Opinion: What Druig and Wanda did are not the same thing.
**Contains spoilers for Eternals**
(These are semi-rambling thoughts based on just two viewings of the movie.)
I’ve seen some people drawing comparisons between Wanda holding a town captive with her magic, and Druig doing what some claim is essentially the same thing with a village (or whatever that was) in the Amazon.
Here’s why I disagree:
First, I do acknowledge that what Wanda did, she did on accident and while grieving. I’m not trying to make an argument that Wanda is evil. And what Druig did, he did purposefully and with the full understanding of what was happening. I acknowledge those differences right off the bat, but as for what actually occurred...
The people under Wanda’s spell were suffering.
We see the evidence of this when the people are released from the spell and they’re begging Wanda to let them go. They say things like:
“When you let us sleep we have your nightmares.”
“We feel your pain.” “Your grief is poisoning us.”
“If you won’t let us go, just let us die.”
No one was happy under Wanda’s control. Whereas the Eternals movie doesn’t really explain just how much Druig keeps the villagers under his control, but we see that when he releases them (after he makes them help fight the Deviants), the first thing one of the people says to him when free of his influence is, “Druig, what’s going on?” And then everyone is standing there until he shouts at them to run and head to the river. The movie doesn’t give us any evidence that people are suffering under whatever is happening there.
Wanda took away the peoples’ humanity.
Literally. Wanda made the people her puppets. She changed their personalities, the way they spoke, even their freakin’ time period! And she did it over and over. The people had no autonomy with her, no control over anything at all, In fact, we see that when the town expands past what she can comfortably control at one time, the people at the edges just stop moving because they aren’t receiving commands from her.
The villagers in the Eternals certainly don’t seem like they’ve lost their autonomy. In fact, when Druig is talking to Kingo he tells him that he thought about completely taking humanity over and erasing all their flaws. When Kingo asks why he didn’t, Druig tells him it’s because their flaws make them human. There’s no indication that Druig ever took away anyone’s choice to do anything but self-destruct.
Wanda disrupted the natural order.
When Wanda took over the town she separated people from their loved ones, kept the kids asleep when she didn’t need them for her plot, changed their dress and time period, and basically made them do whatever suited her needs regardless of what they would’ve chosen.
In the real world, there are people groups who live isolated in the Amazon, so it could be argued that Druig didn’t actually force the people do do anything they weren’t already doing or wanting to do. In fact, when he leaves the Eternals, he’s in Tenochtitlan. That’s Mexico City (North America). The Amazon where he ends up is in South America. So there’s a lot that must’ve happened that we didn’t see in the film. Druig could very well have controlled the people he took from Tenochtitlan, got them settled somewhere, and then travelled to South America, seen people living in isolation and decided to keep them safe. Or he could’ve found people somewhere in South America who were suffering from violent wars and taken them into the Amazon to start fresh. It’s doubtful that he marched down those steps in Tenochtitlan and mind controlled those people all the way to another continent to stash them in the jungle.
And as far as the arguments that he held the people hostage and never let them leave the jungle... the film gives no evidence of that. Druig’s stance is clear: he doesn’t want to see humanity suffer, especially from violence. With that philosophy, there’s really no reason why he wouldn’t be happy to let people come and go as they please, simply protecting the villagers from outside invasions from hostile forces. It could very well be that the majority of the people stayed generation after generation because they were happy there.
Side note: Druig says something about how he’s been with the people for 20 generations. In the past, a generation was usually considered to be 20 years. So that means he’s been with people in the Amazon 400 years, leaving 100 years unaccounted for.
TL;DR
Wanda held people hostage against their will, but there’s no proof that Druig did.
