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#because he literally discarded that name after the war almost as if that man Robert Linder was dead to him
ciderspunk2077 · 3 years
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🥺 Player character is called V because the name the Angel/Skye uses is their deadname 
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samaraclegane · 5 years
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Your writing is wonderful! I have a prompt idea based on the last shot of Gendrya in bed. Arya is slowly getting her humanity back and now she's afraid of losing Gendry. Thank you!
author’s note: this seems like it could totally be canon! love it, anon & i hope i do your fantastic little prompt justice. :)
-arya was above this. she’d been through so much, so much training, so much pain ever since her father had been murdered on the command of joffrey, she didn’t know why she was giving it all up now.
-the faceless man. the wolf. the stone-cold assassin which she had worked so very hard to become, all for what? 
-it wasn’t as though she regretted what had happened. after all, after her father’s passing, she had then met gendry. gendry, that tall boy with a solid chest and piercing blue eyes. that handsome boy who could work a furnace like it was his day job (and, she realised, it literally had been). that boy who she had only recently found out was the bastard son - likely the final remaining one, too - of king robert. that boy who was no longer a boy.
-she had initially thought it was curiosity. she had danced around the idea, but the thought of her last night on earth being spent alone, or even worse with the hound, was what drove her over the edge. she’d marched up to the forge where she knew gendry would return to shortly, and the rest was history.
-in the moment, however, she knew something had shifted. she assumed that it was simply her body’s reaction to being able to touch gendry in this way - like she had wanted for so long, but had always denied herself - and kiss him. she roamed all across his body, exploring him, and found herself classifying the unfamiliar feeling as lust.
-now, though, they’re together still. having finished and rolled over, parting but not so far that they could be considered apart, she got to thinking, trapped inside of her own head. she’s looking off, away from gendry, because if she looks at him she might just explode into flames.
-she wonders: was this what it was like? was this how sansa had felt all the time growing up, so infatuated, caught up in boys and the songs of pretty maids that she enjoyed pretending were about her? if so, why was this a sensation she had desired?
-from arya’s stance, emotions like this were only trouble. every person she had ever known to have loved ended up dead, or worse. her father had loved his family, and he had gotten himself killed. her sister had loved king joffrey, and she had been tormented relentlessly for it. her brothers had loved each other, and they died for this love.
-arya suddenly feels a chill run through her, sending her jolting up and reaching for her discarded undershirt. she casts only a brief look over her shoulder at gendry, checking he’s still sleeping soundly, before she’s dressed and slipping out of the doorway, slinking back to her room.
-she doesn’t get any rest that night, and she feels awful the next morning. with all of her might, she avoids gendry, knowing she might break if she has to explain to him why she left.
-it’s only days later that she lets herself look at him again. he looks much the same - perhaps a little tired himself - but still has his cropped hair and strong, distinctive face, stony as he works like a mule, forging endless weapons for nondescript soldiers.
-she doesn’t approach him.
-no matter how much that little ache in her chest makes her want to stand before him and pull his stupid face down to hers and kiss him again, she doesn’t. she doesn’t because it’s foolish. she doesn’t because it’s irregular - it’s just not her - and so she turns on her heel and quickly walk away, trying and failing to keep the man from her mind.
-it takes several more days, but she finally realises just why she can’t give into her self and her feelings. why, every time she sees gendry now, there’s something in her that feels like overwhelming sadness. her veins are flooded cold at the sight of him, and the one time he caught her eye and tried to wave her over, she dodged him entirely and fled the scene, barely holding back tears.
-this was not good.
-in fact, this was so far from good that she wanted to throw it all up, turn back the time, because now she was feeling regular things. she had only wanted to try something new before the war began, and now she was losing herself to the stupid bull-headed boy that seemed to live in the forge, and she was terrified.
-unlike with the faceless men, she wasn’t afraid he would hurt her. unlike with the hound and littlefinger, she wasn’t afraid he would turn on her and make merry with the money he got from whoever so wanted her dead they were willing to pay for it (cersei, most probably). she wasn’t afraid of him, she realised in time, but the thought of losing him.
-the realisation hit her one day, as she practised with her new weapon. she jabbed at the dummy when she understood, because damn the man, she was in love. she had been for a long time, she realised, no matter how hard she tried to play it off. 
-she hated the thought of caring so much about somebody, but she hated the thought of losing him that much more. she loathed how she was beginning to feel like she had never done before, but she never wanted to stop. somehow she simultaneously felt like she was soaring and crashing, burning, like a blood red star that bled across the night sky, painting it crimson.
-having not spoken to him for a prolongued amount of time, she becomes rather unlike herself when he catches her off guard one day and initiates a conversation. she stairs blankly at him, not hearing what he says the first time he does so, leaving him worried.
-”arya,” he repeats her name, sounding clearer this time, “are you alright?”
-she shakes her head, willing herself to disappear. she couldn’t have this conversation right now. even if she has put a name on what she’s feeling - love, perhaps, as repulsive as it sounds - that doesn’t automatically mean she’s ready to profess it to him.
-”i’m fine,” she knows she sounds unconvincing when she says it, but figures it was worth a try anyway.
-”no, you’re not.” he states plainly, and brings her to sit down on a nearby seat. he takes his place beside her, then looks into her eyes, his own ridden with concern. “why are you avoiding me?”
-she’s frozen. she can only look at him, swapping her focus from one blue eye to the other, and say nothing. what could she say? she’s not one for dramatic ‘i love you’ sequences, and she doesn’t think he is, either. then again, she’s not usually one for feeling at all.
-”arya, if this is about what happened, we can just-”
-she doesn’t want to hear it - doesn’t want him to excuse what he did, or try to explain why she initiated it. she interrupts, loudly stating, “no.” she then retreats back into herself, scared of her own heart now. 
