Tag: wonder woman

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The Germans in Wonder Woman are not Nazis.

I just saw a troubling comment on a gifset of Antiope and her badass three-arrow stunt shot at the three german soldiers on the beach. I love that moment as much as anyone. However, this comment referred to her ‘killing Nazis’. And those men were not Nazis. 

Wonder Woman is set in WW1. Hitler would not come to power for over a decade after WW1 ended. Fascism had not yet become a political force in Europe. In fact, Germany’s treatment as a defeated aggressor instead of as an equal party in the armistice negotiations – and later the Treaty of Versailles – despite the Allies’ equal culpability for the war, directly contributed to the rise of fascism and nationalism in Germany.

Stop calling the German soldiers in Wonder Woman Nazis. One of the greatest tragedies of WW1 is that the soldiers on both sides of the trenches were hungry, young, sick, poor men, who had no stake in the war. This article talks about the experiences (at least early in the war) of both sides on the Western front meeting on no man’s land and finding little difference between one another. 

There’s a lot to love about Wonder Woman, and I very much enjoyed it. I also loved the points in the movie when the violence done by Americans and British – such as when Diana speaks to Chief about the death of his people – were addressed as well, but they were brief. The presentation of Germans As The Bad Guys – especially since Aries’ influence was inconsistent as a plot point – has led to people mistakenly reading it as a movie about Nazis, when the Nazis did not exist in 1918. A WW1 setting does not sustain a narrative of one side being ‘heroic’ and the other ‘villainous’, especially if one takes into account the atrocities both sides had committed during the quarter century leading up to the armistice. It troubles me that this movie allows WW1 German soldiers to be read as Nazis. 

Please stop referring to Nazis in the context of Wonder Woman.

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I think this lends to an underlying point that Aries was trying to cause chaos on all sides apparently including the audience

As Steve points out in the movie, World War I isnothing like World War II… the whole thing was just a big mess…there was no one country that was on the “right” side, just callous people in power all over the world sending kids off to get massacred and not caring about the damage it was doing and the lives it was destroying

It’s worth noting that Steve’s side isn’t really shown to be any more “Right” or heroic than the Germans are…while Ludendorf and Dr Poison are cetrainly villains as well, when we meet them the people in charge on Steve’s side they’re a bunch of clueless, cruel, self important, sexist old men who don’t care about the troops on their own side which is pretty much 100% accurate to what World War I was like…the people giving the orders back then were all basically General Melchett from Blackadder Goes Fourth except even less rational…hell the only person who showed ANY compassion among those in power on Steve’s side turns out to be the GOD OF WAR and only be doing it to further his own evil plans 

Diana doesn’t side with any country in the conflict either…she works with Steve and the team he puts together because they’re good people not because they’re not German…

What I also found fascinating is that the God of War is literally the dude who put together the armistice.  The one that lead directly (with a combination of other factors) to the rise of Hitler and Nazism. He outright tells Diana in the climax that the armistice has been put together to deliberately provoke continuous war in an attempt to get humanity to destroy itself, which … if you factor in the Cold War and the US battles against communism and foreign terrorism, is basically what we got. 

The villain in Wonder Woman isn’t the Germans, Diana only assumes that Aries is posing as a German because her entry into the war is through Steve, an American soldier working with the British. The villain is really very literally war itself, and with the framing device we see very clearly that this is a battle that will never end.