Wanda: You -- you did it, you heartless monsters -- you killed him!
Guard: Up, prisoner-designate Scarlet Witch. You are to be confined in solitary now.
Wanda: Just... just a moment...
Guard: I said up, woman.
Wanda: And I said I’ll go in a minute, you murderer! Just give me -- give me a few seconds to grieve--!
Simon: Not treating my favorite girl right, are they? Want me to klonk their heads together for them?
Wanda: That -- won’t be necessary, Simon. But it’s nice to hear your voice...
Avengers vol. 3 #51; writer: Kurt Busiek; penciler: Brent Anderson; inker: Tom Palmer; colors: Tom Smith; letters: Richard Starkings & Albert Deschesne
This requires some context. Kang has taken over the world. Wanda and Simon have been taken prisoner, and the plan they come up with is perhaps the most Wanda plan imaginable.
They break off the special No Powers collars they’re wearing and try to escape. She does a spell so that, even if they put another collar on him, it will not work. The guards catch up with them. She pretends to surrender, playing up this fragile woman angle. He fights back, but is overpowered. They execute him, but actually, he faked his own death and goes off to get help.
It’s playing a trick on the audience, sure, but it’s also doing all the stuff I like. It’s Wanda being DRAMATIC and at the same time, analyzing the psychological layout of a situation. How are the guards going to react? How does sexism figure into that? Obviously, it’s very Wanda to take any opportunity to do some acting, but I’m an even bigger fan of writers showing that she understands people and knows how to use to that to her advantage. All the better when they’re combined. And then she sacrifices herself because she can do more good helping people where she is. We do not hate to see it.
I’ve talked this issue up before, and it is just... correct. We all love to complain about the ways that comic book writers misinterpret things or miss nuances or add in unnecessary bullshit that misses the point of the character, but sometimes, they kinda nail it.
Annotations for Adventure Time: Beginning of the End issue 3!
Did you enjoy my annotations for issue one and issue two of this miniseries? If so, good news! (If not, shove off!) I have annotations for the third issue, right here waiting for your lovely eyes! Obviously, as with the previous posts, this will have great big massive spoilers for the issue, so take that into consideration. Please enjoy, my pals!
Pages 2&3: Okay, there’s a lot to unpack on these pages, haha. First and foremost is a reference to something other than Adventure Time for once: Jake’s monologue on these pages is a loose reference to one of the very best issues of classic Fantastic Four, number 51, “This Man ... This Monster!” In that issue, among other events, Reed Richards travels through the Negative Zone and muses to himself about the nature of reality:
There are cameos on these pages from a bunch of the “cosmic” things of the AT universe, including the Catalyst Comet, the Lich, a copy of the Enchiridion, Glob Grob Gob Grod, the Finn Sword, and Prismo (in a rare 3-dimensional appearance). There’s also a herd of Time Lards with clocks on their bellies.
Also in this image, note the most minor and in-jokey reference in this entire series: the satellite on the middle-left with the word “FELIS” on it. In the episode “Fionna and Cake and Fionna,” someone asks Ice King where he gets the ideas for his Fionna and Cake stories, and he replies that they’re “beamed into [his] melon every night.” Later that episode, we see him sleeping as a pink laser zaps into his head, carrying images of Fionna and Cake. I chose to interpret this as a reference to one of my favorite authors, Philip K. Dick, who believed that he was receiving knowledge in the form of an information-rich pink laser beam from a satellite called VALIS. So this satellite, FELIS (get it? like cats?), is the source of the Fionna and Cake stories—in my version of the universe, anyway.
Page 4, panel 4: Chronologius Rex declares that he is the lord of Time, not meatloaf. Meatloaf has been established multiple times as Finn’s favorite food.
Page 5: And here we come to the crux of this issue: Finn’s possible futures. Issue 1 of this series was about Finn’s past, issue 2 was about his present, so naturally issue 3 is all about his futures. Obviously none of these should be taken as “canon;” I just came up with three possible paths Finn might take based on what we’ve seen him do throughout the series. I’ll explain my thinking after the third sequence.
All three of the futures are color-coded—the Candy Knight future is pink, obviously.
Page 6: I love Mari’s designs for Queen Bubblegum—the high ‘80s shoulders are great! My suggestion for Old Peppermint Butler was that he be smoother and shinier, as if he’s a candy that’s been sucked on for too long.
