So I'm home for the holidays and after a day of traveling, snow, ice and cold weather I'm wondering why I was in such a hurry to get back here. Except I do love the quiet...and the snow and the ice and the cold weather. Something is seriously wrong with me. I've also discovered that Las Vegas makes me feel claustrophobic--something about the mountains there and how even though it's wide open it doesn't do you any good because it's a little bit like living in Limbo. But I'll talk more on that later.

Right now, what I want to discuss is Wonder Woman.

I just read the latest Wonder Woman graphic novel by Jodi Picoult (hopefully I spelled that right) and I have to say I'm in a bit of a quandary. I had heard mixed reviews, but after reading her introduction I was hopeful about the story. I myself was worried walking into it as, even though I haven't read any of her books, I wasn't sure I was a fan of her writing. While I've heard good things about her writing she seems to really go after the melodramatic, ethical tales of woe. What happens when you have a baby to save a baby like in My Sister's Keeper, and so on and so forth. But despite all of that I kept an open mind. However, I was not all that impressed with the results.

Wonder Woman is a hard character to write. I'm quite sure I couldn't write her without a lot of practice and a lot of thought. And I do mean a lot. My list about women who were strong while maintaining their femininity wasn't a joke (well it was, but not entirely). It is difficult to write a character, especially a female one, who can be strong and still completely a woman. When done incorrectly they are either bland, emotionless, bitches, or inhuman/sociopathic. In the latest installment of Wonder Woman the goal was to show her trying to discover what it is to be human--I like that as an idea. I like Wonder Woman questioning her morals, what she's been fighting for all these years, her existence. That's all very good. Especially in the wake of Max Lord, the man Wonder Woman killed, these are all important character developments to address.

I really felt like, however, that dear old Jodi dropped the ball. For instance, in questioning her morality she used the old "how do you know what's right is right" argument, citing slavery and religious intolerance. Yes laws do not define morality, an idiot with an ounce of self awareness can tell you this (thought not always my students) but Wonder Woman is smarter than that. She doesn't pull her morality from the law and only a juvenile writer/reader would think that she did. Furthermore, because Wonder Woman kills Max Lord there is this belief that she is as bad as the bad guys and, this is explicitly stated, that she should have found another way. I felt like this was completely wrong.

Sometimes the bad guy takes control of the most powerful man on Earth, Superman, and the only way to stop him from making said powerful man destroy humankind, is to kill him. When that happens you snap his neck, dust off your hands, and whistle a merry tune. I'm not belittling the moral ambiguity of murder here, but I am saying that sometimes you've got to do what you've got to do. If the only way to stop you from destroying the world is to kill you (and because she had the lasso of truth she did know this was the only way) then there isn't much choice there, is there? I felt like this was something Wonder Woman should struggle with, a hero murdering a bad guy should always weight heavily on the conscious of said hero, but that Picoult would say it was wrong? Complete cop out.

I think it bothers me because Batman draws a line in the sand and says he'll never kill. It's how he keeps himself from becoming that he fights. Superman has enough power to stop almost anything and anyone without killing them. Wonder Woman does too, but when it's Superman she has to stop, things get tricky. You can't let Superman be controlled by a sociopath. That's worse than giving an atomic bomb to your enemy. Superman can level the world, literally. And so what I wanted to see from all of this, was not a Wonder Woman that backed down from Batman and Superman and said, hey boys, you're right I was wrong, but a Wonder Woman that stood up and said I did what I had to do. You were going to kill us all, including Batman, and I stopped you the only way I knew how. She shouldn't like it, and she shouldn't be happy about it, but I would like to see her work her way through it without backing off of it. Perhaps most especially because this is Wonder Woman's greatest strength and weakness. She does what she thinks is right, sometimes at any cost. That can be extremely dangerous.

But none of this was addressed and that saddened me. Instead it read more like a handbook for feminists. What Wonder Woman really needed was a banner that flew behind her reading "Look at me! I'm a role model for young girls! And I'm hot, isn't that great?!" Not quite the soul searching epic I was hoping for.

So this post isn't nearly as insightful and probing as I hoped it would be. I blame it all on the cold medicine my mother forced on me the moment we walked through the door. I've been fighting falling asleep ever since.

And I keep watching Beauty and the Beast and the Beast is so amazingly hot. But such a beast. I'm going to have to write on that another time too. I'm so not right.