-she hears it beating loudly in her head. the pulsing is rhythmic, drumming into her skull. it only increases as he begins smiling at her, cheeks flushing a pink that’s strange to see, especially in times like these. his smile holds for a moment, he admires her face, and then it’s gone as quickly as it appeared.
-”then what is it?”
-she sucks in a breath. she could tell him right now. she could have it over and done with. she’s not certain he loves her back - hell, she’d only kissed him on a whim, considering the world was ending - but she can try. at the very least, she knows he’d be appreciative to hear it, considering how lonely she knows he’s been for so very long.
-even though she could, she doesn’t. she instead watches him, studies his face, then stands, raising herself to come before him, and then dips her head and gently pecks him on the lips.
-he’s warm and tastes like ash, which she’s never liked before but thinks she just might do now. he tastes, as clichés tell, completely original. not that she’d know, of course, but she can’t imagine all men - nor any ladies - taste like smoke, with a hint of death. he’s like iron, all hard edges and firmly built, but when she curves herself into him, he’s melting, ready to be re-formed into whatever she so desires.
-his arms wrap around her, holding her close even when she pulls back. she stays close to his face, finding she quite likes the heat radiating from him, and actually she just likes him. the faceless assassin, crazy, borderline psychopathic, likes how gendry’s face looks, and not in her usual ominous way. she thinks it suits him too much to ever even dream of taking.
-”gendry,” she speaks gently, purposefully. she looks at him, long and hard, then says, almost as though begging, “promise you’ll stay with me?”
-she’s speaking of more than romance. gendry could be ripped from her at any point, and the thought of it breaks her heart that she never knew she had. she doesn’t want him to leave her side, not just her soul, because she knows nothing nor no one could ever replace him. she loves him. by the old gods and the new, she loves bloody gendry waters, and doesn’t want him dead, damn it.
-he looks softly up at her, eyes all gooey, doing that thing she always saw her father’s doing whenever he looked at her mother when she didn’t know. he kept his eyes on hers, pouring through her soul through them. then, not moving an inch except to smile drunkenly up at her, he spoke, voice barely above a whisper, and she felt her soul sigh and relax into his.
-”for as long as you want.”
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buzzdixonwriter · 7 years
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Mr. Marlowe, Mr. McGee; Mr. McGee, Mr. Marlowe
Some stories are timeless, and some stories stay firmly rooted in their era. 
It’s not an either / or proposition, where one is always preferable to the other.
Two of my favorite series of crime / detective novels are the Philip Marlowe books by Raymond Chandler and the Travis McGee books by John D. MacDonald.
They are, at first blush, somewhat similar.  Insofar as Chandler defined the modern private eye character (although he never laid claim to creating that archetype), MacDonald has to be acknowledged as following Chandler’s lead.
No matter, there’s plenty of room for both.
Virtually all private eye stories, particularly those narrated by the detective in question, filter their worldview through that character (and, obviously, through the author as well).
As much as I love both author’s series, the advantage seems to fall to Chandler.
The Big Sleep was Chandler’s first Marlowe novel in 1939; prototypes of the character had appeared in various short stories published prior to that but The Big Sleep was the first time the character appeared by that name.
Marlowe is a philosophical private eye, with a penchant for poetry and chess and a literary, almost lyrical look at the world around him.  Like most fictional PIs, he finds solace in alcohol, but not to the point of oblivion, only to ease the pain of being human.  To quote “The Simple Art Of Murder” (Chandler’s classic essay on detective fiction):
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid…a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man…a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it…the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”
By comparison, Travis McGee inhabits a brighter, more spacious, more airy world, but not one that’s any less dangerous or debased.
Unlike Marlowe’s Los Angeles milieu, the McGee books typically start in bright, sunny Florida among tanned and trim beautiful people.
MacDonald, like Chandler, was another veteran of the pulp salt mines and though he’d already achieved success as a writer (Cape Fear among many, many other books), the McGee novels were pitched as paperback originals, intended to be churned out like clockwork, filling a particular publishing niche of that era.
As such, the series gets off to a flat, unimaginative, and for the genre, typically gimmicky start:  McGee is a “salvage specialist” who recovers stolen or embezzled money and property through extra-legal means, he lives on a houseboat called The Busted Flush (so named because he won it in a poker game), drives an electric blue Rolls-Royce converted into a pick-up truck named Miss Agnes, has a brilliant economist friend named Meyer who helps out, a colorful cast of background characters, and speaking of color, a linking theme in the titles of all the books (The Deep Blue Good-by, Nightmare in Pink, A Purple Place for Dying, etc.)
In short, pretty typical fodder for the male oriented paperback original action market.
And had the series continued in the vein of The Deep Blue Good-by, we wouldn’t be discussing them.
But MacDonald was too good a writer to just crank stuff out, and while the first McGee novel isn’t what the series would become, it gives MacDonald a voice that wasn’t in any of his other books, and by the second novel he had a firm grasp on what made a Travis McGee story.
Chandler took his time with the Marlowe books, supplementing his income by scripting for Hollywood (Chandler wrote the screenplay for James M. Cain’s book Double Indemnity, William Faulkner wrote the screenplay for Chandler’s The Big Sleep; all that’s missing is Cain adapting a Faulkner story to the screen…).  He wrote seven novels over a period of 19 years, though his focus remained resolutely on character and literary style as opposed to plot (famously when Faulkner and co-screenwriter Leigh Brackett couldn’t figure out who killed a minor character in The Big Sleep they called Chandler and asked him; there was a long pause on Chandler’s end followed by “…damn…”).
MacDonald, conversely, wrote 21 McGee books in 20 years:  Four in 1964, two in 1965, two in 1966, skipping a year, then two in 1968 before settling down to a yearly pace through 1974, another break then the last five books over a six year period.  (Rumors of a final McGee novel, A Black Border For McGee, involving the character’s death and narrated by Meyer appear to be just the wishful thinking of fans.)
