#i am constantly putting this woman through The Horrors™

[empressofthelibrary]

NUMBER THREE FOR THAT QUESTION THINGY

also for some reason tumblr asked me if i wanna add tags to this question wtf so sorry if it got messed up tumblr is tumblring

Ah, tumblr. Please change.

[justmenoworries]

MoM Spoilers!!!

Okay, had a good night’s sleep, now I’m ready to yell.

This movie was fucking awful. It had no bearing on the greater MCU, over half of it is figurative and literal character assassination and a very cool character is side-lined for the sake of White Man Pain™.

What was the fucking point of WandaVision if Wanda seemingly hasn’t learned a goddamn thing and has even gotten worse, somehow??? Seriously, why is the woman who was so horrified about Lagos, who broke down in tears after realizing she was holding an entire town hostage and retreated to the middle of bumfuck nowhere without a fight as penance suddenly so gung-ho about sadistically murdering innocent people, one of which is a literal fucking child???? Her going after and dehumanizing America made no sense at all. Wanda said it herself at the start of the movie: If anyone would know what it’s like to be burdened with and hunted down for enormous powers that you never asked for, it would be Wanda. Are you telling me she had this whole arc about facing her grief and learning that she can’t use her powers to force the world into appeasing her in WandaVision just to make a 180 in the very next installment she appeared in??? Whyyyy????? And don’t give me any of that “buT ThE daRkHoLd”-crap, it’s a bad excuse for a motivation and you know it. If it really was the Darkhold, then why didn’t destroying it immediately snap Wanda back to normal? Why were Wanda’s ultimate plans so small-scale overall if a literal Book of the Damned had a stranglehold on her mind??? That’s like saying the Infinity Stones corrupted Thanos. Also, the way this movie tried so desperately to have it’s cake and eat it was embarrassing. On one hand they want Wanda to be a ruthless horror movie villain who cares for no one and nothing but herself and her children (not Vision though, Wanda seemingly completely forgot about him) and who will slaughter millions of people without a second thought or any sympathy to any family members they might leave behind, but then also want her to be a sympathetic uwu victim who constantly cries about how unfair everything is and how much of a hypocrite Dr. Strange is for not letting her murder a 16-year-old girl. Yeah no. If you want me to feel sorry for a character, maybe don’t spend sixty percent of the movie showing her sadistically torture and kill people who did nothing to her. “But Wanda as a villain was so fun!” Surprisingly enough, I agree. Villain!Wanda was badass and made for a very fun antagonist. But if you needed to make a Scarlet Witch the bad guy, why our Scarlet Witch??? I mean, an alternative was staring you right in the fucking face: We know magic users can “dreamwalk”, meaning pilot alternate versions of themselves in other universes. It could have been an alternate Scarlet Witch, possessing 616!Wanda. Wanda didn’t need to be the villain again. I am so tired of mentally ill and traumatized women being made into horrible monsters in narratives. Wanda already had her villain and anti-hero arcs, why couldn’t you let her be purely the hero this one time???? Also, I really don’t know how I feel about Wanda killing herself to destroy every Darkhold in the multiverse. On one hand, after all the shit she pulled in this movie, there was just no feasible way to have it end differently than her performing a heroic sacrifice. You can’t cry the hundreds of people she murdered back to life. You can’t just ignore the horrible things she put America through. You can’t unmake all the gross and vile things she said in this movie to justify her actions. So what’s left? But then again, as I said, I am so fucking sick of the tired old “hysterical, mentally ill woman makes things worse for everyone because she’s traumatized and mentally ill and also female”-trope. Also, her death opens a whole other can of worms concerning the MCU!Young Avengers that I’ll discuss further later on. What makes this worse is that Wanda’s anger at Dr. Strange and the world in general for continually tearing everything away from her and framing her as a villain whenever she makes an honest mistake is somewhat justfiied, but because we can’t have an angry woman be right about anything, boom! Villain Ball. The Avengers didn’t do shit for her. No one but Vision and maybe Clint ever tried to help her through her trauma. Tony wanted her locked away. S.W.O.R.D. dismantled the corpse of her husband and refused to let her bury him. When she had a mental breakdown and caused the Westview-incident, that’s when people finally started to notice that she was not okay and even then the majority of those who noticed just immediately dismissed her as a terrorist that needed to be put down like Old Yeller. Dr. Strange fucking knew about Westview, but didn’t think to help her and only made contact with her long after, when he needed her for something. She had happiness for about a week, before she was forced to tear it all down again. The MCU just loves torturing Wanda and I’m. So. Sick of it.

