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colonel_green (colonel_green) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-08-26 16:06:00

Entry tags:

char: amadeus cho, char: black canary/dinah lance, char: wonder woman/diana of themyscira, creator: aaron lopresti, creator: fred van lente, creator: gail simone, creator: greg pak, creator: rodney buchemi, publisher: dc comics, publisher: marvel comics, title: incredible hercules, title: wonder woman

Mythapalooza (Part II)

Four scans apiece from Wonder Woman #35 and Incredible Hercules #133.

Diana and Dinah engage in some more cage-fighting, and then come face to face with Pele, Goddess of Violence (and Dance; I'm disappointed that wasn't brought up). She hits Diana with some kind of fire and takes her spirit to Kane's old island, leaving Diana's inert body in the arena with Black Canary.

This goes on for a bit...

Between this and the current iHerc arc, lightning powers are apparently the hot new accessory for autumn.

Speaking of which, the second issue of the month focusses on Cho's quest to find out what's going on with the Excello Soap Company and his apparently living sister Maddy (whose full name, we find out, was "Madame Curie Cho", which, as I see it, indicates that Mr. and Mrs. Cho got what they deserved; yeesh, "Marie" wasn't good enough?). He runs into an FBI agent who contacted him in his origin, and they end up surrounded by an army of giant floating brains (no, really).

He wakes up on a bus again, and then arrives back in Excello (the town), which is now bustling with people and acting like it's a Rodgers and Hammerstein production:

Not as good as the Herc/Zeus story, though a lot of that is probably them spending most of the issue expositing about stuff from Amazing Fantasty (v.2) #15 that most readers wouldn't have read (as well as things the solicit revealed already).

Great art, though. I loved Buchemi's work on #126's Herc origin, and it's great that he's doing "Assault on New Olympus" after this.

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bluefall
2009-08-27 03:21 am UTC (link)

Well, I don't really see Diana killing anybody for sleeping with the wrong woman, or, like, setting a perfectly innocent person on fire just to hurt somebody who hasn't, actually, wronged Pele and is in fact doing her a tremendous favor at that very moment, no matter what the alternative is. Pele is Zeus and Hera combined in terms of mythological shenanigans - she does the seducing and the petty vengeance, all in one convenient fiery package - so there's every possibility that being her champion would lead to exactly the same sort of moral quandary Diana just faced with Zeus. (Unless, of course, Pele gets a white hat facelift like most of the Olympians did, in order to protect Diana from just that sort of problem.)

Hard to say the extent of her pledge, though, anyway - the whole "I made a terrible promise and then it was okay to leave" suggests a one-time exchange, some form of divine reparation (kill Zeus, maybe, which would make sense from Pele and could fit Diana's attitude (and could explain the upcoming "Diana in Themysciran jail" solicit)), but Diana's actual conversation with Pele seems to indicate Pele has inherited her obligation to/championship of Kane and her service is more long-term, a total offer of fealty. I guess we'll see.

Anyway, I mock, but this actually sits much better with me than the conversion to Milohai. Her obligation here is pretty concrete and indisputable, and neither party is pretending the relationship is anything other than it is. And this actually is her responsibility, instead of its direct opposite like last time. To carry the metaphor to its tortured conclusion, if she whored her faith out to Kane, service to Pele after Kane's death is choosing to raise and care for the subsequent baby. It doesn't relieve or redeem her betrayal of Athena and the other Patrons (the... cuckolded spouse, in this case? Why do these metaphors always get away from me?), in fact, it's only likely to make that relationship worse, but it's still an appropriate response, and the only right one for Diana.

damnit, I swear I know how to spell, and what's this parentheticals inside my parentheticals stuff again, man, this is just not my week for coherence at all

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	01d55 2009-08-27 09:53 am UTC (link)
	I'm not familiar with Pele's rap sheet. You know a good page for that? I'm not entirely comfortable with using "whoring" in the way that you use it in this case. Those little self-berating messages that show up below your comments are a little worrying. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

bluefall
2009-08-27 11:12 am UTC (link)

Mostly I know her from this big anthology of world myths I had when I was a kid. Wiki has a couple salient (if not super coherent) stories, though, the one about Hi'iaka and Lohi'au particularly.

Those little self-berating messages that show up below your comments are a little worrying.

Just ETA markers for my ghetto edits. I've deleted and reposted more comments due to lazy, unclear phrasing, mangled html, or blatant spelling fail in the past week or so than in the entire year prior, I think. It's getting very silly.

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bluefall
2009-08-27 11:16 am UTC (link)

I'm not entirely comfortable with using "whoring" in the way that you use it in this case.

It's the most possible accurate word, actually, IMO. We've got this patron-champion relationship between Diana and Athena (and to some extent Aphrodite, Artemis et al) which is a significant commitment and emotional bond between them - in nature, it's primarily filial, but in intensity and exclusivity, it's very comparable to a marriage, particularly as we see it in Rucka's run. There is an insane amount of love and trust there, and a very definite sense of primacy and commitment.

Further, given the nature of Diana, we can feel secure in assuming this is the ideal model for a patron-champion relationship in her culture; she's the pride of the amazons, the incarnation of what they aspire to, the one who embodies their cultural mores, so it only follows that she's an ideal amazon in this way too. This is what it's supposed to look like when a god has a champion: faith, love, loyalty, devotion above and before all others, in total reciprocation. Faith in exchange for faith, love in return for love, loyalty and devotion met by loyalty and devotion.

