tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16538843.post114051849647946813..comments2024-01-02T09:18:23.893-05:00Comments on Written World: Wonder Woman and ReligionRagnellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00373059673228550524noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16538843.post-1140720805028908142006-02-23T13:53:00.000-05:002006-02-23T13:53:00.000-05:00The next reader of Wonder Woman could do alot wors...<I>The next reader of Wonder Woman could do alot worse than reading Promethea (and Snakes and Ladders) by Alan Moore and adopting some of its tools, though not its storyline, as a way of handling the cosmos Diana is in</I><BR/><BR/>Wait, isn't Moore non-christian, as well, (and Morrison, for that matter)... Wouldn't that make for the better portrayal of a pantheon?<BR/><BR/>I agree with Rab, the american protestant majority is generally blind to their on blinders, and (unless they fall prey to the "persecuted majority" complex, as I mentioned briefly in my own blog: For instance, they persist in seeing the portrayal of the sect Opus Dei as power-hungry in Da Vinci Code, when the sect itself is posed as pious, and the <B>fictional</B> leader power-hungry), are largely unaware of the bias they present, unless they are specifically trying to be unbiased or diverse. It's a natural human failing-If what you have is all that you need, generally you won't expend energy looking to see what else it out there. And basic christian monotheism fulfills the need of the general populace who doesn't want to look any further: It gives them a place to start feeling things mean something, when the world is trying to say otherwise. It's remarkably like the ethic pagan majorities that pre-dated it. *shrug*<BR/><BR/>Now, should we be forgiving of these writers? I mean, on a majority basis, aren't they writing for a group that shares their blinders?<BR/><BR/>Another point: Are the Jewish, Catholic and Protestant monotheistic traditions far enough from the mainstream to count as analogues for the ancient polytheism that Diana practices?ComicBookGoddesshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01972671566599447047noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16538843.post-1140636304944584842006-02-22T14:25:00.000-05:002006-02-22T14:25:00.000-05:00Kalinara, I agree with everything you said...and w...Kalinara, I agree with everything you said...and where we seem to disagree may just be a result of me having chosen my words poorly. (Which happens a lot...which is why I'm trying to make a concise reply to replace the longwinded and pompous one I deleted.)<BR/><BR/>I don't claim there's any all-pervasive Protestant bias in comics...or certainly not a <I>conscious</I> one. But we Americans all grow up in a culture so immersed in certain assumptions and values that we don't even recognize them as such. A lot of our values come from early settlers who came here to practice their religious beliefs, and these values are so engrained in our way of life that we view them as simply "American" values without recognizing their religious roots. Even for a Jerry Siegel or a Stan Lee or a Jack Kirby, a lot of the "Protestant ethic" was the default norm of being American.<BR/><BR/>Some comics writers like Englehart -- or Alan Moore or Grant Morrison, who obviously aren't American but, like many Brits, grew up learning our values through our pop culture and our comics! -- have made a conscious effort to step outside that mindset and examine religious and philosophical questions from an outside perspective. But treating other people's Gods (even archaic ones) fairly does require considerable thought and a deliberate effort to step outside a "box" which is so pervasive that we usually don't even recognize it's there.Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01714171897239398438noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16538843.post-1140564434725384832006-02-21T18:27:00.000-05:002006-02-21T18:27:00.000-05:00This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01714171897239398438noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16538843.post-1140557414105154172006-02-21T16:30:00.000-05:002006-02-21T16:30:00.000-05:00But as a rule, comics writers are so immersed in t...<I>But as a rule, comics writers are so immersed in the default assumption of the Protestant God being the one real God -- even if they themselves aren't believers -- that they can't get outside that headspace. </I><BR/><BR/>Sorry to hijack Ragnell's blogspace but I disagree with this completely. A great many comic book creators *aren't* actually of a Protestant background. For example, the original creators of Superman were Jewish (and a lot of the alien-passing-among-humankind is thought to be a metaphor for their own struggles with their religion and dominant culture). Superman, the character, is Methodist because he was raised in rural Kansas, and that's one of the more common religious affiliations associated with that area.<BR/><BR/>Over at adherents.com, there is a fantastic <A HREF="http://www.adherents.com/lit/comics/comic_book_religion.html" REL="nofollow">list</A> that compiles character beliefs based on creator and writer commentary and visual clues.<BR/><BR/>Let's look at some of the Jewish characters listed:<BR/><BR/>Kitty Pryde as you mentioned, Ben Grimm, Ragman, Colossal Boy/Gim Allon, Atom Smasher/Al Rothstein, Firestorm/Martin Stein, The Atom/Ray Palmer...<BR/><BR/>Now many of these characters are lapsed/non-practicing, it's true, but quite a few are pretty devout in their own quiet ways. And none of them have really had their Judaism used as a Holocaust/Israel related plot point.<BR/><BR/>Heck, even the current Robin, though it was never brought up in the comics itself, was considered by his creator, Chuck Dixon, to be Jewish.