What origin would you give Donna Troy in Rebirth?

[MarquisAsh]

I think Donna should be the one Hippolyta sculpted from clay. Would explain the likeness of her and Diana.

[Doctor Bifrost]

LOL!

This makes me ponder... What attributes determine if a Donna Troy origin is good or bad?

For me the big two are that she grows up like a normal teen, then gets powers, and that said powers are capable of taking on someone like WW.

That's pretty close to mine, too. As I've said, I would prefer Donna to be a child born in Man's World, who spent some time growing up on Themysicra, and some time growing up in Man's World. In Themysicra she is Hippolyta's adopted daughter and Diana's beloved "little sister." On Man's World, from the time she's a teenager, she's a member of the Teen Titans, where she forges deep, life-long friendships. And I'd like it if, when she's in Man's World, she lives with parents or a guardian, goes to school, and has normal American teenage experiences in addition to being a teenage superhero.

Personally, I'm not very sensitive to power-level issues for characters, but one assumes she grows up to be on Wonder Woman's level.

And that sort of does it for me. I have a number of issues with the Titans of Myth origin, but the primary one is that it entirely severed the family relationship between Donna and Diana. Donna (and the world) didn't even know who Diana was when Donna became Wonder Girl, and the similarities between the two characters were pretty much irrelevant in-story - something left over from previous versions, really. (Later they tried to retcon, or shoehorn, an explanation on top of that, but it never seemed to matter.)

I really dislike the plot lines that ask "Is she human? Does she have a soul? Is she even really alive? Or is she just a... magically-created thing?" (Sometimes these questions have been raised about Diana herself, and that's bad too, but it's rarely been made as a big a deal of as it has with Donna.) That got kicked off by John Byrne's mirror-duplicate story, but they've really doubled down now with the "created from clay to be a murderous weapon" business. I prefer a Donna that starts out human - not just born in Man's World, but in a fairly ordinary way. (No deific parent, not from a family of superheroes, not set on some unalterable path at infancy by some powerful cosmic villain or manipulator. Just human.)

But that's just me.

[astro@work]

I think whatever you do with Donna Troy, she has to have been an American teen-age girl. In the Teen Titans, there was always a difference between her and Starfire or Raven--because they were exotic women who didn't fit in with regular American culture. Whereas, Donna was the hometown girl. I can see her having had training with the Amazons as a youth, but early on in her life she has to come to America and find her home there.

^This right here is it for me. I think it's why I always favored the Donna-as-an-adopted-Amazon origin(s).
I think later writers got too hung up on WHO brought her to the island. Whether it was Diana, Rhea, or a shipwreck that got her there doesn't matter so much to me. It also allows her to be both human AND raised by the Amazons. In any scenario, she works best as the "grounded" one in the Titans.

[WonderScott]

I'm okay with jettisoning the Titans, Rhea, etc. from her origin to something simpler and more Amazon-related.

At this point I vote for Doomsday Clock to reset the universe so Donna can be a tweenage girl rescued by Diana, brought to Themyscira for a time to live, is adopted by the Amazons, granted superpowers by the Purple Ray, and is a founding member of the Teen Titans when she follows Diana back to Man's World after Diana debuts as a superhero.

The tragic multiple lives, clay golem, mirror twin, Titan's seed, etc. origins insanity has to end!

At this point, the only origins she hasn't had is she's a renegade Amazon from Earth 3 or a gynoid robot duplicate created by a villain. (Just kidding, I'm sure there are way more origins we could come up with.)

[MajorHoy]

At this point, the only origins she hasn't had is she's a renegade Amazon from Earth 3 or a gynoid robot duplicate created by a villain. (Just kidding, I'm sure there are way more origins we could come up with.)

You know what a really simple one would have been?
As a youngster Donna and her family were sailing around the world when a storm stranded the boat on an apparently deserted floating island and killed Donna's parents. Then it could turn out the island was inhabited by Nubia and a tribe of Amazons who, in the ancient past, had separated from the followers of Hippolyta before Hippolyta's group had found Themyscira. Nubia and her people then train Donna until a way is found for Donna to return home to the United States, where she then lives with a long-lost relative named Diana Prince.

[Jim Kelly]

I really need to know the official version of Wonder Woman's history, before I can guess what Donna's origin should be. What really screwed up Donna's timeline was the Perez Wonder Woman reboot. Prior to that Wonder Woman had been active long enough that she could rescue the tiny unnamed child from a fire and bring her to Paradise Island. Since Diana was newly arrived in Man's World in 1987, the Wonder Girl long active with the Titans and a young adult now could not have been rescued by Diana as a child. There's no sense making up another origin story for Donna, if Diana's origin isn't nailed down, because Donna's origin will just have to be rewritten again when Wonder Woman goes through another reboot.