Why was Dr. Strange here? No, I’m serious, what impact did this movie have on anything in his character arc? He’s still arrogant, he’s still forever pining after a woman who just isn’t interested in him anymore and he’s still messing with powers he shouldn’t and justifies it by citing “the greater good”. Nothing about him changed. He’s not actually challenged on his moral beliefs, because everyone who is against him and his methods is either wrong or killed or both. As mentioned before, we learn nothing more about his character, other than that he’s still hung up on Christine, which oh my fucking god, can we drop the Christine story-line for Dr. Strange already???? She’s not interested, let him move the fuck on and deal with other things! Also, I fucking hate that they made him a “mentor” to America and the Marvel-stans of course jumped on it, because they just love Found Family, even if it’s executed as shitty as it is in most MCU-things. Strange should have been the one to learn new things beyond basic multiverse-stuff in the movie. Strange should have been the fish out of water trying to keep up. They introduce a bunch of alternate Dr. Stranges and none of them matter. The fight with evil!Strange is creative, I’ll give it that, but it felt like padding. All it really establishes is that Stephen’s obsession with Christine is unhealthy, only to backpedal and frame Stephen telling Christine that he can only love her in every universe as romantic and heartwarming. Y’Know, despite the fact that we just got done kiling a version of Stephen hat literally only existed to show us why that isn’t a good thing. He can’t do jackshit against Wanda in any of their confrontations and his powers are massively downplayed for most of the movie, so he can’t really act as a bodyguard to America either. He ends the movie with a third eye like evil!Dr Strange had, as a consequence of using the Darkhold, but it doesn’t even bother him and the after-credits scene has him dive into multiverse-shenanigans all over again like nothing’s wrong and nothing happened. This did not need to be a Dr. Strange movie. At all. Also, love how the movie pretended Strange moping about not getting to date Christine was remotely comparable to America dealing with the trauma of being separated from her moms and stranded in the multiverse when she was a toddler. Can you tell this movie was written be a white man?

America Chavez was one of the few saving graces in this movie (besides the visuals, Elisabeth Olsen’s performance and the Illuminati). Xochitl Gomez owns this role and the way they portrayed her powers was amazing. That being said, why oh why did she have to play second fiddle to Dr. Strange??? Why did we have yet another tired instance of the “insecure female hero can’t control her powers until an older male hero tells her to believe in herself”-trope????? America should have been a lead character, not a Living Macguffin who needs to be protected and is unable to fight for herself until the climax. Also, why exactly did she have to go to Kamar Taj? She’s not a sorceress, her powers have nothing to do with the mystic arts???? This is just the most transparent excuse to shove her off to the side-lines and I hate it. What I also hate is how the MCU-fandom is already clamoring for Dr. Strange (and sometimes Christine, because just like Stephen, stans have learned nothing from evil!Strange) to be her “adopted parents”. Um, guys, i don’t know if you forgot, I wouldn’t blame you, it was a really short scene, but: America has parents?! She has two loving mothers somewhere in the multiverse that she would very much like to see again. They’re not dead, the movie makes it a point several times that they’re probably alive out there and that a reunion with them is more than possible, now that America has control over her interdimensional-travel powers.Why the hell are y’all always so quick to replace a poc-character’s loving parents with random white people they barely know??? More importantly, I hate how, instead of whooping her abuser’s ass, America had to appease her to “win”. That’s a horrible message. “If you can’t beat/escape a person hurting you, just give them what they want and hope they come to a heel-realization.” America shouldn’t have been forced to open that portal. She should have beat Scarlet Witch’s ass and then dragged her into that universe by the hair to show her alternate children what a monster she’s become out of spite. This movie’s Wanda deserved no sympathy after all the shit she put everyone and especially America through. This is the second time that a woman of color was forced to be Wanda’s therapist after being treated like a punching bag by her. Speaking of, wonder how Monica Rambeau will react to the fact that not only was she wrong about Wanda not being dangerous apparently, but that Wanda killed an alternate version of her mother in cold blood. Boy, won’t that be an awkward thing to address when they inevitably bring Scarlet Witch back? America travelled the multiverse for over ten years, she shouldn’t have been nearly as helpless as she was in this movie. She should have had more knowledge of alternate universes than “traffic lights are different” and “most universes have free food”. She should have been a way more savvy character by the time she met with 616!Dr. Strange. This should have been her movie as much as his. Also, she shouldn’t have been dropped off at Kamar Taj. She should have gone on a search for her moms. She has control now, she is, like I already said, not a sorceress, so why does she need to go to sorcerer-school??? That way you even have a good set-up for her showing back up to help the MCU Young Avengers. She’s found her mothers, but realized the multiverse, and especially universe 616, could need a hero like her. So she comes back and joins the team. Speaking of which...

