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Aphrodite posted:The darkhold is introduced in episode 7 when Agatha reveals herself. And then they spend all of episode 8 going through Wanda's past and building audience sympathy for her.
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May 10, 2023 22:34
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live with fruit posted:The Darkhold is brought up for two seconds at the end of Wandavision. If the plan was for it to corrupt her leading into MoM, they should've done a better job of setting it up. I'm pretty sure Agatha explained the books deal earlier in the show. (edit: Beaten) All that said, I do agree that WV doesn't lead into MoM very well. I think both work better alone than they do as a continued story, and that the end of WV had some very notable flaws. Nothing some head cannon can't smooth over, but there was definitely room for improvement.
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May 10, 2023 22:34
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It already has two announced show spinoffs so maybe we'll get that improvement. The Agatha show even has announced cast members from Westview proper. I doubt Vision Quest will be about it a very great deal (I've been guessing for a while now it's a way to introduce Viv Vision), but it will probably have some references to it as well.
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May 10, 2023 22:37
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It's an imperfectly executed meta-arc, because I don't think it was intentionally crafted this way, but I actually really like that MCU Wanda is, well, not a very good person, ever. She struggles to be heroic, she wants to be a hero (or, perhaps, wants to want it), but she has the Dr. Manhattan problem of being tantalizingly close to the power necessary to just force things to be how she wants them. It would be a really hard thing for anyone to resist, let alone someone with as traumatized and hosed up a childhood/origin as hers! But you look at her motivations throughout her cinematic outings, and each of them follows a pattern wherein she attempts to be heroic, subsequently suffers a loss or humiliating failure, fumes and stews on it until her grief curdles into a critical mass of resentment, spite, and self pity, and then uses the memory of that loss as an excuse to lash out and hurt people before ultimately calming down and regretting her actions enough to feel ashamed and desire redemption. She does this a lot, and each time, the cycle of loss > grief > rationalizing her lovely behavior > redemption seeking escalates in stakes and subsequent alienation. If you've ever had someone in your life who has struggled with (or if you're unlucky, reveled in) a Cluster B personality disorder, you'll recognize this behavioral arc. You'll also recognize how, without appropriate intervention and a willingness by the individual to develop coping strategies, the cycle must necessarily heighten itself with each repetition until the person finally does something that the people around them can no longer forgive or accept; they've well and truly blown up their life. I enjoyed seeing that arc play out in escalating fashion, with each failure and loss building more pressure in Wanda's brain about what she deserves, what the world owes her. Contrast this with, say Peter Parker, Gamora, Nebula, even Strange, who all learn in different ways the value of humility, de-escalation, adapting, and letting go. Pete has such love for and faith in the people he cares about that he is willing to be forever wiped from their minds if it means they'll be safe; the exact opposite of Wanda's behavior. Strange realizes that perverting reality so you only ever get exactly what you want harms everyone and makes you miserable. Nebula and Gamora decide that carrying trauma and hatred forever as an excuse to lash out is a great way to make sure you're always lonely and feared, and they instead choose to be imperfectly vulnerable and attempt to believe they deserve family and love, even if it isn't the family and love they grew up hoping for. Wanda's complicated! She's fun! Let fictional characters be kinda lovely sometimes! It's more interesting!
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May 10, 2023 23:36
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Really, this all would've worked a lot better if they hadn't included Monica's line. If Wanda just sulked/snuck off after bringing down the hex, it would've seemed like more of a heel turn than it does when the hero of the story tells her and us that she made a huge sacrifice
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May 10, 2023 23:52
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live with fruit posted:The Darkhold is brought up for two seconds at the end of Wandavision. If the plan was for it to corrupt her leading into MoM, they should've done a better job of setting it up. Look at this fool that didn't watch Agents of SHIELD.
