#Which we literally see nothing of but sure petez whater you say

[autisticcassandracain]

You are absolutely correct and this is exactly what I was aiming at. Perez's run does a LOT of victim blaming regarding rape; this is entrenched into his backstory for Themyscira. In the golden age pre-crisis backstory, this victim blaming was entirely absent. The bracelets were a symbol to remind the Amazons never to submit to men again; they were a symbol of resistance against the violence men had brought into their lives. While the golden age backstory is obviously gender essentialist, it also seemed to have, ironically, much more compassion for victims of violence, and outright celebrated them fighting back.

Perez not only did away with this, but straight out promoted the opposite message; that victims fighting back against their abusers makes them just as bad, and is as equal a sin.

Antiope is why I can't brush Hippolyte and Heracles' relationship off as an honest mistake; someone genuinely failing to see the messaging here. Because Perez does literally the exact same thing he did with Hippolyte and Heracles AGAIN, with the sister who was supposed to be the unforgiving one. At this point, it's a pattern of rape apologism, especially if we factor in the work he did on the Judas Contract. I have a mighty hard time believing that it wasn't 100% intentional to show preferential treatment towards rapists. When your writing makes me seriously question whether you're actively advocating for rape apologism, we have a problem.

And god. The Bana-Mighdall. I'll be honest; I just couldn't get through the sheer amount of racism in that arc. I skipped it, and that was unofficially the end to my reading Perez's run, because it got nearly impossible to follow after skipping that much.

I am not against arcs about the importance of forgiveness, but Perez's writing centers it in a way that condemns any victim that does not immediately and irrevocably forgive their rapists and abusers. Anything less than total acceptance of them into society and into your heart is a moral failing. Furthermore, he goes the extra mile by blaming Hippolyte for the invasion of the city (or at least, not having the narrative refute her self-blame; forgive me if I'm confusing this with something else, it's been a while, but I distinctly remember Hippolyte blaming herself for getting the girdle stolen even though there was nothing she could've done). This leaves with a narrative that says 'what heracles did was wrong and bad, but what the amazons did in response was just as bad, and also it was their fault anyway'. It's despicable and it baffles me not a single writer at DC has attempted to address this (at least, not to my knowledge).

This is also why I simply do not buy anon's assertion that Perez deliberately made the gods worse. While certain gods are portrayed as horrifically shortsighted and/or incompetent (Zeus) and others as outright evil (Ares), the goddesses dealing with the Amazons are presented as fundamentally in the right for blaming the Amazons for fighting back against their abusers, and punishing them eternally for it. Paradise Island was called this for a reason, in the golden age; it was a refuge from the violence enacted upon the amazons, granted to them by a benevolent divine being as a response to another's violence. 'Paradise Island', in Perez's run, is explicitly a honeytrap; no matter how beautiful the outside, the inside is rotten, and it's the Amazons' job to guard it for all eternity as penance for killing those who beat, raped, and murdered them. It is not a refuge; it is punishment.

Genuine question: how the fuck did the Amazon origin story become infinitely more sexist the second time around, when we were supposed to have progressed our understanding of feminism?

Anyway, to get back to the gods: if it was Perez's goal to make them worse, to use them as a scapegoat, he would not have made them in the right in this. It would have been so easy to exploit the fact that the Greek Gods and Greek Mythology is chock full with rape and rape apologism; he clearly knew about this, considering he played into it in Challenge of the Gods. Aphrodite, one of the key gods in Themyscira's backstory, has an entire scene in the Iliad where she tells Helen to shut up and go serve her husband, lest she make an enemy out of her (Helen, in the Iliad, is a clear unwilling captive of Paris, now her husband). Perez could've easily framed them as hypocritical and unfair, working by outdated moral standards that benefit them and them alone.

But he didn't. Because he wanted his message to be that fighting back against your abusers is bad. That forgiveness trumps all, even common sense and self defense. That women who fight back against their rapists deserve to be punished.

Perez's gods are used as a moral compass. It's just pointing in the wrong direction.

So, Wonder Woman is basically Moon Knight. And of course the gods are even worse than myth ever since COIE because George Perez wanted to play the unreliable narrator trope with classical mythology. (Think Queen Hippolyta and Heracles.)

