Every day, I see new social media posts about whether Wanda Maximoff has atoned enough for her to return as a hero. The number of people who love to hate Wanda just convinces me that people hate people who have had actual tragedies in their lives. Let’s look at Wanda’s “crimes:”

• She gets experimented on by Baron Strucker
• She colludes with Ultron to fight the Avengers
• She brings out everyone’s worst fears in her fight with the Avengers
• She inspires Tony to make Ultron
  She causes Banner to lose control of the Hulk in Johannesburg
• She fails to stop a suicide bomber (this one looks weird on this list, huh?)
• She causes the people of Westview to live as sitcom characters against their will.
• She uses the Darkhold to try to find the souls of her boys
• She sends demons after America Chavez so she can access alternate realities
• She kills sorcerers defending Kamar-Taj
• She destroys the Book of the Vishanti
• She straight up murders the Illuminati of Earth-838, perhaps her most amusing crime

Wanda isn’t a weak or unstable person. She saw her family killed in a war, stared down a Stark Industries bomb, waiting for it to kill her and her brother, and saw her brother get killed when they switched sides to help the people they were trying to get revenge on. She stayed on their side and fell in love with someone on that team.

She gets blamed for being too dangerous when anyone who would have decided on where to put the suicide bomber would have had a no-win decision to make in Civil War, but because of her power level, people assumed she wouldn’t have to make the same hard choice. She has to meet with the man she loves on the fly because she’s a fugitive. Vision accidentally paralyzes Rhodey, and that has less narrative weight in the MCU than Wanda failing to stop a suicide bomber from a suicide bombing.

Wanda is told to destroy the Mind Stone, which will kill the man she loves, to save the universe. She does, but it still doesn’t fix anything. She didn’t do that alone; she was told she had to do it. Then, she discovers that SWORD is trying to reverse-engineer Vision’s body. She doesn’t just “break down” for no reason; they’re desecrating her loved one’s corpse.

The main argument for Wanda doing something “messed up” is that her grief is so palpable that she doesn’t think about the consequences of creating a world where she, god forbid, gets to live out a happy life, affected by the things that make her feel safe in horrific circumstances, sit-coms. She doesn’t set out to trap anyone in this world; she envisions this world while standing on the site of the house that she and Vision were going to have built to live together.

Everyone in the town was a victim by proximity, and Wanda’s grief was exacerbated by SWORD trying to take Vision and make him something that was never what he was to her, but turning him into an item. Wanda’s already dealing with so much shit at this point. Again, this is not a weak woman; this is a strong woman who has more and more tragedy heaped on her shoulders, over and over again, regardless of her limits.

As a human being, I think at least some of us have had those dreams that we wake up from that felt so real that we almost grieve for what we lost when we realize it’s a dream. That’s what Wanda was fighting against, as people attempted to “wake” her. In her case, her dream translates to reality. She never needs to wake up if she doesn’t choose to do so. If given that option, how many of us wouldn’t fight when we were in that only semi-lucid moment of realizing what we were about to lose?

While Agatha threatens the dream, the fact that something in the dream isn’t working the way Wanda assumes makes things seem more real. How can it be her imagination if Agatha isn’t playing her role?

After losing her parents, her brother, and her lover and being blamed for something that starts off a global set of laws that frame her as the villain for doing something anyone else on the team could have done, she gets her lover, her children, and even, seemingly, her brother back . . . and then loses them all, because she has to give them up for the good of everyone else in town.

Don’t just look at what happens in Wandavision when thinking about her giving up what she has gotten back. She has to “kill” Vision, Billy, and Tommy for the good of “everyone,” just like she had to kill Vision for the good of everyone. How would anyone, no matter how strong, deal with that?

With great power comes great responsibility, but with impossible power comes impossible consequences. Wanda is a mortal woman who everyone expects to play God and play God the “right way” because nobody keeps her from suffering more and more heartache. She doesn’t choose to capture everyone in Westvie; everyone in Westview is captured because she was in the spot where she would have had a home with Vision. That’s important. It wasn’t a decision to trap anyone.

When forced to be fully lucid, to fully realize that she can’t live her life without keeping others from living theirs, she does the right thing, again, as she did with Vision. Wanda isn’t always doing bad when she isn’t being watched. No one is watching Wanda to make sure that one more terrible, insurmountable thing is going to happen to her. We know she isn’t keeping track of time in her “dream” because of how quickly the boys age. She isn’t willingly saying, “I’m keeping these people hostage for the rest of their lives.” She’s living whatever weird dream-like progression of time is presented to her. 

Wanda doesn’t need to atone for anything regarding Westview. She’s owed apologies from her teammates for letting her take the fall and not being there for her. Monica, who doesn’t even know Wanda, shows more compassion for her than anyone on the Avengers. We can examine why they can’t help her, but they aren’t there for her, as a net result.

