One of the benefits of doing a serial narrative—not serialized, necessarily, but simply any narrative where a new installment comes out on a regular basis, whether it’s a weekly TV show, a monthly comic book, or a daily comic strip—is that you have the option of showing development and growth and detailing the consequences of actions.
One of the benefits of Marvel Studios releasing TV shows on Disney+ that tie aggressively into the movies is that they can finally explore significant repercussions and character growth to a degree they really can’t in the cinematic center of the milieu, as we have seen done superbly in WandaVision.
SPOILERS FOR ALL NINE EPISODES OF WANDAVISION, AND SEVERAL OTHER MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE PRODUCTIONS AS WELL
A big reason why we’ve had such a massive renaissance in superhero movies since the turn of the millennium is because Bryan Singer & Co. with the first two X-Men films and Sam Raimi & Co. with the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies did something very few other superhero adaptations had done before: they thoroughly embraced the source material. Far too many 20th-century superhero movies made as little use of the rich and lengthy history of these characters in the comics as possible. Supporting casts and regular villains were avoided, backstories changed. (It’s perhaps not a coincidence that the most successful were the Adam West Batman, the Christopher Reeve Superman, and Keaton/Kilmer/Clooney Batman adaptations, all of which arguably kept the most stuff from the original four-color versions.)
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Kevin Feige and his various writers and directors at Marvel Studios have taken that to the next level, integrating decades of comics history into their narratives—reinterpreting them for the 21st century, but never losing sight of the many storytelling possibilities that they were given in four-color form.
The thing is, those storylines were played out on a monthly basis over decades, with room to grow and breathe and flesh the characters out. Marvel in particular, as initially guided in the 1960s by Stan Lee and his bullpen of artists and fellow scripters, embraced the notion of growth and change. Peter Parker eventually graduated high school and went to college, and later grad school. Reed Richards and Sue Storm got married and had a kid. Tony Stark and Carol Danvers both dealt with alcoholism. Vision and the Scarlet Witch fell in love, got married, then got nastily separated. The Hulk started out gray, then got green, then back to gray, then green again, then red; he got more primitive and then smarter and then even more primitive and back around again. Magneto went from villain to tragic figure to attempted hero and back to villain again. Hawkeye, the Black Widow, Quicksilver, Emma Frost, Mystique, and Songbird were all introduced as villains, and later became heroes. And so on.
That’s easy to do when you’ve got at least one, and often several, stories per month featuring these characters. It’s a lot harder to pull off when you’re only doing 1-3 movies per year.
Movies—especially those of the tentpole blockbuster variety that have been the mainstream of Hollywood since Jaws and Star Wars four-and-a-half decades ago—don’t generally have the storytelling space to develop things too far. Plots need to be completed in the 2-3 hours the movies have, and that’s pretty much it. You can’t focus too much energy on larger storylines because they won’t pick up for a year or more. One of the most amazing things Feige et al. have accomplished is striking a balance between creating movies that are compelling on their own but are still part of a larger narrative. So many other attempts to do “cinematic universes” (DC’s ongoing train wreck, Tom Cruise’s Mummy, the Andrew Garfield Spider-films) have crashed and burned due to an inability to thread that needle.
But one way to achieve the necessary balance is to only scratch the surface of consequences of major shifts and events. The only impact that the Sokovia Accords that were passed in Captain America: Civil War had was to give authorities a reason to ignore due process while hunting down Bucky Barnes in that movie, to give a reason for Scott Lang to be under house arrest in Ant-Man & The Wasp, and…that’s pretty much it. (They were paid lip service in Avengers: Infinity War, but the events of that movie made the Accords irrelevant.)
The Sokovia Accords should be a massive deal, having a broad-ranging impact on the Marvel Universe. And we did eventually get to see that impact—in the TV show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. For that matter, the Battle of New York that made up the climax of Avengers is another huge event that should have all manner of consequences, but beyond being something of a plot catalyst in Spider-Man: Homecoming, we didn’t see that much of the aftermath—except in the first season of Netflix’s Daredevil, which dealt with the impact that battle had on the neighborhoods of central Manhattan.
Those two small-screen examples have given Marvel Studios a good blueprint, and WandaVision has proven to be following it superbly by addressing two key bits of story from the movies that were inadequately dealt with on the big screen.
One is the impact of Thanos’ snap in Infinity War, and, more to the point, the impact of the Hulk’s counter-snap in Avengers: Endgame. The latter in particular was pretty much an abstraction in Endgame and played for laughs in Spider-Man: Far from Home. WandaVision has done a much better job of showing the terrible toll it has taken, both on those left behind and those who were reconstituted. Monica Rambeau was dusted at a time when her mother’s cancer was in remission, and one subjective second later was told that the cancer came back and killed her. With Rambeau mère dead and Rambeau fille dusted, SWORD winds up in the incapable hands of the Peter Principle That Walks Like a Man, Tyler Hayward.
Meanwhile, Wanda Maximoff had just watched Thanos kill Vision in front of her face, and then came back to find that, not only had his body had been taken by SWORD, but Hayward won’t let her have his body for burial. Oh, and Wanda finds out that Vision also bought them a house. (It’s not clear whether the house was torn down in the intervening five years or if construction had started on the house and was abandoned during the blip years.)
Which leads me nicely to the other bit of story, which is Wanda and Vision in general. Because if big-ass action blockbusters have difficulty dealing with long-term consequences, they also have an issue of developing characters beyond a relatively small handful of people. Which is fine if you’re doing a Captain America movie or a Black Panther movie or a Captain Marvel movie. It’s more of a challenge when you’re doing an Avengers movie, and it’s telling that even the first movie, which was most successful at balancing the characters, is remembered at least in part as the one where Hawkeye had virtually nothing to do.
