Just binge watched so a little behind the thread. My pet (and very wrong theory) is that the SWORD director hired Evan Peters to play Quicksilver inside the hex and get information - hence all of the questions. So in WandaVision Evan Peters is playing Evan Peters playing Quicksilver. How does he get his superspeed then? It’s an effect of Wanda’s reality believing hi to be Quicksilver.
…I saw another theory out there today, and its become my favourite one, even though it is unlikely. But the theory is the big bad is…there is no big bad. The show is just what the show is. An extended meditation on suffering and grief. I would love the show to be just that, however I’m not getting my hopes up that this will be the case 
I’ve seen at as well, and I rather like it also.
Of course, in this case, Wanda would technically be the “Big Bad”, but she’s acting out of grief and need.
Saw an article on Huffpost stating Funko was putting out Pop! versions of Wanda, Vision and Pietro in their Halloween costumes, only Pietro’s packaging has his name listed as “Pietro Maximoff” – dun dun DUNNN!!
That was how he was billed in the fake sitcom credits: “and Pietro Maximoff as himself”.
IMHO - I would prefer that this be Wanda ‘acting out’ and its all her - no excuses, no being someone else’s puppet, etc - Simply because I think this story is more interesting in that case…
BUT
If we imagine how powerful she is, and how upset she is now - just imagine how much more pissed and powerful she’s gonna be when she finds out she has gone thru all this grief and loss again at the hands of someone playing her.
The potential spoiler with the Funko thing is:
Pietro is the only character whose name on the box is in scare quotes. Vision’s is just Vision, Wanda’s is just Wanda Maximoff, but his is “Pietro Maximoff.”
Except it made him drunk. That doesn’t seem like a metaphor for (re)gaining his free will and/or literal soul. And Wanda removed the gum, which restored him to his “normal” behavior.
I agree with you, he seemed significantly more aware and independent after the gum incident, which is why I speculated it might have been an intentional act to de- or re-program him, with the “gum” being the reality-bubble contortion of a device to deliver a virus or new programming or whatever. So, even after Wanda removed the gum, the changes had already been initiated. The “drunkenness” was a sitcom literalization of a “virurs” or Vision re-booting with the new data/programming or some combination. Or something. Maybe.
Or maybe it was just a throwaway silly sitcom plot.
Look, how many resurrected sythezoids have you re-ensouled? Maybe that’s just what happens when you do that.
And Wanda removes the gum after it’s been in him all day, Obviously, at that point, all the “soul” flavor would have been chewed out!
I’m not actually all that sold on the “gum=soul” idea. I do think, if the gum is significant, and there’s a suprnatural big bad involved, then the gum’s significance is probably also supernatural. But I suspect it’s just gum, and “Big Red” is just a jokey reference to Vision himself.
I think the clues so far point to there being some sort of Big Bad who initiated the reality bubble and is manipulating Wanda for their own purposes. But, that could be a double-bluff, and Monica was right the first time when she said, “It’s Wanda. It’s all Wanda.”
But, as I opined a couple of times upthread, if that’s true, then Wanda is not a tragic hero in crisis. She’s a villain. And Director Guy is absolutely right, about everything*.
We know that the inhabitants of Westview are, on some level, conscious of the fact that they’re being puppetted. And it hurts. It’s a literal living hell. Thousands of victims, undergoing constant, never-ending torture. Judging by what Vision sees on Halloween, those “off-screen” remain conscious and aware of their condition, the entire time. No respite, no sleep, just a constant, continual, never-ending nightmare.
Many of them are parents. “Pietro” suggests that Wanda’s been keeping the kids sleeping in their beds and unaware, which might be the case (it’s pretty much the best case scenario), but then for the Halloween episode, she brings them out. So those are children, being puppetted, aware on some level that they’re being puppetted, and again, it hurts. And their parents are aware their children are being puppetted and it hurts.
