Originally Posted by
Artemisfanboy
Personally I feel the JSA should either have Wonder Woman, or as much a direct analogue as possible. The argument that Diana being a retconned legacy character cheapens her by being given a predecessor, doesn't hold much water for me. From a real world perspective, the retconned predecessor is going to be seen as the spin-off character. "She" would only exist to fill the void in the fiction left behind by choosing to have Diana start in the present. From an in-universe perspective I'm not sure Diana loses enough by not being the first Amazon to leave Paradise to justify outright denying the JSA a direct replacement. For whatever reason, neither Quality's Ms America or the Golden Age Fury seemed to have had clicked as replacement members, while Hippolyta did.
Post-crisis, I feel they should have just been given another Amazon, either from Themyscira, or a rogue good member of Bana-Mighdall for a stand in. That's the kind of character the Golden Age Fury should have been. As a Themysciran, she simply would have ultimately chosen to leave behind Themyscira having fallen in love and having her daughter, Infinity Inc's Fury. She need not have had any real contact with Diana growing up. She also could have been used to help patch Donna Troy's origin by having her be the one to rescue her from the fire and bring her to Themyscira. She certainly wouldn't had used the Wonder Woman name, but other wise make her as much a stand in as possible to maintain the continuity. If you absolutely dead set on minimizing Themyscira's possible outside contact prior to Diana leaving, making their member come from the Bana could have possibly also worked. May I ask how those objecting to the JSA getting another Amazon from Themyscira, would you also object to them instead getting one from the Bana instead?
I also never had a problem with Hippolyta acting as the Golden Age Wonder Woman, but felt the time travel added an unnecessary layer. If Time travel was to involved it should have been Diana going back in time and getting stranded for duration of her JSA membership. At one time I would have strongly favored removing the time travel element and just having Hippolyta leave the Island during the forties and retire with the rest of the JSA in 1951, so as to maintain the continuity while streamlining it. That was however two reboots and over eight years ago, and with a clean slate I'm more fairly able to evaluate the the pro's and cons of having Hippolyta as the Golden Age Wonder Woman. I'm able to see enough merit in the counterpoints to consider other options.
With a clean slate, I could definitely get behind the idea of just having Diana be immortal and start her career during WWII or even WWI to mirror the movie continuity. Her being veteran member for the Justice League the others look to for leadership and advice doesn't bother me. And for bonus points it can also be used to enable Donna to go back to her original origin in full with no alterations. How you deal with the non-immortal supporting cast members is a question for debate. Though right now we're not working with a clean slate. While I'm not really happy with the history we got with rebirth, I feel it's bit too soon for another complete reboot. Wilson is currently working towards getting Themyscira reopened. The only thing that really needs to actively retconned and fixed is Donna and getting her back to being Diana's adopted sister and getting rid of this evil clone weapon nonsense for good.
For our other potential existing candidates, we have Exoristos, Hessia, and Myrina. Back when I though they might have actually planned out things in advanced, I thought they might be planning make Myrina fill the spot since she had been mentioned to have fought some golden age wonder woman villains(Red Panzer, Minister Blizzard) and she'd been established to have been in the outside world since roman times. Robinson moving Diana's and Jason's births, and by extension Grail's, and Myrina's leaving the island to modern times sinks that. I'm kind of glad because I really did not like Myrina, and I don't think I can see her being a member of the JSA in good standing. My personal choice with these options would be Exoristos as I really liked her in Demon Knights, but we have to find a way to get her to the forties from the middle ages by some means.