more about wonder woman

[sasha_feather]

Alaina Leary at Teen Vogue:

How Disfigured Villain's like Wonder Woman's 'Dr. Poison' perpetuate stigma

Similar to previous linked articles here, but includes a wider critique of media by including Voldemort, Darth Vader, and others.

Comments

[alatefeline]

Thank you.

[gehayi]

We never find out Dr. Poison’s backstory and whether her facial scarring caused her to become a villain or happened after she already was one, but the message is the same: We should be afraid of people whose faces and bodies are different from our own.

I was curious about this, so I looked it up. The interesting thing is that in no comics continuity--Golden Age, Post-Crisis on Infinite Earths, the New 52, or Rebirth--was Dr. Poison disfigured. In the Golden Age, she was a Japanese princess who hid her sex (and her ethnicity, one presumes, since this took place in the 1940s) under a bulky costume that had a hood and a mask. Post-Crisis, she was concealing the fact that a drug she'd created was reversing her own aging process. In the New 52, she was the daughter of two Russian scientists who had been branded terrorists by their country; Dr. Maru blamed the U.S.A. for this and decided to punish America with chemical attacks. And in Rebirth, she's Colonel Marina Maru, a Japanese soldier working for a villainous organization founded by her family; she develops the Maru Virus, a disease that drives those infected with it to rage-spawned murder. (Well, manslaughter, legally, but Wikipedia calls it murder.)

So the movie makers can't say that they were being true to the comics. They weren't.

[sasha_feather]

Wow! Thank you for that information.

[cantarina]

I'm having a Facebook argument about that Vogue article but also I'm not even sorry.

[sasha_feather]

Uh, Facebook!