I apologize. We’re discussing fiction, so I understand that using terms for real-world violence can be unnecessarily upsetting. I’ll stop using the term.
The only thing is, I’m not sure how else to get across the full horror of what Wanda did to her victims. In-universe, that term really does fit what Wanda did to them. This is one of the very few fictional depictions of mind-control I’ve seen that really shows just how intrusive and violent it is.
But, again, I get the sensitivity of using a term for real-world violence in the context of a discussion of fantastical fiction. I won’t use the term anymore.
Well, in the comics, Dr. Doom actually is a magic user. Since at least the 80s, it’s been canon that his mother was a Romani witch, and he inherited her powers. He’s been depicted in mainstream canon appearances as potentially rivalling the sorcerous power of Doctor Strange himself; it’s just that he’s mostly concentrated on technology and has neglected his magical potential. Even before that, he was pretty clearly coded as a medieval magician and alchemist, complete with a castle and all the other trappings, even if he was actually using technology.
It really is a classic villain origin story - villains are often driven by grief, and willing to sacrifice many others’ well beings and lives for a chance to bring their love back or to get revenge for the loss. The best monsters have an initial motivation that we can empathize with. But their redemption has to include a realization of how bad what they have done is. That was missing here.
I alluded to it upthread, but Star Trek: The Next Generation actually had an episode with a remarkably similar plot, “The Survivors”. I don’t think that WandaVision deliberately cribbed from it, but there are a lot of parallels.
That had a similar ending, with Our Heroes letting the reality-manipulating weakly godlike entity go on their way, but that episode made the moral ambiguity of that the whole crux of the episode. The Wanda-analogue actually seems to be cognizant of the horror of what he’s done, but also makes it clear that he can’t go back and change any of it. Picard makes clear that the Wanda-analogue committed an monstrous act, but acknowledges that human/Federation law just can’t deal with the sheer immensity of what he did (and there’s not anything they could practically do about it, anyway).
Yeah, it’s interesting to me how many people in this thread still think of Wanda as a hero, or even a victim. Thanos was also motivated by grief. Wanda lost her husband; Thanos lost his everything. His whole planet died. That made him a bit more of a complex villain than the comics version (who was just insane and literally in love with Death). But I don’t recall any serious discussion of him as a victim or misguided hero.
(I do think that it’s interesting that Wanda in the post credit scene, alone in a remote cabin, mirrors Thanos at the end of Infinity War. I’m hoping that was intentional, as a signal that the writers realize it’s at least a valid possible interpretation that Wanda was the Big Bad of WandaVision).
Helmet Zemo was another Sokovian driven by grief. He doesn’t seem to get a pass from MCU fans, either.
I could have lived with it if Monica hadn’t hand-waved it away. In my opinion that undercut the whole gravity of Wanda’s actions. As did an earlier moment with Darcy, when Vision snapped her out of her zombified state, she said something to the effect of, “That sucked” and they moved along.
It just reinforces my sense that this series neglected to make some important decisions about what narrative it wanted to tell.
A great example, because there’s no doubt that what the Purple Man does is outright evil. And not just because he uses his power sadistically. The “jacket” speech from the guy who was otherwise unharmed showed just how soul-breaking it was for his victims to be turned into puppets and lose every shred of autonomy while keeping enough awareness to knows what was being done to them.
When I think of what’s missing, the words I keep coming back to are remorse, penitence, atonement. Wanda doesn’t show these, and nobody who matters thinks she should.
Agree. And the exploration of how Kilgrave controlled others was very much a shared exploration of rape and other horrific exploitations of power, controlling others for your own selfish ends.
We LIKE Wanda, we want her to be redeemed. But she is not redeemed if she thinks of herself as heroic for having sacrificed in order to stop the torture she was causing.
Yes, I thought that was really well done, and I thought the first season was probably the best of all the Netflix MCU-adjacent shows. Killgrave was unambiguously and explicitly depicted as a ****ist. But, it was also clear that he had no extenuating motivations, he was just a pure hedonistic psychopath. And he mind-controlled Our Hero, and was structurally and explicitly presented as a villain from the get-go, so it’s a lot clearer there that the audience is supposed to see him as a monster.
I think there was a flashback episode where we were shown that Kilgrave had a traumatic childhood, starved of love and treated as an experimental subject by people who were meant to care for him. No suggestion it excused him though.
IIRC, it was left deliberately ambiguous how much of that actually happened, and how much was self-justifying exaggerated grievance and fabulation. Even if we take everything in the flashback at face value, that explains how and why he became a psychopath. But it’s made narratively clear throughout the series that everything he does is simply for his own gratification. He’s unambiguously the Villain. We, the audience, may feel sorry for Young Killgrave, but there’s not ambiguity that Adult Killgrave is a monster.
In WandaVision, we’re structurally and narratively clearly supposed to sympathize with Wanda, and see her as acting from understandable motives. And Monica, at the end, clearly doesn’t see Wanda as a monster, certainly not the way Jessica Jones sees Killgrave.
Did anything permanent happen to anybody (other than White Vision and Agatha) over the course of this? Was anybody killed or maimed etc, if we ignore the “mind rape”? This is not a gotcha question to anybody, just I don’t remember anything.
Physically, I don’t think anyone was harmed (beyond the standard cinematic trope that being beaten unconscious is only a momentary inconvenience). We never did find out what happened to Random SWORD Agent who was Hexed into a beekeeper, after Wanda re-wound and edited out his appearance, but going by the precedent of Monica, he probably was just safely ejected.
Psychologically, it’s clear that everyone in Westview suffered severe, lasting trauma. But I don’t think anyone suffered lasting physical harm.
…its interesting to me how many people still think of Wanda as the villain. Thanos was motivated by grief. But Thanos also knew exactly what he was doing and had agency. Helmet Zemo knew exactly what he was doing and had agency. Two things that Wanda didn’t have here. Thanos killed half of everybody in the universe. Wanda didn’t kill anyone. As @Lobohan puts it:
Wanda is more analogous to the Hulk than to Thanos. We are more sympathetic to Tony Stark who built bombs that literally killed Wanda’s parents than we are to Wanda herself. Stark has the blood of thousands, possibly more on his hands. But Tony gets a pass from Marvel fans. The Hulk gets a pass.
Are you talking about Monica? Because she really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. In the context of the moment she was grieving too. When she spoke the line that most people here hated I burst into tears. I miss my mum so much. Its been just over three months. I think about her every day. I didn’t know how much I needed to hear that until I heard that. But that line more than any other in the show just destroyed me.
As I’ve pointed out several times WandaVision was focused on grief. It spent nine episodes building a story that walked us through the various stages of grief with the last two episodes focused on acceptance. They were never going to be able fit remorse, penitence, atonement as well into the last five minutes of a five hour story and I don’t know why people would expect that they would. These themes, like grief, take time to explore.