Prior to the Disney+ TV show, Wanda and the Vision were barely even characters. Wanda’s primary function in Avengers: Age of Ultron was to catalyze the plot, giving Tony Stark apocalyptic hallucinations that indirectly led to his creation of the movie’s titular villain. She had the exact same role in Civil War, her actions in Lagos (which were actually heroic; had she not sent the bomb into the air, the damage would’ve been far worse, but all most people saw was the damage done) leading to the UN session that passes the Sokovia Accords. Vision’s primary function in Age of Ultron was to function as a deus ex machina in becoming the one to stop Ultron, and his function in Civil War was to provide pathos when he and Wanda wind up on differing sides.
The movies themselves did very little work to show us their growing relationship, and what work was done was entirely on the backs of the actors. Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany completely sold it—particularly in their furtive, clandestine meeting in Scotland in Infinity War, which filled in a lot of blanks. But those blanks were very much present, as the scripts for Age of Ultron and Civil War were relying far too much on the characters’ four-color history as a couple to fill in the gaps that the movies just didn’t have time to deal with.
WandaVision mercifully changed that, and retroactively makes the movies resonate far more in the process. Starting with the goofiness of the early episodes showing the pair of them bantering and navigating artificial sitcom conflicts, then eventually in “Previously On” showing, in more depth, how the relationship developed. We finally get to see what went on between the lines that we were forced to infer amidst the hugger-mugger of the big-ass action movie.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has done very little to depict the everyday lives of superheroes. The dictates of the Hollywood blockbuster are such that character beats are, at best, there to set up or provide a pause between action sequences. The MCU films are better about this than most, and it’s to their credit that they do as much as they do on this front. They’ve managed to make Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Carol Danvers, T’Challa, Natasha Romanoff, Peter Parker, Thor, Scott Lang, and Bruce Banner into complex characters even within the constraints of the format.
But so many others have been left underdeveloped. Two of those have now been magnificently addressed by WandaVision (and two more will be addressed in a couple of weeks in Falcon and the Winter Soldier). As an added bonus, this has all been accomplished in the form of a truly superlative TV show that has beautifully explored issues of grief and questions of how power can corrupt, as well as fleshing out the world of magic in the MCU. All that, and WandaVision gives us forward motion as well, with two more movies set up in the end of the first season—both Captain Marvel 2 with a Skrull talking to Rambeau and Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, which is Elizabeth Olsen’s next appearance.
Keith R.A. DeCandido also wrote about how WandaVision mined decades of comics history for its storyline. His “4-Color to 35-Millimeter: The Great Superhero Movie Rewatch” has covered every live-action movie based on a superhero comic, and he’ll be reviewing each episode of Falcon & The Winter Soldier as it comes out. He’s been writing about Star Trek, old and new, for this site since 2011, among many other subjects. Outside of Tor.com, he’s the author of nearly 60 novels (most recently Animal, a thriller written with Dr. Munish K. Batra), more than 75 short stories (the latest of which is in the charity anthology Turning the Tied, out this weekend), and around 50 comic books (the latest of which is Icarus, adapting Gregory A. Wilson’s science fiction novel).
I originally thought WandaVision was an odd choice to start the Disney+ streaming offerings, because it was very obviously not a traditional superhero story. But they knew what they were doing, and that was one beautiful piece of storytelling.
If nothing else, the sheer magnitude of the resentment that the citizens of Westview have for Wanda at the end of WandaVision is a powerful visual symbol to set up Zemo’s anti-Supers premise in Falcon & Winter Soldier.
If Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home is what happens when there’s no Avengers and someone decides to get smart and step into the gap to exploit it (while bullshitting about the Multiverse), WandaVision’s Hayward voices the anger of the Snap survivors and the desire to have a remote-control Avenger (background wink about a Multiverse)
This is the flip side of the coin that was the Tony Stark / Iron-Man murals in FFH. Not the masses venerating a dead hero sacrificed to end a war, but bystanders damaged by the spillover of a hero come home after surviving it.
Great essay Keith and a special thanks for pointing out that Wanda used her powers for good in Lagos. She minimalized the damage. Civil War is a decent movie, but that plot point always fell flat. If we are supposed to feel that the Accords were in any way fair then the catalyst needed to be stronger.*
*Mind you Tony creating Ultron was all the argument you needed. But his screw up had nothing to do with enhanced individuals–it was just Tony playing reckless with AI.
And don’t get me started on Cap looking guilty for the helicarrier damage in DC…
Using the Battle of New York in Daredevil was clever, but it was more a handwave to explain why Hell’s Kitchen was the gritty neighborhood of the comics rather than post-gentrification New York. I liked it, but it didn’t really stand close examination (the downtrodden residents are established, and clearly didn’t just move in after aliens scared off all the hedge fund traders).
That said, alien invasions not having much long term impact on society is very true to the source material. A big difference between standard superheroes and SF is the limited effect extraordinary powers and events are allowed to have. The world must always regress to the mean of “basically our world, except with superheroes”, even if most people have personal experience of a ridiculous number of global catastrophes. Far From Home’s treatment of the the Blip as something that informs but doesn’t fundamentally change the experience of high school or road trips other than by inspiring a supervillain kind of epitomizes that. Wandavision has consequences, but they’re very self contained in a way that won’t affect the average civilian (except implicitly) in the next movie not directly involving Wanda.
