#MCU has butchered her to be evil wanda that badly

[thetimelordbatgirl]

I'm just astounded by MoM. And not in a good way. When Martin Scorsese said what he did I disagreed with him at the time. But now I don't. The MCU is a spectacle, and no longer an entertaining one. It's been losing artistic integrity for a while and now I'd say it's gone completely. I made a list of my top 10 favorite superhero movies and only 2 MCU films are on that list and they're both from Phase 1. I still love the characters which is why this hurts so much.

It went from actually trying with its characters and plots to just....fanservice and trying to appeal to certain audiences, isolating others in the process. Like, you telling me people who wanna see Doctor Strange wanna see Wanda The Movie??? No, they here for Doctor Strange, but trailers and leaks keep including Wanda as if she's important, and even imply she's....SOMEHOW in the right to say to Strange, "I become the enemy....that doesn't seem fair", like.....no, beyond fair to consider her an enemy at this rate, and what would her being included as an enemy do for Strange much beyond Evil Wanda??? Keep in mind, reshoots mean Benedict Cumberbatch has no clue what Strange's arc even is.....so MCU has basically fucked over their film to appeal to people who somehow think a girlboss character is a good character to have. Also should be noted the films lightwashed Miss America....but MCU would rather lightwash then be accurate really.

And Multiverse of Madness is falling to MCUs ongoing problem: constant need to bring in other characters or cameos, like Professor X....again, RIP X-Men tags soon, and the rumored other cameos and such are all just fanservice really in a bid to get people to watch, the same problem with No Way Home suddenly being multiverse and the same problem that ruined Loki in the end....beside the girlboss character that is Sylvie, and Wandavision ruined any chances Wanda had at a good character.....the only good thing so far in Phase Four is Shang Chi, everything else is meh or bad and the bad ones are somehow ALL multiverse connected. And its clear the MCU is chasing for Endgame levels of success, given how for NWH and even MoM now, they saying it'll be Endgame levels.....but like, Endgame was also shit, so like, says a-lot really about the MCUs goals currently. Plus the MCUs need to CONNECT everything is slowly destroying it, as come on, who wants to watch hours of films just to understand the latest one?? Let alone TV shows now??? And now they seem to be connecting What if...? to the new film, so BETTER WATCH THAT TOO- like, its going to tire everyone out eventually, if its not already.

Honestly, yeah, same....I love some of the characters still, and I still wanna see some of the newer stuff like Wakanda Forever and maybe Love And Thunder and despite my problems with her in MoM, I still enjoyed Wanda up until W/V, then my love for her disappeared really as her character took a dive basically to hell, but outside of that, MCU really has become tiring.....its saying a-lot that I finally felt some joy in Phase Four with Shang Chi, but felt nothing with everything else.

[dontcallmecarrie]

Hello! So you keep everyone pretty in character, and you seem to understand them really well (In my opinion), so I’m curious- How much do you think it would take for Wanda (And Pietro, I guess) to be on semi-friendly terms with Tony? Would it even be possible?

…oh, boy. Um. This has been sitting in my inbox for a while, because I had a tough time quantifying things, plus didn’t have the time to do it justice before now, but…Okay.

Okay, pull up a chair because this is going to take a while because I know there’s a buttload of very well-researched posts out there but there’s some things I still need to get off my chest when it comes to the Maximoff twins. 

Just as an fyi, though: my take on them’s 100% based on the movies, because my comics knowledge of them is next to nil—I think they’re apparently Jewish, and Romani(?) in the comics and that the writers erased that when they cast the people they did, but that’s about it—and apparently they’re very different in the MCU, which I’m not even caught up on since the last film I saw was Doctor Strange. 

Heads up: this post will not be Maximoff friendly, especially for Wanda, but I’m also doing my best not to bash—more like me lamenting what we could have had, via picking apart my interpretation of their characters. Also features quite a bit of my rambling because this also turned into a meta ‘why I think AoU sucks’ rant, sorry. Under the cut, because it got long and RIP mobile users otherwise.

Now, for me, I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, even if I don’t like them. Try to make an attempt to like them, try to get a feel for their character instead of flattening them…but it feels like a futile endeavor, in this case.

