Originally Posted by
kjn
One thing I've learned through reading is that it's seldom the amount of words that determine enjoyment. Many of my favourite works are short stories or novellas. I'm still learning to read comics, and so far I'm focusing on learning the visual storytelling used, partly because I find the typographical conventions of comics to be rather unsuited to concentrated reading.
Flash catching a missile should be easier for him than Wonder Woman, no argument. Him stopping it dead in its tracks wholly another, that'd require a lot of effort or ingenuity.
But this also goes back to the discussion about #60. Wonder Woman acts slightly differently from other superheroes, or actors in this story. Ares (and for that matter Etta Candy) desires peace through security. Their peace is an dead battlefield. Diana desires security through peace, and thinks more like a teacher than a soldier. Her peace is soldiers giving each other hell by playing soccer with each other.
Seen from that lens, her accompanying two kids is entirely in character. She could destroy everything in sight, but that would escalate the conflict. She wants to teach the kids how to handle a situation like this on their own, when she isn't there. She makes a risk assesment that sneaking over ground was preferably to flying relatively slowly (to keep the kids safe), but changes it once they are actually fired upon.
I wrote earlier about effort expanded to help the kids, and I might need to nuance that. The actual physical effort is probably negligible. But the emotional effort isn't, and her letting two kids keep pace with her limits her physical options considerably. So it's part emotional investment, part accepting limitations on her actions.
To take the battalion of soldiers as another example. Diana of this story would have no problem destroying (as in killing a large fraction of) even a well-prepared and experienced infantry battalion. But that's not her nature. Getting past them or subduing when they know she is coming and without causing undue harm to them is the real challenge that she faces.
No, I'm not saying that you need to turn off your brain. Rather, that increasing one's ability to see patterns in fiction needs to be matched by increasing one's ability to unsee or enjoy those patterns by understanding them. To use the brain more.
Take fridging. Once one learns to see fridging, i.e. becomes sensitised to it, one can see it everywhere. One reaction to that is to quit enjoying fiction that employs it, but then you run the risk of starting to see (or create) false positives, or becoming so sensitive that nearly any bad thing happening to a female character causes you to lose enjoyment. A more fruitful approach is to study it and one's own reactions to it, to learn where it is justified, or to set it aside to enjoy the rest of the story. Because one fridging by itself is not necessarily a bad thing—the problem is the pattern of systematic use in stories.
Because I'm afraid that's what has happened to some posters here. Due to the many mistreatments (both in characterisationa and in nerfings) and repeated discussion, one becomes too sensitised to nerfings without learning coping mechanism to handle that sensitivity.