In panel 2, the “Dinner Kingdom” is kind of a half-reference to the Breakfast Kingdom in present Ooo.
And in panel 5, note old Finn’s Jake medallion.
Page 7, panel 4: I am not sorry for the “bunch” of banana soldiers joke.
Page 8, panel 1: Beards are indeed a factor in many of Finn’s futures: pretty much every time we’ve seen an older or artificially-aged Finn, he’s got a beard of some sort. I continue the trend in this issue.
Page 8, panel 5: This is a futuristic version of Founders’ Island, the main human settlement outside of Ooo, fixed up and fully repaired. The implication is that Finn not only returned to the human islands, he also helped fix the place up.
The color scheme for the Teacher Finn future is blue, connecting with the water and sky surrounding them.
Page 9, panel 2: I love Teacher Finn’s design so, so much, you guys. I described him as a lovable old professor, someone with his mother’s compassion and his father’s roguish charm, and Mari knocked it out of the park. Note his Jake hat.
Page 9, panel 3: “Homies help homies: always!” is the Adventure Time philosophy in a nutshell.
Page 9, panel 5: Note that Finn is still using his old, trusty sword Scarlett in this future. She’s even more nicked and battle-scarred, but I’m sure she’s still good in a fight.
Page 10, panel 2: Dodging eggs while fighting was part of Finn’s training from Rattleballs in his eponymous episode.
Page 10, panel 2: When it came to Finn’s human wife, I told Mari to make her look a little bit like a human version of Flame Princess. I figured Finn if has a type, it’s her!
Page 11: The third and final possible future is the Space Captain Finn future, which is green-themed for no particular reason. This future is based on the idea that Finn and his Candy Kingdom pals team up with the remaining humans to build a spaceship to take them away from Earth, which is about as likely as anything else in Adventure Time, haha.
Everything in this sequence is of course heavily inspired by Star Trek: the Next Generation, a show that I love and grew up watching. The Minerva A.I. is the ship’s computer, obviously, warning of “excessive sparks detected on bridge.” Jake is Finn’s right-hand-man, just like Riker was to Picard (and Finn even calls him “numero uno,” like Picard’s “number one”). Lady Rainicorn is the equivalent of counselor Troi, Fern is a bit like Data, and Jake’s skateboarding granddaughter Bronwyn is the hotshot kid pilot, like Wesley. Princess Bubblegum is the engineering chief—she always struck me as preferring the role of scientist rather than royalty, frankly—assisted by Frieda and BMO. Flame Princess, upgraded to Plasma Princess, powers the ship as a whole. And Finn himself sports a beard similar to Commander Riker’s—which is appropriate, as a future version of Finn was voiced by Riker’s actor, Jonathan Frakes!
When coming up with these futures, I thought about what the Finn we knew might be most drawn to doing, and boiled it down to three major options: fighting and defending (the Candy Knight future), teaching and training (the Teacher Finn future), or exploring and leading (Space Captain Finn). For what it’s worth, I don’t really have a preference, or any opinions on which future is most likely—one of the strengths of Adventure Time has always been finding ways to surprise its audience with something that makes total sense in retrospect. If Finn does have a “canonical” future, it’s probably something I would never have thought of, but which makes perfect sense.
Page 11, panel 4: Princess Bubblegum yet again mentions “zanoits,” which are maybe some kind of mysterious particle? It’s a funny word and deserves to be used more often.
Page 12, panel 1: I mentioned in my annotations for the previous issue that I felt bad making Susan revert to her simpler speech patterns, since by this point in the series she’s perfectly capable of using big words. I tried to make it up to her by making her the ship’s communications officer, who would use big words all the time.
Additionally, the “Tuffbone sector” is a reference to Meredith Gran’s Adventure Time miniseries, Marceline: Gone Adrift. In that series, Marceline explores space and meets other races, including the Tuffbones, dog-like alien critters.
Page 12, panel 2: Note that Shelby (the worm who lives in Jake’s viola) is wearing a bandolier similar to Worf’s. I was particularly proud of that idea, haha.
Page 12, panel 4: Jake’s exclamation of “Outrageous!” is a reference to another role by his voice actor, John DiMaggio: it’s the catchphrase of Aquaman, from the Batman: the Brave and the Bold series.
Page 16, panel 3: A “dead world” is another bit of unexplored Adventure Time lore: they’re apparently where people go when they die, but they’re not quite the afterlife as we think of it? Or it is, but there’s a lot of them, like at least fifty? Unclear.