I thought WandaVision had pretty mixed results in trying to depict consequences. The ‘return blip’ scene with Monica is good, but where are the repercussions elsewhere in the show? What were the impacts of the blip on Westview, or any of the people there? We don’t know, because the show isn’t really concerned with anybody living in Westview, despite the events taking place there.
I had some hopes for this show and the MCU, but I don’t think they’re willing to actually engage enough with moral and ethical awareness to really make that leap to impactful consequences. Even in the obvious best movie that everyone is going to go to, Black Panther, shields its hero from really having any culpability for the pain at the center of the story.
Who was Wanda outside of her brother, husband, and sons? I just doubt this even passes the Bechdel test, let alone, flesh out any personality for Wanda that doesn’t involve the men in her life. No personal quirks or hobbies…just her revolving and discussing these guys constantly.
I originally thought WandaVision was an odd choice to start the Disney+ streaming offerings, because it was very obviously not a traditional superhero story. But they knew what they were doing, and that was one beautiful piece of storytelling.
Yeah, I think WandaVision getting bumped up to replace Black Widow as the opening installment of Phase Four worked out in this instance.
It showed the potential of the post-Infinity Saga landscape and that Feige and company are continuing to push the storytelling beyond what they’d already accomplished.
@@@@@ 3 – Except the Sokovia Accords were never about anger over Wanda’s actions, it was anger over the high handed methods and unrepentant arrogance of the Avengers as a whole. Yes, what Wanda did looked bad from the outside but actually saved lives. We as an intelligent audience are supposed to recognize that the Avengers shouldn’t have been there in the first place! This is why the Accords are so obviously the correct response, or at least a more correct response than Steve’s obstinate stance that he knows better than everyone else, despite repeated instances of him being wrong proving his moral compass, or at least his intelligence, isn’t perfect.
Moreover, Wanda is a terrorist who has never been called to account for her actions, which certainly doesn’t help color the optics of “this woman just blew up an embassy” in a more positive light.
@6 – Technically, Vision is not a man…
I had some hopes for this show and the MCU, but I don’t think they’re willing to actually engage enough with moral and ethical awareness to really make that leap to impactful consequences.
And I don’t think you ever will, because that will leave to some wholesale restructuring of world economy and societies that will lead to something interesting, but not very relatable to audiences; that promotes the world building to the status of a supporting, if not leading, character, and I think that a) is a massive storytelling step that no one is capable of, even Feige, and b) undercuts the wide-based appeal of the MCU.
Wanda is a terrorist who has never been called to account for her actions,
I hate hate hate hate this argument.
First of all, it’s NEVER used against the men EVER. Yet every time Wanda gets the focus of the story, into the comments comes the What To Do With A Problem Like Wanda brigade, and I’m so tired of the double standard.
But what I’d really like to ask people who say this, is what do you want to see done to Wanda? Because me, I believe in justice versus punishment, and justice is Wanda serving others to redress the harm she has caused, which is what has been done to her. Most people who start this conversation mostly want to see her punished, which is weird and creepy and you should stop.
But do you want her put in jail? Who does that help? And does it help Wanda, or does it cause further harm to her? Because Wanda, while she has made poor choices that have caused people harm, is also a victim? A victim of war, a victim of a fascist cult, the victim of a genocidal robot, victim of a genocidal titan, and most of all, victim of her own actions(her guilt over Lagos). Or does the way she’s been victimized not count, because she got superpowers? And what stories are there to tell about her in prison, because unless you plan on making Wandavision: Oz Edition, prison is BORING. It’s a narrative dead end, but of course the people asking for that don’t care, because they don’t care about Wanda’s story.
And what about the people around Wanda? What is their culpability? Clint couldn’t have asked her to the farm for awhile, to give her some company in her grief? (Speaking of, where are all the people crying He Should Be In Jail???) Bruce is the nominal leader of the Avengers at the moment, shouldn’t he be checking on her?(Bruce is another one for whom the legal consequences of his actions is never faced, yet also never demanded by the “fans”) Why was no one else there to fight for her right to Vision’s body???
And what about the people around Wanda? What is their culpability? Clint couldn’t have asked her to the farm for awhile, to give her some company in her grief? (Speaking of, where are all the people crying He Should Be In Jail???) Bruce is the nominal leader of the Avengers at the moment, shouldn’t he be checking on her? Why was no one else there to fight for her right to Vision’s body???
Yeah, we’ve come full circle with the aftermath of the first Avengers film and the early Phase Two films dealing with that exact problem of “Why doesn’t so-and-so call you-know-who to pitch in.”
Of the surviving New Avengers, Rhodey, Clint and Sam are the ones she’d be closest with. But it could simply be that the events of their upcoming solo shows will retroactively be revealed to be running parallel with the events of WandaVision. None of them could be in any position to help.
Banner’s definitely another matter, though.
@11 And what about the people around Wanda?
Monica Rambeau returned to work 3 weeks after the Blip. That day she gets the Westview job with Jimmy Woo. When she gets ejected, Hayward says Wanda visited S.W.O.R.D. to nab Vision a week prior. So, Wanda Blipped back for the End Game, smacks Thanos around some, then spends 2 weeks catching herself up. Her status at that point is questionable. Pre-Snap she was a rogue Avenger. During those 2 weeks did she agree to abide by the Sokovia Accord? Not what’s on her mind, I strongly suspect no. Then she goes to S.W.O.R.D. to try to reclaim Vision’s body, gets denied, drives out to the empty lot and Hexes out.