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May 10, 2023 23:58
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I definitely think part of the problem is that people have a hard time accepting that Wanda isn’t all villain or just a misunderstood hero. She a complicated mess. And I don’t mind that Monica sympathized with her. I sympathized with her. That doesn’t alleviate her of blame. You can be both things. But we live in a very “X was always bad/X did nothing wrong” time. I think there’s a bit of a missing piece between WandaVision and MoM but I don’t think it’s incongruous. It’s just a bit of escalation from what she’s willing to rationalize in WV to what she’s able to rationalize in MoM.
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May 11, 2023 00:24
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She murders a lot of people in MoM, some pretty viciously. It's a lot of escalation from accidentally imprisoning people.
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May 11, 2023 00:40
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It stops being accidental once you become aware iit's happening and you keep doing it, guys
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May 11, 2023 00:49
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Again. You can sympathize with someone without excusing them.
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May 11, 2023 00:52
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Arist posted:It stops being accidental once you become aware iit's happening and you keep doing it, guys Still a big jump to blowing Black Bolt's brains out cause he's making it difficult to murder a child.
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May 11, 2023 00:57
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Yeah Wanda goes from “I didn’t do this on purpose but oh gently caress I’ll lose my kids if I stop so maybe I won’t, well ok I will” to “I will murder everyone who stands in the way of me getting my children.” They’re obviously on the same path but it’s a big escalation. I can accept that that escalation happens from a long time of being isolated and grief stricken and not dealing with any of her poo poo and getting your mind hosed by the concept of the children your magic made up actually existing in alternate realities and an evil book messing with your head. But it’s still a bit sudden from 1 chapter to the other. STAC Goat fucked around with this message at 01:07 on May 11, 2023 |
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May 11, 2023 01:04
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Maybe. We still don't know what happened to that beekeeper SWORD agent.
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May 11, 2023 01:07
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Another thing to think about here is that I believe she's probably rationalizing that the people in other dimensions are less real, because there's infinite dimensions, and none of the other ones are hers. Again, the Dr. Manhattan problem, where she begins to position herself and her actions on a different moral plane because she, perhaps not incorrectly, understands that she is a creature which is a tier or two above the ones who created the moral standards that are being applied to her. We timebound humans attempt to pursue moral paths because we recognize that effect follows cause, and you don't get do overs, so it is righteous to make efforts to avoid harming others and worsening their lives. To do otherwise will lead to a cycle of reprisals that worsens life for all. But... what if you were a different creature? One who could pluck causes and effects out of an infinite menu? One who could seek infinite do overs? Is harm really harm when you can erase or undo it? Does "harming" a person in another universe really have moral bearing on yours? After all, aren't they essentially just a theoretical possibility space from your perspective? There's an INFINITE number of them! How can an infinite amount of something have discrete scarcity value! The moral equivocations become very attractive when the rules of reality are different for you AND you're already prone to letting yourself off the hook AND your soul is being poisoned by avarice and selfishness because you're addicted to reading Satan's diary!
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May 11, 2023 01:28
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She tries to steal another her’s kids, so she definitely doesn’t value the other multiverses.
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May 11, 2023 01:29
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Aphrodite posted:She tries to steal another her’s kids, so she definitely doesn’t value the other multiverses. Forget that, she literally steals another her and puts her in constant mortal danger.
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May 11, 2023 01:32
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I am a little annoyed that she didn't just go find a universe where she was dead but Vision and the boys were alive, but I guess that wouldn't have been a very exciting movie
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May 11, 2023 01:36
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It’s gotta be an existential crisis just to learn that there’s another you out there let alone an infinite number of them. Toss in the mind gently caress of her kids and what it says if the “fake” kids her magic conjured are the same as the “real” kids other hers have. It’s a poo poo load of impossible existential questions with no clear answers under the best of circumstances. And Wanda clearly isn’t there. I think I’m gonna do a Phase 4 rewatch next month or so. Most of those films I’ve only seen once. I’m curious to see if Strange and Wong ever have a moment when they realize they hosed up not trying to help Wanda through her poo poo. I can’t remember if that happened or if it’s just what I’m falsely remembering.
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May 11, 2023 02:09
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She’s already full evil by the time they first speak to her.
