WandaVision - Disney+ (***Spoilers***)

The Phantom Pain wrote: »

I don't think that's what anyone is implying at all. Simply that Marvel knew how their audience would receive it knowing full well a multi-verse is coming that involves Wanda and used that so they could draw interest to the story they actually wanted to tell which is one of grief.

I'm not "frustrated" with it; it's just that I'm able to see where people are coming from and I do regard the Fietro as a mistake. It doesn't ruin my overall love of the show or the MCU. Enjoying a show does not mean pretending it's perfect. Marvel is capable of making mistakes, as rare as it is.

Someone earlier in the thread called the Fietro stunt a slap in the face to fans, so I think there are people who would imply that.

I’m not denying that Marvel knew there would be speculation about the multiverse but speculation should be just that, one has to leave room for the possibility that it was just a nod and a wink. I could be wrong but I don’t ever remember Peters’s casting being officially announced, I thought it was leaked but never confirmed. It certainly seemed to be a surprise to many on this thread, so until corrected I’m not sure I buy the narrative that Marvel used that to draw interest. People have the right to be disappointed and criticise the show (I definitely don’t think the show is perfect), so apologies if I read too much into your OP.

so i decided to hold out until all the episodes were complete. i guess i've become spoiled with binge watching culture because of this lockdown and/or netflix has really ruined my life by putting all the episodes up at the same time. and yeah i spent several weeks avoiding spoilers like Neo from the matrix.

BUT i have to say i throughly enjoyed Wandavision, yeah the first 2 episodes were a little weird, i even said to my friends that this was bonkers and i was told keep watching. i had a feeling that Wanda had some sort of breakdown because i knew vision was killed in infinity war. but i also wondered was someone controlling her, cause the adverts were making me suspicious because one of them had hydra in the advertisement.

btw i loved Anges, but then again i love a good villian especially one who is a witch.

also, i know there is a debate among the mcu universe about who is stronger between captain Marvel and the scarlet witch. there is no question after this, its scarlet witch.

Watching the Making Of which is worth a watch and the songwriters referred to he Malcom In The Middle epsidoe as "the oughts" and it occurred to me that the show maybe deliberately skipped the 90s seeing as the children skipped ten years.

Apologies if that has been mentioned before.

God everyone is so negative. The Irish are so negative. It was a fantastic show. It's all fictional and based on comics. Come off it guys. Jeez.

Insect Overlord wrote: »

What's nationality got to do with anything? All the posters here who love the show are Irish too.

I would say posters here are more than positive on the show. Yes some people disliked it or felt it fell flat, but I think most people enjoyed it.

People can be negative and positive, its not an Irish thing to be negative.

Foxtrol wrote: »

This sums up a certain group of fans during WandaVision, hopefully they're tired out at this stage and will be more subdued come Friday...

https://twitter.com/ToureDeTrap/status/1369657773089198089?s=20

Still at this :rolleyes:


Yep. Not much interest from X-Men fans despite supposed legit leaks of mutant characters tonight/this series. Those people just gunna read spoilers instead. I already told you that they have killed the hope of X-Men fans so they are "tired out". It was an interesting tactic :pac:

I get the feeling if some die-hard MCU fans went to a Marvel-themed restaurant and were served a turd on a plate, they would manage to find a way to defend it. Maybe because it 'subverted expectations'.

Anyway here's the Critical Drinker with his take on this show:




Quite extraordinary that they actually managed to convince much of their audience that a protagonist that manipulated and traumatised an entire town for their own personal problems merited sympathy.

'They'll never know what you sacrificed for them' - one of the most amazingly inappropriate lines of dialogue I've heard in a long time.

pjohnson wrote: »

You think X-Men fans were given "instant gratification" by Fox? Have you ever watched a Fox X-Men movie?

But your recent posts have cleared up a lot as to just why you loved the Quicksilver troll so much anyway. I guess the payoff being a Bo(h)ner joke was always going to appeal to some. But calling it "worth it" is a strech. X-Men fans actually expected the usual MCU standard and that backfired.

How can you see X-Men movies as anything other than instant gratification for the fans? They never had a plan and rushed through everything - repeatedly assembling the team and covering off long, potentially complex arcs in single movies. Then in order to get to the next shiny fan service thing they then regularly switched direction completely, even if it meant it was completely inconsistent with the previous movies.

How Fox would have introduced mutants would have been exactly the route of having Quicksilver show up in WandaVision - shoehorning it in via the laziest way possible that would have provided instant gratification.

