#wandavision critical

[unhingedmarvelandclassicwhobuff]

Why the hell was this scrapped?

That was a rhetorical question; I think it’s pretty obvious this line was cut because it calls out the absolute deification of Tony that the MCU loves to indulge in. While this series was allowed to show the trauma Wanda experienced at the hands of SI weaponry, actually letting her criticize God Tony himself would definitely have been about five steps too far for this studio.

[unhingedmarvelandclassicwhobuff]

I’ve pinpointed another reason I don’t like this moment. Wanda’s complete lack of a rebuttal to Agatha’s assertion about her past has led a lot of people to assume this show was retroactively saying Wanda and Pietro knew they were volunteering at Hydra and didn’t care.

I’m willing to give the writers the benefit of the doubt and assume that wasn’t their intention, as this line that we’ve memed into oblivion...

...is said in response to Hayward giving a similarly bad-faith take on Wanda’s past. And I guess to be fair, there isn’t really a good one-sentence answer for this. But still, the lack of a rebuttal from Wanda and her vague response compounded with the fact that we don’t really have any idea what her opinion of Strucker and List was has led a ton of people to the wrong conclusions. Case in point, this reddit conversation I had just today (I'm the one with the green avatar):

Agatha asking all the questions I have been asking since Age of Ultron.

[ciderjacks]

I have a toxic relationship with the mcu where it pisses me off and disappoints me consistently for years and then randomly it releases some of the best television I’ve seen just like out of literally no where. and it’s like. What the hell was that. Hey. Come back. Where did that come from. Were you guys capable of that this whole time.

[blazethecheeto]

i beg your pardon.

Jac listened to BOYGENIUS to inspire the agatha/rio love story i've passed away this is it oh my GOD.

__________________

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that window looks nice, what if i jump out of it.

[unhingedmarvelandclassicwhobuff]

If Elizabeth Olsen wasn't so proud of WandaVision I would be 100% of the opinion that it should not have been made. I don't care how good it was, the fact that in order to make it happen Wanda had to be totally ghosted when she was in more pain than ever and the last person she cared about had to be treated like property induces more rage in me than I can possibly verbalize.

I'm still positive that scene was deleted because criticizing Saint Anthony is a huge no-no at Marvel Studios.

WANDAVISION (2021)

[unhingedmarvelandclassicwhobuff]

I'm not sure what to say to this, so I'll just go on a largely unrelated tangent about the number one reason I despise the direction Wanda was taken, because the mention of her and Zemo in that comment reminded me of it.

A lot of villains have tragic pasts, and they can't be used as an excuse for what they do; what made Wanda special to me was that she was able to rise above her dark past and try her very best to help others. Taking that and having her turn evil made me feel especially betrayed.

This applies to WandaVision as well. I know when all is said and done her noble selflessness shone through in that series, but if I had my way, she would never have been put in that situation to begin with.

And as an aside, screw Civil War for not letting Zemo and Wanda interact. But what can you expect when the writers aren’t interested in anyone but Tony?

[unhingedmarvelandclassicwhobuff]

Here's an extremely loaded question: is what Wanda put the people of Westview through in any way comparable to what she endured on the Raft?

I'm not sure if it could be classified as solitary confinement, as they WERE still around other people (unless you count the children, but it's implied they were asleep the entire time), but still... they spent upwards of 8 days totally unable to move or even think clearly, and as far as they knew there was no hope of ever being released.

You know, it just occurred to me that Steve didn’t know where his team was being held after the airport battle.

Tony, who was in contact with Ross and probably stood and waved at the jet as they took the chained up Avengers away, knew that they were being brought to an illegally-run supermax prison in the middle of the ocean.

Hell, he visits them there to interrogate Sam on where to find Steve and Bucky.

But he never tells Steve.

Now, we can correlate the approximate time it took for Steve to locate the others by calculating the arrival time of Steve’s package to Tony.

Tony gets the package from Steve, and immediately after he opens it, he gets the message from Ross that someone broke the Avengers out of the Raft.

If we assume Steve bought the phone and wrote his letter the minute he got to Wakanda, and had it in the mail to Tony by that evening, it would have taken approximately 8 days to get to the Avengers Tower in New York via Fed-Ex, even with rush delivery.

(At least, according to an online Fex-Ex calculator I used.)