When Wanda returns to life after five years, she discovers that the Avengers “fixed” what happened by not reversing anything other than the snap. They don’t save anyone other than the people who were snapped because of the lives people have had in the last five years. I’m not saying they were wrong; they had to make a decision that they felt would cause the least harm,  but again . . . Wanda’s “family” with Vision was less important than, say, Tony’s “family” with Pepper. Without having a say in the matter, Wanda sacrificed Vision again.

I’m not a fan of Steve’s happy ending, but even if you are, even if you think Steve deserved a happy life, and he’s justified in just trying not to mess with the timeline, he knows that Wanda sacrificing Vision does no good. He could tell her, “If someone tells you to sacrifice Vision, ever, don’t do it, it won’t work.” But he doesn’t. Wanda may not know about Steve’s new happy life in the past, but she does know that Tony’s daughter’s continued existence was given more weight than Vision.

What reckless things have Wanda’s peers gotten up to that she’s likely to know about?

• Tony defies international law by performing paramilitary operations within the borders of other sovereign countries–strangely not cited as part of the impetus for the Sokovia Accords.
• Tony blows up a ton of remote-controlled suits of armor in public on a whim.
• The Avengers bring Hulk on missions with them when he could go berserk, with just Black Widow and Hulkbuster Armor to mitigate the potential damage he could do
• Hank Pym hires Scott Lang to steal from the company he helped found to secure his technology.
• Captain America and Black Widow dismantle much of the global intelligence community on their own
• Doctor Strange uses the Time Stone in the Eye of Agamotto despite it being forbidden.
• Black Panther defies international law by deploying Wakandan assets to other countries to track down Winter Soldier.
• Everybody, on both sides, in Civil War, at some point in time
• The Avengers use the Quantum Realm to travel back in time to use the Infinity Stones of the past in the present
• Tony gives a teenager a pair of glasses that can control a global network of killer drones, which gets stolen by a supervillain and causes massive damage in London
• Doctor Strange casts a spell that mass erases memories, which would seem to be a little iffy, to begin with, that also has the potential to rip holes in other realities

It’s hard to look at that list and say, “I’m going to use an evil book of spells to find the souls of my children,” as worse than some of those offenses. That list also does not make Tony or Stephen look good.

It’s also discounted that Wanda uses the Darkhold to look for her boys, but she hears them cry out for her. Wanda . . . isn’t . . . being . . . selfish . . . she hears her boys cry out in distress.

Stephen tells Wanda she doesn’t know what she knows. Intentionally or not, Stephen is gaslighting her because he can’t conceive of how she could be right about her children being real. He doesn’t empathize with her; he tries to appeal to her need to atone for her deeds. Stephen’s worst character flaw is knowing he’s the only one who can be right about something. At that moment, Stephen could have said, “I don’t think you’re going about this the right way, but let me see if I can help you find your boys and if they’re in danger.” But he assumes she’s crazy, weak, and broken. He’s not harsh, but he pities her rather than empathizes. 

The Darkhold is manipulating her but manipulating her based on understandable assumptions. There is a stark difference between where we see Wanda at the end of Wandavision and Multiverse of Madness, and there are a few fundamental problems that aren’t as much of a problem for the movie internally but are a problem when compared to Wandavision. If you only look at the movie, Wanda is presented as weaker than Stephen. Stephen uses the Darkhold, and while it’s corrupting him, he manages to do good with it first, and we don’t see the long-term results of the corruption. Wanda isn’t shown to hesitate to shred the Illuminati or try to kill America Chavez to get what she wants.

There is no reference to Wanda feeling like her children are in danger. She’s framed as selfish because it looks like she wants what another Wanda has. That’s much more shallow than the teaser at the end of Wandavision implies. Instead of getting the kind of story that teaser implies, with Wanda potentially doing something like selling her soul for the safety of her children, she’s just petulant that her imaginary kids aren’t real, so she’s going to go on a killing spree about it. 

Let’s take the Multiverse of Madness at face value. Wanda is willing to kill anyone to make her imaginary kids real, and yeah, maybe that’s partly because of the Darkhold, which twists her already selfish desires to want something “unnatural,” as Stephen frames it.

But what about the Darkhold’s influence? It’s a subtly insidious thing. It’s a direct connection to the Elder God Chthon, one of the most potent eldritch entities ever to influence Earth, trying to free himself from imprisonment and pushing himself into Wanda’s mind. We hear about Chthon, but exactly how powerful he is, regarding overt control over others, isn’t fully explored.

But this makes me want to revisit something. 

Was Tony responsible for creating Ultron? While Tony feels guilt over Sokovia in Civil War, the movies do a lot to exonerate Tony.