When Diana comes to Kane Milohai, she betrays that bond with Athena, takes that faith, love, loyalty, and devotion above and before all others and gives it to some random dude as, basically, a business transaction. Faith in exchange for a magic boat, love in return for a door to Themyscira, loyalty and devotion met by... I dunno, he seems more fondly amused by her than anything. In short: She takes an expression of love that was supposed to be exclusive and reciprocal and freely given and a deep lifelong commitment, and hands it to the first stranger who was willing to pay.

Understandable? Sure (if you can overlook the Shamazons idiocy that forms half the bedrock of her motivation). There's plenty of reason to empathize with her, to the point where even Athena herself might reasonably not condemn her for it. And that's before you consider that we're looking at cultural virtues here and not objective ones (back on the other side of the metaphor, our culture values marriage over prostitution, but even within our ranks you'll find folks who disagree with the metric for both; surely there are amazons who'd consider "free agent" a better MO than the standard champion system, and we readers being outside her culture have no reason at all to share Diana's perspective). But really... that only reinforces the comparison.

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	bluefall 2009-08-27 11:17 am UTC (link)
	See? Right there. "Possible accurate," wtf is that? Let's just pretend I said "accurate possible" like I meant to and move on. (Reply to this) (Parent)

01d55
2009-08-27 11:38 am UTC (link)

That sounds much more like infidelity than whoring. The case against Diana going to Milohai is predicated on her prior commitment to Athena: absent that prior commitment there's no harm done.

Whoring doesn't imply infidelity; there is nothing in the definition of the word that requires that at least one participant be married. Excoriating Diana for whoring suggests that making the deal she did with Milohai was, in isolation from prior commitments, somehow un-virtuous or at least undignified and by analogy that prostitution is likewise undignified.

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bluefall
2009-08-27 11:51 am UTC (link)

Excoriating Diana for whoring suggests that making the deal she did with Milohai was, in isolation from prior commitments, somehow un-virtuous

Which it is, by amazon standards. I repeat:

She takes an expression of love that was supposed to be exclusive and reciprocal and freely given and a deep lifelong commitment, and hands it to the first stranger who was willing to pay.

That doesn't sound like a completely bog-standard condemnation of commercialized sex to you? "Expression of love" and "reciprocal and freely given" are as important there as "exclusive" and "commitment." And anyway you can't actually separate cultural antipathy for commercial sex from cultural antipathy for casual (ie non-relationship) sex, it's the exact same taboo. See also: the utter interchangeability of the insults "slut" and "whore" despite technical differences in meaning.

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01d55
2009-08-27 12:49 pm UTC (link)

Well now we've got to the nub of why I'm not comfortable with this line of attack: It relies on cultural antipathy for casual and commercial sex, which is inextricably linked with cultural antipathy for women.
I don't believe that prostitution is inherently harmful or undignified and I do believe that endemic cultural and legal persecution has imposed egregious harms and indignities on the vast majority of sex workers, even to the present day.

When you criticize WW's behaviour by calling it whoring, my misogyny alarm goes off, and having my misogyny alarms set off by Wonder Woman's lesbian #1 fan is a bit of a head trip.

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bluefall
2009-08-27 04:29 pm UTC (link)

Hee, sorry. Entirely my fault; I was not nearly as careful or explicit in my comparison as such a comparison requires. It wasn't actually my intent to attack Diana for her action. Her conversion to Kane unsettles me the same way, say, Dinah killing Savant would have unsettled me, even though Helena's (morally equivalent) killing of Mandragora earned an emphatic "hell yeah" - it's a betrayal of self, and as someone who loves the character, that's like watching a super-devout Jewish friend chowing down on cheeseburgers. It's not "I have a problem with you eating cheeseburgers," it's "you're doing something that should shake you to your very core and will certainly perturb your loved ones, nothing good can come of this."

Thing is, though, Diana's whole mess with Kane, being totally fantasy-based and built around a fairly alien worldview, does not necessarily come across as being particularly problematic or a big deal - there's no automatic common language or understanding of what this should mean to her the way there is of what kosher means to a devout Jew. However, her situation does map perfectly to the concepts of sex and fidelity and prostitution in our own wider culture - which do get across how problematic and what a big deal Diana's behavior is in her context, since everybody understands them completely. If I say, "Diana pledged herself to a strange god to save her mother," nobody is going to see why that makes me worry for her or why serving Pele should be a step up in terms of her... internal moral fidelity I guess. If I say "telling an amazon that would be like telling a random American that she ditched her husband and slept with a rich guy so he'd pay for her mom's surgery," though, that's a bit clearer.

Also makes it more obvious that I'm appealing to a common language pool for comprehension's sake rather than endorsing stupid, dangerous sexist bullshit to impugn a character ("whoring" as an actual intentional insult seems to me about as connected to reality as, I dunno, "thetan" as a legitimate explanation for a headache, which obviously makes it totally toothless there since you're all mindreaders amirite?). I should probably not have skipped that whole "establish the metaphor before using it" step. -.-

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	scottyquick 2009-08-29 01:56 am UTC (link)
	Wonder Woman's lesbian #1 fan #2, actually. Sorry Blue, you'll never come close to Io. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	jlbarnett 2009-08-27 06:04 pm UTC (link)
	she also loves her mother and thanks to Athena's actions, so DIana thought at least, her mother was in terrible danger. (Reply to this) (Parent)

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