Wanda Maximoff and the Multiverse of Madness

Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany as Vision in Marvel Studios' WANDAVISION exclusively on Disney+. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. ©Marvel Studios 2021. All Rights Reserved

Care and feeding of a character arc: don’t make promises you can’t keep.

Let me start here: I am not going to use this blog for a bunch of reviews, and I am not launching it just to complain about stuff. But I spent the day after Thanksgiving binging WandaVision and Dr. Strange: the Multiverse of Madness, and I want to talk about them.

I am going to try to avoid specific plot spoilers, but I’m assuming that, if you’re reading this, you know a fair bit about the themes and setup of both Marvel properties. (You’ve been warned!) WandaVision is a single-season show that follows Wanda Maximoff after the Avengers movies, as she grapples with the grief and trauma that threaten to consume her. Multiverse of Madness is a Dr. Strange movie in which he tours alternate realities to protect a young superhero without collapsing realities and causing trillions of deaths.

It is jarring to watch them back to back, because WandaVision is about Wanda struggling to keep her grief from turning her into a villain. In Multiverse of Madness, she’s a villain.

Writers: please don’t do this to your character arcs.

I found WandVision to be compelling, clever, funny, heartbreaking. It says something important about love and grief. Wanda is a victim, trapped in her trauma. She is also lashing out at everyone around her, whether they want to help her, hurt her, or merely exist on their own terms. She builds her own reality, and ultimately has to tear it down in order to survive and grow.

But Multiverse of Madness requires a Wanda that has not grown. It requires that she has failed to learn the lesson we just spent four hours watching her learn. In Multiverse, she is once again ready to destroy the world just to be with her children. The epiphanies she has in this movie are basically a retread of the ones she just had, only less convincing.

Now, I get that this is a callout to The House of M. I respect that, but I also don’t care. More on that in a sec.

Multiverse of Madness is a Dr. Strange story. He’s a fun character, and I like him a lot. He is also way less interesting than Wanda. His character arc a watered down version of Wanda’s: he suffers much less tragedy (his ex marries somebody else), is exposed to less temptation, and triumphs over his inner demons.

Which is a long shot, because it turns out that our Dr. Strange is pretty much the best of all the Dr. Stranges in the universe. This is a low bar: some of them have destroyed entire realities. Meanwhile, our Wanda is the worst of all Wandas: she is tearing up the multiverse while her dopplegangers are cooking dinner for the kids.

Neither Dr. Strange nor Wanda deserve their arcs - his good, hers bad - in Multiverse of Madness.

So why not? Part of this is a “big male hero” problem. Dr. Strange - like Tony Stark, and to a lesser extent Steve Rogers - is a glib, charismatic lead who wins with arrogance and charm. His character moment is basically “don’t do the shitty thing your alternate selves did,” and even there he only succeeds halfway. I think it’s a little embarrassing that Marvel elevated him in his big-budget motion picture at the expense of their female magical lead. It’s a little on-the-nose to vilify the witch.

Do you think it makes a difference that WandaVision’s head writer is a woman, Jac Schaeffer, while Multiverse’s head writer is Michael Waldron?

Also, much of this is a shared universe problem. Marvel wants a multi-verse storyline - I assume - so they can bring in their other characters to the MCU. Wanda gets to be the bad guy so Marvel can earn a little street cred with the fans who were reading comics in 2005. Wanda as a complex and interesting character gets sacrificed in the interests of the Big Picture.

This is also my problem with Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.

I hope there’s a big crossover audience between Marvel and Gilmore Girls. A Year in the Life picks up a decade after the show and gives us a mini-season, a “where are they now.” And it drove me nuts! Gilmore Girls makes a promise: that our time spent growing to love Rory and Lorelai is justified. I want to them to learn the lessons of their experiences, and be wiser and kinder at the end of it all. But ten years later, Rory is circling the same flawed relationship, Lorelai and Luke STILL aren’t talking about their issues… thank god neither of the Gilmores had reality-controlling powers, or Stars Hollow would be a smoking crater.

Infinite universes are no reason to stop caring about characters in this one.

Speaking of multiverses.

Multiverses have a storytelling problem: their sheer existence diminishes the stories we’ve committed ourselves to. How important is the defeat of Thanos in our universe (number 616, it turns out) if he is victorious in the world next door? How much are we supposed to care about the death of a beloved character if their alternate-universe version shows up in the next movie?

So while Multiverse of Madness marginalizes Wanda, it does the same to a number of other alternate-universe characters we encounter. In fact, it does a thing that I hate: introduce alternate universe heroes only to do horrible things to them.

I hate that trope. I hated it in Star Trek when we witnessed the second-hand tragedies of alternate Enterprises sacrificing themselves. I hate it in Rick and Morty, where at least the writers acknowledge the unrelenting bleakness of the concept. It’s a cheap shot, killing off a character without actually killing them off. I don’t love it here.

I DO love the introduction of Monica Rambeau and America Chavez.

I am going to admit that I am only vaguely aware of both characters. Still, their appearance brought me joy. They were incredibly well acted (by Teyonah Parris and Xochitl Gomez, respectively), and hopefully a hint of great stories to come. (E.g., The Marvels.)

It is not lost on me that Marvel decided to launch two new BIPOC women characters (and actors) as subplots in other Marvel properties. If it’s good enough for Wolverine (in Incredible Hulk), I guess I can’t complain. But weren’t ALL of the Marvel women heroes launched as ancillary characters in movies with male leads? Wanda, Black Widow, Suri and the Dora Milaje… only Captain Marvel launched herself.

I am not a super-fan.

I had to Google when Wolverine appeared and I never read House of M. I remain amazed at how good a job Marvel has done at appealing to both new fans and diehard readers, and to me, a long-time casual reader. By and large, the creators seem to love their characters. So I am disappointed when the love and care devoted to a character by one set of writers is mishandled by a second. Wanda deserves better.

Maybe she’ll get it in the next universe.