WandaVision could be the weirdest yet most grounded production from Marvel.
Scarlet Witch and Vision’s stories have been well documented by different comics, cartoons and writers about comics and cartoons. I always find Scarlet Witch a very weird (partly because of her unrealistic outfit) yet interesting character. Vision for me is bland. But their storyline in the comic is one of the most outlandish in my opinion.
I always found the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) Scarlet Witch was very underdeveloped. However, due to the fact that a lot of things the MCU tried to do were still being contractually tied by Fox, Sony and Universal, so it is not a surprise that they need to tip toe around it. But that changed with Disney’s takeover of Fox.
We always knew the WandaVision series is based on decades of sitcoms, but apart from that not much information was available. Now with a few episodes in we started to see what’s happening.
Scarlet Witch in the MCU is a tragic character. Most characters in Endgame got closure, but not her. She was left alone in the wild. Just think about that degree of loneliness she would need to endure:
Her parents were killed in Sokovia when she and Pietro were kids
Then Pietro was killed by Ultron while trying to save Hawkeye
When she found anchor in Vision, she was forced to kill him in Infinity War to save the universe only to witness him died the second time when Thanos rewound time and pulled the Mind Stone out of his forehead
She was dusted
When she came back, the Thanos she knew was dead and she missed out the opportunity to kill the one who ‘took everything away from her’
Post-Endgame, all her mentors or ‘family’ were gone:
o Tony Stark sacrificed himself to kill Thanos and his army
o Steve Rogers decided to stay in another timeline and live a different live, then came back as a retired old man
o Natasha Romanoff sacrificed herself so that Hawkeye can get the Soul Stone
o Clint Barton retired again to his family after losing them for 5 years
o Vision stayed dead because he was not killed by the Snap
With all that, it is not surprising that she wanted to create a perfect life for herself to escape, when she actually has the power to do so.
Who wants to live out a painful life when you can create a pocket reality that can give you everything you wanted?
The mental health issue for Scarlet Witch after all that happened to her in the last 10 years probably has taken its toll on her, as there are no more people to guide her and help her.
We don’t know who is the real villain of the show but what we know is Scarlet Witch is willing to do anything to protect this pocket reality that she could escape to a perfect life without dealing with the reality that she has nobody in her life anymore.
I wish as the series progress; we get to understand more about her trauma and tragedy from a deeper level so that the real Scarlet Witch can be flashed out. We know some of the characters will survive the ordeal but we have no idea how things would end. And with MCU the only thing that is predictable is its unpredictability.
I maybe am one of the minorities, but I really like that WandaVision is tackling Scarlet Witch’s mental issues post Endgame. People said she could be the villain but if we consider someone as a villain simply because she has mental health issues, we are oversimplifying things. Understanding the story behind is what WandaVision is trying to do, despite all the weirdness and magic wove by Scarlet Witch in the episodes we saw so far.
There are lots of Easter Eggs and references. For me the most interesting one was the Hydra Soak commercial that refers all the way back to Season 4 of Agents of SHIELD. For me it is not only about the reference and accurate description of the soap, but that storyline happened in the Framework, a pocket reality created by the Life Model Decoy (LMD) Ada because she wanted to live a real life and not just as an LMD. Also Season 4 is the season that touched on the multiverse with Ghost Rider and the Darkhold.
How WandaVision would turn out is yet to be seen. But with the current story trajectile, it looks like something major will be coming to the MCU very soon, and I genuinely hope that they took this opportunity to fully develop Scarlet Witch as a character. It is long overdue.
