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The great Tumblr outage of 2010 caused a delay but voting is back today. As usual, the moments in today's pool are not the final moments. You select 3 moments to go to the finals from the list. And the scans below are just for legality, they are not your choices. Today's poll is open until 8PM EST
To vote in today's poll click the link here.
And for legality:
Soranik Natu becomes a Lantern

Wonder Woman walks through fire in "A League of One"

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Date: 2010-12-07 03:09 pm (UTC)After two time, I gave up. Hoping that doesn't happen this time.
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Date: 2010-12-07 03:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 03:40 pm (UTC)Whatever, it's working right now. GO PROJECTA!
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Date: 2010-12-07 03:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 03:49 pm (UTC)couldnt help but think of this :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wFjWGnYsJY
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Date: 2010-12-07 03:52 pm (UTC)but i had to go with Babs vs Braniac, Supergirl vs antimonitor, and Rene taking the Mark of Cain (because that was a big OMG moment)
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Date: 2010-12-07 04:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 04:15 pm (UTC)(and naturally the only post on here that has it, the images are down. pfeh.)
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Date: 2010-12-07 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 05:56 pm (UTC)So much so that I had to vote for it as a Memorable Moment. (My other two being Oracle vs. Brainiac and Supergirl defeating the Anti-Monitor and saving Earth at the cost of her life.)
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Date: 2010-12-07 08:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 08:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 06:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 05:22 pm (UTC)Even the ones listed here and at the voting area are nice but hardly seem memorable, heck I haven't even seen most of them.
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Date: 2010-12-07 06:28 pm (UTC)S'what I get for being a GL fan.
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Date: 2010-12-07 06:04 pm (UTC)But M'gann's evil puppies run a close second.
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Date: 2010-12-07 06:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 06:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 06:47 pm (UTC)'Course, I think Steph slapping Bruce is a hells of a lot more about how she doesn't pay attention than any sense of appropriate response, so what ever.
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Date: 2010-12-07 07:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 09:46 pm (UTC)And Steph just reacted naturally to the suddenness of the moment, kind of a Freudian Slap.
I must align myself diametrically opposed on both of these. Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but I, for one, am not going to stand here and listen to you badmouth the Justice League of America! Ladies and gentlemen!
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Date: 2010-12-07 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 10:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 10:23 pm (UTC)To wit: Diana's an amazon. Part of that cultural identity is being beholden to gods who are not always good people, and to laws that don't always make sense. It means believing in prophecy and fighting murderers on their own terms or letting them go unpunished if they know the right ritual to hide behind.
Most of the time, this is a source of tremendous strength for her. As long as she's acting in accord with her code, she can't be unsettled or thrown off in battle by the headgames that trip other heroes up, and she doesn't struggle with self-doubt. When she's lost, when her friends abandon her, when her mother goes batshit on her or her people cast her out, when she doesn't know what else to do, she falls back on her duty and it gives her the comfort and purpose she needs to get back on her feet and back in control. (See also: why Gail's Warkiller arc makes no sense to me.)
It does mean, however, that she can be manipulated. Hiketeia was basically one big fail on her part - as long as the Furies play by the rules there's nothing Diana can do, and so because they do, Danny dies. The Medousa fight, in a stadium on live TV, was amazing; it was also an unacceptable risk to millions of lives that someone like Clark or Bruce would never have taken. Diana won the fight in the Embassy and was three seconds from smashing Medousa's face into the floor right then, but had to stop, and allow the possibility of Circe's plan going through, because she had to honor the Ares-sanctioned challenge.
Now, I personally think this is fantastic. Seeing Diana get trapped in a cage of code and honor like the Medousa fight and winning on those terms anyway is just amazing to me, proof of her heroism and badassery and a charge to me as a fan to a magnitude that Clark fighting off kryptonite has never achieved. Unfortunately I appear to be a distinct minority on that count; her writers, as a rule, would much rather free her of both those restrictions and the strengths that come with them, and waste time instead poking at mundane unimaginative "vulnerabilities" like brute force and/or threatening her friends.
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Date: 2010-12-07 11:01 pm (UTC)Another part I find unsatisfying is that this doesn't even seem to occur to her. Diana is not stupid. She's heard countless stories about how the oracles come true after the fact. So why would she ever take something like that at face value, I have no idea. Diana is certainly smart enough to figure out that not everything is as it seems, and be able to instinctively and naturally navigate the politics, so some self-awareness would not have gone amiss for me.
Finally, (finally!) the last thing that I find troubling is that from her actions, it seems that Diana does not value the sacrifice of her teammates. They are fully prepared to give their lives, but Diana arbitrarily decides that her 'knowledge' trumps their commitment. Even ignoring the whole thing about how a dragon really shouldn't be that much trouble for the 6 of them not counting J'onn, it just seems disrespectful that she wouldn't at least try to talk to them first.
I will say that I prefer this as a weakness, the problem is resolving it satisfactorily without making Diana look like a chump.
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Date: 2010-12-08 12:58 am (UTC)Throw in the art where every panel belongs on a museum wall, and I don't know how it gets any better.
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Date: 2010-12-08 03:52 am (UTC)Ah, but she doesn't! Instinctively navigating the politics is exactly what she does. The prophecy says "the League will die," and Diana goes "well, in that case, the League is me," and goes about completely subverting the expected outcome. If she took the prophecy at face value she'd advise them all to make out their wills while she set her own affairs in order. Instead, she throws everything she has into saving six of the seven lives the prophecy supposedly condemns, with full faith that she'll be able to pull it off and "trick" the Fates.
