Doctor Strange 2’s Wanda Twist plays the worst sitcom

In a milieu where long-lived superhero characters have ups and downs during their careers, it’s rare for some slip-ups like scarlet witch. Even ascended as part of the vanguard in The fourth stage of the Marvel Movieverseher most recent appearance in Doctor Strange in a multiverse of madness It proves disappointingly That’s just like in the comics, putting Wanda into a frenzy is a metaphor her designers don’t seem to want to avoid.

surprise “evolution” Doctor Strange in a multiverse of madness— as much as one can turn 20 minutes into a movie that continues for another two hours afterward — is that Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff isn’t the vengeful ally Stephen Strange thinks he got when America Chavez fell on the proverbial doorstep. Instead, Wanda is the villain of the piece, marred by both Darkhold’s use of dark magic and her mental trauma, who is concerned about the loss of sons she has conjured for herself in Westview, New Jersey—the same products Wanda created with additional grief over the loss of the man she loves, the vision synthetics.

Suffice to say, the reaction to her place as the newest villain in the MCU has been… mixed, to say the least. distance WandaVision Give her grief Both devastating and somewhat understandable – as far as one can understand a reality-faking witch taking over an entire town of people against their will until she can play the role of a 1950s housewife –The multiverse of madness Throws Wanda into a terrifying vile pose, an accidental killer and an unstoppable and relentless force ready to do anything for chance to get her children back. The movie’s title madness is not about the road trip through reality that Doctor Strange and his allies take to try to stop it, but Wanda herself, driven into this unknown and terrible place, always framed as a deranged and deranged evil until that time comes for her to realize the scope of what she has done in her madness, She punishes this with self-sacrifice rather than rehabilitation.

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Taking one of the most powerful, prominent, and most beloved female figures in the MCU around at this point and making her turn heel irks, especially in the wake of a (not entirely spotless) attempt at a more demure spin on Wanda’s grief in WandaVision. But it’s not just because she’s a fallen hero who’s given the tropey “female hero can’t handle power, goes mad in the process” storyline, but because it’s a trope that has defined and influenced the Scarlet Witch for years, well before she first got adapted into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “Well, first off, it’s true to who the comics’ version of the character is and what she does in the comics,” The multiverse of madness And loki Author Michael Waldron He said about the decision to make Wanda the biggest bad movie in an interview with rolling rock this week. “It was always where Wanda headed in the MCU, even when she inherited the movie. The question just became, when Will it happen? “

This apparent determinism Waldron believes – that Wanda Maximov should simply become this depraved, insane evil – is the shadow that has haunted the character through decades of its comic history, and has now likewise been brought to the MCU. From her days of enchantment under the powers of Cthon and Darkhold at Mount Wundagore (which The multiverse of madness itself depends on) in pages Avengers #187, down to the infamous “No More Mutants” house m—And this complex mutated legacy that carried on beyond, only recently began to recover in pages Magneto . trial–Time and time again, Wanda’s story transforms into a dark force within her, or at her fingertips, that turns her not only into something despicable, but into a woman driven insane by her inability to control it. And most of the time, this comes along with forcing the character to. face shock With the loss of her children, Billy and Tommy, and her husband’s vision.

We first see this in the movie “Darker than Scarlet” in the 90s West Coast Avengers Number 56, when Wanda, corrupted by her father Magneto, corrupts her into a malicious version of herself, and criticizes her former vegetable allies for the loss of her family – it tells us that the affair began with captive Agatha Harkness, American agent, WASP, and Wonder Man all thinking of that Wanda has gone mad with her grief, and more so that this is the story in which we are first taught that Wanda’s hexa-powers do not change probability, but distort reality itself. Time and time again, the connection between Wanda’s supernatural power range and her apparent lack of willpower to control it is made during the lowest stages of her life in comedy, always forced to re-confront the trauma of losing Billy and Tommy. It happened so badly decades later in 2004 The Avengers disassembledWith Agatha Harkness The equally infamous way of keeping Wanda docile – erasing her memories of her children – is crumbling, and it seems that Wanda, simply put, can’t help but mentally break down and turn evil again.

And then, of course, there are the most famous ones, house m Just a year later, when Wanda awakens in response to the X-Men and Avengers seeking to stop her destructive madness, she distorts all reality to create a perfect world where she has always put her children by her side. Although Wanda is ostensibly acting less of a villainous motive than an instrument of an overwhelming plot, house m Still concludes with one of Ha The most terrifying act In the comics, she almost wiped out the mutated race when she decided-All but nearly 200 species – a darkness just beginning to heal in the world The current Krakoan era of X-comics. Until then, Wanda (who, thanks to cinematic retcons induced by cinematic ambition, is no longer mutant these days) until Magneto . trial She is seen as a woman with a metaphysical play on the transgender gender that has re-emerged, the “great pretense” who has attempted to weaken his own gender.

Power and Wanda’s apparent ability to evil side-by-side has faded through generations of storylines for the character, reducing one of the most prominent female vengeful women in the entire team’s existence over and over to a disoriented being who must be confronted and controlled, out of fear that her powers are doing more harm than good. And now with The multiverse of madnessThe MCU turned out pretty well with its own version of Wanda Maximoff. But do you really need that? Do you need how long WandaVision Before that, by engaging with this same idea, I was able to present a Crimson Witch who was, at least, understandably more sympathetic rather than the bloodthirsty villain we face in the The multiverse of madness?

time will tell Just how does the MCU view the Scarlet Witch going forward – even if The multiverse of madness She ends her arc with an apparent sacrifice, death (apparent or other) Rarely always in the superhero movie world. But whether the MCU is trying to push Wanda down the rehab path, there will always be a question for her fans as a character: should she always be this way?

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