Superheroes, spouses, and son

[superboyprime]

Also, the series has been apparently been upgraded from mini-series to ongoing status. Huh.

Comments

[pyrotwilight]

Aww. This looks like fun but my LCS hasn't been ordering it. Sigh.

[auggie18]

...really? I remember some of the other stories from the last post on the first issue. The only characters I found sympathetic or even a little likable were the dude who married not!Wonder Woman and his son. (And sorta the daughter.) All of the other characters just sorta ran the spectrum from bland to dickish. (Not!Batman is having gay sex with his sidekick? That's a new one. Nooobody has ever covered that ground before, nosiree bob.)

I mean, good for the creators, I guess. I may have found it a little boring and derivative, but apparently there's an audience for it out there. (Though I might buy the book if it were just about not!Wonder Woman's family. They've got an interesting dynamic going on.)

[pyrotwilight]

She is certainly the most interesting out of all the family setups that I've seen thus far.

[auggie18]

Yeah, and there's so much territory you can explore there. We know the mother focuses all her attention on the daughter, who resents it. The son craves his mother's attention, but doesn't get it. How does that affect the relationship between the son and the daughter? How does that affect the relationship between the mother and the father, who clearly loves both of his children equally. Does the mother even like the father, or does she merely see him as means to an end? (The production of more daughters?)

The whole time I was reading the first issue, I was thinking "Get back to the not!Wonder family!"

[bazor]

In the second issue its also strongly implied that the son is inheriting his mother's powers. Also, a tell-all author has maybe deduced that Sovereign is married to his former arch-nemesis.
Also, the cosmically-aware guy's wife? She's an ex crimefighter waiting for her kids to be old enough so she can go back to doing it.
Not to mention the wife of the elder hero, the one that's retired, is using her shape-shifting powers to trick him out of retirement at a tremendous risk to his own health for some reason.
Its got a lot more going on than I thought it would and I'll definitely keep reading.

[icon_uk]

It would be ironic, and therefore probably inevitable, if we discovered that the daughter had no powers and the son did.

[espanolbot]

As much as the old, cliche and irritating the "joke" about Batman and Robin analogues being gay is, the concept of a misandrist Wonder Woman is also something that appeared before and is also something that comes across as being kind of lazy.

Frank Miller on autopilot lazy.


I suppose that it's justified in this case due to the story that they're trying to tell, but it still comes off as annoying to me. As if the only way that they can show that a woman is strong and independant is to have her actively hate or be dismissive of the opposite sex, or in the case of her son, seemingly be openly emotionally abusive.

[md84]

To Not!Wonder Woman's credit, if she really were misandrist I doubt she would have married the guy and moved to surburbia in the first place. She probably would have done something heinous like seducing him for his seed right before dumping his body into the ocean, and sending her son to a lifetime of hard labor.

[espanolbot]

Just like with all levels of prejudice, there are levels. Just because she didn't murder the guy after getting kids from him doesn't mean that she regards him and her son as inferior to her and her daughter.

[benuben]

But they are not trying at all to show her as strong or independent. She is supposed to be sexist and emotionaly abusive parent.

And even though such characters have been written so many times, it was never the way I would like to see. For once, I would like to see someone stand up in such story, go to that character and tell her "You know what lady? Fuck you. You are hypocrite, sexist and asshole." Its alway "oh, men suck! But you are kind of cute." or "Okay I was wrong. Not gonna apologize to anyone, of course."

[dejadrew]

Perhaps, but there's other stuff going on that's interesting to me that's mitigating the assholish amazon thing. Namely, the son. He clearly looks up to his mom, wants her respect, wants to be like her. Yes, she's being a jerk, and the gender-swapped sexist assholery is tired, but while "young girl with talents is overlooked by sexist father in favour of boy" is done and done, you rarely see it even in gender-swapped assholery-verses. A male character looking to a female character as a role model is RARE in fiction, unless it's a gay character admiring a woman's fabulosity.

It's sort of... I once saw a kids play done by a couple of actors from South Africa, black and white. The black actor was playing, among other things, the wicked stepmother. It weirded me out a bit, that the black actor was playing a villain. But then at the end of the show during the question and answer period he talked about how in South Africa, the black kids love that part, because what THEY'RE seeing is a black guy yelling at a white guy and ordering him around.

There's issues here... but I'm seeing a son who wants desperately to prove he can be just as badass as his mom. That hardly HAPPENS. And she's portrayed as a jerk for not seeing it, but he hasn't been portrayed as dumb or wussy for wanting it. So I'm interested, so far.

[brooms]

oh, gio has old nightwing color-code, too.

is sovereing supes? is he also gay and in the closet? most fics would go the way of bruce/dick/clark threesome for the more liberal. or tragic triangle ridden with jealousy, for the conservative.

[his_spiffynesss]

Calling it now: Not! Wonder Woman's son has been or will be turned by mom's arch enemy.

[md84]

A more tragic possibility will be that he becomes his sister's archenemy.

[auggie18]

A hopefully more likely possibility is that their mother's attitude turns them off to the cape game in general and they go live normal, actually productive lives.

[auggie18]

I'd like it if both kids had powers and the daughter is pretending not to just to try get her mom off of her back.

[icon_uk]

Perhaps a better example would be Winged Victory in Astro City. Her rogues are those she has targetted as preying on women, and she admits that if asked to prioritise between saving a man or a woman who were in equivalent levels of danger, she would pick the woman, because that's how she chooses to operate as a hero. It's not she's anti men, but she's more pro-women, as it were.

[pyrotwilight]

Yeah, I figure that could be where it's going. Though I'd be interested in seeing how someone like not!Diana who seems to value superpowers would react to having perfectly normal unpowered children. (Hopefully better than Quicksilver)

[pyrotwilight]

"She is supposed to be sexist and emotionaly abusive parent."

Which kinda works because lots of parents whether they mean to or not seem to focus their attention on one of their children due to gender, and here the mom's doing it to such an extent on her daughter that while not necessarily meaning it is of course emotionally neglecting her son.

It's an interesting reversal of the trope that dad's want to have sons so they can live through them vicariously.

[benuben]

Dont be such a cynic :-)
Based on the lighthearted tone of these scenes, it wil propably ended up Not! Wonder Woman realizing, what shes been doing, showing that despie all of that, she honestly loves her son, and she starts threating both kids equaly.

[benuben]

To me, it seems more like hes a homophobe.

[deleonjh]

The son is shown in issue 2 to be doing the blindfold training successfully and in secret. I'm hoping it doesn't turn into a thing about how hard it is to have a penis in today's emasculating world.

[icon_uk]

In that particular family, I think that might be a very valid story to tell, since we have a mother neglecting her son because she obsesses over the daughter, when it's the son who has the talent she's looking for.

[glprime]

Just from these pages, it seemed more like he was condemning Night Fox for having an affair with his partner behind his wife's back, which of course is totally hypocritical (oh, superdickery!) if he's hiding a relationship with an ex-archenemy from the public.

[kamino_neko]

I don't know if you're stating your opinion, or explaining Night Fox's, but it's really not hypocritical at all. If Night Fox's strategy for staying in the closet was just to remain publicly single (or Sovereign was married to one woman, but carrying on a relationship with Helen behind her back), then there'd be a similarity between the two situations, and Sovereign'd be a hypocrite - but, he's just not publicly admitting to his wife's former identity, not hurting someone else to do so.