I always get so freaking mad about this scene. Who the heck told Steve that his was was the right way.
In this scene he gets mad bc Wanda is under house arrest. Tony is protecting her.
When Tony is in charge, she’s in a nice and comfortable house, with everything she needs in arms reach.
When Steve is in charge she’s in the frigging raft.
Everything would have been great if Steve had opened his mind and thought “maybe my way of seeing things isn’t the only right way”
Obviously Civil War wasn’t his fault only. Tony gets part of the blame.
But while Tony deserves a slap upside the head, Steve deserves a slap upside the head and two slaps across the face.
You tagged #wanda maximoff and #steve rogers so I’m hoping it’s okay to respond?
So Steve specifically addresses and rejects the idea Tony is motivated by a desire to protect Wanda:
Tony: “It’s a hundred acres with a lap pool and a screening room, there’s worse ways to protect people.”
Steve: “Protection? Is that how you see this? This is protection? It’s internment.”
This is what Steve means when he says “the right way”. Holding someone indefinitely without charge nor intent to give trial is internment. Steve, who personally remembers the US’ history with internment, is rightfully angry over this.
Her freedom is contingent on signing the Accords, but that is not what Ross says is going to happen when he talks with them earlier. He says if they don’t sign, they retire. Not only is Wanda is not being given this choice, but the Accords come with an agreement to act as the UN’s task force, going where and when they want. Wanda’s freedom is being held on contingency with agreeing to being the UN’s weapon.
And Tony knows this–his reaction to Steve’s accusation is not denial, it’s passive agreement because he looks aside with (IMO) guilt, and then switches arguments something closer to the heart of the matter:
Tony: “She’s not a US citizen, and they don’t grant visas to weapons of mass destruction!”
Here Wanda has been reduced to a thing, a weapon of terrible power not deserving of rights.
But if Wanda is too dangerous to be granted a visa, then she’s too dangerous to be used as a weapon at all. Signing a document doesn’t make her less dangerous.
Still, if Tony is dehumanizing her, Steve infantilizes her:
Steve: “She’s a kid!”
She does have terrible powers. She is dangerous, and she is not a citizen. This, by the way, is why I’d be Team Iron Man in real life if there weren’t such things centuries-long perfect government takeover conspiracies (i.e., run on comic book logic). But as it is, if nothing else, Wanda is a person, and her personhood should not be contingent on anything.
I do understand disappointment if the show is Scarlet Witch & Vision and not just Scarlet Witch, but this isn’t about that (although I’d point out that Disney never officially announced a Scarlet Witch-specific show so it’s not like anything was taken away). This is for those who feel that, even if the show does star Wanda as the main character, it somehow is not about her if there’s a romance in it.
I might understand if only female superheroes had romances. But that’s not even close to being accurate.
Here let me just point out that every single MCU franchise starring a single character has romance as a major element at least starting out (save perhaps Ant-Man). This includes the TV series.
But for some reason, I’ve only seen people truly complain about the idea of a romance being important there is a female lead: Black Widow, Captain Marvel, Jessica Jones, and here Scarlet Witch. Despite the fact all the male characters have romances as major parts of their story.
So, why is a woman immediately less important than the man she romances in her own story?
Is he not the oft-maligned “love interest” role? Does he not exist as a way to develop our main character? Is he not only there to be with a woman? No one questions that Tony is the main character of the Iron Man franchise. No one thinks the Thor movies were made so he could romance Jane Foster.
This attitude that women are solely defined by the men in their lives arises in part because we have this attitude that only men are capable of defining. I reject this. If a Scarlet Witch series has Vision as a main role, it’s still her story.
Maybe someone can help me out with this, where in MCU canon is it established that Wanda is/was a teenager? I always assumed she was like, early twenties at the start of AOU. I get that she’s had a traumatic childhood but she neither looks nor acts like a teenager, however I’m prepared to be corrected on this?
I do think it’s plausible she was 18 in AoU. I would argue she’s at least coded as being no older than early 20s. However, she can’t be younger than 17, since she was 10 when her parents died and Tony didn’t stop making weapons until 2008. She is likely meant to be a bit older though.
The people who think she’s like still 17 even in IW are either kids themselves who think that that’s older than it is, or people not getting that her being referred to as a kid has more to do with her relative inexperience than actual age.