Page 16, panel 4: I had to work in the title of the show somehow.
Page 17, panel 3: I wanted to make sure I referenced my favorite song from the show, “Everything Stays” by Rebecca Sugar, and this seemed like the perfect time to bring it up, as Jake discusses the inevitability of change.
Page 17, panel 4: When I described this panel in the script, I specifically mentioned the series Neon Genesis Evangelion, one of the weirder depictions of the end of the world you can find. I love the image of the enormous stone blocks sinking into an endless sea.
Page 18, panel 5: Chronologius’s epithet for Jake, “starchild,” references Jake’s actual origin as a half-alien creature. I checked the dates, and apparently I finished the script for this issue just a couple weeks after the episode “Jake the Starchild” aired, in which Jake’s parentage was fully revealed.
Pages 20-21: Finn’s final “confrontation” with Chronologius might feel a bit underwhelming—essentially, all he does is convince Chronologius to give them an opportunity to escape. There’s no big battle, no war of wits; it’s already been established that Chronologius is basically invulnerable, so it’s not like Finn could beat him in a fight. It’s not terribly exciting, but that’s kind of the point: over the course of this issue, Chronologius becomes more sympathetic to Finn and his plight, particularly after seeing all the good he did (and might have done) in the world. So it’s less about beating up some big bad dude, and more about convincing someone to act like a pal. In a way, Finn beats Chronologius by making him into a friend.
Would it have been better if the ending was more exciting, action-packed, crazy-style? Maybe! Looking back on it, I feel like I could have given Mari more chances to do cool art stuff—the first half of this issue has some pretty far-out sequences and nifty new things to draw, but the second half is basically three characters talking against a mostly boring background. Thematically I feel like it’s better to have Finn succeed by befriending the villain, rather than just punching his lights out, but it definitely doesn’t have the same visual impact. Overall, I’m still proud of it, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be improved.
That’s it for issue three! Join me next time for—issue four?!? Yes! This three-part miniseries is in fact a four-part miniseries, ending with Finn and Jake’s adventures through time! Look forward to it, my chums!
Charles: It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Erik. An inter-species romance doesn’t make you any less of a mutant, you know. Isabelle was a beautiful, intelligent woman and I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if there was still a little part of you that loved her somewhere.
Erik: Well, I should be surprised because those monkeys don’t even smell right, Charles, and as you know, it’s our biological instinct to replace them. Guard?
Charles: If memory serves, your biological instincts were really quite different in those days, Erik.
Ultimate X-Men #33; story: Mark Millar; pencils/breakdowns: Adam Kubert; inks/finishes: Danny Miki; colors: Dave Stewart; letters: Chris Eliopoulos
I have this thing with the Ultimate Universe where, back when it was in any way relevant, I was too annoyed by it to properly engage with it, but now that it doesn’t matter at all, I’m interested in it as a cultural artifact. The changes the Ultimate Universe makes, for good and (mostly) ill, are intriguing to think about, and its 2000s-ness is not nostalgic in a positive sense (for me, at least) but it is a helluva time capsule.
Though, I must admit, no matter how much distance I have from this whole AU, I will never be into the way Magneto is written in this universe. There’s no nuance. It’s just Mark Millar being like, “What if he called people monkeys?” It is boring, sir. You made him boring.
In the Ultimate Universe, Wanda’s mother was originally a woman named Isabelle. But as I have mentioned before, Ultimate Magneto’s backstory went through a series of strange and nonsensical retcons that, among other things, changed Isabelle into Magda and then changed Magda into a spy who was in love with Wolverine.
Much of the appeal of the Ultimate Universe, at the start, was that it was simpler and more straightforward than the main line of comics, but then, well, serialized, collaborative capeshit storytelling happened and that meant characters did not stay consistent. Often, the changes were in the form of 616ization, retconning the new and different takes in this timeline to better match the original, more established versions. Remember when Ultimate Wasp just stopped being Asian-American one day and became white? What a time.
Those who know their Claremontian lore know that Isabelle is the name of a Brazilian doctor that Magneto dated while in Rio de Janeiro. (Spoiler: She gets fridged.) I’ve always thought Ultimate Wanda was maybe meant to look like 616 Isabelle, with her long, straight black hair, though once Bryan Hitch takes over, I’d guess his main inspiration for her look was Angelina Jolie.
