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.
wonder woman
Some of the Amazons, like Kroes, auditioned, while the filmmakers
plucked others from the athletic world — Brooke Ence, an American
Crossfit champion, and Madeleine Vall Beijner, a Swedish professional
fighter, among them. “I got an e-mail asking if I could do fighting on
film,” Beijner recalls. “I said, ‘Well, yes, I can fight, and I think I
can fight in a movie. So yes, I’ll do it!’ ”Months before the cameras started rolling, the women gathered in London
for weeks of training. Not only did they go through basic strength
training to look properly Amazonian, but they also spent hours each day
practicing swordplay, horseback riding and stunt choreography. “The
trainers said they wanted us to look like the female version of 300,”
Beijner says. For several of the athletes, many of whom compete in
individual sports, it was a refreshing change of pace to feel like part
of an all-female team. “It really is cool to see this whole training
area, and there’s not one male figure in sight,” Ence adds. “It’s just
women wrestling other women, kickboxing, doing pull-ups and practicing
with spears — just a lot of stuff that in the real world is very
male-dominated.”[…]
Once they all donned their Amazon armor and took to the beach for the
big Themysciran battle scenes, Ence says she was surprised by how easy
it was to tap into her inner warrior, especially when surrounded by a
whole horde of fellow soldiers. “The first day we were on-set with all
of our swords and shields, it felt like a different type of power,” she
says. “And we looked awesome.” She wasn’t the only one who got swept up
by all the swords and stunts: Kroes recalls a day when her young son
visited her, and she greeted him in full battle regalia. “If I could
just have that face framed as a picture on my wall,” she says. “I think I
melted because he has never looked at me like that ever. He was just in
full admiration of his mommy as a warrior.”
I work at a kindergarten and this is a collection of cute Wonder Woman related things that happened within a week of the movie being released.
- On Monday, a boy who was obsessed with Iron Man, told me he had asked his parents for a new Wonder Woman lunchbox.
- A little girl said “When I grow up I want to speak hundreds of languages like Diana”
- This girl had her parents revamp her Beauty and the Beast birthday party in THREE DAYS because she simply had to have a Wonder Woman party.
- Seven girls playing together during recess on Tuesday, saying that since they all wanted to be Wonder Woman they had agreed to be Amazons and not fight but work together to defeat evil.
- There is this one girl that refuses to listen to you unless you address her as Wonder Woman.
- Another girl very seriously asked the teacher if she could ditch her uniform for the Wonder Woman armor bc she “wanted to be ready if she needed to save the world”. The teacher laughed and said it was okay, and the next day the girl came dressed as Wonder Woman and not a single kid batted an eye.
- They are making a wrap-up dance show, and they asked the teacher if they could come as superheroes, they are going to sing a song about bunnies.
- This kid got angry and threw a plastic car over his head and a girl gasped “LIKE IN THE MOVIE”
- A boy threw his candy wrapping in the floor and a 5-year-old girl screamed “DON’T POLLUTE YOU IDIOT, THAT IS WHY THERE ARE NO MEN IN TEMYSCIRA”
- On Wednesday, a girl came with a printed list of every single female superhero and her powers, to avoid any trouble when deciding roles at recess.
- I was talking to one of the girls that hadn’t seen the movie, and the next day she came and very seriously told me “you were right, Wonder Woman was way better than Frozen.”
Consider this your friendly reminder that if this movie completely changed the way these girls and boys thought about themselves and the world in a week, imagine what the next generation will achieve if we give them more movies like Wonder Woman.
