Still confused since Hex Vision was created ex nihilo. So Wanda can make Vibranium from nothing? Could she make Cap a new shield or a platoon of vibranium robots or is she limited because reasons?
Apparently? In the MCU, what she seems limited by is her lack of knowledge about how her abilities actually work (see the previous few posts). We, the viewing audience, don’t know any more than she does at this point about what her actual limits are.
BTW, in the category of “Obvious Things About a Creative Work You Only Realize Later”:
Westview = WV = WandaVision
She was able to create Vibranium out of nothing while inside the hex field, but once Vision left the hex, the Vibranium started disintegrating. So it’s not so much that she can create Vibranium at will, so much as she can create a localized effect, inside of which she can edit reality more-or-less at will. But anything created inside the hex can’t exist outside it. She could, inside the hex, create any number of Captain America shields, but they’d disintegrate if anyone tried to take them outside the hex.
I’m not sure if Monica’s outfit was supposed to be kevlar when it was inside the hex. I think, while she was “in character,” it was just fabric. When it left the hex, it reverted to it’s original material, without reverting to its original form. So, that’s consistent with Vision - his Vibranium body was created out of nothing, or air molecules, or whatever, but while it’s inside the hex, it acts as if it were Vibranium, including showing up on Haywards tracker. When he leaves the hex, it reverts to whatever it was originally made from - but since you can’t have a Vision made out of air molecules, or “nothing,” he starts disintegrating.
That seems plausible. On the other hand, it’s also probably more thought than the writers actually put into it. On the gripping hand, though, that kind of fanwanking is exactly what a thread like this is for. So, I think your explanation is now my headcanon.
…remember back in episode eight when they were watching Wanda in the monitor and the moment the Scarlet Witch appeared was “rewound” and erased?
Do you think it was Wanda who did that? I think the show was telling us explicitly that it wasn’t her. There were moments when Wanda took charge, like when she chose to expel Monica from the Hex, or when she expanded the Hex. But there was so much she didn’t know or that she didn’t have control over. It was the Scarlet Witch, whatever that is, that had agency and control those other times.
Wanda is clearly in denial. A stage of grief. She isn’t helped by enablers, like Fake Quicksilver. The metaphor the show was going for is really important and relevant to the discussion. Its why the writers went to pains to make it clear that Wanda really didn’t know exactly what she is doing.
In real life being in denial doesn’t make you the villain. It does mean that you do things that often (unintentionally) hurt other people. If people weren’t hurt then the story would have missed the mark. You can’t explore the themes the series was exploring unless innocent people were hurt. They just decided to go big with it here (because super-hero show).
As a society we generally agree that murdering people is objectively worse than detaining them. And I’ve known somebody who was in so much pain they wished they would die. They got better. And that’s kinda the difference here.
Of course he gets a pass. The Hulk is never talked about as “the villain.”
But as soon as Wanda found out she was torturing people she decided to put an end to it. That part matters.
Tony’s character arc was spread out over a series of movies released over 11 years. Yet before you said:
So was Tony’s arc bad storytelling? Or should we give the writers a bit of a pass here, and assume that maybe some of the themes touched on here will get explored in other media?
You’ve literally just given Tony a pass here when Wanda, who didn’t knowingly torture the people of Westview, does not.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. Tony was part of the military industrial complex and he didn’t care. The blood of thousands of innocents are on his hands and it wasn’t until he had been hijacked and kidnapped and nearly killed that he even began to think that maybe he was doing something wrong.
Tony had much more agency over his actions than Wanda did. How could he not know what was happening?
But Tony gets the pass. Because he didn’t knowingly supply weapons to warlords and terrorists. Why downplay this?
But a lot of MCU fans don’t really care that he was on the wrong side of the whole industrial military complex. And I think that is significantly worse than the stance he took during the Civil War.
As I pointed out Monica said something that I needed to hear, and gave me a bit of peace.
And here is the transcript of their exchange.
I don’t think its fair to sum this conversation up as simply the " townsfolk are ungrateful in not acknowledging Wanda’s “sacrifices”, and “Good luck.” I’m not reading “ungrateful” in Monica’s first line. Wanda has watched Vision die three times. And she killed him twice. The people of Westview will never know or understand what Wanda went through or the sacrifices she made. That isn’t asking them to be grateful. Its a simple statement of fact.
