I’m rereading Eldest and what the fudge the elves are annoying. Given later books, I don’t think that Paolini meant for them to be necessarily preaching all of his views at you (or maybe he saw criticism and dialed it back), but in this text they’re never called out for being so full of themselves. AND they’re the most powerful beings in the setting. Unlike Obsidian Trilogy in which Kellen points out in narration how condescending elves can be.
Anyhow I’m still not over Multiverse of Madness so let’s talk about that.
Spoilers, obviously.
Wanda’s Characterization in Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness
[Want to go ahead and put a disclaimer: I haven’t seen WandaVision. Maybe that’ll be obvious. Just wanted to put that out there.]
Look, Wanda Maximoff’s character arc is a dumpster fire and a half. Just in general. It’s not the worst arc in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it IS a mess. In Age of Ultron she loses her twin brother, whom she lived with her entire life, and it’s mostly ignored in the following movies. Civil War has a lot of ship tease with Vision, and then we get to Infinity War and it’s apparently an enduring True Love. And then Multiverse of Madness happens, and, ugh.
Okay, so Wanda is the main villain of Multiverse of Madness. At the end of WandaVision, I believe, she gets her hands on the Darkhold, a book of dark magic that corrupts whoever reads it, and she decides she’s going to get back her children that she had in the fake reality she built over the course of WandaVision but disappeared when it went away because they weren’t real to begin with.
And the way she decides to get her children back is by finding a way to travel the multiverse and grab her kids from another dimension. To do that, she’s going to find America Chavez, the person with the superpower to traverse the multiverse, kill her, steal her powers, and then go grab her sons from another universe to be their new mom. If anyone gets in her way, she murders them with chaos magic.
Now you might be saying something like, “Hey, isn’t that Kingpin’s motivation from the vastly superior animated masterpiece Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse?" Why yes, yes it is. Or maybe you’re scratching your head and asking, “Wait, a powerful magic user gets corrupted by a dark magic tome to try to use forbidden magic to bring back loved ones, and it’s not to bring back the supposed love of her life or the brother she’s known for over half her life, but the children she never actually had to begin with, and her plan to do that isn’t to bring them back from the dead but to go into another dimension and steal someone else’s (admittedly, an alternate version of herself) children? That’s dumb as s***.” And… yeah, you’re right.
She’s torn down by grief and driven insane by the Darkhold, okay, sure. But you’re really telling me that it made her go straight to the most convoluted and obviously evil for something she doesn’t even really want? It’s shaped like something she wants (her sons), but it’s not (because they’re alternate universe her sons, so they already have a mother). This isn’t even like, she has a specific version of her sons in mind, a pair of her children that lost their mother or something. She just wants any versions of a pair of Wanda Maximoff’s kids. She’s not picky. It’s not until the end where she sees their expressions that she realizes that those children wouldn’t be happy or even comfortable with someone who slaughtered dozens to kidnap them, which you think would be a duh.
They’ve taken a character started her arc as a sympathetic antagonist, became a heroic supporting Avenger, and turned her into… an insane homicidal monster? And the way Marvel did it was essentially by saying “Welp her motivation is she went crazy because the evil book! All you need to know.” And when you handwave an antagonistic character’s personality with “This person’s insane!” and think that’s enough, welp! That’s just lazy writing! None of Wanda’s plan or actions make sense with what we’ve seen of the character
[Also I know that absolutely no one cares, but: this isn’t how the Darkhold works! Yes, it drives people malevolently insane, but Multiverse of Madness explains that it was copied from the inscriptions around the tomb of some mega evil wizard on an evil mountain or something. But that’s not what it is! It shows different people different things based on what’s needed! It’s not a specific text! Agents of SHIELD was great and you guys should watch that instead (except for the last two seasons).]
Weirdly, they try to turn this into a ‘morally ambiguous’ situation by having Wanda constantly calling Stephen Strange a hypocrite throughout the film, as he uses forbidden magic too. This is bizarre, because somehow, using forbidden magic in times of desperate need when there’s no other choice is the same as rampaging through the multiverse and psychically shredding people who try to get you to take a chill pill to find and kidnap the dopplegangers of children you never actually had in the first place.
What’s infuriating is that not only is this movie getting rave reviews, this characterization is being praised. I’ve seen more than one article or video titled “Multiverse of Madness has the Best Marvel Movie Villain” and that’s stupid! She’s better than Loki? Than Thanos? Than Ghost? Than Ego? Look, I wasn’t a fan of Thor: Ragnarok at all, and I think a lot of people saw Hela as more complex than she was, but she was still loads of fun to watch–Cate Blanchett was clearly having a ball playing her. Have these people ever seen a complex and interesting film villain before?
This isn’t as if it’s a good motivation that’s been corrupted by the malevolent influence of the book. This is a nonsensical motivation. The argument that she’s a fantastic villain seems to be based on the idea that her character arc has been built over several years and a number of films, rather than just one. But that’s only if her arc made any sense! And the director of Multiverse of Madness has admitted that he hasn’t watched WandaVision so that’s not really a good argument either. This doesn’t seem as if this was a direction they decided on the character several installments ago; instead it reeks of “Someone in the executive board room decided that it’d be cool if Dr. Strange fought Scarlet Witch,” and they bent a lot of established characteristics to make it happen.
This isn’t even in the same dimension as good character writing, guys. It’s pretty bad writing.
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