When she got Snapped, her fellow Avengers were Black Widow, Cap, Bucky, Falcon, Hawkeye, and Ant-Man. In the 2 weeks immediately after End Game, Black Widow’s dead, Cap’s gone, Bucky & Falcon are getting drafted into whatever organization tries to replace Cap, while Hawkeye and Ant-Man got families they would be desperate to reconnect with. None of them would be thinking, “Hey maybe Wanda’s gonna lose herself so completely in grief that she inadvertently tortures an entire town”. Someone gave her a line on where to find Vision, and it all snowballed too rapidly from there for anyone to do anything.
@13 More importantly, I think, is that Wanda would feel like a fifth wheel stuck in a family situation. It would have been the best for her, but I think she would have hated being with an obviously happy family not her own.
So…maybe we can all blame Bruce? (though I can imagine him ham handedly trying to be comforting and failing miserably….)
@14 So…maybe we can all blame Bruce?
Except Bruce quit the Avengers, went back to being a professor, and became a spokesHulk.
Pre-Blip, when Ant-Man gets ratted out, the Avengers are Black Widow, Cap, War Machine, Nebula and Rocket, with international support from Okoye in Wakanda and intergalactic support from Captain Marvel. Bruce, Thor and Tony all having quit, with Clint turned vigilante killer.
During the Endgame, Avengers HQ is blown up and we don’t yet know the shape of what replaces it.
Natasha, Tony and Vision are dead. Thor left Earth with Rocket & the Guardians. Peter went back to school. Most likely, Bruce goes back to Professor Hulk’s career and Clint re-retires (for the 3rd time?) to his farm to process everything he’s done. Scott may or may not still have a small security company with his friends. That leaves Bucky, Sam, and Rhodey as full-time Avengers, and that’s what Falcon & Winter Soldier is about.
I mean I’m going to put out there that the fact that Clint Barton spent five years slaughtering gangs (full of ethnic stereotypes, from the little we see) in order to cope with the loss of his family is KIND of a problem, and I don’t see how a Hawkeye series is going to address that.
Also just wanted to point out that dealing with the consequences of actions in a narrative context does not necessarily mean ‘punishment’, and probably doesn’t. It means acknowledging what’s actually going on, and dealing honestly with what that means. There doesn’t need to be punishment, or atonement, or anything–sometimes you can’t DO anything and you just have to live with what happened, but if you’re being honest about what happened that’s still a consequence.
I’m always going back to Farscape, where the heroes rarely have a good choice but the things they do still wear on them. Their goodness is allowed to be sullied.
I mean I’m going to put out there that the fact that Clint Barton spent five years slaughtering gangs (full of ethnic stereotypes, from the little we see) in order to cope with the loss of his family is KIND of a problem, and I don’t see how a Hawkeye series is going to address that.
Yeah, I mean, I get why McFeely and Markus went that route in the Endgame script to sell the passage of time, Clint’s grief, and bringing him and Nat’s friendship full circle (with him being out of control and Nat bringing him in).
But Clint’s post-Snap reintroduction slaughtering non-White criminals was…yeah, it really rubbed me the wrong way, too. There were just too many unfortunate implications and there were better ways to approach it.
Anyway, my guess is we’ll be seeing a Taken 2 approach with Clint’s show and, just like Liam Neeson in that sequel, being forced to face the long-term consequences of his one-man crusade.
Clint’s victims obviously had friends and family and odds are good at least some of them died in the first Snap. So upon coming back and learning what Clint did to their organizations, families, and friends, you know they’ll want revenge.
If the Hawkeye series does not address Clint’s culpability for his murder-spree, I will be disappointed. Of course that doesn’t mean it will happen, or that it will be addressed meaningfully if it does. But it would have to at least be an elephant in the room.
@17 Vengeful gangsters looking for the Ronin is one way to do the Clint Barton to Kate Bishop Hawkeye hand-off. Having to deal with the fallout in the criminal underworld when a bunch of crime bosses Blip back in only to find that a bunch of their rivals have been killed could be interesting.
Having to deal with the fallout in the criminal underworld when a bunch of crime bosses Blip back in only to find that a bunch of their rivals have been killed could be interesting.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking that would be interesting to explore too: How did the Snap and its undoing impact global crime? Factions that were on top could’ve been decimated overnight and factions that were minor players or underdogs are now de facto crime lords.
An interesting contrarian take at the WaPo:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/08/wandavision-finale-grief-scarlet-witch/
My husband and I were just talking about if the consequences of the Chitauri attack on New York were really handled enough or not – but I agree MCU is one of the franchises that at least attempts to develop these themes as much as they can within the format, and I’ve really enjoyed the TV format in general for this reason. One of the reasons I was so excited about WandaVision even before it started getting a lot of hype was because it seemed more character focused.
I would still like to see some more exploration of the consequences of Wanda’s actions and how she will deal with them going forward. I don’t think anybody in Westview is obligated to forgive her (although it’s possible some would be able to empathize with the grief they felt and understand that she is a victim in her own way…in a way it’s a statement on how trauma/victimhood can continue to cycle outwards) but maybe a little more of an acknowledgement would have been a bit satisfying. I worry about her with the Darkhold! I don’t think that’s going to be good for her :(
But I appreciate you recognizing she really did little wrong (if anything) at Lagos! I always felt she got a raw deal there.
But I appreciate you recognizing she really did little wrong (if anything) at Lagos! I always felt she got a raw deal there.
Yeah, in a way, she got railroaded by the UN as the scapegoat.
