I figured that was bullshit, Agatha had been altering things the entire time to make it go wrong. Wanda herself changed the hex at least once.
Good think Wanda wasn’t putting her trust in Agatha either way - hence her putting runes on the walls of the hex.
I wonder, if it hadn’t been for Agatha and Jimmy losing his witness, how long would Wanda’s Westview have lasted? Weeks, Months?
Remember, right before the big Agatha reveal, when Wanda was breaking down emotionally, and parts of the house kept randomly shifting between different time periods? That’s why they don’t just leave the hex up: It’s a reality distortion field linked to the emotional state and subconscious desires of a woman dealing with severe PTSD. That’s crazy dangerous even without the mind controlled citizens.
You would think Doctor Strange would know INSTANTLY, like he did when Thor and Loki showed up.
If Klingons can have cloaking devices, so can witches.
Someone pointed out to me that in “Spiderman: Far from Home”, Peter Parker asks Nick Fury about a bunch of heroes including Dr. Strange, and Fury says “not available”. It’s about the same timing, so…maybe he’s off doing something? It’s a good question.
It sucks that COVID threw the schedule all out of whack, Wandavision was supposed to lead directly into Multiverse of Madness soon after. I imagine we’ll get an explanation then, but now it’s like a year away.
On the other hand, that wasn’t really Fury, so maybe he didn’t know.
Or was afraid Strange would know he wasn’t really Fury.
Doctor Strange, Hulk, Captain Marvel, and now Scarlet Witch are so powerful, they could solve all problems any movie might set up. They have to invent reasons why they can’t be there so it doesn’t undermine the jeopardy. It usually comes down to “unavailable”.
WandaVision Writer, Director Answer Biggest Fan Questions, from IGN.
Quoting the question that seems most controversial here:
Did Wanda Get Off Too Easy?
In the WandaVision season finale, Agatha breaks Wanda’s control over the citizens of Westview, and when they share in horrifying detail how Wanda has been mentally torturing them this entire time, Wanda recognizes what she did to them was wrong and pulls open the Hex long enough for them to escape. Later, Wanda takes a walk of shame past the townsfolk on her way out of Westview.
Given the severity of her crimes, some fans felt Wanda didn’t take enough accountability or face enough consequences. But according to Schaeffer, that was by design.
“Monica is not going to tackle [Wanda] to the ground and take her to prison. There’s not really room for accountability in this particular show, but I don’t think it’s forgivable what she’s done,” Schaeffer explained. “I don’t think that the finale is portrayed like everything is hunky-dory. She walks through those people, and they’re justifiably furious with her and feel victimized, rightfully so. I don’t think that accountability piece is part of this particular story.”
There’s a precedent for Marvel turning its heroes into forces of antagonism, like how Tony Stark became the “bad guy” in Captain America: Civil War, and it seems Wanda was intentionally left in a morally gray area.
“It was important for us to not have it be a black and white situation. [Wanda is] grieving and having to come to terms with losing Vision, saying goodbye to him and the kids, and there’s a real emotional impact to that journey. She was unaware of what she did to this town, really, until the finale, when Agatha makes it clear to her what she’s done. She’s allowed herself to stay in a kind of a state of denial for a long time about what the impact of her fantasy life is doing to the real residents of Westview. And once she realizes that, she begins a process. It’s not a clean process, it’s messy. She starts to open it up, and then closes it, but then ultimately, reverts everything to the way it was. She does make things right at the end, and she doesn’t get out of town without feeling a lot of angry stares. She’s very aware of how everyone feels about her at the end,” Schaeffer said.
Bolding mine.
Would’ve been happy if she had skipped the line about how they would never know what she sacrificed for them. That’s where they fucked it all up.
Again, interesting that accountability is viewed solely as something imposed on a wrongdoer by a more powerful authority. Obviously, that’s a good model that we use a lot. But it’s not the only means by which wrongdoers can face consequences for their actions and more importantly, it’s not the only means by which victims of wrongdoing can be given restitution.