From what we’ve seen so far, Wanda, if she is actually behind everything, is the most monstrous villain the MCU has produced. Thanos at least gave most of his victims a quick death. Even Purple Man’s mind-rapes in Jessica Jones weren’t this bad. His victims weren’t aware they were being puppetted until after they escaped his control, and his puppetting didn’t cause them pain. Not to mention the sheer scale of what Wanda’s doing…
*That’s one reason I think there narratively pretty much has to be a Big Bad behind things. If there is, by cinematic convention, Monica and Jimmy Woo can get away with multiple violent felonies, because they were right about how to resolve the crisis. If they’re wrong, and Director Guy is right, they assaulted Federal agents, beat them unconscious, kidnapped and unlawfully confined them, stole their weapons and gear, intruded into classified government computer systems, and committed various other miscellaneous crimes, with no extenuating circumstances.
That’s a valid point.
The best villains were heroes with a tragic arc that leads to them being villains. And who we can hope can have a redemptive arc as well, even if they never do.
That said, if this was required to, say prevent the return of Ultron using Vision’s body, would she be a pure villain?
You mean, if it were for some reason necessary for her to subject thousands of innocent men, women, and children to constant, never-ending torture in order to stop Ultron from returning? Yes, she would still be a pure villain. Let Ultron return, then destroy him again. How would Ultron’s return be any worse than what she’s doing?
(And how would that even work? How would the reality bubble stop Ultron’s return? Why would that be the only way? And why would it require her to trap thousands of innocent victims with her and subject them to constant, never-ending torture?)
Sure. The MCU’s Helmut Zemo wanted revenge on superheroes for the death of his family, innocent bystanders in superhuman battle, and killed a lot of innocent bystanders himself in his quest for revenge. That’s twisted, but understandable. Innocent civilians had to die for his plan to work, and in his mind, he’s probably actually ultimately saving lives down the line.
Similarly, the FoX-Men Magneto committed any number of atrocities to “save” mutants. Especially in the earlier movies, his quest to save mutants seemed tangled up with his own ego, which made him an interesting, complex villain, and, as you say, at least potentially a redeemable one. But, again, his atrocities were necessary for his plans to succeed.
But look at what Wanda is actually doing. If all she wants is a fantasy life with Vision, she could have done that without any innocent victims. We know from the post-Civil War movies that Black Widow had trained her in living undercover and off the grid, including carrying on a clandestine romance with Vision. If she had broken into SWORD, stolen his body, created a twisted revenant of him, and hid out in disguise in a small town, that would have been creepy, and villainous in treating Vision as a fantasy object and not an autonomous individual. But it would have been understandable and proportional. That would set her up, at least potentially, as a tragic hero who could be redeemed.
But instead, she’s mind-raping thousands of random innocent people, including children, to try to create her fantasy life. That’s not just twisted, it’s monstrous.
If she’s being manipulated, and is just willfully blind to the suffering of everyone around her due to her grief and loss and rage, she’s potentially redeemable. But if this is all her doing, if she knowingly set up the reality bubble and dragged in all of those innocent victims, that’s villainous selfishness on a level I think is unprecedented in the MCU.
I mean, Ultron did nearly wipe out all life on Earth. And they’d face him again without Iron Man, Cap, and potentially Vision. But we’re entering the trolley problem here.
That is part of the reason that I think that there has to be someone else involved.
She could probably mind control the whole town, but she’s never shown powers of actually altering reality.(In the MCU, anyway, I have no idea in the comics.) She may be unaware of the harm she is doing, and she may even be a victim herself.
My assumption is that she was grieving over losing Vision, and someone offered to help her to bring him back, and she agreed without asking the price.
Wanda can be a villain of the deepest dye who needs to be stopped as soon as possible (and the evidence is thus far that she is) - but Hayward can still be wrong. By analogy, if a crazed hostage-taker is holding people prisoner, and tormenting them, going in with guns blazing may still be wrong, because it puts the hostages at risk.
In the comics,
she absolutely can control reality. The “Avengers Disassembled” and “House of M” storylines revealed that all the previous explanations of her powers, which even by comic book standards were incoherent, were all incoherent in-universe, because her actual power had always been that she could shape reality. And she was profoundly insane.
Ok, that’s valid. But that seems like a genuine dilemma. I don’t think someone advocating to go in guns blazing and damn the consequences to stop the torture is objectively wrong.
Interesting, seems odd that she got those powers from the Mind Stone, rather than the Reality Stone, but that’s comic book logic for ya.
Any heros/villians actually get their powers from the reality stone (as opposed to just borrowing them for a while, ala Thanos on Knowhere)?