Some thoughts on WANDA*VISION

[thatcrazycajun]

Well, we finally got to binge-watch WandaVision. We enjoyed the heck out of it, BUT...
Some thoughts:

• How in the sainted name of Stan "The Man" Lee have I missed knowing about the sexy, sassy awesomeness that is Kathryn Hahn all this time? She's been appearing in a few dozen films and TV series over the past couple of decades, but somehow I managed to not see any of them. Don't get me wrong; Liz Olsen is definitely all that and a bag of chips (and so is Wanda), but as Agnes/Agatha, Kathryn ought to stand trial for grand larceny for all the scenes she gleefully steals. She's so much fun to watch, I can even forgive the producers for depicting Agatha Harkness as so much younger-looking than her usual depiction in the original comics...but then, why would a 300+-year-old witch with the power to change her own appearance want to look like a wrinkled, white-haired, ancient crone? I can't wait to see what Ms. Hahn turns up in next...and hope Agatha does end up returning to the MCU at some point.


• Wanda Maximoff would seem to have created a rather massive public-relations problem for both herself and the Avengers with her behavior in Westview. Aside from the violation of the Sokovia Accords (mentioned in episode #4, "We Interrupt This Program")—which, admittedly, Wanda never signed, or hadn't as of the end of Avengers: Endgame—you can't convince me that at least one or two of the thousand or so people she imprisoned in her TV-sitcom fantasy world wouldn't go on the Internet immediately after escaping and tell the world about what happened, and possibly seek to negotiate a book and/or TV-movie deal. Lawsuits by the dozen; journalistic exposés, in print and online, with headlines like "Is The World's Most Powerful Witch Mentally Unstable?"; trials in absentia in a country or three that signed the Accords; hatred for Wanda wherever she dares show her face in public again; calls for her to be put in prison, hung and/or burned at the stake; government agents looking to haul her in—all of these would be the logically expected results of word getting out about who caused the Westview Anomaly. Hell, I wouldn't put it past some Islamic nation's ayatollahs to put out a fatwa on her.
  
  All the SWORD employees and military personnel would obviously be ordered to keep their knowledge of the facts highly classified, but unless Wanda or someone else is prepared to wipe memories from all those civvies' minds, the Scarlet Witch had better not set foot on US soil for a good long while if she wants to avoid arrest and prosecution...or perhaps stoning. And don't forget, even before this, she was already still a wanted fugitive for continuing to operate as a superhero without signing the Accords—and for attacking the Avengers who did sign at the Berlin airport, with all the destruction that caused.


• At the end of the last post-credits scene, Wanda is shown in seclusion somewhere mountainous, studying the Darkhold when she hears the voices of her twin sons crying for help—you know, the sons who supposedly ceased to exist with the end of the Anomaly? How is Marvel Studios planning to explain this exactly? And how will the Vision we all know and love (as opposed to the rather nasty, all-white one reanimated by SWORD) manage to pop up again? Will it be in the upcoming second Doctor Strange movie (which Olsen has said in interviews that WV was "totally teeing me up for"), or in a second season of WV? Only time will tell...



• And while we're on the subject, if the two kids were only products of the Anomaly, does their ceasing to exist mean Wanda never really gave birth—and thus her body wouldn't show the usual signs of having done so? Any MD worth her/his/their medical degree can tell whether a woman has had kids in a routine physical. And how the hell does a synthezoid (or whatever the hell Vision is) impregnate a human female anyhow? Does he actually produce sperm?



• Why is Wanda the Scarlet Witch, as opposed to, say, the Emerald Witch, the Golden Witch or the Chartreuse Witch? This seems to partake of a sexist trope, namely the "scarlet woman," AKA "harlot," "soiled dove," "woman of easy virtue" etc. (Remember The Scarlet Letter? Miss Scarlet from Clue? Scarlet Overkill from Minions? Scarlett O'Hara... You get the idea.) Yeah, yeah, I know, she was created in the 1960s, but still...shouldn't we be doing better than this in 2021, Marvel?



• And finally, why is Marvel still sticking characters with Slavic surnames with the obsolete, somewhat racist Cold-War-era "off" suffix—as in "Romanoff," "Maximoff," etc.? I'm no student of languages or nomenclature, but even I know that Russian family names ending in the "off" sound are spelled with a V (which is why Pavel Chekov isn't Pavel "Chekoff"), and that they are also gendered, with an "a" being added on the end for women and girls (examples: Anna Karenina, Valentina Tereshkova, Susan Ivanova). Why wouldn't Wanda's last name be Maximova and Natasha's be Romanova? Perhaps the upcoming Black Widow movie (assuming they ever get around to finally releasing it) will answer this question in Natasha's case at least—especially as said film also features a character named Yelena Belova. Star Trek should have known this, too, and named Chekov's space-hippie ex-girlfriend Irina Galliulina rather than "Galliulin."