Yeah so like to try to treat this seriously for a sec, the writer of WandaVision, Jac Schaeffer, specifically said the show has "no Big Bad" Agatha and Hayward are both villains, but they aren't the cause of the main problem, in fact the whole point is they're incapable of thathttps://twitter.com/abradacabla/status/1369778337988685828 …
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Anyway I dislike the read that the story is purely about trauma and grief, that Wanda is the Designated Sufferer and her suffering is what actually counts (which is the narcissism Wanda is stuck in for most of the story) It's also about privilege, and power
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Wanda's suffering is extreme but I doubt she would objectively win a Who's Suffered Most contest if you held one for everyone on Earth, much less the universe She's not the only kid who survived that bombing, or similar bombings all through history
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She's not the only person whose loved one got killed by a supervillain, she's not the only person who's felt alone and abandoned In fact she's had plenty of gifts many other people wish they had, people who've never had safety and love at any point in their lives at all
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It's just, you know She's the one who got picked to get superpowers
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If you wanna pick one thing the show is "about" it's the age-old metaphor -- a common self-loathing self-crit metaphor from creative types -- about the abusive artist Someone whose trauma and pain is certainly real, but abuses their gifts to make it MORE real than anyone else's
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Forcing everyone else -- all the citizens of Westview who have their own shit going on -- to subordinate their grief, their struggle, their feelings to someone else's Sucking other people into their orbit and making them NPCs and bit players in the pageant of their own life
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Have they actually suffered *worse* than the people they exploit? I dunno Maybe, but it feels more likely that it's their gifts along with their suffering that gives them an unfair advantage
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Being born with natural charisma or beauty or persuasive talent, happening to be good at filmmaking or writing or painting or music Lucking into advantages like going to a good school, inheriting seed capital, having connections and a platform
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Look I'm gonna lob a bomb out there -- the kind of thing WandaVision is about is obviously a metaphor for the life of someone like, say, Roman Polanski
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Polanski absolutely went through shit nobody should have to go through, that I personally can't imagine going through Surviving the Holocaust only to have his pregnant wife and four of his friends murdered by the Manson cult ...That doesn't make him not a rapist
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Even if he had never physically raped anyone -- which, to be clear, it is proven and established that he did -- it doesn't make it okay for him to have his own little cult of personality where he was grooming children Girls who, when he let them sleep, had his nightmares
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"But Wanda's not an actual child rapist" Well no shit, you wouldn't keep watching the show if she were But she's painted as committing a profound violation as awful as they could make it without crossing the line from "metaphysical metaphor" into brutal real-life shit
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Like I'll throw this out there too Wanda is obviously sympathetic because she's a woman If you told this same story with a man in her place, people would be rooting for Hayward to cap the guy with a sniper rifle and end this shit right here and now
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I'm not saying this from the shitty YouTube MRA POV that "Making a woman protagonist is cheating, everyone automatically sides with women no matter what they do" The story *objectively is different* because she's a woman
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It hits different because you can see societal sexism reflected, if only indirectly, in her reactions leading up to the Hex -- the way her grief is dismissed and not taken seriously and her emotions are treated by people like Hayward as an inconvenience Even so
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And the whole sitcom setting hits the way it does because it's Wanda's self-abnegation, her guilt and her refusal to see herself as a villain, playing itself out It's her fantasy of paradise but it's one where she's constantly trying to punish herself and push power away
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In the world of the sitcom, she's a harried housewife stuck inside with the kids all day, not the professional with a cool important job (the role she lets Vision play) Her fantasy is a fantasy of servitude, of helping and advising, of being needed
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She's the bullied outsider desperately trying to please alpha mean girl Dottie, even though in reality those roles are reversed The "scripts" make her the butt of the joke, the sympathetic underdog who keeps having bad shit happen to her but pluckily pulling through
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If the magical reality warper creating the Hex were making himself the Dick van Dyke and not the Mary Tyler Moore it'd be much harder to like him If it were clearly a straightforward power fantasy where he's badass and cool and respected all the time
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If it were some dude creating a sitcom fantasy where his wife brings him his pipe and slippers and whatnot the audience would just be like "Okay Hayward waste this creepy fuck" If he were the kid from the Twilight Zone or the Captain from Black Mirror's USS Callister
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I mean, Vision's resurrection alone If this story were about a dude creating a clone of his dead wife out of pure energy and then gaslighting her about where she came from and telling her she should stop thinking about the world outside Westview because he's all she needs
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You'd say "This is fucking rapey as hell, this guy's a monster" and you'd be right But it hits different with the genders reversed (and I'm saying it *actually is different*, not that it's "cheating" or "bias")
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The show is walking this tightrope, it's showing us someone doing something objectively monstrous and yet portraying her in a light where we can say "Okay, but this is a desire a lot of people legitimately have, you can't just dismiss them as shitty people for *wanting* this"
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Zooming out to the big-picture political/social commentary about white-picket-fence suburban sitcoms it's saying, like Okay, yes, this view of the "good life" in America is hugely toxic and was powered by incredible suffering elsewhere in the world But it's natural to want it
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Especially the love-hate relationship white women have had with this fantasy That these shows were incredibly condescending to women and yet women, especially white women, were the primary audience demographic for them
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That women weren't stupid, they were aware that the Domestic Goddess role was a shitty bargain in so many ways and snuck subversive jokes about that into shows like this when they could But it was still a *better deal* than anything else the world was offering
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Better than the incredible vulnerability of being a woman *outside* this white-picket-fence world, on the streets with no protection, treated as completely disposable and a shameful stain on society The Madonna-vs-Whore/Witch dichotomy Agatha throws in Wanda's face
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(Now *that's* something that Jac Schaeffer was clearly aware of and could've gotten a lot deeper into with more time and if not having to keep things relatively light for the MCU A deep dive into Agatha's scorn at Wanda still craving approval/belonging from sexist normies)
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But anyway WandaVision would be stronger if it leaned into power-and-privilege harder, because to me that's the core of the show It's a dicey thing to ask for sympathy for the devil, for a man like Roman Polanski, but there are some harsh truths you have to look in the face
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Power DOES corrupt That fact doesn't excuse what the corrupt and powerful do, but it's still a fact, and it's one you MUST be aware of before letting people take power, especially yourself
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