Because the rules she follows are obsolete
Say rather, "arbitrary." Most of our rules are arbitrary as well, after all. My favorite example is always file-sharing. Our society generally considers file-sharing unethical, but that's a purely subjective perspective based on our own economic setup and cultural history. It's pretty easy to imagine a different culture that considers not distributing music to be highly unethical, and would consider the commercialization of art to be a grave insult to human dignity (after all, there are people even in our society right now who believe that despite the wider ethic).
If you look at, for example, Hiketeia - it *is* a form of justice. The law can't touch Danny, but then again, she's going to spend the rest of her life in slavery. Working off her debt to society under the orders of a wise, compassionate teacher who will treat her well and show her better ways to deal? I can think of a lot of prison reformists who'd consider that a much more just and positive punishment for her crime than wasting tax dollars in prison. It's not a perfect system by any means, but neither is ours. "Outdated" implies a superiority that doesn't exist. Her rules are very different, and sometimes incompatible with ours, but that doesn't make them inherently inferior (and isn't that part of the whole message? Open-mindedness and a willingness to see the virtue in other ways of thinking?).
(I mean, obviously if she were totally Homeric Greek it'd be pretty fucking gross and "outdated" would be far too kind an adjective, but if she were Homeric Greek she wouldn't be a woman to begin with, so.)
it seems that Diana does not value the sacrifice of her teammates.
This is an interesting one. That's absolutely an issue, whether she respects them as fellow warriors with the right to choose to die if the cause merits it, or considers them children to be coddled. I mean, no one saw it as more disrespectful than me when Ollie tased Dinah to keep her out of a fight.
Thinking about it, I think there's a couple reasons that didn't strike me as a problem in League of One, and they all come down to the fact that while Diana believes in prophecy, she knows the rest of them don't. So, they can't really have the same... informed consent, I guess? as warriors in this situation that Diana does. They'll go in believing that the situation is dangerous, but they have a chance. There's no way she can possibly make them understand that they don't. And I'm sure she knows that they would all still be willing if they did understand, but that's still not the same as them actually being able to make the choice. Which, to me, seems like a fair, totally un-disrespectful reason to jump on the grenade for them, as Retro put it.
The other bigger thing is that their deaths would be pointless. Remember, the prophecy says that the dragon dies too. No matter what, if the League fights Karfang, Karfang doesn't walk (flap?) away. Ergo, the boys can't possibly need to be there - the prophecy guarantees that even one person can defeat Karfang if that one person is the League. Therefore, if more than one person goes, everyone in excess of that one necessary person dies for nothing.
Which, again, isn't something Diana is going to be able to get across to the others. They'll all have the Superman reaction ("if it's that dangerous we're all needed"). And besides, what are they going to do, draw straws? Even if she could somehow make them believe that it is a one-person suicide mission, you'd still end up with all seven of them trying to be the one who gets there first, so the fact that Diana gets the jump on the competition is just her saving time. (And of course then you're getting into the issue of "can one person still be the League if the rest of the League is conscious and capable of joining but chooses not to", etc etc, which muddies her ability to twist the prophecy to her own life-saving ends, as well.)
I mean, I guess that is kind of disrespectful? But only in the same sense that the fact that they guaranteed won't believe her is disrespectful to her, so as far as cultural chauvanism goes, I'm inclined to think it balances out. (Plus really, even if it didn't, she'd have a long, long way to go to match most of the other Leaguers for it.)
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Date: 2010-12-08 03:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-08 11:37 am (UTC)Ha! When I started reading that I thought "Hmm, so this is why she didn't like Simone's run." And then you actually said it.
(Um. Sorry for co-opting your post,
Please, co-opt away! I like, others, always enjoy reading your analysis of Wonder Woman.
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Date: 2010-12-08 04:18 am (UTC)I think another part of my dislike actually stems from reading these boards. When most people here talk about the JLA story Babel, it's usually about what a dick Batman is. Here, Diana takes them all out with very little effort, and then expects them to simply accept that what she did was for their own good. And that's seen as a sign of strength here. And I really don't like that double standard.
As to the informed consent, I disagree with that because first of all, she doesn't even try to give her own input about the dragon. She doesn't say "Oh, we have texts that say...", or "Oh, our sages talk about how great warriors fell...", or even "Well the oracle said...". Of course, Batman would absolutely ignore the last one, but she doesn't even try to give her judgement on the situation, which would always be welcomed on the team. Second of all, She never gives them a chance to contribute before she decides the oracle is correct and they can't do anything. No "Hey, maybe my super-breath can counteract the flames" or, "I can create a construct of a castle/heaping pile of emeralds/whatever to lure the dragon", or "Super-speed some bridge cables around her jaws" (which wouldn't work because IIRC, fire came out the nostrils as well, but you get the idea) or, "Perhaps I can convince her treasure is elsewhere telepathically", although that wouldn't work, because of the whole fire thing. There's simply no contribution to or by her teammates
I think my basic gripe is that as soon as she hears the prophecy, it seems that for her, team is out the window. I realize she's an Amazon, but she's supposed to be more than that.
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Date: 2010-12-08 12:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-08 09:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-08 12:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-08 02:10 pm (UTC)Incidentally, do you know if this has been collected, and if so in which trade? It looks pretty good.