Admittedly, I’m rather biased towards Tony […understatement of the year, probably, he’s the reason I even got into the MCU], so that didn’t help. But…just. 

Okay, taking a step back, I can’t help but feel that AoU was a tire fire on a number of levels. The twins’ entrance in the MCU could not have been handled worse, in my opinion, and the choices made had me gritting my teeth when I watched it. This, coming from someone who liked the Star Wars prequels […that’s a thing for another post, I guess, but even if it was cringey at times it still had its moments]. 

The narrative was a mess, and the way they forced so much of it [hi, Bruce/Natasha ship and obligatory Damsel In Distress tropes] did everyone involved a major disservice, and by introducing the twins the way the writers did actively sabotaged them, in my opinion. 

Because in the cutscene during one of the prior movies, they could’ve introduced them in a far, far better light than what they went with. If the twins had been kidnapped and experimented on by HYDRA preying on the local populace and taking advantage of the teeming number of orphans due to the conflict going on? That, I could stomach. Hell, make up some bullshit backstory of how the Tesseract’s radiation affected people who grew up in a certain radius of some abandoned building if you want an excuse to give them powers if we’re not going the X-Men route, it’s not that hard!

No, instead, the writers made them HYDRA volunteers.

That, I—I can’t. Worst part is, I think I get what the writers might’ve been going, for, but…look. If you want to make an attempt at criticism of American policy via using a fictional country as the staging ground of what seemed to me to be a deja vu of the Soviet-Afghan War, and want to have your heroes come out of that, and keep them sympathetic, do not code them as affiliated with Nazis. 

Because the rest of it? I could almost get. Even if it hurt, seeing them go after Tony like that right off the bat, I could see why. To these people living in a war-torn country, grown up only seeing the bad side of American interventionism their entire lives, I don’t think I would’ve resisted the urge to punch someone who symbolized it either. 

After all, for decades Tony was it, perpetuated the military-industrial complex and took it to new levels, designed bomb after bomb and skewed the balance of power in a huge way. Even if Tony changed tracks, after Afghanistan, and worked to fix it, that doesn’t erase what happened. […plus, y’know, there’s the convenient bomb with his name on it, probably courtesy of Obadiah’s double-dealing.] So, that part, I get. I don’t necessarily like it, but I get it. 

By including HYDRA, however, the writers ensured that 95% of my sympathy vaporized before I had a chance to get attached to them. At the time, my then-optimistic self was still trying to see them in a good light, and…okay, bit of a military history lesson here, for context, as to why I mentally made the connections I did [and why I felt they fell so flat in the movie]. It’s probably me reaching, but this was my thought process for it.

Minor disclaimer: this is just what I remember off the top of my head, so if it sounds incredibly simplistic, that’s why. Apologies if I get anything wrong, by the way.

The Soviet-Afghan War happened in the ‘80s, lasted nearly a decade, and devastated the local populace in a manner not unlike Vietnam. The Soviet Union basically invaded Afghanistan after shit went down in their government, and the locals fought tooth and nail to kick them out. If I remember correctly, it’s been considered the USSR’s Vietnam War, due to that…plus, y’know, the fact that the US sent in their guys to low-key help. Not by sending in troops, mind, but they sent in guys to train up the locals to fight back better. Not sure what else, but I know that part because it ended up biting everyone badly later on, since that war’s also where al-Qaeda got its start, and its training. 

Reason I even brought this up is, Sokovia’s situation to me had a metric fuckton of parallels to that. I probably screwed up on the conflicts the writers were thinking of, but that’s what I was seeing, and to me, it’d make sense then that the twins who grew up in such a place wouldn’t think very highly of the Avengers, or SHIELD, etc. 

…anyway, that’s the implied backstory I picked up on in the movie. From there, makes sense that the twins would reach out to shady groups to get power to fight back, and if it’d been AIM, or literally any group other than neo-Nazis, I feel like it would’ve made them more sympathetic without flattening their characters. 

To me, that was strike one against the twins, in regards to things I can’t forgive. Maybe it’s simplistic of me, but given the shit that’s gone down lately, my tolerance for anything that smacks of Nazis is borderline nonexistent. Sorry not sorry. 