<BR/><BR/>The problem, I think, with Diana isn't that she represents a different religious background (though that's been handled with various success), it's that she comes from a background in which the divine interact with humans on a semi-regular basis.<BR/><BR/>The Spectre's God can correlate pretty easy with a wrathful Old Testament God, Wally in Supergirl could correlate pretty easy with the more forgiving New Testament analogy, but that works primarily because of their relative lack of prominence. We don't see the Spectre's God. Wally dances in and out to "work in mysterious ways".<BR/><BR/>But Diana's gods are different, while they represent ideas, no question of that, they've also got very strong literary rooted personalities that are connected with their sphere of worship but also feel enough like individuals on their own. And that clouds the issue.<BR/><BR/>You can get *mythical scholars* who claim they dislike some of the gods of Greek myth (Aphrodite for example, given many of her less than flattering portrayals). Of course they don't hate the prospect of love/lust/sexual fulfillment/procreation...but it's easy to overlook what she *means* and see her just as a female character in a story and respond like that.<BR/><BR/>Is it a fair portrayal, no. But is it an example of an all-pervasive Protestant bias in comics, I don't think it is. It's just a bunch of writers trying to tell a story, responding to stories that came before and not really thinking deeply about the religion behind it.kalinarahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01417686761943716312noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16538843.post-1140555425642632512006-02-21T15:57:00.000-05:002006-02-21T15:57:00.000-05:00In a way, I feel this discussion gives the writers...In a way, I feel this discussion gives the writers at DC more credit for nuance and intent than they actually deserve. Speaking as a lifelong non-Christian, it's always seemed pretty obvious that the DC (and Marvel) position on religion and philosophy is exactly that of mainstream America. Some sort of nondefined Protestantism is the default "normal" state and characters who are anything else -- including Catholic or Jewish or atheist -- are only those things because it's immediately vital to their histories or a significant plot point. There might be one or two exceptions (Kitty Pryde got to be a Jewish character without her backstory involving the Holocaust or Israel or the Golem of Prague or anything like that) but overall, a generalized nonspecific Christianity is the rule. The Spectre is not the voice of a god, but The Voice of The God...and that God is certainly not Yawheh or Allah.<BR/><BR/>The ONE good example I can recall in a superhero comic of a "pagan" viewpoint being depicted as equally valid to a whitebread American viewpoint is in a little-known Marvel comic called <I>Big Town</I> written by Steve Englehart. At one point, Dr. Don Blake confronts a gang of "Odinists" sent by the Red Skull to kill one of Blake's patients. Rather than playing his usual role, Blake stands up to the neo-Nazis and says something to the effect that "You've got it all wrong! I love Odin too! It's true that we admire strength, but we don't prey on the weak, and we hate racism!" For Thor's human alter-ego to "out" himself as a believer in Thor's dad is only logical...but all too rare.<BR/><BR/>The payoff is that the Odinist goons of course refuse to believe him...so Blake becomes Thor, and Thor tells them "My father wouldn't have a single one of you as followers!" <BR/><BR/>Englehart is that rarity who can look at mainstream beliefs with some perspective and distance, so it's no surprise he treats this issue well. I'm sure he'd do equally well by the Greek pantheon. But as a rule, comics writers are so immersed in the default assumption of the Protestant God being the one real God -- even if they themselves aren't believers -- that they can't get outside that headspace.Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01714171897239398438noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16538843.post-1140540323287984492006-02-21T11:45:00.000-05:002006-02-21T11:45:00.000-05:00You're the only person I've met since college who ...You're the only person I've met since college who understands classical paganism.<BR/><BR/>I'm impressed.Scipiohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16217376618860561999noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16538843.post-1140533375211490892006-02-21T09:49:00.000-05:002006-02-21T09:49:00.000-05:00A very nice post, that led me to two different tho...A very nice post, that led me to two different thoughts:<BR/><BR/>re: worship of the Greek gods. Modern folks may ask "How could they worship this?", but the Greeks themselves around the year 0 were asking the same question. It was their rejection of the imperfections in their gods that led them to embrace more Eastern philosophies and eventually led to the embrace of Christianity in the Greek world. And your pagan friend asks the right question, because the Greeks couldn't embrace the Hebrew Old Testament God either. But the Christian God was the type of perfect being that the Greeks could get behind.<BR/><BR/>re: Why can't anyone write Diana? I think you're partly right that Diana is hard to write because she's from an alien culture, and is indeed totally alien because she wasn't even truly born as a human being is. She's (as you point out) a divine being in her own right, and its hard to get into the head of someone like that.