And Monica went through the same experience as everybody else in Westview (although not for as long). Being able to tell people who are in grief that hurt people while in grief that “you don’t hate them” is an important message that needed to be said. The exchange really needs to be viewed in the context of the series as a whole which focused on PTSD, depression, grief, and working though it. Its an extended metaphor and this last exchange really put a capstone on the story it wanted to tell. Granting forgiveness to the person who made your life hell certainly isn’t something that everybody can do, or even should do. But Monica chose to do that here and that’s okay too.
I have no idea what that is supposed to do with anything. The people in the actual show, who were victims of Wanda, said they’d prefer death to the pain she was causing.
Wasn’t it also way back in Episode 1 where the boss’s wife kept begging Wanda to “Stop it!” and all she did was rewind over her?
…as a society we have collectively decided that killing people is worse than detaining them.
And people I know personally who were in great pain said they would prefer death as well. I didn’t grant them that wish and they are now glad that I didn’t. (And so am I. I wouldn’t want to live the rest of my life in prison.)
She was choking him. It wasn’t even clear here that she knew she was choking him until the bosses wife begged Wanda to “stop it” which snapped Wanda out of it.
One thing I was wondering: does Wanda definitely, consciously realize that these are actual humans she’s harming? To the extent she’s aware of what’s going on, she knows she created her dead husband from scratch, in a sitcom world that doesn’t resemble reality. How completely aware is she that the other people aren’t similarly created from whole cloth?
She seems to be in a semi-lucid, semi-dream state, and when reality intrudes she pushes it back almost like smashing the snooze button. I don’t think she ever thinks, “This is a town full of actual human beings that I am forcing to act out my fantasies”; rather, I think she shies away from thinking about the details at all.
This is part of what separates her from Killgrave. Killgrave knows his power, he deliberately experiments with it, he deliberately and sadistically uses it to engage in physical and psychological torture. The pleasure of the experience, for him, is the exertion of his will over others, and their helpless suffering.
The impact of what Wanda does is very similar, but her motives, and understanding, are very different. I think she might have only the vaguest sense that the people she’s controlling are real people at all–which, given her family and her mental collapse, is a pretty understandable mistake.
We don’t know what that was. It could have been a vision of her future self. It could have been a vision of a mythical archetype, not a conscious entity. Or, sure, it could have been a conscious entity that sometimes acts through Wanda. Maybe Wanda unconsciously and unknowingly rewound and edited reality there. Maybe “the Scarlet Witch” did. Either way, I just don’t see how you can seriously argue that Wanda wasn’t aware and in control when she was in the Hex. Between the rewinds and edits, her becoming upset when Vision goes off-script, her confrontation outside the Hex with Hayward, Fietro’s “enabling” speech where he discusses how she’s controlling everyone, and the scene where everyone finally breaks character and the only part that seems to give her any pause is that they were aware they were being puppetted, I don’t think the show could have been any clearer that she was aware and in control.
Here I think we have a point where we’re talking past each other. I’m discussing Wanda’s actions in-universe. I really, super-ultra-mega-ultima-get it. It’s a metaphor for grief. But I don’t think it’s fair to discuss the show as a metaphor for grief while simultaneously also discussing Wanda’s actions as a character in the show in-universe. Thoughtlessly lashing out and hurting others emotionally due to grief doesn’t make you a villain. But taking prisoners does, whether you’re motivated by grief or not.
I don’t know where to go with this. You’ve asked me not to use a word relating to real world violence, so I won’t repeat that. But Wanda didn’t just “detain” people. She turned them into puppets. There simply is no real world equivalent for what she did, and what I think is the closest real world equivalent is one you’ve explicitly asked me not to mention. But what she did is, I think, worse. Again, so does one of her victims in-universe, who literally begs to die.
He is talked about as a monster. By everyone, especially Bruce.
But as soon as Wanda found out she was torturing people she decided to put an end to it. That part matters.
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That part does matter. I also think that it matters that the reason Wanda doesn’t realize that she’s torturing people is because she thinks she’s successfully erased their minds and replaced them with sitcom characters. I frankly don’t understand how you can argue that Westview Vision and the kids are real and that Wanda killed them without acknowledging that if Wanda actually had completely over-written everyone’s minds, that would also be murder.
By mid-way through the first movie, he acknowledged the pain and death his weapons had caused, and devoted himself to making up for it. His arc over the next decade was figuring out how to do that (and I’m not actually sure he really did).
It’s a long thread, so you may have genuinely missed this, but I’ve stated several times that I’m perfectly ok with ending WandaVision on a morally ambiguous note. What stuck in my craw is Monica seemed to be giving Wanda a narrative pass.