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May 11, 2023 02:16
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Opopanax posted:I am a little annoyed that she didn't just go find a universe where she was dead but Vision and the boys were alive, but I guess that wouldn't have been a very exciting movie Without America she could only do the body-jack spell to travel between worlds. Corpse mom is a hard sell.
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May 11, 2023 02:18
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Mama Wanda and new Gamora should get a series where it's just them reacting to how ridiculous everything in universe-616 is.
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May 11, 2023 04:29
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Nearly everything that needs to be said has been said, but there’s also another issue of storytelling here where Agatha, the only other person we saw with the Darkhold, acted the same way whether she had the Darkhold or not, so narratively we’re not led to expect the Darkhold to dramatically corrupt someone all that much, much less to the degree it eventually did. We see Wanda reading it at the end and think “oh no, she’s using something dark” and not “well, next time we see her she’ll be mind-controlled.” Ultimately though, the disconnect seems to come from folks waving off a non-diegetic problem (weak characterization) with a diegetic answer (magic book did it offscreen). You can come up with any number of explanations for a character to do anything, particularly in speculative fiction. I can say, well, Thor learned that he didn’t need a hammer to be great in one film but he needs to get a hammer again anyway in the next story because Thanos is just tooooo powerful to beat without a hammer, and it’s an in-universe explanation for why we’re walking back the character work that we just finished, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re walking back character work you just finished. In a world where mind-control exists, people are gonna get mind controlled, sure. But does that approach fix the non-diegetic problem in question, or was it the thing that created it in the first place? Does it square with the character work we just saw? Does it fit with the story arc it follows? Or do the two projects work in opposition to one another? ‘Cuz again, that’s not some rare strange problem. Age of Ultron did it with Stark. Infinity War did it with Thor, despite otherwise being a very impressive movie. Saying “pls, have you seen other MCU films before” is an indictment of the problem here, not a justification.
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May 11, 2023 06:38
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STAC Goat posted:It’s gotta be an existential crisis just to learn that there’s another you out there let alone an infinite number of them. Toss in the mind gently caress of her kids and what it says if the “fake” kids her magic conjured are the same as the “real” kids other hers have. It’s a poo poo load of impossible existential questions with no clear answers under the best of circumstances. And Wanda clearly isn’t there. Not so much an existential crisis, more like pretty relieving. If you realise and accept there are literally infinite realities where any choice you've made could have/have not happened and contains the people you may/may not have harmed, then it's really just a question of which reality do you decide to live in? Any collateral damage caused will not occur in the universes where you didn't make the terrible choices, everything happens and doesn't happen somewhere anyway so gently caress it, let's just live in the one that has the people you care about the most, etc.
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May 11, 2023 10:39
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BrianWilly posted:Nearly everything that needs to be said has been said, but there’s also another issue of storytelling here where Agatha, the only other person we saw with the Darkhold, acted the same way whether she had the Darkhold or not, so narratively we’re not led to expect the Darkhold to dramatically corrupt someone all that much, much less to the degree it eventually did. We see Wanda reading it at the end and think “oh no, she’s using something dark” and not “well, next time we see her she’ll be mind-controlled.” Agatha is literally depicted as going completely power-hungry and insane in her thirst for knowledge she gained from reading the book, to the point that it led to her killing her own mom (which is generally a good shorthand for evil).
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May 11, 2023 14:19
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We don’t see Agatha with the Darkhold in the past; the story gives no indication that she had it back then, much less that she turned bad because of it.
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May 11, 2023 14:38
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BrianWilly posted:We don’t see Agatha with the Darkhold in the past; the story gives no indication that she had it back then, much less that she turned bad because of it. Her mom specifically says, "You stole knowledge above your age and station. You practice the darkest of magic." Agatha says that this new power hasn't corrupted her and the she has "bent it to my will" instead of being changed by it like the others. Her mom says that it has corrupted her beyond redemption (Agatha: "I can still be good." Mom: "No, you can't. Not anymore.") and that she has to die. Agatha denies having access to "the darkest magic," but then she starts doing an evil smirk and uses the dark magic to overpower all the other witches and drain them of their powers. They don't literally show her with the book, but it is not very subtly implied at all that it was the Darkhold that corrupted her.