What’s shocking about the McGee books during their primo run is just how good they are.  MacDonald through McGee proved to be a sharp and perceptive observer of not just the larger world around him but of American culture in particular and even more tightly focused on Florida. 
Before Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaason began offering their unique take on the criminal eccentricities of Florida, MacDonald had thoroughly mapped the territory.  Others may have done it better, but he certainly did it first.
It shows in the McGee books, with MacDonald’s garrulous narrator making philosophical asides and observations on every topic imaginable.
McGee (i.e., MacDonald) was concerned with human impact on the environment long before most novelists began picking up on the topic (the exception being science fiction writers, who did see looming problems, but hey -- surprise! surprise! – before he settled into crime fiction as his oeuvre, MacDonald also wrote for the sci-fi pulps and penned two exceptional sci-fi novels, Ballroom Of The Skies and The Wine Of Dreamers).
MacDonald through McGee connected the dots between rapacious human greed and the rape of the environment and the society we live in.  While not all the books touched on ecological problems, they all acknowledged terrible and disastrous change was in the air, change brought about by greed and stupidity.
The two, as McGee / MacDonald frequently notes, go hand in hand.
These philosophical asides were what endeared Travis McGee to us when we discovered him as paperback originals in the 1960s and early 1970s.  The books offered more meat and substance than most books in that genre. 
MacDonald grasped how much his fans enjoyed McGee’s running commentary and began including more and more asides, running longer and longer.
They proved fascinating and entertaining and informative and none of us buying the books back in the day objected…
…but in the end they date the McGee books rather severely, and have probably prevented the character from finding success outside of publishing.
Marlowe, while waxing philosophical himself, knew a little bit goes a long way and held his ramblings in check.
And as a result, he edges ahead because his world, his Los Angeles, remains timeless.
This is not to say there aren’t elements that mark the Philip Marlowe books of a specific time and place, but those are details that can be easily discarded when adapting the stories to film or TV or radio or any other media you desire.
Case in point:  Robert Mitchum made his version of Farewell, My Lovely in 1975 as a period film set just before World War II, then followed it up three years later with The Big Sleep set in Los Angeles of 1978 and nobody saw anything odd about it.
The Marlowe stories transcend specific time even though they stay rooted firmly in Los Angeles and Southern California.  The same cast of con men, aspiring actors, phony psychics, melancholy millionaires, and desperate delirious dreamers have inhabited Los Angeles since before the turn of the century -- the 20th century.  You could set a Philip Marlowe story any time between 1920 and today and save for minor cosmetic details the key elements do not change.
But McGee…ah, McGee is a prisoner of his era.
Mind you, that’s a big hunk of his appeal.  What the Travis McGee books do is offer a running commentary on America-specifically-Florida-specifically-riproaring-capitalist-Florida from 1964 to 1984.
Unlike Marlowe who deals with eternals, McGee deals with the here and now.  His stories all reflect specific slices of time and do a damn fine job of it.
But you can’t take him out of his era.
Sherlock Holmes used to be locked in cobble-stone-hansom-cab-gaslit 1880s London until the recent Sherlock and Elementary series broke him free, but truth be told, that cobblestone imprisonment was a late invention of Hollywood.
Most Holmes stories take place after World War I and he rides in automobiles, flies in airplanes, talks over the telephone and radio, and does any number of technologically advanced things.
The earliest Holmes movies were always set in contemporary times, involving him in fights against Nazi spies in WWII.  It wasn’t until the 1950s that films and TV shows began pushing him back into the late Victorian era.
While some Marlowe films have put him in 1940s L.A., far more have set him in contemporary times.  Marlowe (1969) captures late 1960s L.A. perfectly (and features Bruce Lee as an office destroying thug, replacing the white guy who did the same deed in the source novel, The Little Sister); The Long Goodbye, my personal favorite of all the films based on Chandler’s novels, is resolutely set in 1970s Los Angeles (and features a young and uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of the bad guy’s heavies).
And if you think there wasn’t a world of difference between 1969 Los Angeles (pre-Manson) and 1973 Los Angeles (post-Manson), guess again.  The fact that books written literally 20 years earlier in both instances could be easily adapted into contemporary films marks Marlowe’s timeless nature.
McGee has not fared so well.
Mind you, I would recommend the McGee books to anyone who’s interested in how American culture progressed during the 1960s / 70s / 80s:  They give a lot of first hand in-the-now information.
But they remain trapped in their era/s. 
Case in point:  The plot of The Quick Red Fox centers on McGee trying to find who’s blackmailing a Hollywood movie star with incriminating photos.
The story hinges on the actress’ career being destroyed if the photos are made public.
That was a big deal in 1964, but in 2017?  The Internet has inured us to such things.
But by 1967, a scant three years after The Quick Red Fox’s publication, societal norms had already shifted to the point where such behavior and photos would no longer have a devastating impact on a person’s life, especially a show biz celebrity.
In contrast, the blackmail scheme in The Big Sleep does not target the mentally ill victim, but rather her father, a frail and dying elderly man wracked with shame and guilt over how he has failed his family.  The plot works regardless of when the story takes place because it doesn’t hinge on how society judges the victim’s sexual behavior but rather how one specific character does, and for reasons unique and particular to that character alone.
McGee (read MacDonald) typically was spot on with his observations, but they are too much a part of the character and the stories to enable them to escape their time.
