Okay so I watched the new Wonder Woman and I liked it quite a bit but one thing that made me curious was that it was set directly during the first World War. That got me thinking did the DC universe timeline coincide with our own? Did they have all our events that we went through take place with actual super humans living among them?
Was there a second world war and if so did Wonder Woman try and prevent the Holocaust from happening? I mean she must have right? She was so shocked about the innocents dying in the first war.If she thought that was bad how could she handle the second?
These universes use the logic that everything happened like in our own unless it was noted in one of the movies/series within said universe, so the answer is yes until such time that an entry retcons the fact that what happened in reality happened in universe.
An example is the fact that in Iron Man 1 and 2, we're shown that S.H.I.E.L.D. seems to be as well known in universe as it would if someone today stated they where from the agency, yet in Ant Man we're shown that it had a large headquarters under construction in the early 90s in D.C., showing that it was like the NSA in that it was publicly known but most where unaware of it until the events of The Avengers, similar to the NSA before the Snowden leak.
Diana at the end of the movie is all happy and shit, but in BvS we see her as as someone who lost hope in humanity. I suppose she became that way in World War II. There's no way she could have stopped the whole Holocaust.
The reason she was so eager to interfere in the Great War was because she believed everyone was being manipulated by Ares and weren't responsible for their actions. By the end of the film she realised Men were largely responsible for their own actions and the atrocities they commit against each other so she may not be so willing to interfere in such a large scale conflict in the future.
No, 'cause the man she slept with died, therefore there's no good in the world. Remember, the entire movie was basically about how no woman can reach their true potential until a man loves them.
So Captain Kirk gets offed, Diana goes super-Sayan for like a minute, then decides everything is terrible, and I guess goes to live in closet for the next 80 years, complaining to her cats until a billionaire man tells her to stop.
She almost certainly didn't. I mean, comics operate on a "real world unless otherwise stated" premise, so all the major historical beats of the 20th century were hit despite the fact that there was a demigod prancing around Belgium for a few weeks in 1917.
If I had to fan-wank it, I'd say this: rather than showing Diana having a crisis of faith and deciding to just abstain from world wars in the future, the film was making the point that a lone superhero - no matter how powerful - can't do that much to prevent world war from happening or to stop it once it's started. Diana breaks through No Man's Land in thirty seconds, but the village she rescues just gets gassed five minutes later and the front lines don't appear to move at all.
For Diana to have stopped the Holocaust would require that she a) knew it was happening (it may have been too gruesome to contemplate even after her WWI experience) and b) was able to break past German lines, break open the death camps, and escort the starving Jewish prisoners all the way back to Allied territory. And for a lot of the war, France was held by the Nazis, and Italy and Greece were both on Germany's side. She can't take the refugees to Russia because they'd probably die on the trip and Russia couldn't give two shits about feeding Jewish refugees. Her best bet would be somehow crossing the Alps, getting to the Mediterranean and having the Amazons to smuggle the Jews off to...somewhere? Where? Spain, which was also fascist? The Middle East, which was also massively anti-Semitic? Her best bet would be the Palestinian mandate or freakin' Africa. Just making that trip on foot alone is something of a feat; she'd survive, but could she really defend hundreds of men, women and children from starvation, sickness, or just bullets? Moving not hat *her* speed, but the speed the prisoners can move?
The Holocaust is a little hard to process; it's six million Jews dead, and that's just the Jews. Diana could maybe look out for what, a few hundred at a time? Optimistically? The majority of the slaughter would continue unabated. She could spent the entire war making prison break trips between Germany and Themyscira, and she still wouldn't make a significant dent in the overall death toll.
There's a really neat comic series called Uber that directly addresses the question of superhumans being used as WW2 military assets. It does have a fair few flaws - it moves very slowly and the Nazis continue to pull new powers out of their ass as the plot demands - but what I liked about it was how it treated the creation of Superman-level superhumans as basically a question of military infrastructure; only certain people can undergo the treatment, it takes X weeks to "manufacture" a superman, they come in power grades and newer "models" are better than older ones, they need downtime for rest and "maintenance" as well as high-calorie food for fuel, and in order to achieve any strategic gains they need infantry support to avoid being cut off and whittled to death.
