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hyperbali · 3 years

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Agatha Harkness Was Right, And Here’s Why

Alright. Finally had to sit down and write my way out of this quiet, internal temper tantrum, and a few people were interested in seeing what I had to say, so I present to you:

Agatha Harkness Was Right, And Here’s Why

Disclaimer: MASSIVE spoilers for the entirety of WandaVision, and I am not nice about it.

I’ll start off by saying that, for all its foibles, WandaVision was genuinely a good example of a property within the MCU/Disney umbrella that stepped out of the usual ‘good guys fight bad guys action extravaganza’ in a way that pushed the envelope. The pseudo-horror aspect of the first few episodes is something I would really love to see engaged with on a more thoughtful basis in future projects.

I would say that it proved to be more than a vehicle to promote toys, but… well…

Yeah. Anyway.

I’ll assume that you watched WandaVision if you’re reading this, but quick recap: In the aftermath of ‘the Blip,’ Wanda is left broken and alone with no one in her corner. Her biggest mentor willingly abandoned his team to get his own ‘happy’ ending (do not get me started on Steve, that’s a document in and of itself), her other biggest mentor is probably off enjoying his family while ignoring the incredibly racist killing spree he’s been on for the past five years, and her lover is dead. When she goes to claim the body, she’s told nuh-uh, that’s government property, please leave.

So she goes to a plot of land in the middle of some nowhere town in New Jersey, which Vision apparently bought despite the fact they were living a pretty decently comfortable life in Scotland, where she looks at the deed that Vision drew a heart on and wrote ‘To Grow Old In’. Very sweet. Kind of weird, considering nothing of this caliber had ever been suggested for either of their characters and they’d been actively running from specifically the U.S. authorities? But sweet.

She has a breakdown and, in her grief, contains the entire town of Westview and all 3,892 of the people in it in her own personal paradise, where nothing bad ever happens beyond sitcom hijinks, no one dies, and every problem is tied up and neatly dealt with by the end of an ‘episode’. Except we learn that this is only paradise to Wanda, who apparently shares the aspect of having to relate everything to her favourite pop culture with Tony, because everyone else in Westview is more or less being psychologically tortured by the incredible amount of pain she’s in, forced to be puppeted actors to make her happy.

Bear in mind, Westview might have been bigger at some point - we have no idea how many people survived the Blip, or how many have been brought back to life within the past few weeks of the current setting. Either way, this is a town that has already dealt with a lot of trauma being dragged into yet another awful, much more specific kind of emotional damage, thanks to ‘the heroes’. Nice.

Agatha Harkness, a witch who’s been up to who-knows-what in the 340 years since she drained the coven that tried to kill her for getting a little too ambitious into jerky, feels the massive expenditure of magical power and decides to investigate. All the while, she carefully uses her own magic to try and peek into Wanda’s psyche, her motivations, all while keeping up appearances and not letting slip that anything is amiss.

I’ll point out that she’s no saint here, either - she specifically keeps one Westview resident at her mercy, and knows what’s happening to the rest of them, but doesn’t attempt to stop it. I’ll chalk that up to her pragmatism; their ‘sacrifice’ was fine to her as long as she could figure out how Wanda could have done something so unheard of in terms of power.

What we come to learn over the course of the show is that, given everything that happened, Wanda didn’t mean to take over an entire town and tool it into her own personal slice of heaven. She very quickly became aware of it; we know that she knows it’s her own personal bubble as soon as episode three, when she’s confronting Monica about how the latter could possibly know about Ultron. Wanda is made further aware of how much damage this is inflicting on others in episode five, when Vision himself tells her that these people are scared. But still, she has everything handled! It’s okay! The outside world is worse, trust her!

Her handling of the question, ‘where are all the children of Westview,’ is one that bears some thinking - and, y’know, kind of more than a little concern. They’re allowed to walk around as part of the ‘Halloween special,’ but as Vision walks further and further out towards the edges of town where Wanda doesn’t have as much full control, people are just frozen in place, or conducting the same few seconds of action over and over. And fully aware of being trapped.

How are they being sustained? Eating, sleeping? If someone isn’t part of her storyline, is she just locking them down into a coma? What made Wanda decide that keeping the children ‘out of the way’ was somehow kinder than involving them, especially given her later argument that she’s been trying to keep the entire town safe and happy?

The fact of the matter is, she only actually starts to feel remorse for any of this after she’s confronted with the fact that, after weeks of being at her mercy, the townspeople of Westview would rather be dead than endure another moment of having to play nice for her enjoyment. She finally opens the ‘bubble’ to let them out - which leads to the ‘epic’ finale of three different entities trying to take down Wanda and her happy family: the S.W.O.R.D. military led by Hayward, the White Vision, and Agatha.

Winding back to how we got here: after Agatha uses her own trapped resident, Ralph Bohner (who, given his casting and the props in place during the last episode, I’m willing to bet is actually the missing witness protection person Jimmy was looking for) in an attempt to lure out Wanda’s reasoning - and fails - she’s pretty much done pretending. She tricks Wanda into her basement, nullifies her powers, and makes her face her own past to get to the truth of the matter.

Not going to lie, favourite moment of the show. Kathryn Hahn killed Agatha’s slightly-amused-slightly-irritated observations about Wanda’s coping mechanisms, and the whole arrangement was extremely meta. I would have paid real money dollars to see her do the same thing to the likes of Tony, Strange, and Loki. Hell, even just having her meet the rest of the Avengers? Augh. If wishes were fishes.