The way this movie went above and beyond to drill in the point that Billy and Tommy Maximoff do not exist in our universe 616. Dr. Strange repeatedly says that they’re “not real”, because Wanda made them out of magic, like the mere existence of Vision isn’t proof that artificial beings are just as much alive as organic ones. Also, just to twist the knife further, Billy and Tommy exist in every other alternate universe, despite it being just as impossible for Wanda to have children with Vision in those as it is in universe 616. (They never really do resolve that plot-hole, huh?) If that isn’t the MCU showing their entire ass, I don’t know what is. For those of you who don’t know, Billy, a.k.a. Wiccan, and Tommy, a.k.a. Speed, are incredibly important characters for a lot of LGBT+ comic-readers. Billy is possibly Marvel’s most iconic gay character, together with his boyfriend Teddy, a.k.a Hulkling. Their relationship and they themselves are crucial to several story-lines in the Young Avengers-comics. Tommy is canonically bisexual and, while not as much as Billy, still important to several story arcs. I really cannot understate how much seeing these two on the big screen would have meant to me and so many other queer comic- and superhero-fans. But that’s very unlikely to happen now, because Wanda is dead, so she can’t restore them to life in any way. Dr. Strange sure as hell won’t do it, we already know where he stands. And White Vision probably doesn’t even remember or really care about them. The most we can hope for is that their alternate versions will show up somehwere down the line to do a quick 5-second “See? We have gays!”-cameo, before being banished to the aether again. Cool. Moving on. Why even have that after-credits scene in WandaVision with them screaming for help if you’re not gonna do anything with it?

The Illuminati. Oooh boy. Are you seriously telling me that nobody saw any kind of issue with introducing an alternate version of the Avengers that consisted of poc, disabled and female characters, as opposed to the all-white only one woman team of universe 616, and then not only have them all be portrayed as tight-assed, self-absorbed jerks, but also have them killed in the most gruesome manner by a white woman? Aside from Mordo, the black guy in charge, he gets to be portrayed as a vengeful dickbag and then humiliated by his white counterpart. Having 838!Maria Rambeau show up as an alternate Captain Marvel only to have Wanda squash her under a statue is just so many levels of gross. What the fuck is your issue with non-white characters being powerful, Marvel? Don’t actually answer, we all know. Also, of course the only other member of the 838!Avengers-team who gets to live and be portrayed as heroic is Christine, the white woman our also white lead is still simping for. Color me shocked. This is my shocked face. Such a promising cast of powerful characters. Introduced to be a speedbump and prove a white man’s moral superiority. Thanks, I hate it.

For a movie named the Multiverse of Madness, we didn’t really get to see all that much of said multiverse. (Though it did succeed in making me mad, I’ll give it that.) The only alternate universes in this movie are our universe, Earth 616, the Illuminati-universe, Earth 838, and the destroyed universe evil!Strange lives in. That’s it. The multiverse, ladies, gentlemen and non-binary readers! We get so many glimpses of the other worlds in the first jump-scene and only explore one percent of them. Though I suppose “Doctor Strange and the Two Alternative Universes that Kinda Suck” wouldn’t have made for such a snazzy title, huh?

I think I’m done. In more that one way. I’m gonna retreat into my corner now and try to purge everything about this movie that wasn’t America Chavez or the Illuminati from my mind. This movie could have been so great. But the MCU couldn’t help itself, it seems. I should have listened to the dozens of people telling me the MCU was going down the shitter, but noooo, I had to have faith and watch this dreg.

MCU-stans don’t @ me. I sincerely do not give a crap about your opinion and probably vice-versa, so trying to convince me this movie was good will lead to nothing but frustration for both sides.