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Wednesday, February 10, 2021 

It looks like WandaVision and the Dr. Strange sequel are building on House of M

We Got This Covered says it looks like live action Scarlet Witch will be going the direction set for the original illustrated Scarlet Witch by Brian Bendis in the atrocious 2004 Avengers: Disassembled, and soon after in House of M:
Long before WandaVision premiered on Disney Plus, there had been no shortage of speculation that Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch would end up turning to the dark side and becoming a formidable threat to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s roster of heroes, who would look severely underpowered by comparison after Kevin Feige confirmed Wanda to be even more powerful than Captain Marvel, and capable of taking down Thanos single-handedly if the Mad Titan hadn’t called for reinforcements.
What I want to know is if there's been no shortage of objection to this direction, if this is where they're going. And it makes little difference whether she'll turn back to the good side later on. Making a character crazy for the sake of it has long become one of the most insulting cliches of comicdom, and another unfortunate side effect of the Phoenix Saga.
The first four episodes of Disney Plus’ acclaimed comic book series dropped increasingly large hints that Wanda was the real villain of the story, and WandaVision appeared to double down on that theory when she left the comforts of WestView for the first time, with the sole intention of threatening to annihilate the entirety of S.W.O.R.D. if they got in her way.
My my. Is the audience watching this overrated scrap pile okay with this? They're not Wanda Maximoff fans, let alone Marvel fans, if they haven't a whisper of complaint over how a character who wasn't a saint, but was redeemable, is being shoved into such a nasty role as Bendis put her in back in the mid-2000s. And here, it's going to serve as a springboard for where the new Dr. Strange movie sequel is going:
That doesn’t bode well for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where Olsen takes second billing and the title makes it pretty clear that things are going to get out of control, while we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones who told us Rachel McAdams would be returning for the movie long before it was confirmed – that Wanda is going to go completely crazy in the Sorcerer Supreme’s sequel.
So this is meant to coincide with an installment in Marvel's movie machine, is that it? Makes me glad I haven't seen the bulk of these films in theaters. It gets worse:
According to our intel, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will see Wanda go on the warpath throughout the MCU’s various realities, wreaking a trail of havoc and destruction that’s even going to result in the deaths of some well-known characters. Of course, with the multiverse in play, any apparent demises could be easily explained away or retconned eventually, but a murderous rampage would certainly be one way to establish the franchise’s most powerful figure as a serious threat.
Something tells me a woman of Black or Asian background would never be put in this kind of role that Wanda's being put in (note though, that as a character of Romani descent, she'd likely have northern Indian ancestry, which makes her a lady of mixed background). In any case, this is sick. I didn't get into comicdom to see these kind of storylines become the most emulated, and if it matters, I wouldn't approve of turning a male character like Quicksilver into something this repugnant either. It's no different from other situations in comics proper where, instead of creating new characters to fill these specific roles, they go the pathetically cheap route by shoving an established character into the shoddy position of murdering people. And to top it all off, Wanda is suddenly, out of nowhere, the most powerful character in the MCU. I'm sorry, this is a very poor excuse for filmmaking, relying foremost on a story Bendis engineered, and by going this route, they're merely giving him the validity he doubtless hopes for.

If you haven't watched WandaVision, I'd strongly advise not to. Just change the channel. And please, don't go to see the upcoming Dr. Strange movie. To think they'd rely on something derivative of such nasty stereotypes dating back as far as the middle ages is truly despicable.

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For what it's worth the creator told Total Film before the show began that "It was extremely important to me that we not do the lazy thing of having a superpowered lady who can't handle her powers and goes crazy," and she and others involved with the production have described it as a show about learning to heal from grief and trauma.

Now, they might turn out to be liars or they might turn out to think that making her a villain isn't the same thing as making her crazy, but it could also just be that rumor sites are assuming she'll go crazy and evil because that's what happened in the comics (and because the show is deliberately encouraging us to think so because of the mystery). Hopefully they're telling the truth.

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