It's always nice to be recognized, either in agreement or disagreement.
I'd like to believe that I did a good job of expressing myself in my article, so I'm not going to defend it here. But I will say it was never a matter of "Marston Good/Azzarello Bad." I think Marston made good choices and bad choices. (I could say the same about Azzarello.) But I think Marston brilliantly, and appropriately, subverted the near-ubiquitous Paternal Narrative by replacing it with a (rare!) Maternal Narrative, and I describe why I thought that was a good thing. And how the Daughter of Zeus origin is a retreat to the Paternal Narrative, and why I thought that wasn't a good thing.
Admittedly I went into a little more detail than that...
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I've always liked young superpowered Diana on Paradise Island, but I realize that it makes the contest something of a farce. So here's my head canon: Wanting to compete fairly, Diana goes to Magala before the contest and asks her to cast a spell that will remove Diana's powers and store them in an urn. (Grecian, of course!) This is a difficult spell, but with Diana's complete cooperation Magala manages it.
Magala points out that Diana has never trained
without her powers, so Diana will have to improvise and figure out how to do things as a "normal Amazon" during the contest. But Diana is up for the challenge.
We see her struggling with this problem while she competes in the contest. We see her make mistakes as she tries to do things in the way she's used to, but without her powers to back up those actions. And, of course, we see her - with much difficulty - win. Fairly.
She goes back to Magala and has her powers restored. (And what Magala does with the few drops of power she removed from the urn - well, that's a story for another day.)