I’ve never read Moon Knight and know nothing about him so I don’t get what you mean hy that, and I can’t figure out what COIE stands for either, nor do I know what you mean when you say Perez ‘wanted to play the unreliable narrator trope’ (which is not a trope but a literary device, I’m sorry but I can’t resist being pedantic).

That said the greek gods in the comics are in no way worse than in the myths. Like at all. It is pretty much impossible to present the gods in a fashion worse than they were in Greek Mythology. Nearly all male gods are rapists. Nearly all gods in general are vain, prone to anger, and do not tolerate anything less than uncompromising worship. Almost all gods have atrocities on their hands, though the extent of them tends to vary from myth to myth and source to source.

Something to note is that there is not really a set 'canon’ to greek mythology. We have our primary sources, but they often contradict each other. A lot of our primary sources are also, in and of themselves, interpretations of stories that would’ve been well-known to the audience, but are unknown to us. What the gods did or didn’t do is heavily dependent on the source you’re reading. Euripides, in particular, is famous for casting the gods in a bad light and focusing on their flaws. He’s the one who wrote The Madness of Heracles (about Hera driving Heracles to madness in which he kills his wife and kid), Hippolytus (in which Aphrodite orchestrates the murder of a man for worshipping Artemis and disdaining her; the murder involves making his stepmother fall in love with him and then having her commit suicide), etc etc. Reframing myths to put more blame on the gods (or highlight that which was already there) is hardly a Perez original. The exact role the gods did or did not play in certain tragedies in greek mythology is often in flux.

The issue with Hippolyta and Heracles’ relationship is not with any mythological aspect; it’s because Perez himself decided that raping someone does not mean you can’t still have a romantic subplot with them.

In greek mythology, rape was almost universally glossed over and not seen as a big deal. Most if not all Greek heroes, and a lot of the gods, are rapists, and this is rarely presented as even so much as a character flaw. I am no classicist, I am not super familiar with ancient Greece’s attitude towards rape at the time most myths were codified, but Ancient Athens in particular had really shitty views on women, and since Athens was the cultural center of ancient greece, this is where a lot of our primary sources come from (in particular the plays), which absolutely influences the way women were portrayed in the texts. It is not that the texts are untirely unaware that rape is bad (just like they’re not entirely unaware that it sucks to be a slave), but when they choose to engage with it is highly selective. So, basically, rape was commonplace, and usually, the act of rape was not that big a deal.

This is not the case in Perez’s writing. In Perez’s work on Wonder Woman, rape is explicitly framed as a violent, evil act. He is clearly writing from a modern perspective, where rape is near universally condemned. But he then proceeds to handwave it anyway and write a romantic subplot between a rapist and his victim, multiple times. This is not a historical sourcetext from a long dead civilization that had wildly different values than our own; this is a modern text that should’ve known better. It is also not adequately explained by godly intervention (while Heracles’ rage and behaviour was influenced by the gods, he wasn’t outright possesed), and even if it was, this would still he a highly questionable thing to put in your writing. And even outside of Wonder Woman, Perez co-wrote the Judas Contract, which displayed a similar issue with rape apologism. His handling of mythology is not the issue here.

Once again, super not a classicist; I’ve never had an opportunity to study greek mythology, and my reading is limited to the Iliad, the Oresteia, the Bacchae, and assorted plays by Euripides (the guy mentioned above), as well as whatever stray academic papers I’ve managed to get my hands on. Notably, my knowledge of Heracles is emberassingly small. My historical knowledge is also really not impressive. I might very well be talking out of my ass here (and I’m certainly and intentionally missing nuance and detail bc I’m not getting into All That).

But to my view, while Perez’s hellenic gods were hardly the most mythologically accurate, he did not make them substantiably worse than they were in myth (in fact, a lot of his gods - like Aphrodite - were portrayed as substantiably more moral). And claiming that gods in comics are portrayed as morally worse BECAUSE of perez is honestly ridiculous. The idea that someone with even a base knowledge of greek mythology wouldn’t have decided to explore the fucked up aspects of the greek gods if perez hadn’t gone there first is honestly ridiculous.