Themyscira as Westeros: Could Paradise Lost set the DCU on its most ambitious path yet?

Beneath the marble temples and warrior codes of Themyscira lies a history of ambition, betrayal, and bloodlines older than any superhero cape. With Paradise Lost, James Gunn opens the DCU not through invention, but through inheritance. Through a war already in motion, echoing across generations. This isn’t the beginning of a story. It’s the resurfacing of one that was buried too deep, for too long.

What Gunn is proposing with this series is a different language entirely. Themyscira becomes the testing ground for a tonal shift, where power doesn’t emerge from destiny, but from ritual, lineage, and fracture.

Before Superman arrives to inspire, before Supergirl ventures through space, Paradise Lost asks a different question: what happens when a universe is born not from hope, but from history? In this vision, myth isn’t abstract—it bleeds, it governs, it chooses. And Themyscira, with its warrior code and unbroken memory, rises not as a backdrop, but as the crucible of everything to come.

A DCU built on myth, not origin

James Gunn isn’t laying the foundations of a universe from scratch. He’s revealing one already layered with centuries of belief, memory, and consequence. In his own words,

“In this world, humanity has been clued into the existence of metahumans for 300 years.”

That single detail reshapes everything. The new DCU doesn’t revolve around first discoveries or sudden awakenings; it breathes through legacy. Capes aren’t new; they’re relics. Heroes are figures of history, woven into the fabric of civilizations that have already risen, fractured, and survived. And Paradise Lost becomes the first excavation site of that legacy, a place where power isn’t seized for the first time, but reasserted with the full weight of ancestral memory.

It marks a radical departure from the tradition of cinematic resets. Where most universes lean on the origin story as narrative scaffolding, Gunn pulls from the opposite direction toward sediment, accumulation, age. His world isn’t concerned with how superheroes begin, but with what their existence has already done to culture, to worship, to politics.

If the modern world in this DCU knows metahumans as a fact of history, then the role of a superhero becomes something closer to that of a prophet, or a monarch, or a relic of a divine age. They are remembered, feared, misinterpreted, adored. Their symbols appear in stone, not headlines. Their stories are retold in temples, not tabloids.

And in that landscape, Paradise Lost emerges as the most logical point of entry. It’s not an introduction. It’s an exhumation. It doesn’t ask “who are these heroes,” but “who kept them alive in myth while the world kept burning?” That’s a heavier question. And Themyscira, a land untouched by time but shaped by war, is the only place that might hold the answer.

Themyscira as a battleground of queens

“It’s almost like Game of Thrones with Westeros but with all of the inhabitants of Paradise Island.”

James Gunn didn’t choose that comparison lightly. In Paradise Lost, Themyscira is a throne room under siege, not a sanctuary. Centuries before Diana, the island pulses with political tension, ritualized violence, and ideological fracture. Warrior clans clash not just for dominance, but for vision.

What Themyscira must become, who deserves to lead, and what price is worth paying to shape a civilization. These aren’t superheroes debating morals in capes. They are generals, high priestesses, and heirs, raised in temples that train for power as much as for peace. Every alliance speaks in the language of bloodline. Every betrayal echoes through generations.

This is not the Themyscira the audience knows, a place of statuesque elegance and silent unity. It is volatile, fragmented, a powder keg of philosophies passed down through sacred oaths and broken through generations of grudges.

The women here are not unified by gender, but divided by doctrine. Some may cling to isolationism, others to expansion, and others still to prophecy. It’s not about good and evil. It’s about conflicting dreams of order. And in the absence of Diana, there is no one to reconcile them.

Where Game of Thrones thrived on competing dynasties, Paradise Lost thrives on ideological inheritance. It doesn’t need dragons. It has conviction. It has ancestors. It has queens who fight with more than swords, who wield tradition, ceremony, and myth as weapons far sharper than steel.

In this matriarchal war, what’s at stake isn’t just the throne. It’s the very meaning of power, and whether it should rule by memory or by force.

A mythology carved in stone, silk, and steel

To reimagine Themyscira before Diana is to rebuild the very architecture of the DCU’s moral past. Paradise Lost has the chance to do more than dramatize conflict. It can construct a living mythology through costume, ritual, weaponry, and space. Thrones built for permanence. Armor forged not just for battle, but for ceremony. Temples that hold not gods, but histories.

