I promised a post about Wonder Woman and the way it portrayed love, so here it is! The idea of unconditional love has a hold on our imaginations, and most of us would say it’s a wonderful ideal to strive for. Practically, most of us love conditionally most of the time. There are lines people in our lives can cross that might make us stop loving them.

This is an issue Wonder Woman confronts when Ares tries to convince her to destroy humankind. She’s worked so hard to stop Ludendorff from killing millions of people. But to her surprise, that doesn’t stop the war. The real reason for war and violence, at least according to Ares, is that people are inherently corrupted. They kill because that’s their nature. Wonder Woman wants to save humanity because she loves all of them in theory, but finds many aren’t lovable in practice. This is truest of Maru, who’s been helping Ludendorff develop the gas Wonder Woman has worked so hard to stop. Maru arguably doesn’t deserve to live, and she certainly doesn’t seem to deserve love.

But at the end, Wonder Woman spares her. Maru and many people might not deserve love, but Wonder Woman chooses to love anyway. One of the reasons most of us want so badly to be loved, I think, is what it says about us. It means someone has looked into our soul and liked what they saw. What makes Wonder Woman’s act so meaningful to me is that she looked into Maru’s soul, saw everything there was to dislike, and chose love anyway. That may be the highest form of love there is—choosing to act sacrificially for someone who doesn’t deserve it.

Perhaps Wonder Woman’s greatest superpower is her ability to love.