The Brazil connection is amusing because, if you were to erase all knowledge of superhero comics from my brain and you asked me to guess where two siblings named “Wanda” and “Pietro” were from, I’d probably guess Brazil. Or perhaps, Italy. Definitely not Serbia though.
Without the Avengers, Wanda Maximoff and her troublemaking brother, Pietro, were never reformed.
Heroes Reborn #1; writer: Jason Aaron; penciler: Ed McGuinness; inker: Mark Morales; colorist: Matthew Wilson; letterer: VC's Cory Petit
Someone asked me about this comic, which I have not read, so I went to check it out, got to this point, and said, "No."
I am going to say something that should be obvious and uncontroversial: Abused children are not supervillains.
You know this. I know this. We all know this. So, why does almost everyone accept this framing that Wanda started out as a supervillain? This is an absurd idea, based not only on what actually happens in the earliest X-Men comics but also on what we, people living in the year 2021, understand about abuse. And cults. And children.
You know that a teenage girl standing around while her abuser does crimes is not a "villain" and does not need to be "reformed." I don't know what villainy people think Wanda was getting up to in the 1960's. What evil plans was she enacting? Most people haven't read those old comics. I get it. Some of y'all think Magneto is based on Malcolm X. I know you didn't get that idea from reading X-Men #4. But what do people even think was going on in the original X-Men comics?
You know what Wanda was doing before she joined the Avengers? Living in Switzerland, hanging out. What was she being reformed from? Yodeling?
It is bizarre to me the way that people, including and especially Marvel writers, will buy into a narrative framing even when it makes no sense. But more importantly, wow, is the idea that Wanda started out as a spooky, evil supervillain used to justify everything. Right down to her being [Don Johnson in Knives Out voice] lit-rally a Nazi in those awful movies. You can have her do anything and people will rush to say, "Of course, that happened. She started out as a villain!" If you're a homeless teenager who falls under the sway of a charismatic leader who saves your life, then mentally and physically abuses you and you stand around while he does crimes, you are capable of literally any atrocity. That's just facts.
There's a lot of elements at play when we talk about what has gone wrong with Wanda and the horrible way that she's been written over the years. Writers being horny. Writers being incompetent. The sexism, the ableism, all of that. It's all true. But this is, to some extent, the original sin. Because if you create this hero/villain binary and then slot homeless teenagers who ended up in a bad situation into the "bad" category, 1) you have failed from the get-go and 2) you will be able to justify whatever bullshit you want. (And no, I'm not blaming this on Lee and Kirby. This is mostly people not reading their work but thinking they know what happens in it.)
Superhero stories have this ongoing struggle with themselves where they are torn between, on the one hand, the redemption arc and on the other, this black-and-white, tough-on-crime thinking where if you're "bad" once, you're "bad" forever. I'm not a big redemption arc person, but I don't get how people can feel this genre is at its best when it's parroting carceral mindsets brought to you by Ronald Reagan.
Robert: Wanda--! Blocking the door! Oh, no! I can’t stop!
Avengers vol. 1 #164; writer: Jim Shooter; penciler: John Byrne; inker: Pablo Marcos; letterer: Denise Wohl; colorist: Phil Rachelson
There is a bit of conventional wisdom in Marvelland that Wanda is not a person who says dad. She says father and father only. This comes from the perception of her as an overly formal non-native speaker, a Fancy European™ who would never say a commoner word like dad. Comic writers often have trouble sticking to a specific voice for Wanda. They generally have a notion that she’s a Fancy European™ non-native speaker, but they have difficulty keeping to that idea. It’s hard to keep up with these details in ongoing serialized fiction. One thing they can remember though is that she says “father.” Usually. As with anything in cape comics, exceptions exist. (Including one very famous one that We Do Not Talk About.)
This is a funny line to draw in the sand because Wanda’s first language is some dialect of Romanes and in Romanes, across a lot of dialects, the word for father... is dad. Or dat. Or dad with another syllable added onto the end. It stands to reason that it would be much more natural for her to say dad. It’s more common in US English. It’s a word she would be used to. She would say dad. It just makes sense.
It’s The Tiffany Problem. You can’t name a character in a medieval-set story Tiffany because that is seen as a modern name, but of course, the name Tiffany existed in the Middle Ages. Wanda can’t call her father “dad” because Wanda wouldn’t say “dad,” except of course, she would. The tension between verisimilitude and the truth.
