WandaVision: full thoughts

Did WandaVision do Wanda Maximoff justice? I don’t know. It highlighted how much injustice was done to Wanda the person and Wanda the character in the MCU before that.

She is… the weird one. The one with amazing powers that always got used by someone else – and always losing. She has no story of her own, in the large tapestries of the world of Avengers she shows up when her power is needed and then gets kind of forgotten. She was given immense powers in service of the plot or powers that want something from her, but what does she get? Nothing, whatever Wanda does, she only seems to be losing.

What is her purpose in the Age of Ultron? To be a girl (oh, no, we forgot to have female superheroes in the Avengers! Girl Power Yay!) to have Hydra use her and her powers for evil, to turn and help by the end… We hardly know who is is and what she is, and nobody stops to think. She loses her twin brother (because we have to kill someone, but cannot kill anyone important, and she loses her country because who cares about those weird Eastern European countries anyway?)

In the Civil War Wanda is kind of there, locked in the Avengers quotes and well, used for good, kind of – she still ends up doing more harm than good, prompting the creation of Sokovia Accord, as she is trying to help - but with her powers still unknown and her personality still not there. The only people who seem to show her any sympathy are Steve and Vision. Steve relates to Wanda – both in understanding the impulse to help her country even by wrong means, and in having lost most of his world. But Steve is also wrapped in his loss, and he is a part of the group with new friendships and new and better ways to cope, and Wanda is left alone with Vision. Vision is a kindred spirit, because of how alone he is, beside the Mind Stone that binds them. Where Wanda lost, Vision didn't have anything to begin with, and while not human, he longs for human connection and understanding.

And then Wanda loses Vision, too, twice. And She can’t even do anything about it. At the end, when the Snap is reversed and Thanos is defeated, everyone goes to their loved ones. Wanda has no one and nowhere to go. Her parents – long dead. Her country – literally destroyed. Her twin brother – dead. Vision – dead. Even Steve Rogers, the only person she had some kind of friendship going on, happily disappeared in the past.

By the way, a large portion of Infinity War screen-time and plot was dedicated to Shuri making Vision’s backup – what happened to it? Is it whatever White Vision accessed to regain his memories or is it totally forgotten?

I happened upon a post (that I lost since, but no matter) which highlighted that other Marvel heroes after the events of the Endgame found the joy in the hands of their family and friends, whether they were snapped or did the unsnapping. Wanda got an empty lot of land with the outline of a house. It felt like ashes, a place cleaned after the previous house burned down, a place for ghosts, not for hope. And that’s what it became.

In the weeks that passed after the finale, Wanda was soundly proclaimed to be a true unrepentant villain. And well, she is in a way the big bad of the story. Just like Vision is fighting himself, all the while pondering what exactly “himself” even means, Wanda is fighting herself as she comes to terms with her grief and her powers. Yes, in the process, she takes over lives of people in a small New Jersey town, people, I need to add, already traumatized by the events of The Blip, the return of the blipped, and sad five years in between… And yes, Wanda is trying to do her best, “to inflict good”, but ends up only inflicting pain and more pain. And while she is sorry, there is nothing she can say now to the people she forces to play happy roles in her sitcom reality. There is nothing they really want to hear from her. Everyone is in pain here.

So Wanda ends up the villain of the piece, as well as the victim, but still the heroine, the superhero. She is just totally alone, in this warm fuzzy world she organized herself where she has her family, and friends, and friendly neighbors…. But the world is broken.

There is one aspect of Wanda that I haven’t seen addressed, but I felt is unjustly overlooked. Wanda is a newcomer to USA, a refugee, who left her country and cannot go back. And all she knew about USA were those sitcoms she was watching as a girl at home and later on. That’s was her image of USA reality, and I can relate to it. Everyone who grew up away can. I used to joke that The X-files made me fear small American towns, and now I joke that all I know about high school come from Buffy and teen comedies (relevant now, as my son is starting one next year and I am terrified). But even though I learned US history at school, and read Mark Twain and Jack London as a kid, I learned about contemporary US from movies and tv, and the selection of those I got to see was extremely random. I haven’t seen any sitcoms Wanda did, but I did watch Get Smart and Grace on Fire and some stuff I don’t remember the names of. And yes, only moving here, I understood the reality behind those movies and tv, the background, the context. (And only in Canada I realized that the Gold Rush London was writing about and all that Great North was actually in Canada! Heh). Back to Wanda – she is having her typical and understandable immigrant experience by trying to recreate the reality she believes should be. She builds her own American Dream in the way she knows, but it never existed, so it can’t be anything but broken.

Knowledge is power, but as Wanda has only power, but no knowledge, she keeps being used by everyone else.

She is so damn alone. Remember that bigGirlPower shot in the Endgame? The war is over, and Wanda is totally alone. Everyone else is back to their own grief and their own problems, and the world is united no more.

Of course, in the ravages of her pain and grief Wanda clings to the perfect fakeness of her world, and rejects attempts to help her from people who actually want to help.

Which is pity since Marvel introduced a perfect “Best Friends Squad” to warm our souls. I couldn't imagine I wanted to see Darcy Lewis and Jimmy Woo working together. And now that I knew how much I wanted them to solve the mysteries while having coffee and chatting about stuff, I went and wrote a fanfic about it. ()

So during the Blip Darcy got an astrophysics Phd, and Jimmy mastered card tricks? It is not a criticism. When I look back five years, I am not sure, I have anything as impressive as card tricks to show...

Monica Rambeau was introduced as if she would have a bigger impact on a story, but at the end she didn’t. The Pandemic intruded, I guess? Or I hope, because if it was the original decision, it was just weird. It was a nice glimpse in her life, and in lives of people during and after the Blip, but not enough connection to Wanda’s story here. It just felt cut off, after Monica got into the Hex.

Agatha Harkhess was great fun, but I don’t have anything insightful about her.

Vision and Wanda are my favourite and most believable romance as of now, due to performances of Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany. And yes, I am sure we didn’t see the last of it, given that While Vision flew away, and again, what did we spent so much screen time in Infinity War when Shuri did her work on Original Vision? Surely it’s not forgotten…

But why Wanda is so alone?