philippos42

Tasha Teranova is an old friend

They're the only two people in the world who speak this way: a mix of half-remembered school Greek, some technical words in Russian, and elements of the language of their one-time captors & the languages of their fellow prisoners in distant outer space.

"OK, Diana, we're not going to agree."

"No, don't switch into Russian! I'm thinking in Greek!"

"Kremlin sent missiles into the capital city, Tasha."
"What? Into Constantinople? No, into Kiev, you mean."

"People have their pride. For conquerors, maybe especially for Russians, it can be hard to see past your own pride to understand other peoples' pride. Who is prouder than an Amazon? My order is thousands of years old! But there are tribes that have a few hundred persons, living in a forest with no local sources of stone nor metal, who still have pride in the little they have, in their little wooden handicrafts, their little wood & thatch homes. Give a people a flag and a border, Tasha, and they'll fight for that. And you have to learn to understand that, and learn to respect it."

Had a thought a couple of days ago that I haven't actually typed out and published. Oh, yeah, I have a dreamwidth!

I used to think that the violent or dismissive ways writers (specifically male writers) treated the Amazons in Wonder Woman was a kind of male horror at strong independent women who were completely independent of men. I can understand that. But what I'm seeing from Tom King now made something click for me.

Years ago, I remember reading someone, maybe on the DC message boards, maybe in an email group, saying that Wondy creator William Moulton Marston "wasn't a feminist, but a female supremacist." And that seemed strange to me. Of course there are different kinds of feminism, but surely female supremacism counts as one of them?

What clicked for me two days ago is this: Some people genuinely think feminism isn't about female strength, but about female weakness and especially victimhood. They frame it as part of the "woke victimhood complex" or somesuch. So if they try to inject what they think "feminism" means into Wonder Woman, it means showing women being abused and degraded. Just showing a female empowerment fantasy wouldn't be "feminist" enough for them. So of course (they think) the Amazons have to be generally weak, hunted, abused, mostly dead, under threat, or the like. And this trope shows up a lot in Wondy stories over the last few decades!

You know whom this resembles? J. K. Rowling. Not that Jo Rowling is a feminist by her own lights nor by most definitions; but she now claims to speak for women while framing that entirely in fear of men--and fear of women who used to be men.

For women like JoRo, to be a woman is to be mostly ugly & undesirable, never as good as a man; this is entirely opposite the thematic space Marston set up for Wonder Woman, where women can be fat, thin, serious, comical, heroic, villainous, but always centered & always awesome. It seems in some ways a difference between an extreme form of female heterosexuality & an extreme form of male heterosexuality; but it's more precisely a difference between seeing womanhood as hateful, & seeing it as beautiful (to the point of idealization & romanticization).

Anyway, I'm basically on Dr. Marston's side here. The point of characters like Wonder Woman, She-Hulk, Vampirella, and so on is a kind of power fantasy. The fantastic elements can be toned down, as in the mod early-1970's Wonder Woman, or taken to absurd heights, as in the earlier Wondy stories. But the point isn't to make young female readers feel bad & weak; it's to imagine having fantastical power, the same as characters like Spider-Man & Superman allow for young boys. Is that healthy, for either sex? Not entirely. It's literary junk food. But it's wildly irresponsible to replace it with messaging that even a 3000-year-old sorceress queen is nothing compared to the male scions of the present patriarchy--which feels like what some DC writers think.

An exchange which should logically not appear in Wild West Wonder Woman:

"Look at you! Mome Brontë, out on her own, withering away!"
"Er, what did you call her? 'Mome'?"
"Short for 'from home,' meaning she's lost her way. She's very mome, far from home."
"Oh. Oh! I thought it was like, feminine of 'Pope.'"

Had an idea for a moderately serious Batman fic about how a present-day version of Bruce sees the 2020 riots. (I never write fic.) Then thought I might change the names to be legally distinct.

Then...

'His name is Dee Fledermaus and no one knows he is "die Fledermaus."'

To translate between Great Britain and the USA:
African Americans are Lowland Scots
American Indians are Highland Scots
White Americans are the English

Wait, what are Mex--

the Irish.

Well. It's my birthday, and it's dawn, & I've been sitting at the computer all night but apparently getting nothing done.

I'm going to bed.

Learned the last 2 days that my home county, wait, my hometown, wait, the country seat, wait, the county seat AND my hometown,

THE RETIREMENT COMMUNITY WHERE MA HELPS TAKE CARE OF HER BEST FRIEND'S MOTHER,

are seeing more growth in COVID cases than much of the country is now.

My hometown, while still very white, has one of the largest concentrations of black people in this part of the state. The KKK never cleaned it out.

I'm imagining now doofuses in little white bedroom communities & farm villages saying that "the city" is where the COVID is.

Y'all work & shop here, y'know!

And it wasn't people in "the city" who might be gay, black, foreign, or (gasp) live in apartments who spread this. It was rich international travelers, & a government that covered it up.

I have a neighbor with MS who has to stay home until this passes or she may die.

And I see people going around without masks all the time.

Feeling better. Still scared.

Welcome to April, things are about to get worse.