You always find somebody like the characters in the Marlowe books in Los Angeles, but a lot of McGee’s characters have faded with history:
”Without my realizing it, it had happened so slowly, I had moved a generation away from the beach people. To them I had become a sun-brown rough-looking fellow of an indeterminate age who did not quite understand their dialect, did not share their habits -- either sexual or pharmacological -- who thought their music unmusical, their lyrics banal and repetitive, a square fellow who read books and wore yesterday's clothes. But the worst realization was that they bore me. The laughing, clean-limbed lovely young girls were as bright, functional, and vapid as cereal boxes. And their young men -- all hair and lethargy -- were so laid back as to have become immobile.” (The Lonely Silver Rain)
There have been two attempts to bring McGee to the screen, and while both are serviceable and entertaining as movies, both are failures as McGee films.  Darker Than Amber (1970) featured Rod Taylor as McGee and failed because it lacked McGee’s philosophical voice; Travis McGee (1983, based on The Empty Copper Sea) with Sam Elliot failed because it included that voice.
McGee’s narrative musings, while fascinating on the printed page, do not translate well in cinema.  There may be a way of striking a just-right balance, but the two efforts to date didn’t succeed.
In one way it’s a pity:  Sam Elliot would have made a perfect McGee…in 1973. 
If you want a perfect example of why the McGee books are virtually unfilmable, consider the greatest narrative hook ever written, the opening line to Darker Than Amber:  “We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.”
Boom!  You’re already in the middle of the story; the key has been turned, all eight cylinders are firing, the pedal is slammed all the way down.
And it’s McGee’s voice that informs us of this.
The movie shows the unfortunate young lady being tossed off the bridge, and what McGee and Meyer were doing to put them in a position to observe same, but showing this takes too damn long .
By the time she actually is thrown off the bridge, all the impact has been dissipated.
That was MacDonald’s genius…and his curse.
Chandler, showing much more restraint, gets more done even though he does it in (seemingly) a more conventional manner.  There have been awkward adaptations of Chandler’s books, but the fault lays in production decisions, not the actual underlying material.
The crucial difference is that Chandler did not let Marlowe age or otherwise pass through time.
The brilliance of MacDonald’s work is that it traces a long arc through the heart of the 20th century; the brilliance of Chandler’s is that he ignores what is going on around him to focus on foundational issues.
There is also this:  While Chandler faced emotional and physical problems that marred his latter years, he never voiced that pain through Marlowe --  at least not clearly enough to be picked up by his fans.
But following a heart attack in the late 1960s, MacDonald allowed McGee to become more fatalistic, more morbid, more morose, more aware of his own mortality.
His first post-heart attack book, A Tan And Sandy Silence, had fans actively worrying that he was set to kill McGee off; it is certainly as despondent a tale of failed knight errancy as one might hope to find.
The series briefly bounced back to form with The Scarlet Ruse and The Turquoise Lament (though they, too, offer their notes of grim finality; more so than one would expect in a series crime novel), then dipped irretrievably with The Dreadful Lemon Sky (the weakest of what I consider the “real” i.e., original run of McGee novels), followed by a four year gap and then the mediocrity of The Empty Copper Sea.  
I remember reading it when it came out and thinking -- hoping! -- that it was just a temporary setback, that MacDonald would get the McGee series back on its feet and running great guns again.
No.
The quality started faltering badly after that, and though fans tried to convince themselves through The Green Ripper and Free Fall In Crimson that these were still good stories, by  Cinnamon Skin and The Lonely Silver Rain there was no doubting the old magic was gone.
MacDonald died two years after The Lonely Silver Rain was published. 
A lot of us feel it would have been better if he had hung up McGee’s spurs with A Tan And Sandy Silence.
McGee drops back further and further in the rearview mirror; the day will eventually arrive when you will need to be a historian of some kind in order to fully appreciate MacDonald’s sharp writing and observations.
Marlowe will be with us always, even as technology and social changes alter the landscape.
I love Marlowe, I love McGee;  I love Chandler, I love MacDonald.
But only one of them is going to be read by my grandchildren.
. . .
The Philip Marlowe novels of Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep (1939) Farewell, My Lovely (1940) The High Window (1942) The Lady in the Lake (1943) The Little Sister (1949) The Long Goodbye (1953) Playback (1958)
[Poodle Springs is based on four chapters written before Chandler died in 1959 and finished by Robert B. Parker in 1989; as they are not purely Chandler’s work I don’t consider it canon]
. . .
The Travis McGee books of John D. MacDonald
The Deep Blue Good-by (1964) Nightmare in Pink (1964) A Purple Place for Dying (1964) The Quick Red Fox (1964) A Deadly Shade of Gold (1965) Bright Orange for the Shroud (1965) Darker than Amber (1966) One Fearful Yellow Eye (1966) Pale Gray for Guilt (1968) The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper (1968) Dress Her in Indigo (1969) The Long Lavender Look (1970) A Tan and Sandy Silence (1971) The Scarlet Ruse (1972) The Turquoise Lament (1973) The Dreadful Lemon Sky (1974) The Empty Copper Sea (1978) The Green Ripper (1979) Free Fall in Crimson (1981) Cinnamon Skin (1982) The Lonely Silver Rain (1984) 
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The History of Wonder Woman
Hey kid, wanna know the history of Wonder Woman? The whole messy lot of it, not just the very start?
Wanna know HOW her books ended up the biggest mess in the entire comics industry? Big clues as to why her movie took so long to make?
It has feminism, racism, sexism, blasphemy, infanticide, and bees...
Wonder Woman was created by Dr. William Moulton Marston, noted psychologist, inventor of the lie detector, writer, and feminist.  He secretly lived in a polyamorous relationship with two women who helped him come up with Wonder Woman: his wife, Elizabeth Marston, and Olive Byrne, daughter of the major women’s rights crusader Ethel Byrne (known for helping her sister, Margaret Sanger, to create Planned Parenthood). He was heavily influenced by early-twentieth-century suffragists,  birth-control advocates, and feminists.