[MajorHoy]

I really need to know the official version of Wonder Woman's history, before I can guess what Donna's origin should be. What really screwed up Donna's timeline was the Perez Wonder Woman reboot. Prior to that Wonder Woman had been active long enough that she could rescue the tiny unnamed child from a fire and bring her to Paradise Island. Since Diana was newly arrived in Man's World in 1987, the Wonder Girl long active with the Titans and a young adult now could not have been rescued by Diana as a child. There's no sense making up another origin story for Donna, if Diana's origin isn't nailed down, because Donna's origin will just have to be rewritten again when Wonder Woman goes through another reboot.

All depends on if/how closely Donna's origin is connected to Wonder Woman already being active outside of Themyscira.

[SiegePerilous02]

I really need to know the official version of Wonder Woman's history, before I can guess what Donna's origin should be. What really screwed up Donna's timeline was the Perez Wonder Woman reboot. Prior to that Wonder Woman had been active long enough that she could rescue the tiny unnamed child from a fire and bring her to Paradise Island. Since Diana was newly arrived in Man's World in 1987, the Wonder Girl long active with the Titans and a young adult now could not have been rescued by Diana as a child. There's no sense making up another origin story for Donna, if Diana's origin isn't nailed down, because Donna's origin will just have to be rewritten again when Wonder Woman goes through another reboot.

In the current continuity, Diana definitely hasn't been active long enough to rescue infant Donna who is now a 20-something. And she wouldn't be able to get back to Themyscira even if she did.

So ideally, something else would bring Donna to the island (like Rhea, Aphrodite or Hermes at Aphrodite/Athena's behest) and she would grow to be in the 12-14 range when Diana leaves and she leaves shortly after. They honestly should have done this in the New 52.

[Doctor Bifrost]

I think Donna should be the one Hippolyta sculpted from clay. Would explain the likeness of her and Diana.

Ah! Diana gets Cassie's origin. Donna gets Diana's origin. And maybe Cassie can be a human girl rescued from a fire and taken to mystical realm...

Amazon Three-Card Monte!

(No disrespect intended.)

[MajorHoy]

Ah! Diana gets Cassie's origin. Donna gets Diana's origin. And maybe Cassie can be a human girl rescued from a fire and taken to mystical realm...

And we can always throw in Helena ("Golden Age" Fury) Kosmatos' origin!

[Doctor Bifrost]

I really need to know the official version of Wonder Woman's history, before I can guess what Donna's origin should be.

Well, best of luck on that (to all of us). "The Truth" and "The Lies" spent a lot of time focusing on why Diana spent years of her life believing The New 52 run was her real history when it actually wasn't - a topic I don't find very compelling, and that unnecessarily burdens the character's backstory with "years of appalling fake memories," which will either be (a) an annoying, inconvenient detail going forward, especially for anybody writing flashbacks, or (b) something subsequent writers ignore. Or (c) something eliminated by the end of Doomsday Clock - may it be so!

But they did not spend a lot of time telling us what Diana's origin actually was, which I would have been much more interested in.

(Here's a question: Hera's wrath directed at the children of Zeus's affair with Hippolyta is still a major part of the Wonder Woman story, because Jason's whole backstory is connected to it. In The New 52, we saw how Hera reacted after she found out - and, man!, was that ugly! - and then how she was ultimately reconciled. But in the current continuity...? No idea.)

What really screwed up Donna's timeline was the Perez Wonder Woman reboot.

I don't think it was the Perez reboot so much as it was the decision that those stories were happening in "the current day," rather than being a Year One kind of thing (like Superman and Batman got). I don't think that was Perez's idea. And I also think that decision (but not Perez's stories, which I loved) showed a sort of lack of focus DC had on Wonder Woman, and female characters in general, in the DCU at large. They obviously felt that it made no difference at all if Wonder Woman was no longer a founding member of the Justice League, and that they could just swap in Black Canary instead - as if they were interchangeable, being women characters and all.

Prior to that Wonder Woman had been active long enough that she could rescue the tiny unnamed child from a fire and bring her to Paradise Island.

Actually, I don't agree. This was always a problem with the "Diana-as-Wonder-Woman-rescues-infant-Donna-Troy" story. Even if we ignore actual years and dates (as one did in the Silver Age, and we still do to some extent today), there was a "generational" problem.

We don't know how soon after Batman started operating that Dick Grayson became Robin, but I think most people would agree it would have to be in the first three years or so. (Most would say at the end of Year One.) And we don't know how old Dick was then, but let's guess around 12.

If Diana was active as Wonder Woman when she rescued the infant Donna Troy, then that leaves two possibilities: (1) Diana started her superhero career at least 5-10 years before Bruce Wayne did; or (b) Dick Grayson is at least 5-10 years older than Donna Troy. Or a mix of both. And I don't think any of those would fly.

