Ilana Rostovic was a progressive leader seeking to guide her country of Pokolistan through turbulent times, maintaining its autonomy, independence, and sovereignty over its natural resources, before she was betrayed and murdered by US black ops over her refusal to acquiesce to US demands regarding Pokolistan’s oil resources.

What? No, it wasn’t about oil. There was a prophesy that she would kill Superman and take over the US and stuff!

Kill Superman? How? She’s an ordinary human with no powers. Pokolistan’s military would be no match for even the US’s conventional forces, let alone factoring in Superman and others.

In the prophesy Ilana teams up with powerful supervillains like Grodd, but a) the only meaningful thing she has to contribute to that alliance is oil, and b) nobody does anything about Grodd, the actual threat. And she was perfectly happy to sell that oil to the US instead, just on her own terms, as an independent ruler.

B-but the prophesy! She was guaranteed to bring about that future!

If that prophesy was so definitive, then there’d be no point to trying to stop her by killing her. In fact, the fact that she’s killed proves that the prophesy was wrong/preventable. But if it was preventable through assassination, could it not also have been preventable by other tactics, like negotiation? The show characterizes her as “power-hungry” but if you say, grant her a generous oil deal and security guarantees, then it’s in her own self-interest to cooperate, and she’d have much less support if she tried to rally people against a generous ally.

But a more generous deal on oil would mean either higher prices at the pumps for Americans, or oil executives missing out on potential profits, and we can’t have that, can we? That’s what the creature commandos are actually fighting for.

Ilana is royalty - she’s an authoritarian despot!

That’s why it’s critical support. But it’s not as though there’s a lot of popular discontent or an organic democratic movement she’s suppressing (or if there is, we never see it). The biggest threat to her power is the reactionary far-right foreign-backed insurgency, The Sons of Themyscira (as well as the Creature Commandos). Ilana is probably the only one capable of maintaining Pokolovian autonomy and stability, and the future of Pokolovia following her assassination will surely either involve a) the US installing a puppet regime, b) total chaos of a failed state, c) a reactionary, anti-western military junta.

But the creature commandos are so lovable! They’re not bad people!

Yes, the show does a great job of humanizing the agents of imperialism. Somehow, the Pokolovians don’t get the same treatment. We never get any indication of what Ilana’s motivation for (allegedly) wanting to “start WWIII” are, beyond “being a power-hungry narcissist.” Meanwhile, Dr. Phosphorous melts people’s faces off left and right and ran a criminal organization, but it’s all because of his tragic backstory, you see. Bad actions by Westerners are always framed in the context of “what happened to make them do this” while bad actions (or predicted bad actions) of foreigners are simply “because they’re like that.”

Weasel is by far the most sympathetic of the group. He doesn’t even understand what’s going on and still acts at a higher ethical standard than any of the rest. G.I. Robot is great, he’s the reason I watched the show, however, as much as I respect his commitment to killing Nazis, he also blindly trusts his commander in the US military to tell him who is and is not a Nazi, which is not great.

The rest of them The Bride, Dr. Phosphorous, and Nina, are imperialist scum with varying degrees of reluctance. It’s particularly frustrating that The Bride and Nina, who were both unjustly imprisoned by the US government, never stop to question whether the same US government might have made a mistake when telling them to kill someone. Any sort of solidarity they might have seems to stop dead at the US border.

So you just hate the show, then. Just don’t watch it.

I actually enjoyed a lot of things about the show, I just really, really hated the ending twist and wish they’d taken it in a different direction. If you can ignore the fact that US black op assassination and regime change is framed as a good thing (which is a pretty big caveat), it’s pretty good slop technically speaking with good character development. If anyone decides to check it out after seeing this, sorry for spoiling the ending, but it kinda does need a warning.

Tbh I have half a mind to write a “correct the ending” fanfic about it, because it really feels like the show took all the potential it had to say something good politically but then it was just like, “Nope, imperialism is good, actually.”