At the absolute minimum we’re looking at eight full days of Steve trying to locate and break out his friends.

(And seeing as he’s got a reputation of single-handedly storming bases without a plan, I think it’s safe to say that he was flying their way on a jet the second that he pinpointed their location.)

Which means that it took almost eight days for Steve to track the other Avengers down so he could rescue them.

Eight days of them all being kept in tiny cells, not allowed to get any exercise or fresh air or real light, and all of them being told that they are to spend the rest of their lives there without the hope of a trial or release.

Eight days of Wanda being locked in solitary confinement for 24 hours a day, unable to move because of the straitjacket and being shocked whenever the guards feel like they need to give her a warning. 

And I would actually like to take this moment to point out that solitary confinement isn’t as innocent and harmless as everyone in fiction likes to make it out to be, either.

In fact, here’s a great post by @scripttorture on the topic of solitary confinement and its affects on the victim.

Check it out here.

Being in solitary confinement for a week - especially with exasperating factors like poor living conditions, restricted movement, artificial light/air, no clear release date, pre-existing trauma/issues, and the threat of electrical torture from the guards -  would have very likely been long enough to have lasting negative affects on Wanda’s mental and potentially physical health.

She’s likely going to have trouble interacting with others. She will likely get depressed or suicidal. She may suffer from hallucinations or mood swings. All of her pre-existing issues are likely going to get worse.

Steve is on a timer to get them out ASAP.

And Tony purposefully delayed that.

The worst part is that Tony wasn’t sure if Steve would even be able to locate the others at all.

Tony thinks Steve is dumb - he’s made no secret of this. What reason, then, would Tony have to think that Steve would be able to track down the others in any kind of reasonable amount of time without help?

Tony doesn’t know that Wakanda is offering help.

What reason would Tony have to think that Steve is going to be able to arrange the gear or transportation allowing him to get to the Raft and help?

What if Steve hadn’t been as clever as he actually is? What if he hadn’t been able to find them for two weeks? A month? Six months?

Tony didn’t care.

He didn’t care if his teammates were suffering or being abused, he didn’t care if their basic human rights were being violated, he didn’t care if the prison conditions they were being kept in very clearly violated half of the UN’s rules on prisoner treatment.

He would rather turn a blind eye.

Tony was feeling petty because the others decided to listen to Steve about the super soldier threat instead of meekly doing whatever Tony said and blindly signing off on the Accords, and so he left them all at the Raft to rot without so much as a word to Steve about where he could find them.

How hard would it have been to tell Steve where they were? One word shouted after him in Siberia? Messaged to him at any point in the week after Tony tried to kill them? Some type of hint at where to find the others? Hell, even something so immaterial as an anonymous appeal to the UN about prisoner conditions?

But no.

Tony was not only willing to let them all live out the rest of their lives in indefinite detainment without a trial while he lazed about his mansion in luxury and did nothing to amend the Accords like he’d claimed, but he wasn’t going to so much as tip off their only chance at rescue as to where they were all being held.

“Tony cares about his team” my ass.

[unhingedmarvelandclassicwhobuff]

I’ll never be able to decide if I like or hate this scene. On the one hand, it’s a really well-written and well-acted confrontation. On the other hand, this is Wanda at her absolute worst, trying to manipulate Vision and borderline gaslighting him to stop his questions. Because even if she was telling the truth about not knowing what was going on, she was still trying to make him stop attempting to figure it out.

I’m not surprised that a ton of people came away from this episode in particular fully believing she had gone bad.

you can’t control me the way you do them

[dusty-daydreams]

Rewatching Wandavision has made me realise what it is that I am enjoying so much about Agatha All Along that I haven’t for the MCU in years - which is just how unashamedly fantasy it is.

Like even Wandavision which was supposedly all about this massive feat of magic Wanda does is still extremely sci fi but not in an interesting way in the incredibly bland way that the MCU developed

Agatha All Along is just straight up about witches and magic and I love it

[wishfairies]

The problem with how Marvel is handling the Maximoff twins is that they shot themselfs in the foot.

They have a lot of projects planned do release at certain times in a certain order.

They already started doing the team up to Young Avengers so they need Wiccan rigth now. They can not do a time jump because the others are teenagers now. So they had to kill Billy Kaplan and make Billy Maximoff's soul jump in his body.