He doesn’t get a pass. That was my whole point. Midway through the first movie, he acknowledges the pain and death he’s caused, and starts trying to atone for it.
Wanda didn’t know the Westview residents were conscious of being puppetted, so I acknowledge, and have from the start, that she didn’t realize just how awful what she was doing was. But she knew they were puppets, and she didn’t show any concern over that. She only got upset when they went off script.
Fine. If you want to make a case that Tony Stark was really a villain, not a hero, throughout the MCU, I’d be willing to read it. I still think Wanda was a villain in WandaVision. She’s a sympathetic villain, but the best ones usually are.
You know what? You’ve actually shifted my opinion, at least a little. That transcript does make that exchange seem more nuanced than I thought it was when I watched it. I still don’t buy the “sacrifice” line, though.
It’s ok that Monica had her own reaction. But the episode is structured such that she seems to be speaking with Narrative Authority when she absolves Wanda. But, again, after re-reading that transcript, there does seem to be more of an acknowledgement by Wanda than I recognized when I first watched it.
I still think she’s a villain. But I think maybe she’s more aware of that than I first gave her credit for.
Are we sure she knew they were real people being puppeted, and not creations like Vision and her kids? Remember, she tries to control her kids, and Vision, and is shocked at her inability to do so. She may think the townspeople are figments as well.
I read that “sacrifice” as including all the stuff that led up to Westview - Ultron, and Thanos, and all of the stuff that led to her mental break, not just giving up her fantasy life with Vision and the kids.
Maybe not at first, but Vision tells her explicitly that they’re real people, and that they’re suffering, in the episode where faux-Pietro shows up. And Pietro also says that they’re real in the next episode, when he tries to tell her that what she’s doing is actually okay. So, by mid-series, it’s hard to argue that she didn’t know any more.
She never gave any indication of that which I recall. Fietro goes into some detail about how she’s letting people mostly keep their relationships and aspects of their personalities, and how she’s keeping the kids tucked away unconscious somewhere, until she trots them out for Halloween. She doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge that’s what she’s doing, but she also doesn’t give any indication that Fietro is lying or wrong, and that everyone is just a fictional character. As I’ve pointed out several times, when Agatha lets them break character, Wanda doesn’t seem at all surprised that they’re real people; she only seems surprised that they’re aware they’re being puppetted. Also, when the drone strike fails, she leaves the Hex and confronts Hayward. She doesn’t say or do anything at that point to indicate that she thinks that Westview and it’s residents are fictional creations.
I actually do buy that she was deep in denial, in a dreamlike state, and that she didn’t think about what she was doing to everyone else. She didn’t want to. She’s not Kilgrave. She’s not pure evil.
I still think she was a villain.
Ok, except everyone does seem to know that. As discussed upthread, the details of the battles with Thanos seem to be public knowledge, which various characters discuss as if they assume everyone else is just as familiar with events as we the audience are. I suppose it’s possible that Wanda killing Vision is one detail that isn’t public knowledge and that Monica is privvy to due to her SWORD affiliation, but that seems pretty strained to me.
The details of the battles might be common knowledge, but the details of Wanda’s relationship with Vision wouldn’t necessarily. Everyone might know, “Thanos killed Vision,” but not “Vision and Wanda were in love.” IIRC, is was explicitly a secret relationship in Infinity War.
Were the children really fantasy creations of Wanda’s mind? Remember, she said, “Thank you for choosing me,” as she was saying good night to the kids. That’s a very strange thing to say to phantasms of the mind.
Ok, that’s fair. But then, how would Monica?
Actually, I think it’s a perfectly fair reading of that line that it’s not just about giving up WV Vision and her kids, it’s about that and all of her losses. But in the context of the series, and the place that line comes in the structure of the series and the episode, I just can’t not read it as also saying that Wanda “sacrificed” WV Vision and her kids for the Westview residents, which I just don’t buy at all.
They were created by Wanda like with the hex Vision, they weren’t real kids she puppeted. I really had no idea what that line was supposed to mean. They didn’t choose her, she made them.
It’s a thing I’ve heard from real parents. Wanda certainly doesn’t think of them as just phantasms.
I think their ontological status is debatable, but their degree of reality in-universe is, I think, deliberately ambiguous. Again, that post-credit scene, where Wanda’s astral form apparently hears her children crying out to her. Is that a delusion (possibly stoked by the Darkhold)? Or are their souls somehow real, and out there somewhere, in danger (which would be consistent with at least one of the de-re-retcons of them in the comics)?