I figured Wanda was 18ish in CW because Clint made the High School comment to her. And Steve refers to her as “just a kid.” ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It’s a glib line accusing her of being mopey, like a teenager. Clint isn’t literally threatening to force her to go to high school. The CW/IW writers have said she isn’t a teenager in CW.
Steve refers to definitely fully adult men as “son”–it’s just a part of the whole paternal Captain America thing that has been in his character since the very first issue he was created. More than that, IMO the intention behind that line was to show that Steve was also being biased about Wanda, as Tony was when he called Wanda a “weapon of mass destruction”. Tony was dehumanizing her, Steve was infantilizing her. This is confirmed by the writers in the same interview I linked above.
Maybe someone can help me out with this, where in MCU canon is it established that Wanda is/was a teenager? I always assumed she was like, early twenties at the start of AOU. I get that she’s had a traumatic childhood but she neither looks nor acts like a teenager, however I’m prepared to be corrected on this?
I do think it’s plausible she was 18 in AoU. I would argue she’s at least coded as being no older than early 20s. However, she can’t be younger than 17, since she was 10 when her parents died and Tony didn’t stop making weapons until 2008. She is likely meant to be a bit older though.
The people who think she’s like still 17 even in IW are either kids themselves who think that that’s older than it is, or people not getting that her being referred to as a kid has more to do with her relative inexperience than actual age.
So there’s a 10AM to Glasgow which would give us more time together before you went back.
I love this line from Wanda. It’s easy to overlook, but it gives us just as much insight into what Wanda wants as Vision asking Wanda to stay told us about what he wants.
Wanda wants every minute, every second she can have with Vision. She has the whole train schedule memorized. She’s planning down to the last possible instance so they can steal every moment together there is. They just wanted time.
I read something the other day criticizing Wanda’s role in Infinity War as being “just a weepy girlfriend”. And it took a few days for that to settle in, and I gotta tell you, the latent sexism blows my mind.
Let’s talk about Mr. Wando Maximoff, male superhero.
Wando and his love interest have been seeing each other secretly. They’re on their way to send her back when she stops him. She’s trying to tell him how she feels, but she’s blushing and stammering! How cute. Wando doesn’t have that problem, he’s quite confident, and assuredly helps her get it out. But that’s not all–his love interest wants commitment! She wants them to stay together… but Wando has doubts. Wando is a hero, he’s got comrades he fights alongside, and he can’t just give up on them.
But before Wando can give her an answer, they’re attacked–his love interest is grievously injured, and Wando has to fight off the attackers and protect his girl–lifting her up, carrying her away, catching her when she falls… During this Wando assures his love interest he won’t ever leave her.
Later, when we discover what those villains really want, Wando’s love interest nobly volunteers to sacrifice herself but Wando is having none of that. He wants to save the girl and his friends agree. When the villains come for her again, Wando again has doubts about not being with his comrades, fighting alongside them until at least he enters the field and proceeds to absolutely crush the enemy.
So. Wando Maximoff is a character who is a super badass who’s got a soft spot for the girl he loves. He’s all about fighting with his friends, saving the girl, and being the #1 badass on the field.
But Wanda Maximoff is a frail and ineffectual. She’s Vision’s girlfriend, and spends most of her time too paralyzed with all her womanly feelings of love to be useful.
I’m not saying that Wanda doesn’t have a number of feminine-coded characteristics and tropes, but she’s also got quite a few masculine ones that audiences would interpret as cool and heroic if she were a man.
I don’t think I’ve ever directly posted this here, but here it is at least for reference: this is from the canon prelude comic to Age of Ultron, explaining why the twins volunteered. While I don’t blame anyone for not reading this comic or not knowing what happens in it, canonically, the twins thought they were volunteering with SHIELD.
There’s some problem with the logic of the twins’ motivation that stems from the writing one way or another, but in the comic, HYDRA is very aware the twins wouldn’t be cool working with them if they knew.
Right? It makes me think about how there were soooo many “android Jesus” and “robot Marvel Superman” references after Age of Ultron came out, and those all drop off come Civil War.
While I think in the long run I would have been happier with the Russos portrayal of Wanda and Wanda and Vision’s romance, I do think that Whedon did a great job of modernizing Silver Age Vision. Silver Age was very unique in being a sympathetic android, and a lot of his character beats might seem a bit trite and overdone now, but were then novel. The idea “even an android can cry” was necessary to show that Vision is equal in his humanity in an era where most robots were like this:
But we have lots of stories like that now (even if some people are still unable to accept non-human personhood like they just walked straight out of the Westworld remake), so the novelty is lost. By making an android who is more than human, though, I think Whedon could capture some of that freshness while staying true to the sentiment.