<BR/><BR/>But, even more importantly I think, her creator gave the writers very little to work with. The early issues of Wonder Woman, unlike the early issues of Batman or Superman, don't lend themselves well to defining a personality for the character - or at least not one that would work in the modern day. Later writers have had to try to give Diana a personality beyond the one Marsden created for her. And while I think many of them have done okay with what they had (Perez, Messner-Loebs, and Rucka especially), her personality really hasn't gelled completely.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16538843.post-1140530832168251312006-02-21T09:07:00.000-05:002006-02-21T09:07:00.000-05:00As usual, R., you've gotten me thinking. I was co...As usual, R., you've gotten me thinking. I was conflicted after reading <I>WW</I> #225, too, but Rucka piled on such a hearty helping of wish fulfillment that I didn't dwell on it. (For hours after reading the issue, I could be heard muttering "Ummm, wish fulfillment...") Athena said so many things I wanted to hear ... that I didn't cringe too much at the realization that she was cutting herself off at the knees in doing it. <BR/><BR/>The mish-mash of paradigms in the DCU is a big problem. And the heart of the problem is that in the West it's pretty much ingrained in us to think of polytheistic religious thought and ritual practice as an intermediate "stage" in human-kind's progression towards monotheism or rationalism/deism, the "right answers".<BR/><BR/>As a historian of European-indigenous relations, I look at the misery that resulted when a group believing it had attained the "right answer" stage exerted control over peoples whom were judged to be "stuck" in the polytheistic stage of development--so I'm <I>not</I> saying the ingrained way of thinking is a good thing. Though things have, of course, changed in the last 300 years, the wider culture still doesn't "get" that polytheism can be a component of a complex, rich, and coherent system of belief.Melchior del Dariénhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11710950972039068797noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16538843.post-1140530803298522982006-02-21T09:06:00.000-05:002006-02-21T09:06:00.000-05:00Its totally possible in a pantheistic universe or ...Its totally possible in a pantheistic universe or better yet henotheistic (which the DC universe can be cast as) to have both monotheism and pantheism both be right. You can have the Angels and the Pagan gods.<BR/><BR/>The next reader of Wonder Woman could do alot worse than reading Promethea (and Snakes and Ladders) by Alan Moore and adopting some of its tools, though not its storyline, as a way of handling the cosmos Diana is in.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16538843.post-1140522023609601422006-02-21T06:40:00.000-05:002006-02-21T06:40:00.000-05:00Hmm, I also had another thought, the problem with ...Hmm, I also had another thought, the problem with the shared universe in which gods and angels and such actually exist is that essentially, the creators have to determine which, if any, are "right" with regards to the Universe.<BR/><BR/>It's easier to have Pagan Gods as some how "lesser" than a single almighty creative force, because most polytheistic religions do have some sort of "original source" figure, whether it be Chaos, Eurynome, Brahma, Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah et al.<BR/><BR/>So then they try to take the easy way out. Assimilate like the Jesuits...okay, the Judeo-Christian god is Allah is Brahma is Chaos and so on and so forth.<BR/><BR/>Which gets complicated because in most Polytheistic Religions that original creative force is either not really personified or somehow inactive, allowing the Pantheons to be essentially supreme. Whereas in a Monotheistic religion that original creative force is still very much an active force.<BR/><BR/>Thus, when you assemble the correlation: Brahma is Allah is Chaos is Yahweh is Jehovah and so on and so forth, the Pantheons' Power will end up diminished, in some sense.<BR/><BR/>It's not fair really, and it's a gross oversimplification of people's actual belief systems, but when you've got the Earth Angel, Zauriel, Diana and Etrigan running around in the same universe, you need to construct a cosmology to make it all work.<BR/><BR/>Unfortunately, that means some religions unfairly get the shaft. :-(kalinarahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01417686761943716312noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16538843.post-1140521209608125232006-02-21T06:26:00.000-05:002006-02-21T06:26:00.000-05:00It's odd, but I saw Athena's role in 225 to be str...It's odd, but I saw Athena's role in 225 to be strictly symbolic of Diana herself.<BR/><BR/>Athena as the personification of Wisdom representing Diana's own rational mind. She loves the ideal (symbolized by Athena's love for Diana) and what she represents, her cause and righteousness. But I read Athena's implied self-hatred, not so much as the Goddess hating herself, but Diana's rational mind not quite yet able to come to terms with what she had done.<BR/><BR/>I'm not saying Diana's self-hating, but I think that a part of her hasn't forgiven herself for what happened with Max Lord, and the subsequent conflict in the League and the Trinity. Max's death was justified, self defense without a doubt, and the rest of it isn't her fault at all. And I think she'll come to terms with that eventually. And then perhaps the Gods will return.<BR/><BR/>Probably it's because of my own ex-catholic, currently college-freshman-style-undecided religious affiliation, but I've always seen the Gods as something of a Greek Chorus representing Diana's own personal state. I never really read them so much as actual Gods so much as an extended metaphor.<BR/><BR/>I could just be weird though. :-Pkalinarahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01417686761943716312noreply@blogger.com