WandaVision on Disney +. Open spoilers

Cafe Society
,
1311

…this was made explicitly clear in the show. Wanda wasn’t aware exactly to what extent she was in control in the Hex. When you said this:

All of this applies to what Wanda was doing in the Hex. We don’t know. She didn’t know. She doesn’t understand the power. But she will. That’s the point.

I think its entirely fair. I don’t think we can or we should separate the two.

People that were in the Hex for shorter periods of time like Darcy or Monica don’t give the impression that the word you used is an appropriate one. If it were then I don’t think either Darcy or Monica would have given Wanda a pass. I don’t think what she did was worse and I think the show explicitly tells us this.

Again from the script:

I don’t want to minimize what Wanda did. What she did was very very bad. But they are not on the scale of Kilgrave bad. Not even remotely close. I actually wouldn’t have complained if you had used that word to describe Kilgrave’s actions. But I don’t think what Wanda did was even remotely at the same level.

I don’t think this at all.

I don’t agree with your interpretation of what happened here. Wanda was simply in denial. She didn’t want to think about what was happening to the people of Westview.

That doesn’t change anything I said.

He does get a pass.

You just gave him that pass.

This wasn’t about the movie. This was about what you said.

Now I’m not talking about you here with this. But we (the collective “we”) have never talked about Tony’s actions the way we talked about Wanda’s. Because Tony’s victims were brown people, people in far-off-lands, people we can’t really relate too. Wanda’s victims looked like us. We relate to them in ways we could never relate to the thousands of people that would have died at Tony’s hands. I’m brown, and the hypocrisy on display (again, not talking about you) really hurts. What Tony did was infinitely worse than what Wanda did in my opinion. “Acknowledging the pain and death he’s caused” isn’t good enough.

You minimized his actions when you said “He didn’t knowingly supply weapons to warlords and terrorists.” Because he did knowingly supply weapons to the US military. And in the real world the US military is responsible for a lot of death and destruction and you glossed right over that.

1312

Fietro called them “demon spawn”. Maybe that was just a joke along the lines of calling kids “little monkeys”. But we know he was being puppeted by Agatha in the hopes of getting a rise out of Wanda. Maybe Agatha knows something about the kids?

1313

@Banquet_Bear, you’ve stated in a few of your replies that you recently loss your mother. I’m sorry for your loss. And I know me saying that isn’t adequate to address that kind of loss.

I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it seems like this show resonated with you on a deep, personal level. It just didn’t with me. I’m not sure there’s much more productive that can come out continuing this discussion, because I think we had very different emotional reactions to a lot of what was depicted in that show. It spoke to different traumas for me than it did to you.

Having said that:

Yeah, you’re very careful to say you’re not talking about me, while directly addressing me. I’m done.

1314

…to be explicitly clear here I absolutely was not talking about you here. I had just previously quoted you but this was tangential to your post, and probably better suited to a post on its own, so again my apologies.

That comment was really directed at the meta-level commentary that we’ve seen rise up over discussion over this show. This twitter thread here says it best:

This was a series that was always supposed to be viewed through a certain lens, talking about a complex subject in a relatable way. Wanda isn’t just suffering grief. She is suffering from post-traumatic stress. Depression.

The fact many have casually dismissed this in favor of only a literal interpretation of the show is problematic because it buys into the standard tropes of “women being emotional.” The show avoided all of those tropes, explicitly and implicitly stating that Wanda didn’t know the extent of what she was doing was bad and when she found out she went into denial.

People cast Wanda as the bad guy and passionately argue she is the bad guy while glossing over the fact that others we see as heroes have done much, much worse. And that’s a meta-commentary on how things happen in society.

So when a white-middle class mom who has been forced to not see her daughter for a week is seen to be many orders of magnitudes worse than thousands innocent people being bombed in Afghanistan then I think its fair to say that hypocrisy is at play. Because it all ties into the same thing. We have certain societal expectations about gender, about trauma, about grief. And I think the rush to say that Wanda is the bad guy plays into all of this. We don’t do enough in society to help people with severe trauma. That should be the takeaway from the show. Not if Wanda is or isn’t a villain.

1315

You are trying very hard to minimize the horrible things Wanda did. Those people wanted to die. What she did is inexcusable.

1316

I don’t remember anything about how Tony Stark started, I’m only a casual Marvel viewer and other than Infinity War and Endgame (which I rewatched during the run of WandaVision) have only seen the films once when they first came out in theaters. So I am not comparing what Wanda did to anything that anyone else did or how anyone else’s actions were viewed and I find it ludicrous that now people are actually saying that thinking that Wanda is the true villain of the series is somehow racist. :roll_eyes: I am judging what she did solely on how it was portrayed in the show.

1317

…nobody is excusing Wanda. But by snipping my quote you’ve taken what I said out of context. Yes: I deliberately did play down what Wanda did: the very same way that Tony Stark’s actions have been downplayed. That’s precisely the point.