Something occurred to me watching Infinity War: a key difference in how the Russos see Vision vs how Whedon saw him.
The Russos see Vision as someone who was going from robot to person, someone who was gaining his humanity slowly as he developed more human emotions, but Whedon saw Vision as someone who was born more than human. Bear with me:
I’ve talked about how Age of Ultron goes way out of its way to establish Vision is a Real Person, android or no. But there’s also an important element Whedon emphasized as being somewhat more than human. There’s the subtle-as-a-marching-band messianic imagery of Vision both in the movie and in the marketing:
But I think it’s easiest to identify in his last conversation with Ultron–the final words he speaks in the movie and therefore what our final understanding of the characters are meant to rest upon. Ultron is locked into the confused and broken perspective of a doomed, worthless human race because he’s incapable of changing. He “misses” the beauty of them because he is too machine to perceive it.
Vision, despite being born predisposed towards that same confused hate and violence quickly forms new opinions and comes to an independent conclusion.
They are positioned as opposites, foils, counterparts–where Ultron is the most regressive take on the ultimate answer to the worthiness of humanity, Vision is therefore positioned as having the most enlightened one.
There’s nothing less than human about Vision in Age of Ultron. What feels inhuman about him is not the machine part of him, it’s the ethereal.
But then we get to Civil War.
I’ll start off by saying, the Russos are clearly more comfortable with “grounded” characters. They have frequently talked about their desire to ground characters in interviews, and I think that extended in being too uncomfortable with Whedon’s take of an angelic, Lamb of God android. Or they perhaps were simply predisposed to think of a synthetic character as needing to rise up to humanity and saw Vision’s character in AoU through that lens.
But this means when we are introduced to Vision, we go from a character who immediately grasped the social importance of clothes[1] to needing multiple discussions on the concept of privacy.
One of the most important distinctions is I think subtle, but inarguable if taken together: Vision is actually very empathetic and able to read emotionally complex situations with relative ease.
From being the only character to have compassion for Ultron and express an emotional, nuanced take on the mission to stop him (vs Civil War Vision seeing things in terms of equations and action vs reaction):
From understanding the unspoken implication of threat from Bruce that Bruce himself wasn’t fully aware he was making (to missing quite a bit of Wanda’s underlying feelings):
From the display of very genuine trust and empathy to a heretofore antagonist Wanda (to being a bit too obtuse in his attempts to comfort Wanda, if in a very well-meaning way):
Nothing suggests in Age of Ultron that Vision has trouble with social cues or feelings. Yet that his main arc in Civil War.
I think some of this might be responsible for the disconnect people feel with Vision’s humanity now–even though it wasn’t intentional, I think much of the audience instinctively were clued in to the fact Vision seems to have regressed, and some of the interest piqued in AoU was likely deflated when he was functionally almost a different character.
It might be that since I’m talking about how I feel the Russos started off Vision as somewhere not fully human sounds like a criticism of them or their version of Vision–but it’s not. I think I might have personally preferred the take of Vision coming down to humanity’s level via his love of a very much human woman[2] rather than the much more done take of “What is this thing you call love?”, but that’s simply a matter of personal preference from me. One is not inherently superior to the other.
It’s a different approach to the character, but I think the end goal was the same for the Russos and for Whedon: Vision as Wanda’s equal.
[1]Not to mention, clothing oneself is a highly important symbolic gesture of civilizing and humanizing oneself, from The Bible, to the Epic of Gilgamesh, to Lord of the Flies.
[2]Despite the Russos many interviews stating Wanda’s arc is meant to show how she is moving away from humanity, they either really missed the mark, are saving that for A4, or simply changed their minds, because Wanda is never more human than in Infinity War.
Hey people with the “Okoye was willing to kill her husband but Wanda won’t kill Vision” hot take
Okoye is also supporting the plan to try and save Vision. She also doesn’t think an innocent woman has to kill an innocent man when there’s an alternate solution. She recognizes the difference between that situation and the one with a traitor to her country who was trying to help kill the royal family and take over the world.
Those Celestial Bodies 