10.22
Even germs are able to beat up Superman this season.
A long wait for a horrible episodes, dears. After dealing with monkeys and Greek mythology, Justice League now believes that feminism can be handled correctly. Of course, the show has been able to deal with female characters without demonizing them. And after all, Superman’s been more of a punching bag on the show than Wonder Woman or Hawkgirl ever are. So the episode can’t be that bad, right?
With a male production staff, and a female writer not to been until the second season of Unlimited, the idea of a balanced view towards feminism wasn’t going to happen in this episode. Instead, we see the typical man-hating psychopath whose slimmest of motives get thrown out in favor of pure, unbridled rage. She can kick Batman’s ass. She can kick Superman’s ass. She can even make the Injustice League think she’s a better villain than Luthor, and yet our dear Aresia doesn’t have the personality to show it. There’s no depth or realistic motivation behind that stoic demeanor. For all her supposed intelligence and strength shown in the story, Aresia lacks the reason. Don’t talk about how she came from a war-torn country, because women can commit war crimes too. Women can be murderous pirates too. But no, Aresia happens to get everything bad handed to her by men. And even that gets taken away when we’re told how she thanks her life to a captain. With that, Aresia is literally without a cause.
But then, Justice League hasn’t had a particularly good track record with positive or even layered depiction of women. For instance, the first story had Themyscira refusing to help save the Earth from White Martians, despite how they’ll clearly attack the island once they’re done. When we see them again, they all end up petrified by a single man with only decades of knowledge in comparison to Hippolyta’s centuries. Last episode had a villainess who was only motivated for Love out of Grodd (who happens to never be mentioned again). Then, there’s how Batman faked a romance with Cheetah in order to take advantage of her and screw with the Injustice League. These examples may seem like nitpicking, but they show a clear problem in Justice League’s stance towards gender.
And dear Themyscira becomes the resident village of idiots throughout the season. Combined with the examples listed above, more Themysciran incompetence resonates in how they couldn’t figure out that Aresia escaped the island even though she was away for weeks despite being known to be a possible danger among other Amazonians. Hell, Hippolyta doesn’t even think until the climax to tell Aresia that a man saved her life. Her indirect ignorance was why the world almost ended in this story. Once again, feminism gets knocked down due to the idea that global anarchy and ruin almost happened just because a woman couldn’t bother to tell someone the straight facts. You could explain this conundrum due to Themyscira obviously being an island based on female supremacy with no mention of men, but there lies in how male gods are rooted into their Greek mythology. Figures like Hermes even appear later in the show without causing a major issue among the Amazonians. Hippolyta even had a relationship with Hades, for crying out loud. She holds not only ignorance, but complete and utter stupidity for not being able to even educate our main villain on how the male gender works besides “they are bad”.
While misogyny does get made fun of in the next story, the show still features one decade’s worth of biases and values complaining about another era’s. While superheroines no longer have to be the damsels in distress or the subservient sidekick, they still get treated badly enough for this to be an actual issue. Essentially, one prejudice has been traded for another. The show preaches balance between genders for this story, but this carries a bad undertone from the very structure of a 28% amount of representation at the least for one gender, which becomes an overestimate due to Hawkgirl’s lack of a focus story this season.
And implications don’t just get played for the villains. Hilarity is made out of how Wonder Woman still doesn’t understand Earth culture. However, the sad side-effect shows in how Wonder Woman becomes a mouthpiece for how women shouldn’t wear makeup or perfume. Diana is speaking with a man’s voice here, standing on a little soapbox and using some cheap jokes to make a point before the games begin on this episode. But even during the action scenes, does the idea of gender equality become questionable within the show. The idea that Diana and Shayera can be independent female characters gets heavily downplayed by how Hawkgirl and Wonder Woman need Star Sapphire’s help to do so much as rescue people. And even then whatever characterization Star Sapphire gets from that betrayal is rendered a ruse, allowing her to sit back down as a generic henchman among cardboard antagonists.
So here we have it, a message for gender equality heavily brought down by poor hindsight and little thought put forward. This episode is the equivalent of a man who voluntarily defecates himself telling you to learn your manners. And of course, the episode ends with Wonder Woman offering her praises towards the male gender. If this were any other show, that would be followed up with the entire cast laughing while the credits roll. But as we know, the show goes on…