But, removing that element, the twins could’ve been interesting. We could’ve had a story where the Avengers run into people who do not think of them as heroes, and see where that went. Could’ve seen an American-based group deal with people who aren’t friendly, who have a good reason to be that way. […I’ll just ignore the evil AI trope, this is supposed to be a character study not me bashing AoU even more.] 

Removing the HYDRA element, we have the Maximoff twins: 

Pietro, who’s bitterly sarcastic and fiercely protective of what family he has left after essentially growing up in a war zone. Pietro, who’s speed means he can raise hell in the blink of an eye, made himself a nuisance because of it more than once throughout the film. Pietro, who we only know in the the one movie he shows up, since he gets tragically killed off in the end.

And then there’s Wanda.

…okay. Um. Here’s the thing: I’ve only seen her in two movies, and AoU was a train wreck and Civil War was a tire fire. 

So.

This is my perception of Wanda: 

Once you remove the ‘hey let’s flatten our female characters this round!’ lens the writers apparently had going on during AoU, as well as me removing the HYDRA element […which, for me, is absolutely necessary], and you have Wanda Maximoff: a very, very driven young woman, who’s been [understandably] angry at the world for the better part of her life and only now has the power to fight back. Wanda, who’s equally protective of her brother since he was all she had left, and whose loss was devastating on a number of levels because of that. Wanda, who now has to pick up the pieces of her life and carry on, and deal with the huge burden of responsibility that comes with a power as potentially insidious as hers. 

For the most part, throughout AoU, that was the impression I got from her. Pietro I’d actually liked because of his snark, since the start; Wanda, on the other hand, I’d actively disliked [yo, triggering someone with PTSD? Not cool] but had been steadily warming up to—until Johannesburg. 

For me, the dealbreaker with MCU’s Wanda was when she took the biological equivalent of a nuke, and aimed it at the largest civilian population she could find. She could’ve turned the Hulk against the Avengers, could’ve had him running off in a random direction and thus forced the team to chase after him in the most high-stakes game of keep-away there ever was, but no. 

No, instead Wanda unleashed the Hulk on the biggest city in South Africa. 

I mean, taking a step back, I can see why the writers went there: this is an action movie, after all, so why not throw in some hero-fighting-hero scenes? But in-universe, that choice was what cinched it for me, that this was not a hero in any meaning of the word. If the writers wanted her to be one, they’d need to throw in a redemption arc, after Johannesburg—and they didn’t. 

No apology, no acknowledgment, not a word of responsibility, like it never happened. 

…and then there’s Civil War to consider. Where the writers butchered her character along with everyone else’s, because now they’re calling the young woman who grew up in a war zone, who knowingly and willingly underwent experimentation for the chance to fight back, who lost everything and still carried on–a child. The sheer lack of agency they removed from her was an insult in and of itself, in my opinion. That, and the fact that apart from Natasha [who’s got her own thing going on, but I digress], she’s the only non-American on the team. 

Which leads me to yet another opportunity missed: the perspective Wanda had to offer, because of that. Having grown up the way she did, in a country screwed over by others’ interventionism [hi, Stark weapons, what’re you doing here in Sokovia?] she would’ve had a very different opinion on how to do things than a team that, for the most part, was born and raised in the US, with all the biases that includes. Where the rest of the team’d be more inclined to just rock in to other countries without hesitation, Wanda’s knee-jerk reaction to hearing that would be a “fuck no”, for instance, and…um. 

Okay, irony is, I can’t help but think that Wanda, as a non-US national, would’ve been 100% on board with the idea of ‘hey, this US-based team can’t just barge into other countries and fuck shit up, cut it out’. Which, incidentally, is what the Accords were about in the MCU […but that’s a rant for another post], even if Ross was undoubtedly angling for something shady when he was presenting them the way he did. 

…I rambled, didn’t I. Oops. 

So, as for the latter part of your ask: 

what would it take for her [and Pietro, had he lived] to get along with Tony?

