This is the YMMV page for instances relating to Wonder Woman Volume 1. For the YMMV page for the Wonder Woman franchise at large see YMMV/Wonder Woman.
- Alternative Character Interpretation: During the Charles Moulton run, Steve Trevor not being able to tell Di and Wondy apart does not seem possible considering he spends a lot of time with both of them and she doesn't wear a mask, and has recognized her by voice alone and waits until he has enough context to call out the proper name. Some readers tend to think he may have been putting on a front to preserve her identity, or being willfully obtuse out of respect for her attempts to keep her identities separate, or just suffered from facial blindness. Steve seemed to quickly lose grey matter under subsequent writers, and it became quite obvious he really had no clue.
- Audience-Alienating Era:
- The all-but In Name Only early-1970s period where she lost her powers and became a Badass Normal kung-fu superspy in a white trouser suit, with a male Chinese mentor called I Ching, because DC was trying to emulate the success of The Avengers (1960s).
- Some fans go further and treat everything between William Moulton Marson's Golden Age stories and the George Pérez Post-Crisis reboot (around 40 years of material!) as one. It's certainly difficult to name an "iconic" Wonder Woman story from that period, even for sheer goofiness. To say nothing of the fact that when they initially returned Diana to Paradise Island and restored her outfit and status (issue 204), they spent a number of issues rerunning older stories like "Wonder Woman and the Coming of the Kangas" (redone as "Attack of the Sky Demons") and "The Four Dooms", originally from #32 in 1949, with art by Ric Estrada and Vince Colletta.
- Complete Monster: Cylvia Cyber, also known as Doctor Cyber, is the leader of an unnamed Nebulous Evil Organization who was defeated by Wonder Woman after slaughtering a monastery full of monks just to get the valuables inside and staging a jewel heist in London. Returning to destroy Hong Kong and blackmail the world with Earthquake machines, Cyber was disfigured by a member of Tiger Tong after she had the group killed for no longer being of use to her. Irrationally blaming Diana for this, she ordered the Earthquake Machine she placed across the world to be activated and tried to kill Diana herself, but was thought dead when one of the machines she was near exploded. Surviving and desiring to regain her beauty, Cyber returned multiple times to abduct women to transplant her brain into them, trying this on both Diana and Donna Troy, and fatally extracted information from a famous cosmetician in an attempt to graft Diana's face onto her own. Escaping custody and disguising herself as Diana, Cyber broke into the Pentagon and stole America's nuclear launch codes, planning to start a nuclear war and frame Diana for the deed.
- Ensemble Dark Horse
- When DC held a poll for which "Golden Age" villain fans wanted to see the Earth One counterpart of, the winner was Countess Draska Nishki, who had only appeared in two issues and really only gave Wonder Woman trouble due to circumstance rather than any traits inherent to her. Still, if one excuses the relatively small threat she poses to the protagonist she was one of the more intelligent villains, and that apparently left an impression on readers.
- Fausta Grables was a one shot antagonist in the Golden Age Wonder Woman comics that DC never bothered to use again in any of its various reboots or else worlds. However, she's been featured in three adaptations, two of which greatly expanded and developed her character, one of which was set two decades before the comic character would have any reason to meet Wonder Woman. While she wasn't as intelligent as Nishki overall, Grables was one of the most successful when it came to deceiving Wonder Woman, which again left an impression.
- Fair for Its Day: While the depiction of the original Doctor Poison leaned into Yellow Peril stereotypes, she lacked the caricatured appearance and speech patterns that most Asian villains of the era had. The fact that she actually had an individual personality was another point in her favor, since most Japanese villains in World War II comics were one-note evildoers who would've been lucky to get even the bare minimum of characterization beyond "evil and Asian".
- Fanon Discontinuity: Even fans who enjoyed the 1986 Legend Of Wonder Woman don't necessarily consider it a valid conclusion to the "Golden Age" stories due to some minor continuity errors (Hippolyta's hair is blonde instead of black, Etta Candy is blonde instead of redheaded, the Atomic Universe is instead a "pocket galaxy"; this could maybe be excused by "Earth One" if the fan girl who wrote it didn't explicitly reference the golden age books as her inspiration) and or the non explanations for the villains' returns to despotism (Leila's is because of Atomia, and Atomia's is just because).
- Fridge Brilliance: It doesn't make much since for the Silver Age Diana's sister, Nubia, to look so different from her when they're both supposed to have "The Beauty Of Aphrodite" until one realizes that on Earth one the Greek gods are being treated less like Higher-Tech Species aliens that they were in The Golden Age and much more like the Physical Gods of recorded myths. According to the Greeks, their own gods preferred Ethiopian parties to Greek ones, and one imagines the goddess of love would be partying more than most. The Greeks also believed the gods could alter their appearance, which means even though Aphrodite was mostly worshiped by the central Europeans of the Mediterranean she probably spent a good deal of time as a darker skinned African too. The Athenians in particular thought the women of Kemet("land of the blacks") and Aethiopia("as scorched by the sun") were just as attractive as their own, in their own way, so it makes sense someone from another Athena venerating culture would be interested in a "Nubian" baby as well.
- Harsher in Hindsight:
- Nazis trying to kill Steve Trevor and Diana Prince by pumping car exhaust into a room became a lot more uncomfortable when news broke to the general public that was an actual Nazi execution method.
- In #3, when Diana goes to track down and rescue Paula's daughter Gerta, she discovers an entire barracks full of hungry children in torn clothes in a Nazi prison camp and declares that she'll rescue the children from "the horrors of Nazi cruelty." The extent of this cruelty in the real world would only really become known the year after the story was published when the first major concentration camp came into the hands of the allies.
- Doctor Psycho's backstory in #5 bares a distressing resemblance to many members of what would later be known as the "incel" movement, being a "manlet" that was unsuccessful with women and blamed it on them and believed that they needed to be subjugated.
- Issue #215 has Mars attempt to start a war between Atlantis and the Amazons to regain his strength from two of the world's most powerful armies attacking one another, with Wonder Woman and Aquaman working together to stop him and call off the war. In Flashpoint (DC Comics), Wonder Woman and Aquaman are leading the sides of an Amazon/Atlantean war, and both sides are so powerful it ends up nearly destroying the world.
- Mis-blamed: Feminists seem to get a lot of blame for Wonder Woman's depowering in the Bronze Age; however, the complete opposite is true. While the decision to depower her was made to make the comic more appealing to feminists and women in general, DC came up with the idea all on their own — in fact it was partly backlash from the feminists that resulted in her getting repowered.
- Nightmare Fuel: Every single one of Queen Atomia's slave "subjects" was presumably human at one point, before she hit them with her Shrink Ray and shoved them in her horrific Mook Maker, permanently altering them physically and mentally into the forms of her robotic looking "Neutron" and "Protron" slaves for the rest of their lives.
- Values Dissonance:
- Many of the modern printed Wonder Woman collections remove the painfully racist caricatures of black people, replacing them with more natural-looking black characters.
- Wonder Woman from the Golden Age had a particular problem because her creator, William Marston, believed that dominance, submission, and a very bondage-oriented culture were all things needed in what was then "today's world". Wonder Woman at one point extols the virtues of being a (consensual) slave. Needless to say, this sexuality-based cultural paradigm was not in synch with what people believed then, and hasn't really caught on now either. And while Marston had very progressive ideas about women's empowerment for his day, he also seemed to think that women were "naturally" prone to things like vanity and emotional outbursts.
