InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "BUGGRIT!"

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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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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