I've repeated before, during, and after WandaVision that I don't want the Fox X-men in the MCU - that is why I'm happy that Quicksilver was a red herring. Even if I wanted them in I expect I would have seen the lighter side of what Marvel did here, like I did with the Mandarin - a character that I really liked and wanted to see in the MCU.

Foxtrol wrote: »

You seem to live in a very black or white world - the world isn't all good or bad.

People can feel two emotions at once for a character - they can feel sympathy while also acknowledging that they did a horrible thing. It is basically the art of good storytelling - characters that are always good or always bad a just boring.

I agree that specific line is clunky but it is still true - those people she hurt won't know what she actually gave up to release them and even if they know they have a right to not care (just like you and others watching can choose not to care). That however doesn't mean she didn't give something up.

I'd argue that overall Marvel dealt with the whole thing pretty well. They acknowledged throughout and at times in a very visceral way the trauma Wanda was putting the townspeople through, unlike say that WW84 scene. They provided background how she got to a place that this occurred but didn't excuse it.

I wouldn't be surprised if the backlash to what she did to the town is a driver of later shows/movies (just like backlash to damage the Avengers caused drove other movies). I think you're completely ignoring precedent if you believe Wanda's slate hasn't been wiped clean due to a single comment from a new character.

'The world isn't all good or bad' is quite a defence for a character using her own grief to take over the minds of an entire town, including separating children from their parents, traumatising them to a degree many will never get over.

This isn't Wolverine-esque shades of grey here. This was a different level entirely, akin to something a villain would do. Her 'sacrifice' was giving up a fantasy of her own warped making, and she didn't even have the class to apologize or look to make amends for what she did, as she hovered away like a selfish coward.

Awful writing for an awful character.

Mr.Nice Guy wrote: »

I get the feeling if some die-hard MCU fans went to a Marvel-themed restaurant and were served a turd on a plate, they would manage to find a way to defend it. Maybe because it 'subverted expectations'.

And some people seem to define themselves by what they don't like and being different to the general consensus. Maybe just enjoy what you enjoy?

Mr.Nice Guy wrote: »

Quite extraordinary that they actually managed to convince much of their audience that a protagonist that manipulated and traumatised an entire town for their own personal problems merited sympathy.

Because she didn't know what she was doing and when the reality of what she was doing was presented to her, she stopped doing it.

Mr.Nice Guy wrote: »

'They'll never know what you sacrificed for them' - one of the most amazingly inappropriate lines of dialogue I've heard in a long time.

When she was faced with the reality that what she was doing was hurting the townspeople, Wanda stopped the delusion knowing that would kill her children and Vision. Do you have a partner or children? Would you choose random people over them?

Mark Hamill wrote: »

When she was faced with the reality that what she was doing was hurting the townspeople, Wanda stopped the delusion knowing that would kill her children and Vision. Do you have a partner or children? Would you choose random people over them?

They weren't her children. Androids can't have children. To suggest this was like someone sacrificing a family is a bit like saying a kid that gives up his/her imaginary friend is the same as a kid that had a best friend die. They aren't remotely comparable.

Mark Hamill wrote:

Nobody "uses their own grief" to do anything, that's not how emotions like that work. Grief uses you, makes you do something you wouldn't normally do. In the real world, if you do something illegal out of extreme grief, then you will usually be punished far less because of "crime of passion"-type laws.

Everybody grieves at some point. Not everybody reacts in the selfish, deranged psycho fashion like Wanda did.

Here's Pitch Meeting's take on it (the part from 6:50 on really nails the absurdity of 'they have no idea what you sacrificed for them'):

Mr.Nice Guy wrote: »

They weren't her children. Androids can't have children. To suggest this was like someone sacrificing a family is a bit like saying a kid that gives up his/her imaginary friend is the same as a kid that had a best friend die. They aren't remotely comparable.

They were her children. She gave birth to them. And Vision is a synthoid, not an android, he is a synthetic human so there is no reason to assume he couldn't have children.

Mr.Nice Guy wrote: »

Everybody grieves at some point. Not everybody reacts in the selfish, deranged psycho fashion like Wanda did.

It might not be the most scientific of models, but the middle stage of the 5 stages of grief is bargaining. Most people actually do have very selfish reactions to grief. They want what they lost back, or they want revenge for loosing it.
And someone who barely has a lid on her reality altering powers, having an explosion of emotion leading to a powerful delusion that she herself is happy to believe because it contradicts her grief, that's not surprising at all.