So, here is a rare example of her calling The Whizzer, who is not her dad, dad, and here are more thoughts about Wanda’s inconsistent speaking style and her inconsistent class coding.
Vision: The problems are becoming abundantly clear. Avengers West has failed, conceptually and practically. The logical response is to wind up the operation and re-absorb the membership into the east coast organization. Re-evaluation will be necessary for certain individuals. Until then you will be placed on reservist status.
Wanda: Reservist? So what are we going to do... odd jobs? Are we such an embarrassment? Has your work been so much more important than ours?
Avengers West Coast #102; writers: Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning; penciler: Dave Ross; inker: Tim Dzon; letterer: Steve Dutro; colorist: Bob Sharen
From Chad Nevett’s newsletter:
I’ve been thinking a lot about the superhero as a Job. About those days where I wake up and just don’t want to go to work and what that must be like for one of these characters. Where you do it because you need the money and you have powers and you’re good at it, but you don’t really love it. What’s funny about this issue is that I don’t see that perspective in the group that’s being let go: I see it in the group that’s secure in their jobs.
And that’s what galls me the most about this comic. That’s the part that reflects the real world in the worst way. It’s not Vision and Captain America and Iron Man playing their bullshit with people’s lives. They’re right to shut down the West Coast branch. It was a failure, mostly because it had no strong management. But, it had talented, passionate people, and those are the people being told not to show up anymore, while passionless drones who just collect a cheque are sitting on their side of the table, secure that they still have jobs on Monday. Because it wouldn’t be ‘fair’ to get rid of them in favour of a bunch of ‘losers.’
There is a perennial, low-grade discourse online surrounding the question of whether or not the Avengers are a “found family.” This discussion follows a predictable path: Someone will claim that they were found family baited by a certain accurséd film franchise. If the responder likes the Avengers, they will insist that in the comics/cartoons/early-mid 2010′s fanfiction, the Avengers are a “found family”; it is only the films that promise this and do not deliver. If they’re more negative on the team as a whole, they say, no, the Avengers were never a quote-unquote found family; if that’s what you want, look to the X-Men/Young Avengers/ambiguously canon network television program.
(On the latter point, if you’re the sort who finds the whole found family thing as conceptualized in fandom to be a bit cultish, recent happenings among the X-Men are not going to change your mind.)
This argument is boring to me because 1) I am not a found family person (I have nothing against characters forming tight bonds obviously, but the way people talk about this trope is so overblown and oversimplified that it bears no resemblance to an actual human relationship) and 2) “Avenger” is a job. There may be groups of Avengers who have long histories and close ties, but overall? Come on. No one really believes that the 616 Avengers as a unit are a “found family.” Too many people with no connection to each other have been on this team. There may be 800 X-Men, but at least, they all have something in common. The Avengers don’t have that shared history or culture binding them together, only a shared profession and maybe, sometimes a mission statement. Individuals sets of characters may be argued to have that kind of relationship, but the team as a whole, as an idea, is just not a family.
Where I diverge from others is that I think it is Cool and Good that the Avengers are merely coworkers. I like when “superhero” is a job. I especially liked when, in the old days, the Avengers were reined in by bureaucracy. This modern depiction of them as god-kings who start civil wars over the possibility of oversight is dull. It’s uninteresting to me to have them be so above everyone else. I liked when they were simply workers dealing with management and office politics.
Which brings us back to this issue where Wanda quits the team rather than be demoted. Why wouldn’t she? Wanda is one of the few mythical beings who maybe, possibly has a found family within the Avengers, but is that enough reason to accept a subordinate position to some randos? Nah. She picks her pride. Black Knight and Sersi aren’t her family, and she’s not honored just to be included.
Wanda: But despite what he tried to do with me, I can’t help feeling sorry for him. Villain though he was to us -- he still was noble in his own way.
Avengers West Coast #62; writers: Roy & Dann Thomas; penciler: Paul Ryan; inker: Danny Bulanadi; colorist: Bob Sharen; letterer: Bill Oakley
I’m on record as saying Roy Thomas was not good at writing Wanda (because he wasn’t) and I have a grudge against this issue for introducing the concept of “nexus beings,” which has become the bane of my existence, but this moment, at least, feels Correct and True.