Every visual element becomes a glyph, a signal, a memory encoded in metal and marble. In a world where power is inherited, not improvised, symbolism becomes law. Themyscira doesn’t just represent strength. It defines the shape of it. And if Paradise Lost embraces that vision, it won’t just show us where Wonder Woman came from. It will show us why she mattered in the first place.

Themyscira, at this stage in history, is less a location than a worldview. Its language is spoken in fabric and stone. The choice of textile in council chambers, the height of a statue in a bloodline’s ancestral courtyard, the placement of a blade during a ritual, all of it carries weight. In this kind of storytelling, aesthetics aren’t ornament.

They are law, memory, and strategy. If a character wears silver instead of gold, if her armor mimics the style of a long-dead queen, if her weapons are curved rather than straight, those are declarations of loyalty, of rebellion, of identity.

And that makes the role of direction and design more than decorative. Paradise Lost must convince us that this is a civilization that predates Superman and will survive his legend. Its walls should echo with the stories that shaped Diana long before she was born. Its visual grammar should feel older than language, heavier than justice. Mythology here isn’t the background. It’s the argument.

The women who carry the DCU before it begins

In the order of release, Superman comes first. But in the order of meaning, Paradise Lost lays the foundation. It sets the tone, the stakes, the mythology. Before capes fly and symbols are painted on chests, the war for what the DCU stands for is already being fought by women.

This is about the shape of a universe where power isn’t improvised but inherited, where the first battles happen in shadows and sanctuaries. With Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow arriving soon after, the DCU is clearly being sculpted by women shaped by loss, legacy, and survival. Diana, Kara, and the queens of Themyscira don’t represent a departure from what came before. They are the reason anything comes next.

Together, they form a kind of mythic arc, three points on a crown. One is born into ritual and conflict. One is cast from her homeland into isolation. One will rise to bridge both worlds.

While Superman may offer the DCU its public face, these women define its soul. Paradise Lost begins with division. Supergirl arrives with exile. Diana will one day reconcile both. That structure is more than elegant; it's ideological. It tells us that the emotional and ethical weight of the DCU isn't carried by legacy alone, but by the women who survive it.

Their roles aren't interchangeable. The queens of Themyscira rule by history. Supergirl acts by memory. Wonder Woman, when she enters, will choose by principle. That spectrum, of rule, of survival, of moral clarity, isn't a coincidence. It's a blueprint. And it's no accident that James Gunn chose to begin with them. If this new DCU hopes to tell stories that endure, it must be built on characters who already have.

If this is the DCU’s Game of Thrones, what does that really mean?

The comparison invites expectation. Betrayals, shifting allegiances, power without purity. But it also carries a challenge. Game of Thrones wasn’t built on spectacle alone. It thrived because its world felt ancient, lived-in, and merciless. If Paradise Lost wants to inherit that throne, it must do more than mimic tone. It must craft a lineage of consequence.

Themyscira cannot be a backdrop. It must be the crucible. A place where war, faith, and philosophy are indistinguishable. A place where power is a burden passed down, not a gift claimed. If the DCU begins here, not with a hero but with a civilization, then maybe this isn’t a shared universe at all. Maybe it’s a myth finally treated like one.

And that raises the real stakes. Not just for Paradise Lost, but for the future of the DCU. Can a superhero franchise sustain the gravity of dynastic politics and ancestral ideology? Can audiences follow characters not because of their powers, but because of the systems they navigate, the histories they inherit, the kingdoms they betray?

Gunn’s premise dares to believe they can. It suggests that Themyscira matters not only because of who comes from it, but because of who tried and failed to rule it.

If Paradise Lost succeeds, it won’t do so by creating spectacle. It will succeed by creating memory. Rituals the audience will remember, bloodlines they will argue about, symbols they’ll try to decipher. It will introduce queens the way other universes introduce gods. It will ask the viewer to witness, not just to cheer.

And if that happens, then Themyscira won’t just resemble Westeros. It will surpass it. Because here, power doesn’t come from dragons or dynasties. It comes from women who’ve never had the luxury of forgetting anything.