I’ve seen some comments of Wonder Woman, basically on the extent to which it is alternative history, if Wonder Woman’s involvement in WW1 was hushed up, if it could be hushed up, if the rumours of a superhuman warrior queen never spread because the people she saved ended up dying, or if her involvement is widely known, a historical fact, etc.
And it’s a cool question, and I hope people will write the same quasi-historical, quasi-journalistic fics about her that they wrote about Captain America.
At the same time, WW1 mythology was fucking unbelievable. I’m not an expert, but I worked with someone who was, and I’m not kidding, very bored but very scared people come up with some exceptionally weird shit. Contemporary reporting of WW1 was already a mess of understatement and overstatement. If you want to calm the panic on the home front, you’ll
write about how our soldiers laugh in the face of machine guns, and mustard gas is just a minor inconvenience. If you want to motivate people, you’ll tell them the enemy desecrates altars and murder babies for fun. People were told conflicting things about the confusing terror they experienced.Partly as a result of this, partly as a result of shock upon shock, people who were in the middle of it came up with the weirdest shit, truly. There were tons of stories about stone statues on churches who came to life, either to protect the inhabitants or to predict the end of the war. Overall, very many things prophesied the end of the war: spontaneously breaking glassware, blessed infants who spoke immediately after birth, all sorts of dreams and visitations. A flying woman with a shield was not the slightest bit out of place in the trenches. Catholics would probably assume she was the Blessed Virgin Mary, some Brits would probably say she was Britannia herself, and after the war was over, nobody would be quite sure if they really did see her, or if they just really, really needed to see something to give them the strength to walk out into No Man’s Land.