Even putting aside how jaw-droppingly progressive his woman superhero was, the comics still stand out for how whimsical they were.  Wonder Woman/Diana had an invisible plane and a telepathic radio. She jousted on a giant battle-kangaroo, and, like all Amazons, enjoyed deflecting bullets with her bracelets.  She fought Nazis, mad scientists, valkyries, mole-men, tiger-ape hybrids, flying mer-sharks, a subatomic army, and her arch-enemy: Mars, the god of war. She regularly battled aliens well before it became common for her peers (including Superman, who in those days was usually taking on gangsters and corrupt politicians). When not kicking back with her mother and sister Amazons she hung out with a short and stout firecracker of a girl called Etta Candy, a slew of college girls, and an Air Force pilot named Steve Trevor that was as disaster-prone as Lois Lane. And while later writers said that gods gave her superpowers  under Marston everything she could do was just from training real hard.
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Analysis often puts attention on some elements that are – let’s not beat around the bush – kinky as hell (like the “bondage” aspect of Wonder Woman typing people up and getting tied up), but just focusing on that is a massive disservice to Marston.  Early Wonder Woman comics were far ahead of the curve in sheer quirkiness and how progressive they were in their depiction of women (even stating there would be a woman President one day).  It certainly helped that s Marston was often helped by his assistant, 19-year old Joye Hummel (I’ll come back to her in a moment), particularly when his health began deteriorating.
Marston put thought into Wonder Woman’s origin. Diana was created when the Amazon Queen, Hippolyta, wanted a child and Aphrodite granted her wish by bringing a clay baby to life. The “artificial woman” is a common theme in religion and mythology, including the most famous examples of Pygmalion and Pandora. Pygmalion was essentially a living gift to a sculptor that the gods liked, while Pandora was clay brought to life by the gods that promptly unleashed all the evil in the world (much like Eve, created from Adam’s rib). Marston could have made Wonder Woman’s father a god (a dime-a-dozen origin for heroes), but instead made her into an inversion of the “artificial woman” trope. Here was a woman made from clay, but she was neither a blight nor a prize to be won; raised by women, she was a hero in her own right. After millennia of blame for all the world’s woes, Pandora got her revenge: Wonder Woman.
How Marston got into comics is a story by itself. At the time, there was a fledgling movement to censor comics (“Dick Tracy is too violent!”). Family Circle magazine published an interview with Marston on the subject, since he was a noted psychologist who had worked for Hollywood as a consultant (the interviewer was actually Olive Byrne, who lived with the Marstons by then and wrote under a pen name). Marston’s defense of comics attracted the attention of DC Comics, who offered Marston a job as an “educational consultant” (wanting to tell any would-be censors that the staff psychologist okayed everything). Marston had offered the opinion that what comics needed wasn’t to censor “violent” heroes but rather to offer nonviolent alternatives, and saw an opportunity to introduce that, as well as to create a prominent female hero. His pitch was a hit - in 1941 Wonder Woman appeared.
Wonder Woman’s use of a lasso tying people up (and getting tied up) certainly boosted sales by appealing to readers that liked seeing a little bondage (including Marston himself). For Wonder Woman to succeed (and for his feminist message to reach male readers), Marston didn’t shy away from titillation. But her heavy use of a lasso wasn’t just a way to attract readers. The frequent imagery of Wonder Woman escaping from ropes and chains provided a powerful image of women escaping their metaphorical bonds. Moreover, it also stemmed from Marston’s desire to offer a less violent hero – Diana lassoed bad guys and explained what they’d done wrong instead of breaking their jaws like Batman or Dick Tracy. Wonder Woman’s compassion was front and center in Marston’s comic, and her efforts to reform her foes were a major theme.
And she certainly had her fair share of foes! Marston came up with a colorful gallery of recurring villains, including Giganta (a gorilla-turned-into-a-woman), Cheetah (think a Kardashian that went crazy and started wearing animal skins while committing crimes), the fascist mad scientist Dr. Poison, the misogynistic mentalist Dr. Psycho, and plenty more.
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Marston worked from 1941 to 1947, when he passed away of cancer.  Joye Hummel, his assistant, asked to continue writing the book, making an argument like “you know I was writing a bunch of the stories already, right? Marston had polio and cancer; I was doing most of the work near the end.”  DC heard her excellent argument and ignored her, giving the book to Robert Kanigher, the book’s editor (making him essentially his own boss), and there’s never been a more disastrous baton-passing between writers in all of comics history.
Kanigher’s Wonder Woman ran from 1948 to 1968. He had co-created The Flash and many other characters, and churned out scripts by the bucketloads, with particular impact on superhero and war comics (including that one with a real-life Confederate general as the hero).  But his 20+-year(!) run on Wonder Woman was an unmitigated catastrophe.  
The feminist underpinnings of the book were discarded (most egregiously, a section Marston had included in every issue celebrating great women in history was replaced with a section about weddings), and Diana seemed obsessed with Steve Trevor. As Dr. Fredric Wertham led a high-profile moral crusade against comics, DC kept Wonder Woman as inoffensive to 50s sensibilities as possible. Stories pitted her against monsters, mobsters, and aliens (with the occasional story about strange creatures falling in love with her), and while parts campily echoed Marston’s absurdist moments (Dinosaurs in a Department Store!), the core of the book withered. Steve became an “alpha-male” that felt threatened by Wonder Woman’s heroics… and she felt bad about it. While Steve and Hippolyta still showed up, the rest of the supporting cast were forgotten and nobody took their place. The idea that her feats stemmed from Amazon training was dropped – Wonder Woman was given superpowers by the gods (including flight, rendering her invisible plane obsolete).
