Mad About Madness

A Breakdown of the Misuse of the Scarlet Witch

Sometimes, it really does not pay to try to ignore things, readers. Or to attempt to ignore things, as I have been trying to do with Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If I could hide under a rock and wait for these shenanigans to end I would, but that is not an option for a writer who actually (a) enjoys the franchise, (b) sees the archetypes present therein being abused from all quarters, and (c) leaving writers and the audience in the quagmire of poor examples of storytelling.

Let’s get a few things out of the way: this post is not a defense of Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch. I like the character and I am not going to pull my punches on how the writers have mishandled her for decades, but I am not going to rewrite Multiverse of Madness or say how it could have been done better. It could have been done better by simply not being made.

There, done, I have said my piece on the movie. Do not expect me to come back to it because I will not be doing so: I have not seen the film and I have no intention of viewing it because Endgame was the finale of the MCU. All subsequent media is an attempt to keep this branch of the franchise going indefinitely, which is already biting the owners in the tender part of the body that reposes in seats. I feel very bad for the actors and actresses trapped in this embarrassing trainwreck, but they are making money and getting jobs, so by most metrics they are doing fine. I can only hope this travesty does not take their edge off and we continue to see them perform to the height of their craft. If the MCU has proven anything, it is that even the lesser-known members of the cast can act and – typically – maintain some level of class.

With that also out of the way, let us move on to how the character of the Scarlet Witch has been mishandled over the years. This will focus primarily on the comics, but if you have seen or read about the shows and/or films, you will be able to keep up with most of the discussion. First (and this is a reference to Elizabeth Olsen, not the film) is this very important fact:

Wanda Maximoff is not a murderess.

I have heard some people criticize Olsen’s acting skills, and they are free to do so. Personally, I think she has a very good understanding of the character, which is why this statement regarding her difficulty with the direction the movie took is significant. Wanda Maximoff has very rarely killed her opponents in her comic book history, primarily because she was never trained as a killer. Black Widow was raised to be an assassin and a spy from the time she could toddle. Mockingbird was a SHIELD agent and had to kill in the line of duty. Sif grew up in and takes part in her culture’s warrior ethos, so killing in most circumstances will not bother her.

It will bother Wanda. She typically affects the battle from the rear and does so without killing anyone. This fits her character, as the Scarlet Witch is a “girly girl.” She likes sewing (in an early comic, she made a suit for Hank Pym “just in case” he returned to the team), she is sweeter than sweet can be, and the only thing that will make her lose her temper is if someone she cares about is harmed. The reason she fights is not because she wants to kill but because, like any good princess, she cares. She cares about the innocent, about doing what is right, and about saving lives. If and/or when she takes a life it is for the simple reason that there is no other way to protect the lives of others.

Olsen struggled to play a murderous Wanda Maximoff, I believe, because she knows the character well enough to understand she has no natural killer instinct. Nice girls like Wanda require an entirely different approach from an actress than a femme fatale such as Natasha Romanoff, a warrior woman in the vein of Sif, or a bloodthirsty queen like Cate Blanchett’s Hela (who is not a patch on her comic book counterpart – Blanchett was robbed in Ragnarok). Forcing Olsen to pivot from her role’s essence and act contrary to established character resulted in the struggle she endured filming this unspeakable movie.

From here we can discuss another issue: Wanda’s marriage to Vision. This was a big mistake.

I know, I know, it’s canon and has been for years. Wanda has always wanted a family, so how can I say her marriage to Vision was a mistake?! That’s cruel, isn’t it? Doesn’t Vision deserve to be treated as human? After all, in the comics, the biggest difference between him and a human man is that his internal organs are plastic.

First, that is not the only difference. Vision is an android; he can be taken apart and rebuilt – and has been, on more than one occasion. In at least one crossover with DC’s Justice League, Vision was “killed” and the Leaguers were naturally worried about him. Thor, of all people, told them point blank: “Oh, yeah, this happens all the time. Don’t worry about it, he’ll be right as rain in a few months.”