And that actually brings up a point that I wish had been addressed in-story during Civil War — specifically when Steve was talking about his fears of the Avengers falling under the control of politicians with agendas.
The very nature of how the Accords were drafted was proof positive of that. The Avengers weren’t notified of the developing legislation during its early stages. They were given no opportunity to participate in the debate or the drafting of the bill. Instead, they were only informed mere days before its guaranteed passage, leaving them no time to argue their case or prepare any legal defenses.
And given how fast the Accords came together, the implication for was always the UN had been developing them for a while (probably since Age of Ultron). Wanda was simply the excuse they needed to finally move forward.
wiredog: That WaPo article conveniently ignores the horrible things Hayward did, and also speaks of Hayward as deserving of being the head of SWORD and dismisses Monica as a nepotistic hire, because of course the white guy is automatically qualified and of course the black woman had to have schemed to get there. Makes it hard to take the article seriously.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
In a way, Civil War suffers from being a Captain America movie. It’s part of a piece of Steve Rogers being failed by the institutions he works for: the Army, Shield, then the Avengers Initiative. But as a result, the focus remains on Steve, with the Avengers defined in relation to him. And Steve sees them as soldiers in a paramilitary organization, so in that meeting he’s not going to argue. His context for Lagos is what he says: they save more than they lose, and they’ll try harder to save more next time.
By the same token, when Wanda gets thrown under the bus, her commanding officer doesn’t speak up for her. He’ll rectify that lapse when he finds out she’s been indefinitely detained, but there’s no real support network in place after what amounts to something somewhere between an officer-involved shooting and civilian casualties during a military op on foreign soil, depending on tjurisdictional definitions.
Bah. Hayward was a clown. He had no idea if a miss would lead to the situation getting even worse, or if a hit would actually solve the problem at all (we ultimately learn that Wanda was the cause, but could he have been certain that she was the only cause?)
Also: Everything that passed through the barrier was transformed into something matching Wanda’s vision for her world, which means that on some level, she was aware of everything passing through. Including the drone bearing the weapon.
It would have served Hayward right if he’d been clownified with the others.
(and the drone’s gun should have had a little stick poking out of the barrel with a flag saying BANG!)
Westview was a hostage situation, and Hayward should have called in a hostage negotiator. Which could have lead to some interesting negotiations, as Wanda is lead to understand that she is in fact holding the town hostage.
@@@@@ 11 – I could not disagree with you more. First off:
First of all, it’s NEVER used against the men EVER. Yet every time Wanda gets the focus of the story, into the comments comes the What To Do With A Problem Like Wanda brigade, and I’m so tired of the double standard.
Um, yes, it is! The Sokovia Accords as a whole are an acknowledgement that a superpowered paramilitary force is a major threat to sovereignty for the various nations who are signatories. Beyond that, whatever mistakes the Avengers make (and there are plenty), only one party actively collaborated with an omnicidal monster. There is just no getting around that Wanda actively aided and abetted Ultron, and prior to that, actively aided and abetted HYDRA. Not “hoodwinked into it,” but joined up willingly and knowingly, and ditto with Ultron.
But what I’d really like to ask people who say this, is what do you want to see done to Wanda? Because me, I believe in justice versus punishment, and justice is Wanda serving others to redress the harm she has caused, which is what has been done to her. Most people who start this conversation mostly want to see her punished, which is weird and creepy and you should stop.
I don’t want to see her punished. I want the fandom to acknowledge that Wanda is a big part of the reason why people in-universe view the Avengers, and their preferred modus operandi, with a lot of suspicion. She has reformed, and that’s great, but there is no fallout from her being one of Ultron’s and Strucker’s henchmen. Moreover, this is the entire point that I think CA:CW misses – Steve is a villain, for the same reason Wanda was. Both of them did what they thought was right, both of them cause massive amounts of 100% avoidable civilian casualties… etc etc. Their moral certainty doesn’t make them right, and the fact that Wanda’s actions are the instigating factor for the Accords should be reminding us of her history, and how her past actions helping Ultron extirpate every living thing on the planet are a mirror for Steve’s certainties. The fact that she remains on Team “I get to do what I want, when I want, and the law or normal people be damned” isn’t a great look for a reformed criminal, either. She’s not alone in that arrogance, but it’s a little more glaring in her case because of the above.
But do you want her put in jail? Who does that help? And does it help Wanda, or does it cause further harm to her? Because Wanda, while she has made poor choices that have caused people harm, is also a victim? A victim of war, a victim of a fascist cult, the victim of a genocidal robot, victim of a genocidal titan, and most of all, victim of her own actions(her guilt over Lagos). Or does the way she’s been victimized not count, because she got superpowers? And what stories are there to tell about her in prison, because unless you plan on making Wandavision: Oz Edition, prison is BORING. It’s a narrative dead end, but of course the people asking for that don’t care, because they don’t care about Wanda’s story.
Wait wait wait. This is downright offensive – Wanda is neither a victim of HYDRA nor Ultron. She was a willing and competent (in a mental sense) collaborator. You don’t get to take away her right to make bad decisions simply because you want her to be a hero.
I don’t want Wanda in jail. What I want is some acknowledgement that Wanda’s refusal to confront her past actions (or, given the context of this article, the inability of the movie format to show us that moment) casts her entire post-Ultron arc in a different light. Tony asks that Wanda, the woman he knows is susceptible to mistaking her preferences for a greater good, stay in the Avengers compound for a while – that’s it. It’s an eminently reasonable request in context, since she was a key part in killing a whole bunch of people (not solely her fault, all the Avengers in Lagos have blood on their hands), and has the aforementioned reputation as a terrorist… and even that is too much for her. And the rest of Team Cap, so I am not singling her out for criticism, but she’s also one of the few members of Team Cap who was a willingly collaborator with a supervillain. Of course in a fraught moment of international diplomacy it’s reasonable to ask for something like that.
