Superman versus Wonder Woman : The Sacrifice Part 4 of 4

[lucky_gamble]

Over a storyline spanning several issues, it's revealed that Maxwell Lord has been taking over Superman's mind (it took him several years to achieve that). The result has made Superman highly suggestive, which ends with Clark taking out the whole Justice League sans-Wonder Woman. The actual story isn't that great but the climax is rather amazing. The following pages only show half of the WWvsSupes fight.





















We all know what Wonder Woman did next. Damn page limits =(

Comments

[arrogantcur.livejournal.com]

All of the examples I mentioned are Simone, yes.

I didn't say "Rucka made Diana more grimdark", though.

I said "[Diana] did get more grimdark". Which is precisely what happened.

Started in this story, continued into Simone's run and, judging from the comments above, is how Azzarello is writing her now.

Yeah, it might've been editorial telling them to write her a certain way, have her use lethal force more often. Rucka might have even been reluctant, for all I know.

But right before threatening to torture Cheetah if she didn't start talking quick, you want to know what Wonder Woman told her?

She reminded Cheetah that she had killed Maxwell Lord. She was basically saying "If I did that to him, just imagine what I might do to YOU."

Going by that, you can make a case that killing Lord was the beginning of Diana becoming a lot more ruthless and, in my opinion, a lot less ethical.

[aravis]

Suddenly, I'm happy I haven't read Simone's Wonder Woman, besides the one Power Girl is in...

Torture, really? Aside from the ethical factor, there's also the thing that torture has, historically, turned out to, well, NOT WORK. The Spanish inquisition stopped using it other than as punishment for that reason, and the English stopped using it when they realised the information they got by more ethical means was actually way more reliable. Etc etc.

Any work of fiction that shows torture as working perpetuates the myth that "sometimes you have to use torture to save lives!" Which, of course, is indefensible nonsense.

[arrogantcur.livejournal.com]

What really made me have a "WTF?!" reaction at the time the issue came out was that I'd previously read a post by Gail in which she said she was happy to see the Bush Administration end. One of the reasons she gave was because they'd used torture.

So I would have thought that she would avoid writing a story in which it yielded reliable information. I remember asking her why Wondy did that, why she wrote it, etc. I forget exactly what her answer was. I think she may have said something like "You don't actually see Diana torturing her. She might not have done anything at all."

Here's the scene as best as I can recall it, four or five years after the fact: Diana had Cheetah tied up and wanted to know where her friend Etta Candy had been taken. Cheetah wasn't telling her, and I'm pretty sure she gloated about how Diana wasn't going to hurt her because she was a hero and so on.

It was, IIRC, at this point that Diana slashed Cheetah's face with her tiara. Cheetah was some combination of astonished, in pain, and outraged. (Btw, if you're wondering why Wondy didn't use the lasso to interrogate her, the lasso had been stolen by a villain named Genocide.) And as I recall, it was then that Wondy mentioned Maxwell Lord and how she'd snapped his neck.

Then she grabbed Cheetah by her tail. She held the sharp tiara up to Cheetah's tail. She either implied or said flat out that if Cheetah didn't give her Etta's location so that she could rescue Etta, she was going to start cutting Cheetah's tail off, piece by piece. The last panel or two we see is Diana getting ready to cut and Cheetah looking terrified and begging her not to.

Then it cuts away to some other characters somewhere else, and what happens is left to our imaginations. But when we next see Diana, she's attacking the Society's base, where Etta is being held.

Gail's answer didn't satisfy me back then, for the following reasons:

-Even if Diana was bluffing and wouldn't really have tortured Cheetah, she did cut her once, to "persuade" her;
-If Diana wasn't bluffing, if the only reason she didn't torture Cheetah was because Cheetah started talking before she started cutting, then Diana was still willing to do something both horrible and (in the real world, at least) counterproductive, which makes her the opposite of a hero in my book;
-Gail never said "She didn't torture Cheetah." So there is a very real possibility that Diana cut off part of her tail and inflicted considerable pain on her before she talked.