7 Uncomfortable Superhero Origins That Sorely Need Updating

2. Wonder Woman

It's not like Princess Diana of Themyscira has a particularly strange origin compared to that of other superheroes. It's just that...well, you'll see. After growing up in a tribe of women called the Amazons on Paradise Island, Diana comes across downed pilot Steve Trevor and fights for the right to take him back to 'Man's World'. She is quickly enthralled by the place and wishes to stay in it to fight crime and be with Steve, who she's in love with because of course she is. We've all heard stranger stories than that, and it sounds like it would be fine for a one-off story in which a woman who's never met a man falls for the first one she sees only to find out he's a cad when she brings him back home in the context of all the other men in the world, but Trevor never turns out be a bad guy and so Wonder Woman is perpetually stuck in that pubescent phase of being all doe-eyed about her first boyfriend. That and the remoteness of her origin with the Amazons make her a hard character to really relate to, other than the idea of moving into a big city for the first time. And the acquisition of her secret identity (she swaps names with a nurse called Diana Prince who looks exactly like her and wants to move to South America) feels incredibly flimsy, almost like an afterthought by the writer, William Moulton Marston. He wanted (and was encouraged by his wife) to create a female superhero who resolves conflicts "with love", but that's not exactly what he ended up with.