Great, wonderful, that’s so convenient. Except how does having Vision continuously rebuilt after dying again and again affect the psyche of his human wife? There is a reason the writers were able to have Immortus (Kang the Conqueror’s future self) set up Wanda’s marriage to Vision to be a preventative measure to keep her from having children, which led us down the path of Disassembled and House of M. No matter how human he may be in mind or how close he is physically to humanity, Vision is a machine. Wanda is not, and therein lies the rub.

Yes, Wanda absolutely wants a family. See the above statement about her being a “girly girl”: Typically, girly girls want to be wives and mothers. There is nothing at all wrong with that. Nothing. Zero, zip, nada. If anyone tells you otherwise, they are liars.

Vision is an android. He cannot father children and, as a meme I cannot find again pointed out, Wanda and Vision consummating a relationship is much like a woman trying to marry a mannequin or have relations with a virtual character. It will end in nothing because Vision is not a real man; he cannot give Wanda what she truly wants.

It is true that their personalities (he is the “Spock” and she is the passion to his logic) work well together. This is one reason why I think pairing her off with her other potential love interest, Wonder Man, would be a mistake as well. Apart from the fact that he is sterile due to his powers, Wonder Man has panache, bombast, and a flair for the dramatic. In other words, he is a passionate person, and thus would be very poor at balancing Wanda’s passions.

Nightcrawler, who marries or at least has a daughter with Wanda in some alternate universes, is better than Wonder Man but still not what I would call a match for her. Generally sunny and cheerful, he’s a little too much like Wanda for their relationship to “click” in a yin and yang manner. I am sure others can come up with a more suitable partner for her based on the criteria above, so I will not suggest anything further, but this aside is meant primarily to point out what a writer would need to consider for an ardent heroine like Wanda Maximoff.

The main point is that, while Vision’s personality operates as a good counterbalance to Wanda’s, there can never be a true consummation of their relationship. John C. Wright’s review of the Japanese film BELLE, a retelling of Beauty and the Beast in cyberspace, sums this up better than I could:

…BELLE avoids the recurring errors that haunt any cyberspace story, or “trapped on the holodeck” episode. A similar error haunts any story taking place in a dream. Namely, even within the context of the story, cyberspace is not real. No one can actually suffer wounds, bruises, or death.

Many a tale attempts to circumvent this limitation by establishing that the events and the dream-world or cyber-world, if sufficiently damaging to one’s image or avatar, will drive the real man mad, or traumatize him, or erase his brain, or the system biofeedback will kill his sleeping body. Shifts and conceits are attempting to make what essentially must be a purely mental or spiritual drama into a physical drama. Even when successful, it is awkward. – Emphasis mine

Vision and Wanda’s relationship is not real. It can never be real because, unlike the Velveteen Rabbit, Vision can never achieve true humanity. A 2016 comic arc tacitly acknowledges this by showing Vision with an android wife, son, and daughter he built himself. It is, frankly, creepy because it is synthetic. It apes the human family via synthetic means and is the stuff of nightmares, particularly when the audience considers the fact that Vision used his human ex-wife’s brain patterns for his android wife (more or less with Wanda’s permission, but still).

His new “family” is not real and, as much as the audience might like Vision himself, our very nature rebels at the artificial simulacra of the “family” he creates. It is not a true family and, since man was made for truth, abiding near anything that is false makes him uneasy due to the fact that lies hide deep, ugly threats. Vision himself may not be a threat but he, above all others, should recognize that he is purposefully veiling his eyes for his own pleasure. That carries extreme risks whether one is human or not, because to entertain a delusion that can potentially harm oneself and/or others puts them as well as the person suffering under the specific misapprehension in danger of trying to make their fantasies real by any means necessary.

This leads us to a discussion of Wanda’s twin “sons,” who are even now acknowledged to be no more than projections of her own imagination. She is living the delusion of motherhood, not the fact; her sons are not real. Elizabeth Olsen stated as much in an interview somewhere after Age of Ultron and before (or after – I can no longer remember which) Captain America: Civil War. She said she would “love to play at having imaginary children,” and I can see why an actress would want that part. I can even say with perfect honesty that I think Olsen could nail the role without half-trying.