• Tony is only under the influence of Wanda and the Mind Stone
• Tony is trying to do something noble in subverting control of all defense systems on Earth
• Tony is even nobler because making Ultron is an extension of him trying to atone for his arms-manufacturing

So, if Tony wasn’t responsible for Ultron, why does Wanda need to atone for what she’s done in the Multiverse of Madness? Yes, like Tony, we could see Wanda still carry guilt over the part of her personality that was exploited and for what happened as a result. But if Tony is moved to keep being more of a hero by this, why shouldn’t that be Wanda’s story as well?

Multiverse of Madness goes out of its way to show that Wanda is a thoughtless killer if someone is in her way. Tony doesn’t kill anyone himself; he just creates an AI that can control the entire planet. Because we see a less direct line to what Tony does and the consequences, he doesn’t look as bad. But Tony’s creation of Ultron does some pretty terrible things and probably has a much higher body count than Wanda.

But beyond saying that Wanda, amplified by the power of the Mind Stone, drove Tony to do something he was already prone to do, what about the Darkhold? Wanda wants to destroy Tony, and the Mindstone doesn’t want anything, really. But the Darkhold is a line straight to Chthon, who wants to corrupt a powerful magic user to act as his herald. That’s a much more direct coercion from the mind control MacGuffin. 

Tony feels guilty about Ultron, but somehow, Wanda is the one everyone needs to watch because she couldn’t throw a suicide bomber in the right direction. She doesn’t even harm anyone with her powers going out of control; she just isn’t precise enough to throw him far enough in the right direction. The world has even concluded that Banner/Hulk is not a threat, but Wanda is insurmountable and unforgivable. 

So again, why isn’t Wanda seen as being a hero, the way Tony is when he makes Vision to defeat Ultron when she finally turns against Chthon? Instead, we get the typical Western fiction trope: “Evil villains can be redeemed, but only if they die in the process.” Which is bullshit for Wanda’s situation. 

There is also a thematic element to Multiverse of Madness that’s worth looking at, which reflects how Stephen is contrasted to Wanda. We know that the Doctor Strange of Earth-838 was corrupted by the Darkhold, as was the Incursion surviving Doctor Strange that Stephen encounters. This sets up the idea that Stephen has the potential to fall to the Darkhold. However, our Stephen, from Earth-199999 (fight me), defeats his evil self and successfully uses the Darkhold to animate his corpse to confront Wanda. It’s hard not to read that, as Stephen has flaws, but he can master his temptation. At the movie’s end, we see him gain a mark of corruption as a teaser, but he doesn’t start sending demons after teenage girls or murdering alternate-universe versions of superheroes.

We also see Wanda confronted with another version of herself. That version doesn’t appear to have powers; she has Billy and Tommy as her children. She is happy and content, and when our Wanda takes her over, Billy and Tommy are scared. Wanda with no superpowers can be content and happy and have what Wanda with power cannot have. That suddenly makes the first bullet point under Wanda’s sins at the start of all of this her original sin. She would have been content and happy if Wanda had never had power. Stephen can use an unnatural artifact to do good with (for now) minor consequences because he’s trying to restore the natural order. Wanda can’t fight off the influence of an elder evil because she’s using something unnatural to attain the unnatural, to have the children that the version of her with powers should not have.

That’s kind of messed up.

I’m not going to make a list of how Wanda has atoned because she doesn’t need to, and atonement is, in many ways, a construct that tells you that you’ve done “enough.” But I do want to make a list of very difficult things that Wanda has done that show her character:

• Wanda turns on Ultron when she realizes the extent of his plans
• Wanda abandons revenge on Tony despite his direct connection to her suffering
• Wanda feels responsible for the deaths Crossbones caused because she couldn’t stop them, even though she tried
• Wanda sacrificed the man she loved to stop Thanos
• Wanda gave up on a reality where she had her brother, Vision, and her sons for the good of the people of Westview.
• Wanda fights off the Darkhold’s influence to destroy the Temple of Chthon on Mount Wundagore, even though she may not survive.

Wanda is a strong woman who survived her parents and her brother dying in front of her, made the right decision to turn against Ultron, was able to work against her own needs to sacrifice her family multiple times for the greater good, survived the emotional devastation not just of loss, but being blamed for events out of her control, and finally fought off the will of an elder god to stop him from returning. 

Wanda is the strongest woman in the MCU, and she’s a hero.

https://whatdoiknowjr.com/2024/11/05/the-maximoffs-dont-need-your-forgiveness/

#800000 #AgeOfUltron #CivilWar #Endgame #InfinityWar #MultiverseOfMadness #ScarletWitch #Wanda #WandaMaximoff #WandaVision