In canon, I find it highly unlikely. As in, the world’s more likely to end, and apparently something like that happens in Infinity Wars if the spoilers I’ve glimpsed are anything to go by? [Nowhere near caught up means I have no clue what’s going on anymore, and some people don’t tag their stuff which leaves me even more confused, but—rambling again, oops.]

As for in any fics I’d write, with my take on their characters: 

Okay, for that to happen, we’d have to go wildly AU. Me being me, I’m removing the HYDRA element […’nuff said], and Johannesburg didn’t happen either, so what you have left is the Maximoff twins, and the guy who embodied everything they hated about the US/the world in general, even if he was doing everything in his power to change. 

Suffice it is to say, it’d be a rocky start, but. 

But, I’d like to think they’d eventually get along, somehow. Slowly, and painfully, but over time the twins’d realize that Tony’s actually human, and not an amalgamation of everything they hated, not the boogeyman they grew fearing. Would see that he’s just one man, and a flawed one, struggling with severe PTSD […I’d like to think Wanda’d feel pretty bad about triggering him the way she did, later on, but that’s just me] and doing his best to atone for being the Merchant of Death. Would see that he’s just a man, doing his best to make the world a better place—the twins’d realize it’s not an act pretty quick, and from there, they’d have common ground.

Don’t get me wrong, there’d be plenty of mishaps along the way, but. 

Over time, and with Tony asking—and actually listening to them, taking them seriously when they give their opinions on what they think about how to approach something, instead of dismissing them because of their age—they’d start to warm up to each other. Because at heart, Tony’s an ally, and trying to be an even better one, and I’d like to think the twins would pick up on that pretty quick. And Tony, between his guilt complex and seeing what the twins have done with the tools they’ve had at hand, would reciprocate, and forgive Wanda for doing what she did once she apologized […again, my opinion of triggering people with PTSD rears its head].

Or, worst-case scenario I can think of: the twins tolerate him, because he’s trying to be an ally and even if they might never like him personally, they can respect that. 

To me, though, this feels a bit static for their characters, especially given how dynamic we’ve seen them in the past [going from antagonist to Avenger in the same movie, anyone?], so I’d rather see the one where character growth happens instead.

Incidentally, your ask also brought to mind a scene I’ve low-key wanted to see but haven’t yet: one way I can see Tony and the twins bonding is via very, very dark humor. Because Tony was raised to be the heir of a weapons company, and the twins grew up in a war-torn country, there’d be plenty of morbid humor to go around, weirding out almost everyone else on the team [barring Natasha]. 

Specifically, something along these lines, during a time when things are still pretty rocky:

“Okay, guys, I know you hate my guts because of that bomb, but you’ll be pleased to hear that something similar happened to me a while back.”

“…go on.”

“So I’m in Afghanistan, headed back from a presentation, when the convoy I’m in gets attacked, we’re getting shot at with my own guns. But that’s not the best part, even—not five minutes later, I get a bomb with my name on it. Literally, I’m not even kidding here.” Tony said, his hand drifting to his chest unconsciously. “That’s where the shrapnel came from, by the wa—oh, hey Steve…why’re you looking so pale? Geez, take a few deep breaths or something, that’s—um, guys? Give me some space, will you?”

aka the twins [and the team] get a sneak peek at Tony’s tire fire of a mental state and his tendency to cope via joking, and realize that yes, he is legitimately that self-deprecating. If the twins didn’t start to ease up on their dislike before, they do now, if only because it’s not worth directing their anger at a guy who hates himself even more than they possibly could. Waste of energy, that. 

also, afterwards, cue a lot of bonding over that sort of thing, such as hating Hammer Industries for doing what the Merchant of Death used to do, and quite a few brainstorming sessions about how to approach the military-industrial complex, etc. 

tl;dr: my take on the Maximoff twins in the MCU’s mostly had me Photoshopping my headcanons into where they’re supposed to fit, due to a myriad of reasons; AoU and CW did them a huge disservice, but apart from the remarkably bad writing, they had a lot of potential. My take on them would’ve had the twins warming up to Tony eventually, realizing he’s trying to be an ally, but said take would also have gone wildly AU not ten minutes into their introduction, so.