Wonder Woman and disability

I think it's quite acceptable to have an evil female character. And Dr. Poison was a more deeply drawn character than your typical femme fatale.

Villains that have some kind of deformity or disability, often derived from their own evil acts, is an old old trope (from Davros to Palpatine to Voldemort to.. the list goes on and on). I admit it flew over my head too. I didn't even think of her deformity as a disability, though of course it was. I assumed that the character had, perhaps, been disfigured by her experiments with corrosive gasses, so maybe it was "fitting." These things shouldn't go unexamined, though.

I suspect the most serious problem is the overall paucity of more positive (and neutral) portrayals of people with disabilities. I don't think anyone thinks that everyone with a disability should be "good" or that villains should always be able bodied and never harmed in any way by their own evil magic or experiments, any more than protagonists and support characters should never be disabled, but things are pretty one sided overall.

I did like the fact that they made Etta a sympathetic woman of some size, as she was in the original WW comics. I also liked that some of the Amazons were pretty beefy (not fat, but muscular and big boned), the way strong, athletic women tend to be in real life.

I suppose it's too much to expect WW herself to look like a real athlete or have some scars from her own training, instead of being a slender, small boned model type, but there has been some progress, at least.

Still a ways to go, though.

Roxxsmom said:

I suppose it's too much to expect WW herself to look like a real athlete or have some scars from her own training, instead of being a slender, small boned model type, but there has been some progress, at least.

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She's a creation given life by the eternally randy Zeus. Given the incestuous pantheon of ancient Greece, she could never have been other than this, I'd say. I'm positive that Zeus had a creepy "Maybe..." in his head by making her like this.

Actually, she's perhaps the only actor playing a major superhero right now who has served in the military. She's not some "small-boned model" just because she's classically beautiful.

I mentioned this in the WW thread, but I think that the biggest disservice the movie did to Dr. Poison was not to make her Ares' alter-ego. The moment where she and Steve had their interaction at the gala made me think it was possible, and it would have been an interesting twist to see such a powerful character hide as someone considered so weak. (Not to mention it would have spared us Thewlis' awful transformation into a muscle-man at the end.)

With the sniper, he was also done a disservice. Not because he had PTSD, but because it was handled so clumsily. The nightmares were more of an insert-style mention, and then his one attempt to use a gun failed. It highlighted how little characterization was given to the supporting cast.

In a similar vein, Eugene Brave-Rock's character introduces himself as the Blackfoot trickster god when he meets Diana, she doesn't hesitate to believe him, so why didn't we get to see any trickster-style magic from him, even though there were scenes where it could have come in handy. It was a neat aside, dropped in with no pay-off.