Acknowledging that does not prevent me from stating emphatically that setting Wanda up with this false image of herself and Vision was a bad idea. It was a bad idea for two reasons: 1) it limited the story and the characters, and (2) it encouraged the audience to believe that delusions could be made real. We are seeing, in a multitude of ways, the fruit of that conviction bearing out now. Just look at these articles on raising virtual children here and here. Don’t want to give birth to and raise a real child? No problem! Create one in the “metaverse” of cyberspace – “Tamagotchi kids” won’t make a mess or wake you up at night. Heck, you won’t even have to let them grow up or become teenagers!

Yes, that sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Almost like a certain female character currently under discussion right now. Olsen at least knew she would be acting in such a scenario, but these articles actually look forward to this willing delusion. Japan’s Avenger anime was prescient in more than one way.

Living under an illusion is not healthy. It is not attractive, it is not safe, and it can never, ever bring happiness. All it will ever bring is more pain, more sadness, and more anguish not just for the person deceiving themselves but for those they try to force to live in their fantasy. This is where the true issue arises with how Wanda’s character has been portrayed for decades – the writers made it seem that not only could she make-believe her way through life, she could convince others to support her view of herself and be happy about it.

That is not how humanity works. It is certainly not how reality works. A man can state he can fly without wings, paraglider, or other equipment and jump off a roof to prove it. Gravity will bring him down to earth faster than he can blink and likely kill him in the process. Sane, concerned friends and family will know this and do everything they can to keep the man from leaping off the roof for his own good because they care about him and do not want him to die due to believing something that is not true.

So why, oh why, did Marvel let Wanda Maximoff not only convince herself of this fantasy for years but let the other Avengers go along with it? Moreover, why are fans continuing to let them do this to her and the audience? If it is in the name of character development, I pray we stop soon. This is a waste of character, not an evolution of same.

I discussed the basic tenets of Wanda’s archetype in this post here where I pointed out that she is, in RPG parlance, either a healer or a cleric. She affects the battle from the rear, not the front, and is not a physical fighter. She does battle at a distance, not hand-to-hand; her strengths are entirely suited to support and not brute force.

Another way of putting it is summed up well in the video below:

Holding Out for a Healer - World of Warcraft Parody

Do not tell me that role would not be more interesting than Wanda losing her mind and rewriting the world twice over, erasing mutant powers with just a few words, or having a fake family with an android and her imagination. Moreover, Marvel already has a heroine driven to madness by great power: Jean Grey under the influence of (or replaced by) the Dark Phoenix is a textbook example of how great power can lead to evil. Why do we need a second one? This is nothing more than a case of writers repeating “what works.” They just used a different character to do it.

This should not have happened. It should not be repeated continuously, either. It is a dead-end story that encourages unhealthy behavior or at least attempts to normalize it, and it traps authors in a “break the cutie” mindset that is downright abusive. Only abusers tear someone down out of a desperate desire to hurt them, and throwing everything and the kitchen sink at a character just to “break” him or her is the author essentially trying to break the audience by proxy.

Healthy people see that in a story and discard it because it does not satisfy. To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling’s “The Female of the Species,” a writer who vivisects or deals out pain by hitting a specific nerve over and over again is only interested in causing agony. In causing discomfort for personal pleasure and to assure themselves of their own power.

To this I say no. Not today, not tomorrow, never again. Let the nice girls be nice girls and the nice boys be nice boys. We do not – and likely never have – had enough of either. I’m tired of living in a world that thinks The Matrix was a playbook, not a story. I want out and if, to paraphrase a certain Captain, I am the only one, then fine.

But I do not think I am the only one who sees a problem with this trend in fiction or with so-called “Tamagotchi kids.” I do not think I am alone in saying, “Enough, time to take the red pill and leave this machine-induced dream behind.” Nor do I believe that this is the end or that it will be accepted by the public in the number which the “experts” claim it will.

I think we have a chance. We just need to avoid wasting it, if we can. The world is changing and no longer what we thought it would be or were taught it would become. Let’s get out of the metaverse and into the real one. Let’s leave the madness behind.

The only way to go from there, as the movie says, is up.