(Robin's just an example. You'd have roughly the same problem with the other O5 Teen Titans.)

So my guess is that would have had to be fixed. Possibly by Hippolyta, sent by the goddesses on a brief mission to Man's World (while Diana was still fairly young, and had never left Themyscira), rescuing Donna and bringing her home. That would have the added benefit of strengthening the sisterly relationship between Diana and Donna, since they both would have been kids (albeit about 10 years apart in age) together on the island.

(A different fix is: "Time flows differently on Themyscira than it does in Man's World." But that opens a whole other can of worms and, unless the writers wanted to deal with them, they should leave the can closed.)

I think the real problem, post-Crisis on Infinite Earths, was that Diana started her superhero career "five years later," but Donna had already been active as Wonder Girl during several of those years (since the didn't reset the Titans like they did Wonder Woman). So Wonder Girl debuts years before Wonder Woman, and the two didn't even know each other. I think that's hard to make sense of, especially given the similarities of their powers, costumes, and accoutrements (lasso, bracelets). And, of course, it eliminates the sisterly relationship between them.

[MajorHoy]

I don't think ti was the Perez reboot so much as it was the decision that those stories were happening in "the current day," rather than being a Year One kind of thing (like Superman and Batman got). I don't think that was Perez's idea. And I also think that decision (but not Perez's stories, which I loved) showed a sort of lack of focus DC had on Wonder Woman, and female characters in general, in the DCU at large.

And a similar problem happened with Hawkman when for some asinine reason they decided to make the 1989 Hawkworld three-issue series by Timothy Truman take place in the present day rather than using it to update & modify the Silver Age character's past origin.

[Doctor Bifrost]

And we can always throw in Helena ("Golden Age" Fury) Kosmatos' origin!

I really hope that, in whatever way they ultimately bring back the JSA, Helena Kosmatos as the "GA Fury" and her daughter Lyta Trevor, the "Infinity, Inc. Fury," can be maintained.

Roy Thomas was originally told that, after Crisis on Infinite Earths, he would still have an Earth-2 in which to set his JSA (with its Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman), All-Star Squadron, and Infinity, Inc. (He also thought he'd have a GA Green Arrow and Aquaman.)

At the last moment he had the rug pulled out from under him. Everybody was smushed together on Single-Earth (what some call Clutter-Earth), and Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman were not present during the heyday of the JSA.

Roy Thomas, being a trooper and a team player - as well as immensely imaginative and well-educated in Greek mythology (among many other things) - adjusted his stories accordingly. Some of his "substitutes," like Flying Fox, didn't really "stick." But I think the "GA Fury" and her daughter were the best things to come out of that mix-up, and I really like the characters.

I know that the Lyta Trevor Fury was originally the daughter of the Earth-2 Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor, but actually I liked her better as the daughter of the GA Fury. (Also, Neil Gaiman made fantastic use of the character and her connections in the Sandman arc "The Kindly Ones." On the other hand, Helena Kosmatos was pretty much character-assassinated when she was brought back in the modern-day Wonder Woman - we can skip that part...) But I think that, depending on how they bring back the JSA, it would be quite possible to have a WW II-era Diana/Wonder Woman and Helena/Fury active at the same time. I'd make Lyta/Fury Helena's daughter, and give Diana's daughter another name.

But that's just me.

[Doctor Bifrost]

And a similar problem happened with Hawkman when for some asinine reason they decided to make the 1989 Hawkworld three-issue series by Timothy Truman take place in the present day rather than using it to update & modify the Silver Age character's past origin.

Tell me about it...!

[Jim Kelly]

I didn't mean to suggest it was George Perez who wanted his origin set in the present.

De-linking Wonder Girl from Wonder Woman has never been a good thing, yet it continues. Even before COIE, the two didn't have much connection to each other. In fact--at the time that Marv Wolfman wrote the original origin story for Wonder Girl, now with the name Donna Troy, in TEEN TITANS 22 (July-August '69)--powerless Diana was having her mod adventures, sans lasso, while all the other Amazons had gone off into another dimension. So even when that first origin was concocted it didn't jibe with the continuity.

I was fine with Wonder Woman having a long career--long enough to have saved the child from the fire--because as an Amazon she could have been around for a long time. And I think the continuity was fuzzy about when Steve Trevor crashed on Paradise Island--the updated version would have had him crashing during the Korean War. Which would still give Wonder Woman more than twenty years in the star-spangles.

This was also when the Weisinger comics said that Superman had first appeared in 1938. The attitude towards time was different back then, before DC copied the Marvel approach to time.

The current comics should copy the popular version from the movie. Diana should be very old yet look young. And Donna should have grown up with Diana as a mentor and a role model.