And what about the people around Wanda? What is their culpability? Clint couldn’t have asked her to the farm for awhile, to give her some company in her grief? (Speaking of, where are all the people crying He Should Be In Jail???) Bruce is the nominal leader of the Avengers at the moment, shouldn’t he be checking on her?(Bruce is another one for whom the legal consequences of his actions is never faced, yet also never demanded by the “fans”) Why was no one else there to fight for her right to Vision’s body???
Clint should be in jail, too! We haven’t actually seen a post-murder spree scene with Clint, have we? I mean since Endgame. So we don’t know what the consequences of his actions will be. I think the fandom is far more critical of Clint than of Wanda (with some justification). We’ve had several movies and television series in which Wanda’s culpability in all this has been entirely ignored. We’ve had none of that for Hawkeye, and I will be equally disappointed if that isn’t explored. I thought he should have killed himself to get the Soul Stone, as he couldn’t bear facing his own actions and all that. But I digree.
But as for him asking her to the farm – how would that help? Her “home” was the Avengers compound, and she refused to stay there. How is house arrest in someone else’s house better than your own, if that’s how you view it? And why in the world would anyone think Wanda has a right to Vision’s body? Almost no one knows they were romantically involved, seeing as they were in hiding during the entirety of their romance. Unless Vision has some sort of will, which I doubt, Wanda has absolutely zero right to his body, either legally or ethically, especially in the context of in-universe knowledge? Vision is an immensely potent weapon – his body is made of ultra-rare vibranium, which given the events of Ultron and Black Panther can be easily classified as a Controlled Substance.
Seems strange to suggest that Clint murdering non-white criminals is somehow worse than if he just murdered white guys. It’s not shown, but it seems like Clint was just murdering criminals wherever he found them. Presumably he already killed off whatever mafia types he found in North Jersey long before he ever traveled to Mexico and Japan. Hate on Clint all you want, but it seems odd to suggest that either Clint or the writers were racist. I’m sure whatever people Clint killed were plenty vile whatever their pigment was, but Clint shouldn’t have been out killing them. Thanos wanted to wipe out half of all life good or bad, Clint felt that having his children killed while vile criminals still breathed was wrong and he did something about it. The movie told us this was wrong, and Clint seemed to know it was wrong too. He was broken, like the world was broken.
Unfortunately, there is never a great way to entertain people by having the hero go to jail for their actions. Even when it does happen, they are inevitably set free as soon as the world needs them again.
@27
And why in the world would anyone think Wanda has a right to Vision’s body? Almost no one knows they were romantically involved, seeing as they were in hiding during the entirety of their romance.
Given the level of detailed knowledge characters in this show have about events in Infinity War and Endgame, I think Wanda and Vision’s relationship is probably public knowledge by now. And I don’t think you need to be a world-famous couple to be able to have your partner as your next of kin? Wanda stated that she was the next of kin, and we have no reason to assume she was lying or speaking in metaphor. If Vision can purchase a plot of land and have “Wanda Maximoff and The Vision” written on the deed, why can’t he have Wanda as his next of kin? It’s not like he has any other relatives.
Unless Vision has some sort of will, which I doubt,
Hayward himself mentioned Vision’s “living will” in the debriefing scene in episode 5. He knows it exists because he knows he’s violating it.
Wanda has absolutely zero right to his body, either legally or ethically, especially in the context of in-universe knowledge? Vision is an immensely potent weapon – his body is made of ultra-rare vibranium, which given the events of Ultron and Black Panther can be easily classified as a Controlled Substance.
One, that vibranium was stolen from Wakanda so it’s not as if SWORD has any legal or ethical right to it either. Two, Vision is a person. You could argue that the body of Steve Rogers is an immensely potent weapon created by the US government; that still wouldn’t give them the right, in the event of his death, to seize his corpse and use it for experiments against his will. It should have been possible to remove the vibranium and any potentially hazardous substances in Vision’s remains and still have enough bits left over to put in an urn for Wanda. The only reason they didn’t do that is because Hayward was planning chicanery.
There is just no getting around that Wanda actively aided and abetted Ultron, and prior to that, actively aided and abetted HYDRA. Not “hoodwinked into it,” but joined up willingly and knowingly, and ditto with Ultron.
Yeah, there’s a missed opportunity there I wish Civil War had addressed: Zemo’s reaction to a fellow countryman (or technically countrywoman) having joined the Avengers despite their role in their homeland’s destruction — as well as Wanda’s. Tony (and Banner) created Ultron, but Wanda was the one who mind-f****d Tony and set off that chain of events.
The problem there, of course, is how much of Wanda’ role in Ultron’s creation is public knowledge or not — and we don’t know because the films never really definitively settled that or how much of Tony’s culpability was public knowledge of the Avengers circle.
@13/chieroscuro:
To follow on from this summary: IMHO, it would be helpful if the MCU films-and-shows gave us absolute time references, rather than forcing viewers to individually compile timelines (from relative references and circumstantial evidence) whenever we wonder “what is character ABC doing at this point? was this enough time for DEF to earn a doctorate? how many mach is Iron Man pulling?”