Kanigher’s frequent time-traveling stories let Wonder Woman team up with her younger self. Thus, for a much of a 20+-year period, rather than building up a solid cast, Wonder Woman was left literally talking to herself. When Robin brought together other sidekicks to create the “Teen Titans,” nobody involved was paying enough attention to realize Kanigher’s "Wonder Girl” was just a younger Wonder Woman. After spotting the error, DC said the Wonder Girl in Teen Titans was a new character (“Donna Troy”), but attempts to retroactively connect her to Wonder Woman underwent so many rewrites over the years that she remains one of the biggest headaches in comics. When people read Teen Titans, they learn that Wonder Woman’s book is confusing.
Despite being on the book for over 20 years, Kanigher’s only notable new characters were Angle Man (a generic recurring mobster), Egg Fu (an evil egg/racist Chinese caricature, see below),  Nubia (“what if we made another Wonder Woman, only this time with black clay?”), and Circe (another character plucked from mythology).  Of the recurring villains that Marston had created, Kanigher used Dr. Psycho a few times, Cheetah twice, Giganta twice, and… that was about it.  At a time when heroes like Batman, Superman, and The Flash were building up villains, settings, and supporting casts, Wonder Woman’s world was shrinking as fast as her peers’ were growing.
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When his run concluded, Kanigher had essentially left Wonder Woman with no notable villains and a supporting cast smaller than when he had inherited the book 20 years earlier. Worse, book’s feminist soul was in tatters.  The book was handed off to Denny O’Neil  in 1968.
O’Neil, a major Batman writer, was almost as mismatched for Wonder Woman as Kanigher, and his editor wanted drastic changes to improve sales. O’Neil killed Steve (a mercy at that point), depowered Wonder Woman, and gave her an elderly Asian martial-arts instructor – basically trying to turn her into a spy-themed 70s movie hero. 
Thankfully that run only lasted only a few years, and from 1974 to 1986 the book was thrown like a hot potato from writer to writer. Nobody stayed, little was built, Steve was brought back to life, Steve was killed again, Steve came back again, the setting was shifted to World War II (because the hot new TV Show was set in WWII), and then back to present day… it was clearly a book in serious trouble.
When Superfriends (the first Justice League cartoon) debuted in 1973, there was no clear major Wonder Woman villain in the books, so the show settled on Cheetah (who had racked up a paltry 9 appearances, including a reprint, in the 30 years that Wonder Woman had been around).
And when Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman live action TV show came out in 1975, it was a hit that cemented the character’s prominence in American pop culture, but it was set in World War II. Wonder Woman wasn’t the only hero to be created in WWII, but hers was the only comic with its glory days so clearly in the past.  
In 1986, DC rebooted their entire line of comics, wanting to start from scratch, updating and streamlining the best of what came before. Wonder Woman was given to George Perez (and Len Wein), and his brilliant run took the most iconic and well-known elements of the character, making it all work. He brought back Etta Candy and made Steve Trevor into a likable human being. The Amazons were fleshed out and given flaws and foibles. He plucked villains from the book’s distant past (Cheetah and Dr. Psycho, now revamped to be foes worthy of a Superman-level hero), and retooled a few of the more recent ones that had potential, like Circe. He showed that at least some Amazons were gay (in 1986!), and found a way to visually combine the classic Wonder Woman costume with more accurate Grecoroman soldier styles. If you’ve ever seen Wonder Woman dressed like a “warrior,” you have Perez to thank. 
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And while Wonder Woman remained compassionate, Perez showed that when there were no other options his Amazon warrior was willing to use lethal force.
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Hippolyta and the Amazons were reimagined with a greater emphasis on actual Greek mythology, but at the same time were presented as a mutiracial tribe (of particular note, Perez introduced the black Amazon general Phillipus, who would be presented as Diana’s teacher and Hippolyta’s closest friend). 
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The difference between them and Amazons of myth was explained as being due lies told to make Hercules look good – in DC’s world the famous Greek demigod had actually deceived, raped, and enslaved the Amazons before they overthrew him and withdrew from the mortal world. In the “starting from scratch” new universe, Diana was written as having just left the Amazon island of Themyscira for the first time, finding a new home in Boston with Julia Kapatelis, Curator of the Museum of Cultural Antiquities (a great friend for an “ancient Greek” suddenly finding herself in the modern world!). Vanessa’s teenage daughter went on a few Wonder Woman-related adventures, and it looked like she was going to become a new (and less confusing) “Wonder Girl”. And Perez brought back the god of war (calling him Ares instead of Mars), who had been virtually absent since Marston’s run. That last bit’s incredible when you consider the villain was clearly her arch-enemy in the early days… imagine if Joker or Lex Luthor had been missing for decades. He also sought to end the cycle of writers not knowing what to do with Steve Trevor – Steve and Etta got engaged.
Then the book was handed to William Messner-Loebs (WML), who wrote it from 1992-1995. Sadly, it squandered almost everything Perez had done. Right at the start it threw her in space, abandoning the cast that Perez had introduced, and when she returned the Kapetalis family was nowhere to be seen. Perez had left one instruction when he left the book – Steve and Etta were to get married. WML had Etta appear a few times (long enough to make the always-comfortable-about-her-weight character bulimic), then wrote her and Steve out of the book without ever showing their wedding (a broken promise that resulted in Perez being furious with DC comics for years).
The Amazons of Themyscira were dropped into another dimension for years (and for most of that time the readers were led to believe Themyscira had been destroyed, so the reveal that it was in another dimension may have been a panic-driven last-minute change). A series of stories showed Wonder Woman trying to have a “normal” life, like holding a minimum wage job at a Taco Bell knockoff (bear in mind she had no secret identity – everyone knew she was Wonder Woman). Notably, he created a gritty new Amazon named Artemis that briefly became Wonder Woman, died, and came back because Wonder Woman desperately needed supporting cast members. Although he added little that was truly bad, WML had cost the book all the momentum and stability that Perez had given it.