In the context of the MCU (and I agree that exploring this issue to this level isn’t something WandaVision should have done, I’m just interested) this brings us back to the Sokovia Accords and Civil War: what oversight, if any, should powered individuals operate under, and do we require their consent to its oversight? If there are individuals too powerful even for other supers to detain and imprison against their will, what can be done to create a system of accountability? Are we ultimately just relying on their moral sense and/or some system of karma whereby they will find the consequences of misjudgements and bad choices to be untenable in the long run?
And I appreciate that as the goal. But if the intent was to have the audience feel the very important tension of that, I think they failed, with Monica’s narrative near absolution dispensed being a significant but not exclusive part of that failure.
And here is where the showrunner has a bigger failure to my read:
No. She did NOT make things right. She did not continue torturing them but the harms from being tortured are not undone, cannot be undone, and have stopping the torture, of many hundreds including children and making parents watch their children being tortured, is not making things right.
I don’t even know how the showrunner can hold these two beliefs at the same time:
She ALLOWED herself her denial is incompatible with actually being unaware. She was told by Vision that she was causing the residents pain and chose denial. She actively rationalized even as she recognized that what she was doing was being a villian. She sought absolution from her fictive brother.
Bullshit that she was unaware.
Just thought of something and sorry if its been mentioned…maybe Captain Marvel is radioactive and she gave Photon cancer and her daughter mutated cells.
There’s a color palette in the Marvel Universe, and we had to be very careful not to cross-pollinate the color,” Maiers says. “We actually did quite a bit of testing to make sure we stayed out of the reds, because that’s Scarlet Witch’s world, and we stayed out of violet, because that’s somebody else’s world. We had to stay in these deeper purples. And that becomes Agatha’s color. And now the colors we used will be posted in the Marvel universe, she’ll own those. As the origin-story creators, we got to be the ones to establish that color.”
So… who’s violet, I wonder?
Black Panther? That’s the color we see when the nanites in his suit glow from stored energy or when that energy is discharged. Come to think of it, it’s also the color of the heart-shaped herb and other effects in Wakanda. So I’m going to type it more confidently: Black Panther.
I left this thread after a very upsetting interaction. I’ve also decided to leave this board. I have no wish to restart any arguments or take any parting shots as I head out the door, so I’m not going to address any specific poster. I did want to make clear just why I was so upset.
I understand that the show was about grief. It was an extended portrayal of a person overwhelmed by grief, and as a fantasy show, it literalized a lot of metaphors about grief. In that capacity, it seemed to resonate very strongly with a lot of viewers, including several posters in this thread. I appreciate that, and I definitely do not want to deny or disparage it. If it spoke powerfully to you about your experience of grief, then the creators did their job well, and I genuinely hope it gave you some solace.
But as good a job as the show may have done with depicting the suffering of someone trapped in their grief, I think it did at least as good a job, albeit accidentally, of portraying the suffering of someone trapped in an abusive relationship.
Wanda had enormous power over people around her. And she abused that power. She treated the people in her life that she had power over not as human beings, but as props for her own personal psychodrama. She made everything about her, about her wants, her needs, her desires. She deformed the lives of everyone around her to center on her and only her. Their own needs were utterly irrelevant. She controlled everything they did. She had them terrified of doing the wrong thing, of saying the wrong thing, of thinking the wrong thing. Everyone around her had to be constantly aware of her moods, of what might keep her happy, and what might trigger an outburst. (And because fantasy show, all of this was very literal).
Wanda was a narcissistic abuser.
And here in this thread are pretty much exactly the sorts of excuses that enablers make for abusers.
“You’re exaggerating. It’s not that bad.”
“Well, she didn’t physically hurt you, did she?”
“Why don’t you try to see it from her point of view?”
“Think about how much she’s suffered.”
“She’s not normally like that.”
“It’s not her fault. She’s just upset.”
“She didn’t really mean to do it.”
“But she’s done so much good for the community!”
“But she’s such a good person!”
“But she’s a woman!”
Again, I don’t think that the creators actually intended any of that. And I don’t think anyone in this thread is really enabling an abuser. This is just a fantasy show. But if this show spoke to you powerfully about your experience of grief, just maybe consider that even if unintentionally, it might have spoken to someone else just as powerfully about a different sort of trauma.