I mean, what bugged me about that series was that it spends ages establishing all these rules the superhumans have to abide by - they're hard to produce so they can't be wasted on suicide attacks, they can get exhausted so they can't be used without support - and then had the Nazis basically ignore them periodically, because the Nazi superhumans were the bad guys and to be the bad guys they had to be threatening and they couldn't be threatening unless they periodically broke the rules. So they keep making decisions that are intensely stupid under the rules the series itself established, but then win anyway because they have to win because they're the bad guys.
And then in one issue they pull an army of submarines out of their butthole to attack America with, and I got fed up with it and stopped reading. Waste of a good premise.
Silentpony said:
No, 'cause the man she slept with died, therefore there's no good in the world. Remember, the entire movie was basically about how no woman can reach their true potential until a man loves them.
So Captain Kirk gets offed, Diana goes super-Sayan for like a minute, then decides everything is terrible, and I guess goes to live in closet for the next 80 years, complaining to her cats until a billionaire man tells her to stop.
No she didn't, and actually Ares(in his human guise) already did so much damage by pushing what he called the Accords in the movie. The Accords, otherwise known as the Treaty of Versailles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Conference,_1919 put a lot of pressure on Germany in particular. Germany was basically blamed for the war and was expected to pay reparations to other countries. It is a commonly held belief that the humiliation (Germany lost a lot in these deals) led to the rise of the Nazi party.
WW1 was not like WW2 there was no set enemy, no obvious evil. Just a bunch of power hungry Europeans.
As others have said, it is the real world in broad strokes except for some details here and there justified by their presence, so WWII did happen. In fact Ares, Steve and a lot of other characters were pretty clear that, while Ares enjoyed and fomented the conflict, he was not the sole responsible for the existence of war in the world, but humanity as a whole was to blame for it. The disillusion of Diana about what she thought was a black and white, obviously evil created conflict is a mayor point of her arc.
Under that premise, there are no reasons why the uneasy peace earned by "the accords" would not escalate into another world war, like it happened in the real world.
Okay so I watched the new Wonder Woman and I liked it quite a bit but one thing that made me curious was that it was set directly during the first World War. That got me thinking did the DC universe timeline coincide with our own? Did they have all our events that we went through take place with actual super humans living among them?
Was there a second world war and if so did Wonder Woman try and prevent the Holocaust from happening? I mean she must have right? She was so shocked about the innocents dying in the first war.If she thought that was bad how could she handle the second?
If they even address it at all, I'm going to guess that after WW 1, she went back home, thinking her job was done, or at the very least, needing to rethink her life. And time might not flow the same on her island compared to the real world. Sure she's immortal (or at least very long lived), but that doesn't mean a magic island follows all the same rules of physics and nature as everywhere else. Since there are no reports and records of a Wonder Woman running around the world, fighting crime and saving the world between WW 1 and BvS time, I'm guessing she removed herself from the equation until she felt she needed to get involved again.
TLDR: Don't think about it too much, it's comics, and they're fucking stupid and weird 99% of the time.
The Holocaust is a little hard to process; it's six million Jews dead, and that's just the Jews. Diana could maybe look out for what, a few hundred at a time? Optimistically? The majority of the slaughter would continue unabated. She could spent the entire war making prison break trips between Germany and Themyscira, and she still wouldn't make a significant dent in the overall death toll.
She could stab Hitler, preferably before 1942. There's still a war and it's still horrible, but without him in power to insist on some of the most horrible parts and drag it out to the bitter end. Even shortening it by a few months without any change in policy would've saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Dude...
Go outside more, I don't think the internet is having a positive impact on your life. D:
Enjoy the sun and talk about everyday banalities with the waitress that brings you ice tea or whatever, there's so much more to life than this.
One thing people seem to forget is that the Holocaust wasn't really known about until after WWII was over. Some people even think the U.S. got involved in WWII solely to stop the Holocaust, but the fact is that the U.S. didn't even know what was going on. Most people didn't, until the camps were actually found.
So it's entirely possible that Diana had no idea what was happening until it was revealed, and by then it would have been far too late.