You are going out of your way, ignoring things from the show and how basic human emotions work, in order to pretend there is some huge ethical problem here, just so you can bash the MCU.

Insect Overlord wrote: »

Consider her backstory again for a moment. War. Losing her parents. Isolation. Genetic experimentation. Manipulation by Ultron. The destruction of her home city. The death of her brother. Finding hope with a new love only to see him die twice fighting in an inter-galactic battle. The consequences of the Blip. Manipulation by Agatha. She's a witch. How exactly do you expect her to just behave like an average young woman?!

I expect her to behave like a heroine since that's what she's written to be. She's not the only hero to go through immense trauma. Bruce Wayne loses his own parents in front of him too, sees those that fight alongside him suffer torture, lose their lives, but doesn't decide to take his pain out on Gotham - quite the contrary. And not to mention we've seen her fight with the Avengers before this, so she knows what it's like to fight on the right side. It's really not worth going through mental gymnastics to defend this.

You're also overlooking the fact that the 'they'll never know' line was uttered by Monica, who is supposedly the sane, sensible one. The one who is basically representing the viewer's perspective. It's a bit like Hitchcock at the end of Psycho trying to get the audience to sympathise with Norman, as opposed to the victims of his madness.

And you pointing out she's a witch brings up something that hadn't occurred to me - since she had the power to trap Agatha in a mind prison, shouldn't it be considered likely that she also has the power to make the town she mentally tortured forget their trauma? So not only did she not have the class to apologize, she couldn't even bother her backside to undo the damage she did!

Mark Hamill wrote:

They were her children. She gave birth to them. And Vision is a synthoid, not an android, he is a synthetic human so there is no reason to assume he couldn't have children.

Now you're just being pedantic. From Wikipedia:

In the late 1960s, editor Stan Lee and writer Roy Thomas decided to add a new team member to the superhero-team series The Avengers. Thomas wanted to bring back the Golden Age alien Vision (Aarkus) but Lee was set on introducing an android member. Thomas ultimately compromised by using a new, android Vision.

And here's Paul Bettany on the only scene he contributed:

“I realized [the scene] was missing a trick, which was the [reference], ‘Even the androids can cry,’ which is this famous frame from a VISION [comics run] where he realizes that he's crying,” elaborated Bettany. “I thought, if his journey has always been a journey towards humanity, the realization that he is crying is ‘I'm a real boy.’ Jac loved the idea of it. I realized that if [Wanda] looked [at him] and [they both realized] that there is joy in the ending of him. He has completed his journey, as it were.

Call him what you want - android, synthezoid, the tin man - he can't have children over the space of a 24 hour period or whatever it was.

I'm reminded of The Simpson's gag relating to illogical things in shows like this: 'whenever you notice something like that, a wizard did it'. It seems the Marvel die-hard defence from now on is going to be: 'whenever you notice something like that, a witch did it.'

Mark Hamill wrote:

It might not be the most scientific of models, but the middle stage of the 5 stages of grief is bargaining. Most people actually do have very selfish reactions to grief. They want what they lost back, or they want revenge for loosing it.

And someone who barely has a lid on her reality altering powers, having an explosion of emotion leading to a powerful delusion that she herself is happy to believe because it contradicts her grief, that's not surprising at all.

You are going out of your way, ignoring things from the show and how basic human emotions work, in order to pretend there is some huge ethical problem here, just so you can bash the MCU.

I like how you're happy to use scientific models to make a defence for Wanda's mind control, but apparently not when it relates to Vision reproducing!

That she suffered grief is not in dispute. What is being challenged is the idea that because of this grief the audience should forgive her extraordinary cruelty against an entire town who had nothing to do with it. That motivation is fine for a supervillain, but not a hero. You're going out of your way to defend this purely because it has Marvel's prints all over it.

It was mentioned earlier in the thread that Marvel are dealing with consequences for characters such as with Bucky's counselling. I'd like to see that tried with Wanda, attending a group therapy discussion for people who tragically lost their children. And after they get done talking about how they lost loved ones to a range of accidents, illnesses, etc. then Wanda can get up and say: 'I know how you all feel. I lost my imaginary boys - who I knew for a whopping fortnight - that I gave birth to with my inhuman husband. We're all the same.' I suspect that wouldn't go down too well because it's insulting.

silverharp wrote: »

"illegal" :pac:

Yes, illegal. Are you going to contribute to the discussion?