Wonder Woman/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples from Wonder Woman in Comics


  • Complete Monster: Genocide. Dear God, Genocide. The first time we see her, she crushes the skull of an innocent. She also pulls a Kneel Before Zod on WW while Genocide is holding up a shopper. Wondy complies: "Is this to give me a sense of defeat, monster?" Genocide replies, "No. A better view." CRONCH.
    • Doctor Psycho is far, FAR worse. Genocide is just a particularly sadistic Omnicidal Maniac. Doctor Psycho is a sick fuck whose intense misogyny fuels some of the most utterly depraved and just plain disgusting behavior in the DCU. There's nowhere one can even start when it comes to listing his atrocities thanks to the sheer amount and severity of them. While Vandal Savage may have been around far longer and done far more horrible things in his time, we haven't seen him do anything quite as bad as some of Psycho's worst.
      • Which makes the one scene in which he interacts with her in her final pre-Flashpoint arc so poignant: He wants to restore her proper timeline because he senses they are connected somehow, and he wants to be close to her. So... not a complete monster.
  • Dork Age: The I Ching kung fu period.
    • Subverted with the current run. Who is Wonder Woman? was a good start, but the return of her secret identity did not make fans optimistic; Love & Murder wasn't bad either, but Jodi Picoult misunderstood a lot of Wonder Woman's background, and then there was Amazons Attack, which was not popular among fans. But, just when Wonder Woman was a (yet another) low point, the series became awesome.
  • Fetish Fuel Station Attendant: Blatantly S&M during the William Moulton Marston era, and T&A during the current age of comics.
  • Hate Dumb: A lot of people with a vocal negative view on the character and/or comics believe they know about Wonder Woman from the TV show, a few poor comics, or assumptions. These people Did Not Do the Research, yet are listened to by the editors and writers more than is logical. The fact that she did not get a singular guiding purpose until 20+ years ago makes it that much more frustrating.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Wonder Woman (vol. 1) #296 featured a villain by the name of... Commander Video.
    • An Episode of Justice League had Wonder Woman meeting Hermes with him saying her formality was unnecessary since she was practically part of the family. Come the New 52 where Diana is now the daughter of Zeus.
  • Ink Stain Adaptation: The Lynda Carter TV series, especially since unlike her famous teammates, Diana hasn't had any really well-known adaptations since. When ABC News reported on The Movie, they claimed it would be an adaptation of the TV show with absolutely no mention that, you know, it's a comic book.
  • My Real Parents: For the modern generation, Gail Simone and Greg Rucka. For a generation ago, George Perez.
  • Motive Decay: Cheetah III, Giganta, and Circe all have severe cases of this.
  • Ruined FOREVER. The new reinterpretation literally has fans saying this.
    • The most annoying thing in all of it is that all those angry fans dance exactly as DC wants them too and everybody with at least a minimal level of genre savviness can see that this change was never intended to be permanent from a mile outright. Hell, the creators all but outright said that it's not intended to be permanent (although certain elements -- presumably, the costume among them -- are intended to remain).
  • We're Still Relevant, Dangit: The new costume has come under fire for this. Especially since that for a 2010 retool, the style seems awfully Nineties...
    • Because there have been so many failed live-action adaptations of the show, there are a lot of rejected treatments, film scripts and that infamous 2011 pilot floating around the internet. Despite the fact that fans are scrambling for something to happen (considering there have been 8 live-action Superman adaptations and 5 of Batman, fans are afraid that a live-action WW is quickly entering the Duke Nukem Forever territory of being physically impossible to live up to the hype around it), they just cannot agree on what it should be.

Examples from Wonder Woman in Live Action TV

  • Ear Worm: The TV theme song. Sure, Batman and Superman get full orchestras, but only WW gets a funk bassline and backup singers.
  • Hollywood Homely: Mocked a bit in "Beauty on Parade". Diana proposes infiltrating a USO beauty pageant to find a saboteur. Steve objects, thinking they would need somebody really gorgeous to pull off an undercover like that. Diana does it behind his back, and the enthusiasm from the pageant organizers reveals that Steve is, well, kind of a moron.
  • Narm Charm: Reaches its peak in "Skateboard Whiz", when Wonder Woman -- you guessed it -- chases a fleeing car on a skateboard. It is impossible not to love it.

Examples from Wonder Woman in the 2009 DTV Animated Movie

  • Broken Aesop: The film has some very important things to say about women and men, and how they relate to each other... if only it could make up its mind what those things are.
  • Fan Service: The whole damn movie.
  • Les Yay: Inevitable given the source material, but practically everyone seems to agree that Artemis is a lesbian in this version.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Hades, dear lord Hades. He initially refused to remove Ares' shackles, claiming that Zeus had asked him not to. What he neglected to mention was that Zeus asked him not to because he foresaw that it would get Ares killed.

Hades to Ares when he appears in the Underworld after his death: A tragedy. A terrible terrible tragedy. How it weighs on my heart to see you like this. When my brother asked me not to remove your bands he said I was only dooming you, that he could not save you from yourself yet again. Perhaps, I should have listened.

  • Moral Dissonance: "Men are cruel, bloodthirsty and untrustworthy", says Hippolyta. And yet, she has no problem killing her own son - a son she considers to have been "cursed" upon her, as if she didn't willingly lay with Ares - and no problem essentially violating Steve Trevor's spirit with the Lasso of Truth. Not to mention how Artemis was perfectly willing to simply kill a prisoner. Possibly justified in that she killed her son to protect her fellow Amazons, who he was happily murdering. And Ares 'forcing him on me like a curse' might mean something else...
  • Nightmare Fuel: The Underworld is not a pretty place.
    • Subverted post-Flashpoint: when Diana responds with horror when she realizes everything in the Underworld is made of the souls of the dead - including the stones she is walking on - Hermes replies that, for the immortal souls, it is not horrible - they will change into a myriad forms throughout eternity.
  • Straw Man Has a Point: Persephone's arguments about the wrongness of Hippolyta's hiding the Amazons away from Man's World:

Hippolyta: "You were given a life of peace and beauty!"
Persephone: "And denied one of families and children. Yes Hippolyta, the Amazons are warriors, but we are women too."

Examples from Wonder Woman in the 2011 TV pilot

  • Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: See Designated Hero
  • Designated Hero: Wonder Woman. As Linkara, otherwise a fan of the character, puts it, "flaunts the law; she threatens, extorts, tortures and outright kills. When Alan Moore did this with superheroes, it was commentary on the medium. When this show does it, it's because it can't think of anything better to do!"
  • Straw Man Has a Point: The head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who calls Wonder Woman out on her extreme vigilante tactics.
  • Xenafication: Xena herself was ten times as compassionate and sympathetic. This version of Wondy seems to have been built around the notion that "strong women need to be more ruthless than anyone else!"