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What follows is an open letter from Diana Prince, a.k.a. Wonder Woman, to billionaire businessman and bat enthusiast Bruce Wayne. It contains many spoilers regarding the events of the movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, so if you have not seen the movie and do not wish to learn what happens in it, you should stop reading now.
Seriously.
If you keep reading, you will see spoilers.
It's going to happen.
Don't say you weren't warned.
You were.
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Dear Mr. Wayne,
While I appreciate your invitation to join the "Justice League," your new club for superheroes and also yourself, I am afraid I must decline.
Don’t get me wrong; I certainly applaud your gumption. It’s rather sweet that you seem to think saving the world requires me to join a club run by you. I am a literal ageless goddess with more than a century of knowledge of the world who can fly and use an arsenal of magical weapons. You’re a rich orphan with a trick jalopy who can’t tell the difference between a supervillain and a boat. Yes, of course, it’s only natural that you should be in charge and I should do the grunt work of recruiting "others like me."
Right.
Seriously, your pal Alfred should write a parenting book about whatever he did to build up your self-esteem during childhood. I was raised by a group of actual deities, and I don’t have half your sense of entitlement.
But even if there were not such a glaringly, laughably obvious gap between your abilities and my own, which of our past encounters should give me confidence in your leadership abilities?
That time when I noticed you lurking obviously inside Lex Luthor’s mysteriously unlocked server room and managed to steal your own stolen data out from under you while you were distracted by the shiny, shiny party?
That time when you decided that the way to introduce yourself was by emailing me a file full of my enemy's creepshots of me? Yeah, Bruce, women love it when you tell them you’ve carefully perused a hard drive containing their private photos and videos their stalker secretly shot. It’s a perfect way to build trust.
Oh, and of course there was that especially A+ moment when you fell blindly for Lex Luthor’s transparent trickery and nearly murdered Superman. That certainly showed excellent judgment.
Maybe I'm being unfair. After all, Lex managed to tap into your deeply rooted concerns about the vision of American power that our pal Superman represented. You don’t like the idea of trusting that an all-powerful, unlimited force will stay loyal to your interests. You doubt whether anything that powerful can ever truly be good. Those are all reasonable concerns. I'm with you so far.
But you also think that wealthy vigilantes with a penchant for branding irons are the best form of law enforcement. And you're so easy to manipulate that Lex Luthor barely had to stretch in order to send you into a murderous rage.
And while I’m glad you failed in your murder mission, I can’t say I feel much confidence in your crime-fighting abilities now that I know that all a villain needs to do to stop you in your tracks is mention your mom. How long is it going to take before every hood in Gotham knows that shouting "MARTHAAAAAA" will make you suddenly become their best pal? I’m sure Martha Wayne was a lovely woman, but as battle flaws go, that one’s worse than kryptonite.
OH, AND SPEAKING OF KRYPTONITE.
We need to talk about what happened during our battle against Doomsday. As you may recall, when the going got rough, we found ourselves with one (1) hybrid supermonster, bred by Lex Luthor to be killable only with kryptonite, and one (1) spear made of the aforementioned space mineral, which is lethally crippling to Superman but just a glowy rock as far as I'm concerned.
And I guess it escaped your notice, Trumpy McBatface, but I’m an ACTUAL AMAZON. Check my résumé: I have spear experience. Enough experience to know, for instance, that spears are meant to be thrown. That is, in fact, one of the key selling points of spears: that you can use them as projectiles and thus avoid coming within a radius of your enemy that would allow him to, say, run you through the heart with one of his fearsome bone spikes. You know, if you happened to find yourself in a situation where that might be a concern.
So obviously the thing to do was … not even consider handing me the space weapon, and instead have Superman heroically sacrifice himself in order to take down the monster with his incompetent spearing technique. Great leadership and decision-making there. Really. Definitely makes me want to go into battle with you again.
Why do you think I was shouting, "Nooooooo!" at the top of my metahuman lungs? It wasn’t despair at the thought of losing our helmet-haired superfriend, as you seem to have concluded. I was screaming, "Nooooooo, you incompetent morons, let me handle this!"
But you didn’t listen.
I’m not saying you didn't listen because you’re a man and I’m a woman. (Although that does remind me — at a later date I would like to discuss the matter of the gender pay gap at Wayne Industries. Lexcorp isn't the only company whose servers can get hacked, and I'm not at all pleased about a few things I noticed while rifling through yours.)
I'm not even saying you didn't listen because your pathetically weak human ears cannot comprehend the true majesty of my Amazonian voice.
Rather, I believe that sometimes a working relationship just doesn't quite come together, and it would be best for us to remain professional acquaintances rather than colleagues.
I wish you the best in all of your crime-fighting endeavors.
Yours sincerely,
Diana Prince, a.k.a. Wonder Woman
P.S. I do like the car, though. If you’re ever interested in selling, my sisters and I would be willing to offer you at least two of our tribe’s rejected male infants for it.
