(Like Rocket Raccoon said to Drax -- "Everyone's got dead people, it's no excuse to get everybody else dead along the way")
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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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It corrupts everyone, the bored and sheltered and happy as well as the traumatized and broken, let's be clear (The headass, evil argument that "Those who've suffered can't be trusted with power" is a real argument historically made for aristocracy)
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But it corrupts *differently* depending on what kind of person you are -- and it's futile to talk about what kind of corruption is "worse" When the person making you suffer is doing so *because* they know what suffering rather than in spite of not knowing, it's cold comfort
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I mean one thing WandaVision is about is Karen Discourse -- like that's literally the role Wanda seeks to inhabit, the Classic Karen, to the point of freely and viciously abusing a Black woman who dares to challenge her view of herself as the only true victim in Westview
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And I don't think it's actually true, at all, that "Karens" are women who are so privileged they've never experienced sexism and therefore don't know what suffering is like Quite the opposite -- it's really really fucking obvious that a lot of "Karens" are traumatized af
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Someone who's been casually belittled and pushed around by her dad growing up and by her husband now, who's compromised herself in a million invisible, intimate little ways every day of her life And is now a total dick to you at the counter because she DESERVES this ONE THING
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It's a dynamic that replicates itself all over the fucking place -- people beaten and ground down by oppression in one arena of life so they grab on HARD to any power they have in another MRAsians who take out every microaggression white people ever gave them on Asian women
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The observation that, while it's not a universal rule, "rags-to-riches" millionaires can be way more callous and cruel to the poor than people born into wealth Sometimes it's a conscious "I made it, so can you" philosophy, but sometimes the FYGM is just automatic and thoughtless
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And, like The point Monica makes in the ending that if she had the immense power Wanda did, no one could've stopped her from doing something very similar is a GOOD POINT
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It doesn't get Wanda off the hook, it doesn't mean that the citizens of Westview have no right to want to protect themselves from her in the future But if the Mind Stone gave any individual one of them her powers, fuck, of course they'd also make a Hex
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They've all been through the Blip, they've all got shit going on, who the fuck wouldn't cast a magic spell to take it all away if they could Are you so confident your integrity is so great? How would you actually know?
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