@antinatalistaggie said:
Examples of her using nonviolent solutions to subdue super powered opponents:
1) With such colossal strength as Hercules', she could easily grapple against opponents and hold them at bay while she talked them down without having to strike them.
2) With her bracelets she could harmlessly deflect any offensive attacks away from noncombatants while also preserving her own life while seeking a solution.
3) With the beauty of Athena, she could easily seduce opponents into submission.
4) With her unbreakable lasso of truth she can harmlessly bind an opponent and have it's truth telling magic have the villain experience the conviction of their consciousness and confess their deeds.
5) With the speed of Hermes she could easily dodge and sidestep super speed attacks; her opponents would swing and miss until they tired, allowing her to negotiate a solution.
6) Nonviolent solutions require creativity and very ingenious writing.
7) It is the laziest form of storytelling to resolve a conflict with: "The villain punched, but the hero punched harder. And they lived happily ever after..."
I added numbers so it's easier to tell what I'm responding to...
1) Do we really want to see this? Page after page of Diana simply restraining someone, while they debate back and forth?
2) She still does this.
3) So she needs to be more peaceful, and prostitute herself out to villains in order to stop them? "You don't really want to blow up the building, Doctor Psycho. You just need to get laid. Let mama show you what 'loving submission' is all about."
4) Like #1, this would be a story of talking heads, and while using the lasso to get into the psyche of the characters is something I have no doubt that Devin Grayson could write very competently, it gets a little stale about halfway through your standard sized issue.
5) "Swing and miss until they tired?" Have you ever attended a no-hitter baseball game? It makes you wonder why you had to pay for a ticket. This would be a sure way to drive away readers.
6) When the Comics Code Authority was in place, mostly nonviolent solutions were all we ever got. Sure, punches were thrown, but nobody died, blood was hardly ever shown, and even the villains who fought their hardest, with full super strength and frightful powers, only went to jail with minor bumps and bruises, rather than to a hospital for injuries they surely would have sustained in such battles.
Not only that, but often, to make these nonviolent endings even passably plausible, there had to be the most contrived (calling them ingenious is being unkind to the word ingenious) plot points you've ever seen. Why yes, Batman probably would call in Superman to help him when Mongul invades Gotham, but gee, Superman was called away for an emergency in space. What's Batman gonna do now? Yes, Spider-Man's spider sense does enable him to dodge bullets with ease, but the Frogman can tag him in this story, because Peter Parker has a cold and it's fogging up his spidey sense! C'mon, that crud is cool until you're about nine or ten, then things need to start making more sense.
7) It is not even the same neighborhood as lazy to continually write slugfests. In fact, it's pretty danged hard to write fight after fight and keep it interesting. What is perhaps lazy is to have characters that are so powerful that they never sustain any serious damage. Although I think it's more realistic to say that it's simply convenient, which is not always the same thing as lazy. Comics are a business, after all, and if the hero isn't whole for the next issue, it probably won't continue to sell. Erik Larsen has made a point of this with his Savage Dragon. Dragon is only but so powerful, and he is constantly injured, charred, and dismembered. He has a healing factor though, and can regrow charred flesh and missing limbs. He spends time in the hospital often, and although Larsen did write an entire issue where Dragon was immobilized in traction, mostly, Dragon is shown in the hospital just long enough to establish he was there, then he's healed up and back out on the street.
***
Back to Wonder Woman though...this version is one of the best versions DC has had in quite some time, and that's coming from me- a confessed hater of the New 52. The only thing I'm not fond of is that they made her the daughter of Zeus, which really isn't so bad, but that was Cassie Sandsmark's big reveal, before New 52. Other than that, they've frankly done everything I've long thought they should do with Wonder Woman: tied her closer to the Greek mythology, redesigned the gods (which is in keeping with their taking other forms when desired, from the mythology), and they've made her stories pretty epic. She's literally fighting gods right now. There are going to be punches.
Most importantly though, they gave in and made her a warrior. Original intentions be hanged, they never made sense. An Amazon warrior princess, trained from childhood to be a warrior, but sent to man's world as an ambassador of peace? (Or later of peace and loving submission?) The only reason that ever flew was because she was created in an era when "women's place is in the kitchen," or "women's place is barefoot and pregnant." Simply put: Wonder Woman could not be allowed to be powerful and warrior-like, because "that's just not how women are supposed to be." Horse hockey.
Now she makes sense. Not just an Amazon warrior princess trained from childhood to be a warrior, but trained from childhood to be a warrior by the god of war. And now she is the god of war! (...and...okay...she's also the daughter of Zeus. There, I said it.) This version is much more in line with her origins...even her Golden Age origins. The "original intentions" for the character were not in line with those origins.
You really need a pacifist hero? Create one. Wonder Woman never should have been that to begin with.
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