A hallmark of good (and some bad) Wanda characterizations is this idea that she expresses empathy for -- not cruelty towards -- people who abuse her. I buy that her first reaction after waking up, now knowing that Immortus ruined her life and tried to turn her into a comatose universe stabilizer for all time (did I mention I hate the nexus being thing?), is to feel sorry for him. How one feels about this trait combined with the fact that the ur-abuser, Chthon, is the literal embodiment of evil, is a “your mileage may vary” situation. To me, it seems valid to pit a character whose first response is empathy against a force that cannot be empathized with, but I can see the counterargument.
The flipside of this is that it feels like almost a given that people who have no idea what to do with this character or what her core emotional engine is supposed to be would have her throw him down a well or something.
There are exceptions. That’s the thing you learn from reading 1000+ comics written about the same character over decades by dozens of writers. There are people who can make Wanda reacting vengefully in anger work because their take is so nuanced, so balanced, so well thought out that these two impulses can exist within this one person and you understand that both of them, her empathy and her vengefulness, are flaws in their own way.
So far, those people are Steve Englehart, Dan Abnett, and Andy Lanning and no one else.
They’re all down there -- doing the job, being Avengers, planning strategy, gathering information, whatever they can -- and I’m just not part of it, am I? For all that I’d like to belong, I’ve always been connected to the Avengers by others -- by my brother, Quicksilver -- by The Vision -- by my friendships with Hawkeye, Carol, Jan --
Avengers Vol. 3 #8; writer: Kurt Busiek; penciler: George Pérez; inker: Al Vey; colors: Tom Smith; letters: Richard Starkings, Comicraft & Dave Lanphear
I’ve been thinking a lot about how Wanda has become the favorite female character of MRAs.1 It’s a depressing turn of events. You never want to see something you love become the face of anti-feminism. Rather than rant about how much this sucks, I’m going to be very on-brand and over-analyze one of the reasons I think they’ve latched onto her.
People really don’t like ambitious women. There is an impossible tightrope that women have to walk if they want gain power and influence. They’re automatically labelled abrasive and judgmental. They have to know when to be “soft” and when not to. They have to lay out detailed, specific plans because, without them, they won’t be taken seriously. Even if they do everything right, people still hate them.
And I think so much of the appeal of Wanda, for certain people, is that she has no ambitions.
Let’s be clear: There are counter-examples.2 In the 70′s, Steve Englehart wrote Wanda as a dedicated, driven person who wanted to be a witch and studied very hard to learn magic. In the 90′s, Abnett and Lanning wrote Wanda as a tough, pragmatic leader who cared deeply about what her team was doing and not just who was there.
But many people (who are wrong) find Englehart’s Wanda “unlikable,” and they much prefer what they get here: someone who is adrift and aimless and cries a lot. They see her as the antithesis of all the things they don’t like about high-achieving women. She already has power, but it’s dangerous and might backfire and she mostly uses it to be a secondary character in a group shot. Does she want to be the best superhero? Absolutely not. Does she want to be something besides a superhero? Also no. Is she dedicated to saving the world? IDK, she’s here because her friends are here.
I’m not saying every character needs to be driven, but Wanda’s not written as having no ambitions because there’s a statement being made. Most of the time, it’s not a deliberate bit of characterization. It’s an oversight. It’s been almost 60 years, and this scene is about as much as her aimlessness has ever been addressed. And it ends with a man showing up so they can make out.
So often, Wanda is written to be as nonthreatening to men as possible. She’s powerful, sure, but it’s not a power that is demanding or takes up space. She’s not going to threaten the narrative position of the male characters. They want her to exist in a sweet spot where she isn’t “useless,” but her choices don’t drive the story. Powerful, but not empowered. If a female character is really strong, she should probably cry a lot.
This is not a simple problem of one storyline having messy elements or being poorly executed. It is a bone-deep issue. Out of this enormous list of men3 who have written Wanda, very few of them have stopped to wonder what, outside of a man, does she want. And for a lot of shitty dudes, a female character who doesn’t want anything, who doesn’t demand anything, who doesn’t strive for anything, is exactly what they want.
1. When they aren’t pretending to care about Alita: Battle Angel.
2. I’m not counting anything where her goal/desire is “redemption.” It’s too dissimilar to the kind of positive aspirations that people find threatening. If you’re in need of redemption, you have already been brought low.
3. Wanda has, on occasion, been written by female writers, but they never write her long enough to make a lasting impact.