When Agatha comes to the conclusion that Wanda is the vaunted, nigh-indestructible force of nature that she’s literally spent her entire life reading about is the ultimate source of chaos magic and will likely bring about the end of the world, she’s pretty understandably taken aback. To that matter, the fact that Wanda… has very little control over any of it, and is using what she does understand to play housemaker? After how long Agatha has spent learning control, hiding in plain sight, just to be child’s play compared to what Wanda has at her fingertips? I’d be pretty pissed off, too!

The way that WandaVision handled both of the major ‘fights’ - Vision versus White Vision ending in philosophy, and Wanda ending up beating Agatha at her own game of deception - is excellent. A little grating that they had to go with the beat down angle before they got there, but this is MCU; punches and thrown cars had to get shoved in somewhere. And, given that this series very much played with the idea of grey morality, I was sort of hopeful that Agatha would end up in a not-quite stalemate arrangement with Wanda. She’s not as powerful as the Scarlet Witch, but she has the know-how that Wanda sorely lacks; in recompense for her own deeds, she would be able to teach what she knows while also kind of scheming on her own time.

Y’know, like what they did with rehabilitating Loki?

Except that Wanda, who has just gone through the entire rigamarole of coming to terms with the fact that she trapped thousands of people into a nightmare scenario against their will, rendering them helpless to her mercy… traps Agatha into a nightmare scenario against her will, rendering her helpless to Wanda’s mercy.

That moment actually shook me. Oh, my god. We’re supposed to still look at Wanda as a good guy after this?

This isn’t even covering the incredibly awful confrontation with her and Vision where she tries to gaslight him into believing that everything is A-OK, or the fact that the person she gets most violent with (apart from Agatha) is Monica Rambeau, a black woman who spends most of the show bending over backwards trying to say that what Wanda is doing is understandable, justified, and just needs a gentle touch to be dealt with.

That could be its own document, too - how Monica, much as she’s incredible and definitely looks to be a really exciting addition to the MCU roster, more or less gets used as the Good One to absolve and enable Wanda’s actions. One of her last lines to Wanda, after seeing how the people of Westview (rightfully) look at Wanda like she’s monstrous, is “they’ll never know what you sacrificed.”

Sacrificed what? The fake husband and fake kids she made out of her own compulsion to pretend that everything is okay? None of that would have existed if she’d been given the proper resources to actually cope with how much loss she’s had to deal with. None of that would have existed if she hadn’t caused this problem in the first place.

In the end, Wanda flies off in her fancy new gear before the FBI shows up, avoiding any real consequences to her actions - which has pretty much been the running theme of her character ever since she was introduced to the MCU in Age of Ultron. The worst kind of direct consequence she’s ever gotten was being grounded to her room for a while, then kept in the Raft for, like, maybe a day - and both times, she was broken out post-haste.

Meanwhile, she worsened the issues in Sokovia (which, I will say upfront, was Tony’s fault to begin with), unleashed the Hulk on Johannesburg, got a pretty significant amount of civilians killed as bystanders in Lagos (hey, how come Wanda keeps turning a lot of black people into casualties?), and stood back in Wakanda to let their people try to fight off Thanos from getting to Vision until it was clear that there was no other option than for her to get involved.

Great Power Comes With No Responsibility At All, Actually.

Wanda, in the several years she has maintained her identity as an Avenger, has proven time and time again that she takes on innumerable risks without any full understanding of what they mean, allows others to take on the brunt of the fallout for her, and looks sad until she’s forgiven and moves on to the next problem. She has no business casually throwing around the kind of power that being the Scarlet Witch entails, not until she’s actually made any kind of headway into making reparations for what she’s done and tried, really tried, to get a handle on what she’s capable of.

Which she’s apparently doing in the last post-credits scene, astral reading the literal Book of the Damned on her lonesome in the mountains, but… without anyone to guide her, or give her any kind of boundary?

[I ran out of images I could post, but you know exactly what image I am referring to here]

Agatha Harkness was right. And that should terrify everybody that has to deal with Wanda in the future.

(P.S. Do we know if she actually even killed that dog? We never see her holding anything but a blanket, and characters go in and out of that show all the time. Granted, she wasn’t great with the cicada-turned-bird... hmm.)

Additional Notes:

“Well, you’re a Tony Stan, of course you think Wanda’s a villain”

I like Tony because he’s such an awful mess, and the narrative isn’t exactly kind about telling him what a piece of shit he can be! He reaped a lot of problems, created practically half the villains in the MCU, and ended up dying a martyred hero. Thanks to being the tent pole by which this franchise hoisted itself into a cultural powerhouse, he will always be their golden savior. If you want to read about how he’s the true villain of this entire affair, feel free to look up any number of takedown pieces about him that are out there. He’s a dick. I will never “uwu sad baby who did nothing wrong ever 🥺” him the way people do about Wanda.

“Why are you so pressed about this”

Because something as good in concept as WandaVision could and should have been about anyone other than the whitewashed, antisemitic take on Wanda Maximoff that MCU brought upon us. They put crucifixes on her wall in Civil War, for fuck’s sake!

“Weren’t you mad about them not including Aaron Taylor-Johnson”

At this point, I am almost kind of relieved the real Pietro wasn’t resurrected for this, because god knows they probably would have killed him all over again just to inflict that much more pain on his sister.

“Anything else you’d like to tell us, turbo nerd”

This was literally itching at me all weekend to write, so it’s more or less just to get it off my chest. If you powered your way through it, uh… thanks? Sorry if I yucked your yums, but I tried to be as clear with the disclaimer as I could. 🤷‍♂️

#blah blah #long post #marvel #mcu #wandavision #wandavision spoilers #wandavision critical #anti wanda maximoff

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