(But then we’ve got the problem that the time-clues in Spider-Man: Homecoming (between post-Chitauri attack and the movie) don’t sensibly align, and absolute dates would make them painfully obvious. And the MCU probably finds it expedient to be intentionally vague, as with trying to fit Sokovia and Wakanda onto real-world maps.)
On Disney+, the MCU section has four “Legends” short videos (devoted to Wanda, Vision, Bucky and Sam) to re-introduce the titular characters prior to their shows. They (*) are merely clip shows, whereas some explanatory voiceover and graphics would be helpful. Similarly, some reminders about the secondary characters (“Darcy Lewis was a graduate assistant to Jane Foster when they met Thor in 20xx and fought the Dark Elves in London in 20xx. She later completed her doctorate in astrophysics and …”) would help the viewers who don’t have encyclopedic memories (right now, I’m serving that function for my parents).
(*) Wanda, anyway; I haven’t watched the other three.
@@@@@ 27 – I think there is an interesting question in here, which you touch on. Namely, is Vision a person? He’s a computer program, created by Tony Stark. His body isn’t organic material, but resources stolen from Wakanda. I’m conflicted about it, because he’s clearly a sentient being… but is that enough to qualify as “personhood”? It’ll be a question we’ll have to grapple with as a society as AI develops further.
Obviously he’s one of Our Heroes, and thus the narrative all insists that we respect his wishes as we would a person. But if he had never had a body, and remained Stark’s personal AI butler, would we be having the same conversation? Would we say that the piece of advanced software known as JARVIS had a right to have it’s will respected? What would that entail? In Iron Man 2 Tony Stark tells the congressional hearing that they can’t have “his property” and we’re clearly supposed to agree with him that the Iron Man suit and he are indistinguishable, but if Vision is a person, then shouldn’t JARVIS be considered one as well? Which brings up a lot of ethical questions. And tangentially, seeing as his body is composed of material stolen from Wakanda, why does Wanda have a claim on Wakandan national resources, just because she feels a personal attachment to it?
@32: The point that I was responding to, as I understood it, was “Why should Wanda think she has any right to claim Vision’s body?” And my point was, why shouldn’t she? Legally, Vision is apparently considered enough of a person that he can sign the Sokovia Accords, purchase property in his own name, and have a living will and next of kin. Any other Avenger who died, their next of kin should have been able to bury their body. If there were legal or practical concerns about the materials his body is made of, it should still have been possible to find a compromise that respects Vision’s wishes, respects Wanda’s right to mourn him, and doesn’t put the public in danger or violate any law or treaty. But this did not happen, because Hayward’s intention all along was to provoke Wanda into using her powers to reactivate Vision’s body, then to take control of the reactivated Vision as an “asset” and blame any legal violation on Crazy Wanda. The fact that she did not rise to his bait and instead walked out peacefully indicates that Wanda was not inherently inclined to just throw her powers around to get her way.
When I watched the finale, I was flabbergasted the writers had the gall to present basic human decency (you know, don’t turn people into meat puppets, torture is bad, etc.) as some sort of heroic sacrifice on part of the protagonist, but checking at the comments here it seems to me they were actually opting for the high ground. Never understimate the capability of nerds to justify the unjustifiable, I guess.
@34: With respect, I’d say that’s a huge misinterpretation of the events of the Wandavision finale.
It’s made clear that the creation of the Hex was not a conscious act by Wanda, that it was the magical manifestation of her overwhelming grief. Don’t forget, she didn’t even know she was a witch, let alone understand her powers.
She only learns about what she’s doing to the citizens of Westview (and the effect it is having on them) in the finale, while she is also dealing with a number of other bombshells. Vision really is dead, her kids aren’t real, Vision’s body is now an android trying to kill her, Agatha is a witch (which means witches are real!), she herself is not just a witch but a witch who is going to destroy the world…
Once she has dealt with the immediate threats of Agatha and SWORD (while her Vision deals with robo-Vision), she has to basically decide between continuing to torture the citizens of Westview or giving up her family. The fact that she now knows that her family isn’t real doesn’t change how she feels about them. How many of us can honestly say we’d make the right decision in that moment? Looking at human history, I’d say plenty would make the selfish choice and find some way of justifying it to themselves. Not to mention, all the trauma Wanda has been through that has led to the Hex in the first place.
To her credit, she makes the right decision and immediately starts collapsing the Hex, giving her enough time to say heartbreaking farewells to her children and her partner. I do think they could have done more to show her regret for her actions when talking to Rambeau, but perhaps her guilt over her actions will help drive the plot of the next Dr Strange film? I don’t think the show presents her as a hero for making the choice not to torture people and I don’t think she’ll get a free pass for this, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Your last sentence does you no credit and is simply petty.
Additionally, a rebuttal for those claiming Wanda was aiding a supervillain who wanted to destroy humanity. Her association with Ultron (and Hydra before it) was obviously wrong and was based on her anger over what happened to her parents. Again, I challenge readers to think about how they would react to such a tragedy, especially if it happened when you were a child. Once Wanda touches Ultron’s new body and realises what he’s planning, she turns on him. Not only that, she goes to the Avengers to try and help stop him. That’s an organisation containing a man she has blamed most of her life for her parents’ deaths. She realises she has made an awful mistake and immediately does whatever she can to rectify it. Not saying that absolves her of all guilt, but is again a more heroic response than many others would show in similar circumstances.