Marvel's problem was timing they introduced Billy too late and the other Young Avengers too soon. They were scared that the public would forget them if they stopped doing Avengers for a second

[unhingedmarvelandclassicwhobuff]

I suddenly had a thought; Wanda saying “then how could you know about Ultron?”. What are the implications of that? Does it mean she is in fact aware of the Hex’s mind control and thinks it has wiped everyone’s memories? Why else would her being a neighbor mean that she couldn’t know about Ultron and Pietro?

I suppose this leads to another question; does the general public even know Pietro existed? If they didn’t, then I guess maybe this could be interpreted as “if you’re a civilian, then why do you know classified information?” But why would Wanda not want her brother’s sacrifice to be honored?

Either way, this whole scene is a prime example of WandaVision’s most glaring flaw; the writers prioritizing audience intrigue over character consistency.

WandaVision (S1E4)

[lokigodofaces]

Since I've been seeing more and more anti-Wanda stuff lately, I thought I'd write something out and express my thoughts in a low-key venty manner.

I really don't trust the vast majority of Wanda criticizers*.

There is so much misogyny, victim blaming, dismissal of trauma, etc. I cannot believe it. And most of this started during WandaVision.

Okay I saw criticisms before mostly for Age of Ultron but it was your classic "poorly written" criticisms which I disagree with I think that in the majority of movies she was in they did a decent enough job of writing her. The only major ones I saw were because they wrote her and Pietro as part of Hydra initially. A) That definitely was not the most well thought out decision of Marvel's, given that they are Jewish and Roma in the comics but of course they've been whitewashed so Feige didn't see it as a concern. B) If it weren't for their ethnicities, it would be kind of genius if it had been fleshed out more. Real life Nazi organizations prey on young people who have been mistreated (or perceive themselves to be mistreated) by the government or other authority figures and groom them to be fascists. Don't get me wrong, definitely insensitive to have that happen with these two given ethnicity, but unfortunately that is kind of accurate still. Unfortunately, this fascist groups manage to get POC, LGBTQ+, and other minority groups to join them. TL;DR: the way AoU handled it was not written well, but it definitely could have been something note worthy if the time had been taken to analyze this. Never claimed that Wanda was written perfectly, will be the first to admit that there are problems as well. But I will say that I used to see lots of people claiming she was "boring" pre-Infinity War. Idk, maybe I wasn't seeing what everyone else was, that's 100% a possibility. Like I said, this is more of a vent post than an academic paper.

Infinity War and Endgame I didn't see that much criticism, but those are the movies where they let Wanda be awesome and powerful so yeah guess no one had too much to say. Other than the occasional dudebro being mad that women can be powerful characters, there wasn't much I saw.

Then we get to WandaVision. Now y'all no by now that I am not a fan of the majority of newer MCU stuff. WandaVision is definitely one of those exceptions. Brilliant series. I was going wild as it was being released. I was so unbelievably hyped for Multiverse of Madness after this (Stephen and Wanda! Two of my favs! Together!). And the majority of it was really good, loved the other characters (or loved to hate them, in the case of Hayward lol), loved the sitcom references, it was a very enjoyable series. And as it came out, I didn't see much criticisms other than the reasonable ones (it isn't a flawless series). But we started to run into some things I hated, and it would just get worse and worse as time would go on.

People have no ability to understand morally grey characters these days. Any Wanda, Bucky, or Loki fan will tell you this because Marvel's been doing them dirty and the fandom hasn't been much better.

What was WandaVision about? Grief and trauma and how difficult it is to overcome these. And I think they did a pretty dang good job at that. But then what does everyone do? Freak the heck out because Wanda took over Westview. Well, first off the series suggests that Wanda wasn't even aware of it for the first couple episodes. Then at the end it implies that Wanda was not aware that she was causing pain the citizens were feeling and she tried to get them all to leave once she found that one out. And you've got Agatha who was messing around, killing dogs, manipulating Wanda, and mind controlling Ralph. And let's not forget the pressure from S.W.O.R.D and Hayward being irrational about it (he literally shot his gun at kids and his employee who tried to protect them and people try to defend him). All Wanda wanted was to be happy and have her family (no one gets mad when other MCU characters do that, such as Tony in Endgame). By no means does this justify her actions, but she is villainized so much over something when clearly her motivations are not out of ill intent but out of trauma, grief, desperation, and also being provoked by Hayward right before she got to Westview. She is feeling all of these emotions, and clearly her powers somehow got stronger/she unlocked or leveled up/something idk that's never explained as she is feeling all of this. I mean, if I had powers as ridiculously strong as Wanda's, it'd be hard for me to control them on rough days.

