see how the German army had applied the theory of evolution and what he saw horrified him.
 
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