1318

…that wasn’t what I said.

1319

I actually see this very much the other way.

Wanda did something truly horrific. We know that she had some awareness of her agency in it even in the first episode when she belatedly told Vision to save Mr Hart. And when she was explicitly told by Vision that they were suffering her reaction was some denial perhaps but also trying to control Vision just like she does them. In the Halloween episode sure Fietro enables but it is made clear that she knows.

But Wanda is a very attractive women and we empathize with her and her pain. We like her.

She is not sadistic like Kilgrave. The goal is not the control, is not to cause pain. The goal is avoiding her own pain. But she lies to herself as she lies to Agatha when she says she didn’t know. Despite her self denials she knew. And it bothered her some. Just not enough compared to avoiding her pain.

She is not evil but avoiding dealing with her grief, avoiding accepting it, was worth making others suffer.

Her regret rang hollow. And it was focused on her victims hating her, and wondering if Monica hated her … but not any self contempt. More feeling sorry for herself rather than repentance. One suspects she would not have released them if Vision gave her his blessing for keeping it up. She said goodbye because she had no choice.

Again, her being set up as someone who is not evil but who could easily abuse her dangerous power as she learns more about it is fine. Her grief is not yet accepted and she now only has more with the loss or inter dimensional imprisonment of her children.

I just do not feel that was shown.

1320

Oh. Others.

No expert on the other movies I but my sense is that their self regret is explicit. Bruce was horrified by what he did as Hulk, for example. As viewers we cut him slack because we see Hulk actually doing good things. Stark we see as driven by guilt to make restitution to the universe.

Their regret, their owning their crimes, and their desire to make it right allows us to forgive them. The show however seems to forgive Wanda without those things.

1321

Part of the reason that the Kilgrave comparison falls a little flat to me is that, from the first time he’s presented, Kilgrave is an evil man doing evil things. And he stays in that role.

With Wanda, she’s initially presented as an antagonist. Then we have a few movies where she’s working with the good guys and genuinely disturbed about the damage she causes, and the loss of life, in Lagos. Then we see her destroy Vision in Wakanda, only to have it nullified and be forced to watch Thanos do it when retrieving the Mind stone.

Fast forward to Endgame, and we see her back from The Snap, and kicking ass.

We’ve already developed an emotional stake in Wanda before the events of the show.

1322

Which is actually something of a problem with such characters, at least for me. Tony Stark, well, his entire character arc was one of acknowledging his past responsibility for the suffering his weapons caused, and trying to atone for it—if not always in the most reasonable or appropriate way (see: Ultron). That’s Iron Man’s origin story; he isn’t a hero despite what he’s done, he became one to atone for it, and even so, he’s a clearly ambiguous character in the MCU.

But with characters like the Hulk, and Wanda here, that sort of logic is uncomfortably close to that used by the abused to justify their abuser’s actions: they’re not really bad people, they just sometimes lose control, they can’t help it, in fact, they usually fight it, I should be thankful! The issue regarding the Hulk is usually addressed by having it explicitly so that he doesn’t cause harm to innocents, although the conceit by which that happens is often left nebulous (and occasionally frankly ridiculous, such as having Banner calculate the arc of stuff the Hulk throws in such a way as to minimize damage…).

But none of that is acknowledged regarding Wanda. She Hulks out, and hurts lots of innocents—grievously so, enough that at least some of them would prefer death. But the fact that she does so is essentially just handwaved away, and that’s somewhat disappointing; not because she, as a hero, should’ve done otherwise—I’m fine with Wanda occupying a morally grey area, or even descending into outright villainy—but because the show, in essentially handwaving Wanda’s responsibility for her actions away, legitimizes the sort of logic that says that the powerful sometimes may harm the less powerful if they lose control. They don’t, after all, really mean it like that, and sometimes, they even promise not to do it again, if you just stay with them. They’re just going through a lot right now, you know.

Yes; she clearly acknowledges that she’s controlling the others there, if I remember correctly (I think the dialogue is something like, ‘You can’t control me like you do the others!’ – ‘Oh, can’t I?’).

1323

…lets not pretend that being “a very attractive woman” is some sort of a shield. Right now in real life Meghan Markle is being pilloried in the British press, they are creating all sorts of narratives about her and they are building a narrative she is a bully and that she is cruel. There is a lot of push back against that as well. But the reason that (many of us) emphasize with her has nothing to do with her looks. It has everything to do with the undiagnosed and the unresolved trauma she is obviously going through.

Again from the transcript:

I don’t see any focus on the “victims hating her” at all. She just assumes that they do, and she doesn’t blame them. But she asks Monica the question because Monica was a victim as well.

