I agree with your post overall, and I agree that the creators of the show didn’t intend to portray it that way. This is especially apparent in the way that Monica talks about Wanda in Wandavision, and I get the sense the creators intended for the audience to agree with her. There’s also a line in the new Doctor Strange movie (very minor spoilers) where Doctor Strange says something like “Wanda made things right at the end of the events of Wandavision”, as if simply stopping what she was doing was enough to make it all right.
Yes, well, that character is also very self-centered, controlling, and narcissistic and more than one iteration across the multiverse a highly abusive, destructive, and evil character.
I do wish the MCU would start addressing the abuse of power/bullying/abuse aspects of some of these supers.
Monica’s line in WandaVision fell very flat to me. Wanda mind-raped and abused and entire city and escapes without consequence. That is not a message I like to see.
Re-watching all this more than a year later, and knowing where it’s headed, there’s just a remarkably high level of creep.
It did seem that they were trying to paint her as the victim in Wandavision and excusing her abusive behavior, but they did make her an outright villain right after the show and that can’t have not been planned already.
I’m on episode seven today and what I would say is that while the grief angle is clear, also the horror is there. Even in episode one, there’s a terrible scene where Debra Jo Rupp from that 70s show is the wife of vision’s boss, and as the boss chokes on a piece of food, she starts yelling “stop it!” over and over and over in a sort of fake gleeful manner, and it’s awful.
I do remember my outrage at the dismissiveness of the last episode, it will be interesting to see that again.
Yeah, the entire failure of that ending comes down to a couple of sentences uttered by Monica Rambeau, forgiving Wanda (the townspeople certainly and rightly don’t). What a clinker ending.