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He came up with a gritty new Amazon warrior called Artemis that briefly became Wonder Woman, died, and came back because Wonder Woman desperately needed supporting cast members.  Although he ADDED little that was truly bad, WML had cost the book all the momentum and stability that Perez had given it.  
John Byrne took over from 1995-1998, and set the tone by slaughtering half the Amazons at the start. His run had little good in it, but wouldn’t be too bad if not for a few things. First, he made a more confusing mess out of Donna Troy (the Teen Titans’ Wonder Girl). Second, he tried to make a flawed hero out of Hercules (established as a rapist in the Perez run). Third, he felt that since the Wonder Woman TV show had been set in World War II there needed to be a Wonder Woman in WWII, even though we’d already seen that the “start from scratch” Wonder Woman’s first adventures were in the modern days. Byrne had Hippolyta, Wonder Woman’s mother, go back in time to become the Wonder Woman of WWII, making her the first Wonder Woman and Diana the second, and if you think that seems really unnecessary then I hope you can go back in time to tell Byrne not to do it. Lastly, he shoved Steve, Etta, and the Kapetalis family even more firmly out of the book by having Diana move (to “Gateway City”), and came up with a “Wonder Girl” that was the teenage daughter of a museum curator specializing in Greek antiquities. Since she was a blatant photocopy of the character that Perez had created to become Wonder Girl, it’s unclear why he didn’t just use Perez’s character (the pattern of Diana’s supporting cast failing to get traction has never stopped).
The book was given to Eric Luke from 1998 to 2000. I’m not 100% certain why he got the axe mid-story, but I can guess - Wonder Woman met Rama, a major Hindu god (who was wearing a leather Korn jacket… a no-no for a Hindu god). They teamed up to fight the Greek god Chronos, who had already defeated the Greek and Hindu Pantheons and was waging war on Christian heaven. Furthermore, there were hints at romance between him and Wonder Woman, even though Rama is married in Hinduism. Perhaps someone in authority felt that the book had wandered into a religious minefield.
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Phil Jimenez’s run lasted from 2001 to 2003. He liked the idea of Wonder Woman being the UN Ambassador representing the Amazons and tried to do something with that (for the first time since Perez), and fleshed out the Amazons by showing some of the conflicts between different groups. He implied that Phillipus (Wonder Woman’s Amazon mentor) was in love with Wonder Woman’s mom. He made an effort to draw from all eras of the book’s past (even Kanigher’s – the generic mobster “Angle Man” became a surprisingly enjoyable thief armed with a device that could turn his surroundings into an M.C. Escher drawing). The Kapatelis family from Perez’s run returned. Jimenez’s major new addition to the cast was a new boyfriend by the name of Trevor Barnes, who was killed by a fill-in writer the minute Jimenez left the book (Wonder Woman is not allowed have a consistent supporting cast). And due to the U.N. elements, Diana moved to D.C. (she’s not allowed get a consistent city either). He certainly made missteps - such as replacing Wonder Woman’s best-known original foe, The Cheetah, with a male character by the same name, so for a while this was a thing...
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And for some reason Jimenez made a point of bringing up that Wonder Woman was a virgin. But overall, his run stands out for its sustained effort to build up Wonder Woman’s cast and villains, bringing back old favorites from all eras of the book.
Greg Rucka tried to build on the Perez-Jimenez idea of Wonder Woman as an Ambassador from Themyscira. She got an embassy staff as a supporting cast (complete with a Minotaur chef), and the embassy was given a teleportation portal to Themyscira, making it easier than ever to juggle the Amazon and non-Amazon parts of Wonder Woman’s world. Classic villains like Dr. Psycho and Cheetah (female) showed up, along with modernized takes of figures from Greek mythology. It was getting rave critical reviews and had stabilized many elements of her world, but DC decided they had an idea that would boost sales even more (spoiler: they were wrong) so they pulled the plug. The Amazons were yanked into an alternate dimension in a big crossover event and the embassy closed. Diana lost her supporting cast. Again.
DC’s big idea was a major overhaul by TV writer Allan Heinberg… whose run had so many delays that it started in 2006, ended in 2008, and was just five issues long. While Jimenez and Rucka had started to give Diana back stability in her supporting cast and made an effort to dust off and properly revamp some of her enemies, Heinberg went in the opposite direction, throwing villains at her without explanation for who they were, and giving Wonder Woman a whole new cast and a secret identity… as a superspy, drawing on O’Neil’s comics of the 70s of all things. Bear in mind that Wonder Woman had never had a secret identity after her 1986 reboot.  Also keep in mind that having a superhero’s secret identity be an adventurous government agent with high-tech gear gets redundant fast. Although Heinberg’s run was a mess and he basically decided that as a TV writer he didn’t need to hand in comic scripts, it’s worth nothing that he has the sole screenplay credit for the new movie. Clearly, he did have a blockbuster Wonder Woman story in him – it just took a while to get it out.
The book was handed to Jodi Picoult, an acclaimed novelist that had never written comics before. It was the first time a woman was (openly) assigned a lengthy stint on Wonder Woman. But rather than let her learn the ropes and give her a chance to show her own vision of Wonder Woman, DC started a multi-title crossover event headed someone else.  The event was called “Amazons Attack,” and Picoult was left to follow the lead of Will Pfeifer, a man who had never written Wonder Woman before, and whose knowledge of the character was apparently nonexistent. 
