#Or you’re a grown up who writes adult/teen fic in a fandom where you’re surrounded by kids

[beloved-child-of-the-house]

🤷🏽‍♂️

[portraitoftheoddity]

What are your thoughts on Wanda? One thing that really really bothers me about her is that her crimes aren't really acknowledged? I feel like cap especially infantilizes her a bit, if she's old enough to be a full avenger, she's not a kid. Plus that line 'i can't control their fear only my own' sounds great except she terrorised the avengers with their worst fears, literally invaded their minds which was also never addressed by any of them?? Honestly how can there be any trust for her at all?

How can there be any trust for Tony, who for years didn’t give a shit that he built bombs that destroyed lives?

How can there be any trust for Natasha, who was raised from childhood to be a remorseless killer for the KGB, and murdered untold numbers of innocents?

How can there be any trust for Bruce, when his alter ego destroys cities and leaves profound carnage in his wake?

How can there be any trust for Thor, who isn’t even from earth, and who happily started a war for his own ego and considered all non-Asgardians inferior races and advocated for genocide of the Jotnar?

How come fandom is (rightfully) willing to accept the redemption arcs of every other character, accept their growth and heroism, but always wants to fucking shit on Wanda?

Like with many, many, many other heroes, Wanda fucked up, learned, and grew as a person, and became a hero. We even get to watch it happen. But it baffles me that people somehow choose to be willfully ignorant so they can make the foreign refugee woman a scapegoat for the actions of the privileged rich white guy, and it frankly is one of the more disgusting habits of this fandom and pisses me right the fuck off. 

One thing that really really bothers me about her is that her crimes aren't really acknowledged?

Yeah, funny how Bruce Banner is on trial for all the people Hulk killed and Tony TOTALLY faced a tribunal for war crimes for-- oh wait! They didn’t! We don’t lock up all our superheroes for the shit they do because let’s face it, the genre would be really boring if we did. But funny enough, WANDA DOES GET LOCKED UP. And blamed for things that are absolutely not her fault. She owns her misdeeds in AOU in the very same movie by changing sides, risking her life, and being willing to die taking Ultron down in atonement for her role in the whole situation. At the end, she has lost everything; her home, her family, her twin, and only by Vision’s intervention has she not also given her life. How much more do you need her to suffer? And why are people like you only demanding punishment for Wanda and not demanding the accountability of every other character who has ever done wrong -- like, say, Tony for building Ultron in the first place?

I feel like cap especially infantilizes her a bit, if she's old enough to be a full avenger, she's not a kid.

I really hate how Wanda-Antis latch on to this line and blatantly and deliberately misinterpret it, when context is perfectly clear in the scene. When Steve says “She’s just a kid” he isn’t saying “she’s a child” -- If Steve were infantilizing her, he wouldn’t go speak to her with respect as an equal, he wouldn’t trust her to have his back in battle, and unlike Tony, he wouldn’t drag an actual child into battle. With that line he’s responding to Tony’s COMPLETE AND TOTAL DEHUMANIZATION OF HER when he refers to her as a weapon and not a person. Steve is highlighting that she is a person, a person who is young and capable of mistakes and still learning, and a person who is  VULNERABLE (Keep in mind Wanda is 20, she’s old enough that she can make her choice to join the Avengers, but her development was interrupted due to having her childhood stripped away from her and growing up as an orphan in a warzone), and that she should maybe be protected and guided instead of scapegoated and exploited. (Plus Tony seems to think Peter at fifteen is old enough to be an Avenger, but still treats him like a child to be grounded, so maybe Steve isn’t the character we need to be looking at critically here when it comes to full avenger vs. kid) 

Plus that line 'i can't control their fear only my own' sounds great except she terrorised the avengers with their worst fears, literally invaded their minds which was also never addressed by any of them?? 

Again, you are taking a line completely out of context, on purpose. “I can’t control their fear, only my own” is describing the fact that she can’t control the public’s perception of her. She can’t -- and wouldn’t -- get in the mind of every single citizen to change how they see her and feel about her. But she can control how she responds, and how she reacts to her own deep-seated insecurities. 

You’re right that we don’t see everything on screen showing how the other Avengers got past her being in their heads. But since she’s been on the team all this time, and they are working together, presumably amends were made at some point. They weren’t shown explicitly to us, true. But the movie makers I guess assumed we’re reasonably intelligent enough to figure out it happened at some point. I’d be willing to guess that it even happened before the end scene of AOU where we see her joining the formal Avengers roster. Time has passed, and forgiveness has clearly happened offscreen. Maybe fandom can take a note from the actual heroes, and realize that forgiveness is, you know, a thing. If it bothers you that it wasn’t in the movie, go write a fic to fill it in. 

It’s also worth noting that even when she is fighting HYDRA terrorists, or in the pitched Avengers battle in Leipzig, Wanda never resorts to getting into the heads of others. There is clearly a line that has been established that going into people’s heads is too far, and even when she is locked up, bound and collared like an animal, Wanda never crosses that line again.

But Wanda haters apparently never bother to notice that.

My thoughts on Wanda are that she was a child who lost her family to violence, grew up in a warzone, and then was recruited as a teen/young adult in a time of desperation by an organization that lied to her, used her, changed her, and exploited her (the official MCU comic tie-in shows that Wanda and Pietro did not know that Strucker was HYDRA). She’d grown up scared, angry, and surrounded by violence, with a burning thirst for revenge. But when she realized how many civilians were being hurt in her quest for revenge, realized that it was misguided and wrong, she changed her course. She switched sides, and was willing to lay her life down to make right her wrongs. She lost EVERYTHING -- her home destroyed, her twin dead -- and instead of taking time to mourn or try to find her own life, she joined the Avengers so that she could continue to try to do good and stop people like Rumlow. And despite the horrors that have defined her life, she remains sensitive; she blames herself for everything, is clearly empathetic (she’s on the brink of tears when Ross shows the footage of destruction), and struggles with her insecurities and sense of self-worth. She went through a rather typical arc of ‘misguided-antagonist-turned-hero’, choosing to continue with being a hero to make up for her past. 

And yet, while fandom eats up this arc with every other character it applies to, they reject Wanda and treat her like shit so they can justify other characters’ dehumanization of her. And I think that’s pretty fucking shitty, anon.