WandaVision introduced us to this very complex narrative of Wanda doing something wrong but not because she had ill intent yet not wanting to give up the little happiness she is feeling while she is also being manipulated by Agatha and Hayward. It isn't black or white. She isn't a villain, but she isn't Westview's hero. She's a grieving woman that needs therapy and also help to learn about her growing magic (ie what Multiverse of Madness should have been).

But half the time you see anything about Wanda in WV it's just saying that she was evil, that she was purposely hurting the citizens, that it was for nothing but fake kids, etc. Dismissal of trauma. Victim blaming. Misogyny. Let me tell you, if Wanda was a man everyone would claim that he was a good father and that he only wanted to build a family. But noOoOoO, she's a woman so she can't be complicated.

Then we get to Multiverse of Madness. Pretty sure Waldron never watched WandaVision (a literal masterpiece) before writing the flaming pile of trash he calls a script. There's so much to unpack about how Waldron didn't write her well, how she became a villain out of literally nowhere, how while Agents of SHIELD definitely supports the idea of a Darkhold twisted villain even still Radcliffe never was pure evil he was simply misguided by a sudden overflow of information that didn't happen all at once, etc. There's a lot. But, hey, it basically sums up what antis have to say about Wanda. Because Waldron seems to hate every single character he has written other than some select people in the TVA!

Now, even more motivated by the awful writing of DSMOM, antis say that Wanda was crazy for a desire to have kids (again, would they have said the same thing if she was a man?) and that she was actually this villainous the whole time (show me your receipts because even the beginnings of Age of Ultron showed her not being completely evil). And I could go on, they say so much. But, as I have said, all of it is dismissal of trauma, victim blaming, and/or misogyny.

But it's caused me to be very suspicious of people who claim to hate Wanda. Which obviously no one has to like her. Totally understand that she might not appeal to some people that like different tropes and whatnot, that is definitely understandable. But whenever anyone starts to lean into anti territory, I just have to wonder why. Why do you hate Wanda so much? Tell me why? Because generally when I find out why, it's because she's evil and insane and tortures whole towns without remorse (canonically not even true).

*Disclaimer: I am not referring to anyone criticizing the MCU and it's whitewashing of Wanda. That is a reasonable concern. I am talking about everything else listed in the post.

[unhingedmarvelandclassicwhobuff]

Wanda’s mental state during Westview (and why it matters)

One of the biggest defenses that we Wanda fans love to use for her actions in her own show is that she was having a mental breakdown. It’s basically the only way to rationalize the fact that she was told multiple times that she was torturing people and completely brushed it off, because even though she has no reason to believe half the people who tell her that, you’d think with how empathetic she is she would at least entertain the possibility even if she doesn’t know she is capable of doing what they claim. 

The problem with this is that I’m not sure if a mental breakdown was the writing team’s intent; there’s never any reference to mental illness during the show; the only explanation ever given is that she is grieving. Yet I’ve seen what Jac Shaeffer and her crew have said; they apparently never intended to turn Wanda into a villain, so that makes me think they were hoping to convey that she was mentally compromised in some way. Because if that wasn’t their intent, then I have some very serious questions about what they think constitutes a hero.

I simply cannot accept the idea that the Wanda Maximoff I know and love would ever knowingly continue to imprison and torture people, so unless something concrete is ever said I will continue to cling to the headcanon that she was having a mental breakdown until the end of episode 7.

I suppose if you really, REALLY stretch things, you can make it so Wanda wasn’t having a mental breakdown without being ruined. You can argue that she has zero reason to believe Hayward or Monica, and that her trust in Vision was shaken when Agatha stepped in with Fake Pietro. But all of that kind of makes her look like a negligent, self-centered moron, so I much prefer the mental breakdown explanation.

[oceanwithinsblog]

only two episodes have come out but i already love this show more than i could've ever imagined HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE ?!?!?!

[musclesandhammering]

Monica and America both deserve to beat Wanda’s ass there I said it

[thecoolguy24601]

Among Us: The Animated Series