I think the implication was that Wonder Woman prevented a far worse alternate outcome for the Great War. By stopping Ares' machinations she brought the historical timeline more or less back in line with our own.
bastardofmelbourne said:
If I had to fan-wank it, I'd say this: rather than showing Diana having a crisis of faith and deciding to just abstain from world wars in the future, the film was making the point that a lone superhero - no matter how powerful - can't do that much to prevent world war from happening or to stop it once it's started. Diana breaks through No Man's Land in thirty seconds, but the village she rescues just gets gassed five minutes later and the front lines don't appear to move at all.
Pretty much this. Demi-god or not, Wonder Woman still isn't invincible, nor can she be everywhere at once. Indeed, it can be argued that it was her altruistic detour that ultimately doomed the village by giving Ludendorff and Dr. Poison the time and rationale to attack it.
Sniper Team 4 said:
One thing people seem to forget is that the Holocaust wasn't really known about until after WWII was over. Some people even think the U.S. got involved in WWII solely to stop the Holocaust, but the fact is that the U.S. didn't even know what was going on. Most people didn't, until the camps were actually found.
So it's entirely possible that Diana had no idea what was happening until it was revealed, and by then it would have been far too late.
Not only that, but many people were skeptical at first. Rumors began to circulate out of occupied Europe that Jews and other groups of people were suffering horribly under the Nazis, but they were believed to have been overblown. This was not entirely without precedent; it was widely believed that Allied propaganda had greatly exaggerated German atrocities in Belgium during the First World War (to what degree said exaggerations were is a subject of debate among contemporary historians, but at the time it was believed to have been mostly fabricated). Even when the Allied armies first started liberating camps it was still initially met with denial and disbelief, as it was difficult for people to wrap their heads around just how horrifying it actually was.
In the novelization Diana's Mom tells her that if she leaves the island she can "Never Return!!!" dum-dum-DUM!!!
And in the very next breath Mommy tells Diana how proud she is of her little girl and that she will love her forever and ever...
I haven't seen the movie yet but if the novel (which was written based on the screenplay) is correct then Diana can't take vacations back on Paradise island.
OT: Nah. I figure they'll gloss over that. bastardofmelbourne was right when he pointed out the tactical, strategic and even logistical nightmare of saving even a few hundred victims, much less millions of people. Diana's a godling but she's hardly all powerful.
Even when the Allied armies first started liberating camps it was still initially met with denial and disbelief, as it was difficult for people to wrap their heads around just how horrifying it actually was.
The Soviets, on the other hand, had seen so many horrible things by the time they starting capturing camps that the aftermath of the Holocaust didn't leave much of an impression. They repurposed them for their own captives and moved on. Even post war, they didn't acknowledge the Holocaust as being anything special.
The Soviets, on the other hand, had seen so many horrible things by the time they starting capturing camps that the aftermath of the Holocaust didn't leave much of an impression. They repurposed them for their own captives and moved on. Even post war, they didn't acknowledge the Holocaust as being anything special.
The Soviets had the dubious advantage of having suffered dramatically greater casualties than either Britain or the US did. Like, thirty or forty times more dead. That, combined with the cynicism of the Stalinist purges in the 20s and 30s and the memory of the post-Revolution civil war before then, meant that the Russians were uniquely inured to the shock of finding out that the Nazis had been executing prisoners on an industrial scale.
I think out of the three million or so Russian POWs captured by Germans, maybe half a million survived the war. The Russians knew what to expect. They didn't exactly hold back [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_crimes#Mass_rapes] when they got to Berlin, either.
Veylon said:
She could stab Hitler, preferably before 1942. There's still a war and it's still horrible, but without him in power to insist on some of the most horrible parts and drag it out to the bitter end. Even shortening it by a few months without any change in policy would've saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Kinda. Maybe. In a lot of ways, though, Hitler was his own worst enemy. It's debatable whether Nazi Germany would've been any less effective with him dead considering there were thirty-something plots to assassinate the guy, all coming from inside his own regime. And what do you do if the replacement Fuhrer is more inclined to ask for an armistice while he's still ahead? Now you've got a stable post-war Nazi Germany, continuing its shenanigans well into the 50s and 60s.
I have a secret theory that the reason why Hitler survived assassination so many times is because sometime in the distant future, someone invented time travel, and the first thing they thought of doing was "kill Hitler." But every time they did, history turned out worse some way or another, so the time cops or whatever just kept saving Hitler's bacon, over and over, to ensure that shit didn't go fucking atomic or whatever.
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