I’ll go back to what Karnythia had to say in the twitter thread: " Sometimes you can’t make amends, you can’t take it back. All you can do is withdraw & fix you." Wanda accomplishes nothing by expressing self-contempt. She would accomplish nothing by hanging around saying sorry to everyone, or letting herself get arrested, or attempting to atone for her behavior in the moment. She has just discovered that she has leveled up. She is at God Tier mode now. She could express self-contempt. Or she could move on and try and fix what’s broken.

The minute she realizes what the Hex is doing she tries to raise the Hex and get everyone to leave. So I think this rings hollow. She only dropped the Hex because her husband was literally being torn apart while she was watching and her children were as well. Even if they were complete strangers it would have been better to continue the Hex and try and figure things out than it would have been to watch them die.

And Wanda didn’t need Vision’s permission to drop the Hex. She had agency over that decision. She made that decision on her own.

Wanda had already made up her mind. And Vision knew it. Vision wasn’t giving permission: he was telling her that he knew what she was going to do and that he was okay with that.

But we don’t cut Wanda any slack for saving the soldiers who were trying to either capture or kill her (and who had earlier tried to assassinate her) , or for trying to raise the Hex to let everyone escape? She didn’t even try to steal Vision’s body. Wanda did a lot of good in the show. And she was horrified when she found out what her actions had done. By your criteria doesn’t that give her a pass?

How many other children like Wanda grew up without parents thanks to the weapons produced by Stark? He may be trying to make “restitution to the universe” but he never tried to make it to people like Wanda, and to a degree that’s what really matters.

The show doesn’t forgive Wanda. She is in exile once again. Alone. Almost certainly a fugitive.

If Tony owned up to his crimes he would be on trial at the Hague. And if the Hulk owned up to his crimes he’d be sitting in jail whilst being the subject of multiple lawsuits.

But Tony isn’t on trial and the Hulk isn’t being sued. Because ultimately these are comic book movies and TV shows and if we get hung up with them “owning their crimes” then the world doesn’t get saved. We just accept it because the world isn’t perfect and move on. We can do that with Tony and the Hulk. Why can’t we do that for Wanda?

I still don’t think we can separate the metaphor from the literal here. Because the metaphor doesn’t work if people weren’t directly harmed. We can’t see how harmful untreated PTSD and grief can be if we don’t see any of the collateral damage.

1324

…some details of a cut scene from Wandavision Wandavision director Matt Shakman (direct link to the segment) :

For those that don’t want to click I’ll quote from the comments:

No joke. Straight out of the directors mouth. They filmed it but didn’t finish the VFX, and ultimately took the scene out. I would have LOVED To have seen that.

1325

…I’m just catching up with the rest of the episode.

So they wanted to release the first three episodes all at once, ending on expelling Monica from the Hex. But covid caught up with production, and while they released the first episode to press (from what I could understand) the third episode wasn’t quite ready for the public so they went with the first two instead.

1326

That just seemed to me to be the kind of thing a loving mother should say to her kids.

1327

I don’t have a problem with innocents being harmed because the powerful lose control—that’s a thing that happens—, but I have some difficulties with it not being acknowledged that this is still a bad thing, with neither Wanda nor anyone around (Monica, most notably) appearing to really care all that much about the hurt being caused, much less view it as something that needs to be atoned for. Wanda’s hurt and grief and rage may explain what happened, but it doesn’t excuse it, but the show treats it as if it does.

Besides, it’s not like there’s any point about treatment being made—Wanda just flies off into the unknown to deal with it on her own (which apparently involves studying lots of dark magic, which I don’t know if it’s such a great coping mechanism). It wouldn’t have taken much—some lines in the final exchange to the effect of, Wanda, you really need help, this sort of thing can’t happen again, innocent people have been hurt, or something. She still could’ve accepted or declined, thus perhaps either marking the first step to salvation and healing or greater darkness and suffering, but that sort of thing would’ve at least placed the issue of her moral culpability on the table.

1328

My candidate for the best review of the series:

1329

That guy reminded me A LOT of Patrick Warburton

1330

She doesn’t “fix it”, though. She just stops doing it.

That said, I agree that Wanda was not acting intentionally and with full agency until the end of the series. By the time she started coming out of her spectacular case of denial (as WV Vision increasingly gained his own agency), the machinations of Agatha had begun to ramp up.

IMO she’s neither hero nor villain here; just a really fucked-up person (for understandable reasons) with powers way beyond her own understanding or control. She had no malevolent intent (although who knows if that’s true at the very end), but she’s a danger to everyone around her.

Because she was just there to have an Origin Story.

…to the tune of Yakity Sax…

On the Dr. Doom side point, it would amuse me to have him appear once we get a full-crossover MCU:

Dr Doom: Tremble before the mighty Dr. Doom, for I…what..urk…AAAAAAARGH!!"

< crumples into a small ball >

Magneto: Well, he was fun.

Even better if he does it while making the thumb-and-forefinger pinching gesture: “I’m literally crushing your head! Hee hee!”