@34 I think you vastly overestimate how often people perform “basic human decency” when it puts them at a disadvantage. Slaveholders saw men women and children tortured, mistreated, beaten and killed and were not moved by “basic human decency” to eliminate slavery. Nazi Death Camp guards murdered millions of people and “basic human human decency” didn’t make them quit and stop. Cigarette companies found out that their product killed and sickened millions of people and they fought like hell to keep a small box warning of the dangers off their product. In 1965 Lyndon Johnson warned that increases in carbon dioxide would lead to global warming and fossil fuel producers shrugged and downplayed any scientific evidence of that fact. In all but the Nazi Germany case, the people making these decisions were doing so on the basis of making lots of money. They already had millions of dollars, but decided that people dying and being injured wasn’t as important as them making MORE money. Basic human decency would have said, lets get rid of the hurtful practices, not let’s hide or ignore the facts.
I honestly believe that Wanda was pretty unaware of the pain she was causing. She didn’t create this world deliberately, she had a huge wave of grief and suddenly the world was everything she wanted, Heck by capitalistic standards she improved Westview. Everyone had good jobs, the town was clean, The run down areas were gentrified. She was honestly shocked that the town was having her nightmares and simply didn’t consider how she was hurting people. Once she did know, she fought it for a second, then took care of more pressing threats, then gave up EVERYTHING SHE LOVED OR WANTED to undo the harm she had wrought. That is a lot more to give up than making your 3rd million dollars.
Basic human decency is, sadly, often not that basic. As people we extend it to friends, neighbors and individuals who we related to. Large swaths of people we don’t know and have had no personal reason to care about, not so much. As the saying goes, one child dying in a well is a tragedy, a million foreign children dying of starvation is a news article at end of the paper.
So yeah, I think Wanda did make a huge sacrifice and that should be acknowledged. I don’t think the townspeople forgive her. I don’t think she should receive any rewards. She let go of her dreams and then isolated herself where she couldn’t be tempted to do it again. That is something and a lot more than many people do.
@35 Sorry, but that’s simpy not true. Every single moment in the series where another character tries to confront her with the fact that she has mind-slaved a 4000-people town she either tries to deflect or justify it. Vision, Hayward, Rambeau, heck, even her victims when they finally get rid of her control. Every time there’s a intrusion in the reality she has created she *deliberately* expels it with those powers she’s supposed not being able to control. She may have accidentally triggered the Hex, she may don’t know how she did it (an statement I find incredibly dubious at the very least, but let’s assume she’s telling the truth for the sake of argument) but she’s perfectly aware she’s the source of the anomaly and she’s actively defending it. Not only that, but in her conversations with both Vision and Fake!Pietro in episodes 5 and 6 it’s implied pretty clearly she’s very aware what she’s doing is WRONG. I’m sorry that you feel bad about Wanda and her sad story, but what we see her doing is monstruous by any moral standard in existence. Not only that, the writers themselves were so aware of that fact that they felt the need to include not one but TWO scapegoats for her in the form of Agatha Harkness and SWORD, in order to hide with their classic, run-of-the mill villainy the uncomfortable realization that we had been rooting for the bad guy the whole series. She’s not Lucy Ricardo, she’s Anthony goddamn Fremont.
@36 As a general rule we don’t, as a culture, create TV series in the superheroic genre based on nazi death camp guards or smoking advertisement executives. We just don’t.
As for the “improvements” she applied to Westview and their denizens, they literally scream in agonizing pain and ask for the sweet release of death every single moment in the series were they get rid of her mind control. So I’m going to take out on a limb here and claim they feel those “improvements” are Not Good.
@37: Wanda is definitely not aware for most of the first two episodes, because she actually tries to call Vision’s attention to the strange things she notices, like the helicopter and the voice on the radio. At the end of episode 2, when the beekeeper with the SWORD logo appears, is what first seems to clue her in that this reality is artificial and there’s another one trying to intrude on it, and it’s the first we see her exert any kind of control when she rewinds the scene. By this point, she’s already created Vision and conceived children with him; so even if you assume that she’s fully cognizant at this point of everything that’s going on and everything that she’s done, there’s still the issue that bursting the bubble on this reality would condemn her family to death.
But we can’t assume that she’s fully aware even then; it’s a pretty big leap to go from “I’m somehow living in a sitcom and Vision is alive instead of dead” to “I altered the reality of an entire town and mind-controlled all the residents without noticing.” Especially given that she had never displayed that level of power before. Agatha described it as “magic on autopilot,” so it did not require conscious control on Wanda’s part. Yes, she remained in denial about it, tried to tell herself that she couldn’t possibly be controlling that many people, or that if she was that they must be in a state of blissful unawareness like she was for the first two episodes. It was either that or face yet another round of Kill Your Loved Ones For the Greater Good. But when actually confronted with the reality of what she was doing by the residents themselves, she immediately tried to let them go.
@38 You’re aware that nothing of what you say in your message absolves, justify or diminish Wanda’s actions at all, right? Or even paints her final choice as something even remotely close to a “heroic sacrifice”, which is what’s being discussed here? There is enough evidence throughout the series she’s at least at some level completely aware of what she’s doing. If you are comfortable with a narrative that tries to justify the mind-rape of thousands of people because, y’know the one who did it feels, like, really really sad, be my guest. I am not int he mood for that.
@39: It just seems to me that there’s a difference between “Despite any extenuating circumstances, what Wanda did was undeniably wrong” and “Wanda is the villain of the story and anyone who sympathizes with her condones the mindrape of thousands of people.” At this point the discussion seems to be coming down to “I think the narrative shows that Wanda wasn’t fully conscious of her actions” versus “I think the narrative shows that Wanda was fully conscious of her actions”.
@40 Well, good thing that’s not what has been said here then!