Don’t mind me, I’m just having a MOOD about Wanda Maximoff...
(Possibly) unpopular opinion: Wanda Maximoff is fundamentally a selfish person. Wanda is a bad person that only believes she’s a good person.
I’m going to work my way backwards on all the truly ridiculously shit she’s done that the writers have handwaved.
WandaVision - I think most people can agree she was not the hero of this story. She mind controlled dozens, if not hundreds of people for over a week and kept them enslaved for her own happiness. Initially, it was accidental. Fine, but by episode 4, she has realized (at least on some level) that this is fake. But by episode 6-7 she more or less knows exactly what she’s done and continues on anyway, even if she doesn’t know the extent of the pain she’s putting these people in.
The second half of that last sentence is actually irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if these people are not in pain. You don’t get to intentionally steal all of someone’s documents, keep them locked in your home for months and pretend you haven’t committed a crime just because you’re not also beating them on the regular.
Wanda didn’t stop in the end because she is a good person. She would have stopped much, much earlier if she were. She stopped because the way that the people were treating her completely removed her ability to pretend she wasn’t a bad person doing bad things all this time.
Let’s briefly go back to Captain America Civil War.
I’m not blaming her for the beginning of the movie (side note: that was Steve’s fault. Wanda clearly has only been vaguely trained on her powers and shouldn’t have been on the field at all). We’re actually starting from the middle of the movie. Where she “breaks” out of the compound. That she’s treating like a prison, when she had, at most, been grounded. Even calling it a grounding is debatable, considering she hadn’t even known about it for the several days between the bombing and when Clint came by. She was basically being advised to keep a low profile while things calmed down (probably due to VISA issues).
BUT the moment she decides she wants to leave and is told, “Maybe, don’t,” she sends VISION, who she supposedly loves through god knows how many floors of a building that was meant to handle super soldiers training in it. Did she know he would be okay after that? That he would survive it? She didn’t check. And then, during the airport battle, she chides Clint for holding back in his fight with Natasha. Like, she’d forgotten that some of these people were her friends (or at least friends of her friends). But for Wanda, once you’re no longer on her side, your life means pretty little.
Finally we move right on back to Age of Ultron. Let’s leave out any theories on whether it was even reasonable for her to blame Tony for the deaths of her parents (was it Stane? Were those even real SI bombs?), grief isn’t rational. So fair enough. She blames Tony for her parent’s death and wants revenge. And decides to join Hydra for the chance to get powers for this revenge. Wanda was 26 in AOU in 2015, and even assuming that she got her powers the minute Hydra/SHIELD got the scepter in 2012, she still would have been 23. An adult, not a kid. Combine that with her powers literally allowing her to read minds, there is no way that she didn’t know she was working with Hydra. After which she went on to work for Ultron.
Now, here’s the rub. There is no possible explanation for working with actual neo-nazi’s in the 21st century and a mad AI intent on destruction (because he was totally planning on retiring to be a nurse after destroying the world’s heroes, right?) and still believing that you’re on the right side. Never mind the fact that the rest of the Avengers literally had nothing to her beef with Tony. Never mind that she let Tony go in that state of panic, hoping he’d do something destructive (and joining up with said destructive AI) or setting off the goddamn HULK.
All of that was totally done with the belief that no one would be harmed. Of course.
Wanda and her brother didn’t defect from Ultron because he wanted to kill a lot of people. They left because they and their country would die too. If it had just been America he was planning to destroy, they likely would have left him alone. She left Ultron because it benefited her to do so. She joined the Avengers because it benefitted her to do so. After all, what else was she going to do? Go on the run, living in poverty for the rest of her life? Remain in Sokovia and possibly be brought up on charges for her part in helping Ultron, Hydra and the disaster in Johannesburg? No.
Over and over again, innocent people get hurt or killed because of her. But these movies/shows treat her as if she is someone to sympathize with. Like it’s reasonable to intentionally cause the death and torture of people over and over… because she’s sad.
In all fairness, I can acknowledge that AOU soured me on her hard since they never actually showed feeling any sort of real remorse while she was doing all of that really evil shit.
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