The Amazons returned, but Diana wasn’t given a chance to enjoy having her cast back, because they immediately started a nonsensical war.  It featured misandrist Amazons that killed defenseless children in cold blood for being male, plot-holes you could drive a truck through, the Amazons trusting Circe (think “Commissioner Gordon agreeing to make The Joker his deputy”), Batman being the one to (easily) defeat Circe, a wtf twist ending that told readers to pick up a non-Wonder Woman book, all leading up to the Amazons being taken out of Wonder Woman’s cast yet again – this time giving them amnesia and spreading them across the world where Diana could never find them (and in another book Pfeifer turned Angle Man from a likable rogue with interesting powers to a pathetic depowered misogynist – a good example of how Wonder Woman’s villains can’t catch a break either).  It literally lost track of where characters were and what they were doing from one issue to the next, lost track of characters’ motivations in the story, contradicted itself on what characters could do, and tarnished Wonder Woman’s cast like nothing written before. Amazons Attack was DC’s first (and to-date only) big multi-book event revolving around Wonder Woman, and it’s best remembered for being awful. And for this:
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After being forced to work on that, Piccoult walked away from DC and likely comics as a whole (she’d been greeted by the very worst that the industry has to offer). The book was given to Gail Simone, whose run lasted from 2007 to 2010. She made an attempt to use the spy agency supporting cast left by Heinberg. While the book was often plagued by writers not using the supporting cast left by the previous writer, Simone may have been the only writer who probably should have dropped what she’d been left.  The pseudo-Agent of SHIELD secret identity failed to gel, even when Simone brought back Etta Candy.  Unfortunately, Etta was one of very few things that Simone brought back – her run made heavy use of characters from other books, including characters from Flash, Green Lantern, and an obscure sword & sorcery book from 1975.  Wonder Woman’s own supporting cast and villains remained in terrible shape. Simone started finding her footing (bringing back the Amazons and setting the stage for a wedding between two of them – Hippolyta and Phillipus, Wonder Woman’s mother and mentor!) when she was taken off the book in favor of another famous TV writer with his own vision.
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J. Michael Straczynski rebooted Wonder Woman in an alternate reality where things had happened very differently (for one thing, Wonder Woman wore pants!), the Amazons were all but extinct, and there were a couple interesting things in his run aaaand The End. Less than a year in, DC reassigned him to things they thought would be more profitable.  
The book was turned over to hardboiled crime series writer Brian Azzarello, who rebooted it yet again. An argument can be made that his run is more accurate to Greek myths, but only in the most cynical ways. The most egregious moment in his run was when he “revealed” that the Amazons regularly sneaked up on boats, pretended to be helpless women lost at sea in order to get on board, seduced the men, slept with them, then massacred the defenseless crews in their sleep. If any male babies resulted from that, they were sold to Hephaestus to be slaves (with the story stating that if they didn’t have the slavery option, the Amazons would just throw the male children off a cliff).
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Now say what you will about the Amazons of myth, but they didn’t go around seducing anyone. They just straight-up charged into a village and killed people – evil, yes, but completely honest about what they were. Azzarello seemed to have merged the myths of the Sirens and Amazons and tried to create something even nastier. He basically looked at two of the most misogynistic stories in Greek mythology and went “hold my beer”. To really put this in perspective, keep in mind that in all the decades that Wonder Woman has been around, the Amazons have basically been the only remotely stable element in her supporting cast. What Azzarello did was essentially the same as a new Superman writer declaring that the entire staff of the Daily Planet had secretly been in a child sex ring all along. He also turned the Amazons to stone because Wonder Woman doesn’t get a consistent supporting cast. Ever. Additionally, he decided that the whole “clay baby” thing didn’t work for him, so he redid Wonder Woman’s origin to say she’s one of those millions of kids Zeus sired – her powers, thus, were owed to her father (he also scrapped the idea of Wonder Woman’s learning her skills from Phillipus and the other Amazons, and had her learn from Ares, meaning that she owed both her power and skill to male gods). So, after several decades, Marston’s deliberate attempt to flip the script of Pandora was discarded in favor of making Wonder Woman into a she-Hercules or Percy Jackson. And, spoiler alert, the movie seems to use his idea. It’s possible the sequel will go “nope, just kidding!” (one can hope), although I wouldn’t put it past the company behind Superman v Batman to double down and put in Azzarello’s reimagining of the Amazons.
Azzarelllo’s 2011-2014 run has its fans, but whatever the merits of his tale as a self-contained story I would argue that it was very bad for Wonder Woman overall, by further tarnishing the Amazons and continuing an alarming trend of making nothing in her book consistent over time. Moreover, while he was focusing on his new characters and Greek Gods, he had no time for Wonder Woman’s other supporting cast or villains. Thus, in the new rebooted DC universe they ended up being rebooted in other author’s books, often in ways that made them far less compatible with Wonder Woman’s own stories. Last I checked, most of them are still twisting in the wind, lacking basic origins and motivations in their new incarnations.
While it’s fantastic that the movie makes people excited about Wonder Woman, I do have to worry that it compounds some of the problems Wonder Woman has. To be clear, that’s not knocking the movie. Most books wouldn’t be negatively impacted by tinkering in adaptations, but DC’s mismanagement has left Wonder Woman’s book uniquely unstable. The movie has Steve and Etta (two major supporting characters) alive in WWI, meaning they’d be absent from any Wonder Woman movies eventually set in modern times. It also uses an origin that’s six years old, that contradicts the one that had been in place since 1941, and is thematically at-odds with the character. There’s room for different interpretations with adaptations of course, but I’m certain that Marston would hate the new origin, and I don’t think the first ever Wonder Woman movie should include something as fundamentally at-odds with her creator’s vision (and the majority of her publication history) as having her powers come from a father.
I haven’t followed the books since Azzarello (really, DC couldn’t have driven me away harder if they’d tried), but from what I’ve gathered Wonder Woman is still Exhibit A for why these decades-old characters should really just be in the Public Domain at this point and not owned by corporations.
This isn’t a story with a happy ending, I’m afraid. It’s the story of how badly this industry has treated its favorite daughter.  Perhaps we’ll have to make a happy ending ourselves.
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