Wonder Woman

Spoiler Alert to the movie, Wonder Woman

Everyone wants to argue about who is their favorite superhero and why. Everyone wants to argue between Batman and Superman and who is better and why. My favorite superhero is Wonder Woman and I know many of you will say, oh it’s just because she is a woman and you are a woman. Yes, to a point, this may be true, but it is so much more than that. People want to argue and say the great thing about Batman is that he was a man and not a God and that he fights with the internal struggle that we all fight with and that time and time again he chooses good over evil. He fights his human urges and becomes better. There was once a time he killed but does not any more because he chooses to see the good in others and sees that killing is not the answer. He even chooses to not kill his arch nemesis, the Joker, who is rumored to be his older brother Thomas out of love. Some say Superman is the ultimate hero because he is a God and nothing can defeat him, except we all know this is wrong because a small amount of kryptonite can bring him to his knees. And in a way, that is one reason people love him because even though he is a God, he still has a weakness and we all equate our own weaknesses to kryptonite, whether that is greed, lust, jealousy, insecurity, addiction, etc etc. This could be why so many of us identify with him.

I identify with Diana, Wonder Woman, because not only is she part God and part Amazonian, and even though they were superhumans, they were still humans. She has the best of both qualities, that of a human and that of a God. But what really makes her story beautiful is how she became Wonder Woman. It is almost as if she didn’t choose to, it or destiny, whatever you want to call it, chose her. Yes, there was this plan for her to defeat Ares, the God of War, and that Zeus gifted her to the Amazons as a weapon against Ares, a weapon known as the God Killer. But this was a secret that was hidden from her from birth until she met Ares himself. She grew up sheltered and hidden away from the rest of the world. Her mom loved her so much that she didn’t wish for her to know who she truly was. Her mother, Hippolyta, felt that by keeping this secret safe, she was protecting Diana. While Hippolyta might have been a Warrior Queen, she did not want this for Diana. Yet, Diana, still felt this urge, this passion, this need to be something other than the dainty protected daughter of the Queen of Amazons. No, she trained with her aunt, who loved her as her own, to become stronger and more knowledgeable in her people’s way. Many will argue that what Diana’s mother did was wrong and hurtful and not love at all. What mother would deny her daughter’s true colors and hide the truth from her. While we can argue the merits of this, there is no denying that this motherly love in fact helped create the Wonder Woman we know today and love. Without this lie, there would be no Wonder Woman. Diana had known peace her entire life as a child and for most of her young adult life. This created a sense of innocence and wonder that is often seen in children. She hadn’t been tainted or violated by the hatred and ugliness of mankind. In her heart of hearts, she loved unconditionally, for she knew no other way. She left her home for this very reason. She felt that it was her responsibility to help mankind from war and suffering, that it was her mission to stop Ares. Little did she know that this was all too true.

She got to the war front and she started to see the atrocities that mankind put upon each other and the needless suffering of innocent people. This was in a way her first step into the loss of innocence that happens to many of us. But it wasn’t the hand that dealt the blow. For she still had hope that her mission would end such suffering. Through the mire of pain and suffering, she was lucky to experience what many of us only hope to experience in our lifetime, love, and not just that of a mother’s kind, but that of another significant other, whether man or woman. For her, it was a man, but she also felt the love and commoradie that these group of men felt for each other and for her and for humanity as a whole. She saw them fight for what they believed in and fight for love and fight to end suffering and war. For a moment in the village, she felt true happiness. She felt like that the war against evil could be won and would be won because it had to be so. You see another layer of her innocence destroyed when the village that she had just saved wiped from the face of the earth in one instance. She saw that happiness could be destroyed in the blink of an eye and that it wasn’t lasting, at least not as a long as Ares was allowed to live. So she left the village and with it a piece of her heart and soul and went to find the God, Ares, to destroy him and to bring happiness back into the world.

She faced the man she thought was Ares and after killing him she realized that war and suffering had not ended. In fact, it continued to rage on poignantly in front of her. She then became disillusioned by the plight of mankind. She saw the ugliness and the destruction and that even killing one God would not remove that stain on mankind’s heart and soul. She then was faced with the actual God of War, Ares, who had come to recruit her for his mission. He wanted her to fight along side of him to destroy mankind for its ugliness and hatred. He wanted to return the world to what it was supposed to be, beautiful and unmarred by mankind’s presence. And for a second, you see the wanting and longing in Diana’s eyes for this to be true. She wanted to return to a simpler time, to a time of innocence, but still the human in her held some sort of altruistic truth that mankind can be saved and learn to love and be worth saving. So, she sided against him and then they fought. It seemed as if Ares would win because his power was too strong for Diana, for even though she was a God Killer, she was only half God, while Ares was a full God and had been practicing at it a lot longer than she. In the movie, you can see her almost give in and give up, but it wasn’t until she lost the love of her life before her eyes in a most traumatic way that she was able to find her true powers as a God. It was in that moment of pure agony of losing something so great and so new and so young that she found the strength she needed to defeat Ares. The only problem was that her power, while great, was mired in pain, hatred, and suffering. Sometimes, we all lose ourselves in our traumas and sufferings. We feel weak and defeated. This is far from the truth. For we are strongest when we are weakest. Sounds silly and ridiculous but it isn’t. Because if we dig deep down and even open our hearts and souls to the powers that we cannot always see, we will see that glimmer of hope and light in the midst of the darkness. All you need is that tiny spark to start a fire, a fire full of passion that can consume the weakness and burn it from our very nature. So, while in her weakened state of losing love, she found her God strength, yet it was unharnessed and harsh and punishing. It wasn’t until she stopped for a second before sealing her fate as to whether she would side on the side of darkness and hate or that of love and light, that she remembers what it was her love had told her. He said he could save them today but she could save the world. He said he loved her and then he left to save the day. He didn’t realize that he was also saving the world too because out of his love and his courage for not only mankind but for his men and for Diana, he showed her that mankind was worth the sacrifice, that there is beauty among the rubble and that not everyone is full of evil and hate. And it was through his sacrifice and his love for Diana, that she realized that humans were worth saving and in that moment she was able to harness that ravaging emotional raw power into something that could beat Ares, because after all, love beats hate any day, right?

We may find our strength and our power through pain and suffering, but it is through love that we are able to change people and the world and to make a difference. We see this human side of Diana, where she starts out innocent and losses innocence over time. We see her rejoice in happiness and cry in the throws of loss and sorrow. We see her laugh and dance in the light of love. We see her struggle internally after losing that love, but then we see her find it again and it is beautiful. And in that new found love, she fights for mankind. She puts her uniform on and she finds a way to see the beauty in mankind worth saving. I love this line from the movie, “It's not about what you deserve, it's about about what you believe, and I believe in love.”