Vision and the Price of Repeating the Past

scarletwitching:

Disclaimer: This post has spoilers for the recent Vision solo series, won’t make much sense if you haven’t read said series, and gives away the ending. If you haven’t read it, you should get on that. Now onto the 2 A.M. meta…

Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta’s Vision series is about a lot of things. It’s about the constraints of Suburbia, the pain of being Other in that environment, and the sacrifices of parents to make that life for their children. But it’s also about repeating the past, and by extension, it’s a metacommentary on being stuck in the superhero loop. There are plenty of stories about what it means to be a superhero in the archetypal sense, what it means to be a superhero in the broader culture, but Vision stays closer to home, to what it means to be a superhero in cyclical Big Two comic books.

There is a saying about superheroes, that they always return to the status quo. This means Steve Rogers can be a werewolf one month and then go back to being just Captain America the next, his fundamental nature unchanged. It also means characters tend to repeat the same kind of stories. No matter how far they go, they can’t escape their origin stories. King shines a different light on this truism of superhero comics by framing it as a form of repetition compulsion. He turns it into a coping mechanism for Vision’s unprocessed trauma. Vision returns to an old story, but something feels sinister about it this time.

Vision starts with its title character having recreated a very specific scenario: that of Vision & the Scarlet Witch volume 2. That of a wife and two kids in East Coast Suburbia. This is the site of Vision’s trauma, both as a person and a character. The story goes like this: Vision and Wanda had two kids. They lived in Suburban New Jersey. Everyone was very happy. Except for Marvel writer John Byrne who hated Vision, so he deconstructed Vision, literally and figuratively, and got rid of the kids. Then Vision’s original creator Roy Thomas showed up to do damage control, but it was Too Little Too Late. Then Vision got stuck in a loop of “idk, maybe this?” where writers weren’t sure what to do with him so they made him a detective or killed him off or had him be weirdly self-confident for no reason. He was still technically the same character – even Byrne’s all-encompassing deconstruction couldn’t fight the power of the status quo – but he was never really the same.

So why go back to the situation that created all that trauma and inadvertently caused Times He Was a Detective? Well, because people are weird, and no matter what Quicksilver thinks, Vision is a person.

It would be easy to say Vision just wants to go back to the point where he was happiest, but there is something darker underlying the decision to create a new family with a new Wanda and new twins: Vision wants to reshape the origin of his trauma into something he can control, and by controlling it, prove his power over said trauma. This is repetition compulsion. It’s an attempt to find safety and power in the very place that made him feel unsafe and powerless, but like I said the last time I talked in depth about this book, “healing doesn’t come from returning to a poisoned well and repeating the past will only hurt you more.”

And all of this does hurt Vision more. It goes horribly wrong. His old life comes barging in in the form of Simon Williams’ brother Eric and the end result is disaster. The attempts to cover up that disaster by Vision’s wife Virginia only make things worse and worse. She and Vision are both invested in maintaining a facade of normality and happiness, and the decisions they make in order to do that cause their problems to metastasize. There are a lot of messages and lessons you can take from Vision, but I think this is the best one: Trying to cover up or deny your problems only makes them grow. They become more and more unruly, requiring more and more effort to keep them hidden, until they finally explode.

Deal with your shit or it will deal with you. Mafia style.

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