I watched Young Justice Episode 11 last night, and it reminded me how much I love Amanda Waller. For those of you who don’t read DC, Amanda “the Wall” Waller is an antiheroine, most infamous for her role as the government agent in command of Suicide Squad (a team of incarcerated super-villains who take on high-risk black-ops missions in exchange for commuted sentences.) She is morally complex, fierce in her own convictions and she doesn’t take shit from anyone. She is undeniably one of the most bad-ass characters ever created. As Rachel Edidin of girl-wonder.org puts it:
She is smarter than Batman. She is tougher than Darkseid. And she is one of the most morally and humanly complex characters in fiction. She embodies a combination of deep compassion, profound ideals, and utter ruthlessness that female characters rarely get to touch–and she will fuck up your binaries and paradigms better than any other character in mainstream comics.
Her characterization in Young Justice was completely true to this; she was tough, uncompromising and not even mildly intimidated by the threats of posturing super-villains. You can tell that Amanda Waller would literally go head-to-head with the entire Justice League if she didn’t like their agenda; and even though she’s a non-powered human woman, I would hedge my bets just in case she took them all out with sheer scorn and grit determination.
massive hassle 