JournLOLism? Slate tries sniffing out the truth about Wonder Woman's armpits

https://twitter.com/SuzanneKelleher/status/842044157719920640

https://twitter.com/JAscariat/status/842068198916796416

https://twitter.com/BborDarb/status/842065792745242624

With Rachel Maddow’s Trump tax bombshell turning out to be a yuge bust, Slate’s gotta find something else to get worked up over.

This is apparently what they’ve settled on:

What’s going on with Gal Gadot’s armpits in the Wonder Woman trailer? https://t.co/qfzwyBq90X pic.twitter.com/nMdqqYDrhy

— Slate (@Slate) March 15, 2017

Slate editorial assistant Marissa Martinelli is determined to blow PitGate wide open:

Over the weekend, Warner Bros. dropped a brand new trailer for Wonder Woman, with Gal Gadot reprising her role as Diana of Themyscira. And while fans and critics alike have already dissected the trailer frame by frame, there’s one crucial detail that we still need to address: Gal Gadot’s armpits look … weird.

…

It turns out that the internet is already plenty preoccupied with celebrity armpits in general, and with Gadot’s in particular, so it didn’t require that much digging to determine that in real life, Gadot’s pits are perfectly ordinary and are not, in fact, shielded by mysterious blobs of light. Heck, even elsewhere in the same trailer, when they’re not front and center, Gadot’s pits look totally normal. So why do they appear so strange at this particular moment? Is this just a trick of the light? Or perhaps the inevitable result of that combination of that ubiquitous orange and teal filtering and the low lighting that makes so many films and television shows look unbearably dark?

The simpler answer is that Gadot’s already-silky pits were probably digitally bleached in post-production, perhaps out of fear that we as moviegoers aren’t ready to see the creases of a woman’s unobscured armpit in close-up. You might be saying, Really, armpits?Is this seriously still happening in 2017? There’s certainly precedent: Just last year Maxim apparently airbrushed Priyanka Chopra’s armpits into Barbie-like smoothness for their July 2016 cover. Even so, it seems like an enormous waste of effort to recolor the underarms of Wonder Woman herself for a split-second scene, especially when the obvious editing is much more conspicuous than the unaltered lady pits alone could ever be.