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May 11, 2023 15:00
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I just watched the scene. There is absolutely no dialogue in it that suggests that this darkest power, whether it’s the Darkhold or not, “changed” Agatha or anyone else in any way. They don’t mention corruption whatsoever, much less have Agatha’s mother accuse her of being corrupted, much less have Agatha deny being corrupted, and there is no mention of anyone else being corrupted. The vibe is very much that Agatha is a bad person because she chose to study dark magic, not that she turned into a bad person because of dark magic. I say this in the nicest way I can that it seems like you’ve imagined dialogue that doesn’t actually exist in the episode, which happens. I imagine they intended for the Darkhold to corrupt people and, indeed, that’s how AoS and Runaways depicted it, but going by WandaVision alone there’s no sign that it corrupted Agatha. And again, it’s not mentioned that she had it back then at all. In fact, if we do consider AoS and Runaways — which I don’t necessarily — then Agatha definitely didn’t have it until WV, because other people had it.
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May 11, 2023 15:24
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I just saw Kathryn Hahn at a Starbucks and I asked her if Agatha used the Darkhold and she told me quote, "Yeah sure. Please get away from me."
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May 11, 2023 15:31
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AoS and Runaways are definitely not canon in the MCU. It would be a very weird choice to have Agatha become incredibly powerful and proficient with "the darkest magic and ancient knowledge" from something that she stole, that did not come from the Darkhold and is just never explained in the show. I don't think you need dialogue explaining you have become evil when you do an evil smirk, supervillain laugh, glow with dark energy, kill your own mom, and then fly away. I think the implication is kind of clear. She even argues with her mom that she "bent it to my will" and that she can still be good despite having this power and her mom says she can't. That's basically every item on the "movie character is becoming evil" checklist without just explicitly saying she is becoming crazy and evil.
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May 11, 2023 15:39
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drat it sounds like the Wandavision writers really did a poo poo job tying into the movie they were hired to make a prequel for.
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May 11, 2023 15:47
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Hey, I wrote a thing! It's a look at the Marvel crossover movies that could have been, not counting the MCU. Includes TV Hulk vs. TV Spider-Man, Fox's version of Civil War, and the loving bonkers Dazzler movie.
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May 11, 2023 16:53
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Opopanax posted:Even if we forget about how Wanda held an entire town hostage and puppeted them around for a while, The Darkhold corrupts whoever reads it and makes them evil, that's very clearly laid out. Even the sorcerer supreme can't stand up to it as we see from both the evil Strange and then prime Strange at the end. Yea, I got that but clearly people needed more than that. Maybe when She and Wong are at Wundagore she could have said "I took the Darkhold from Agatha, and studied it. As I read it, I was able to hear my boys calling out for me from somewhere. As i gained more powerful from its pages, their voices became clearer and clearer. I knew what i needed to do" and Wong goes "thats the Darkhold corrupting you, finding what you wanted the most and making you think that it is the only way to get it" or something to that effect. That would also explain why she was hyperfixated on the world where That Wanda was just a good mom who had clearly retired from superheroing to steal her kids, because Cthon knew that her taking those kids would cement Wanda's dark side path. Sending her to a world where say, Wanda died fighting Thanos orphaning Billy and Tommy would not have suited his plan of being as evil as possible. I really liked MoM but thats despite its obvious flaws.
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May 11, 2023 19:04
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twistedmentat posted:Yea, I got that but clearly people needed more than that. Maybe when She and Wong are at Wundagore she could have said "I took the Darkhold from Agatha, and studied it. As I read it, I was able to hear my boys calling out for me from somewhere. As i gained more powerful from its pages, their voices became clearer and clearer. I knew what i needed to do" and Wong goes "thats the Darkhold corrupting you, finding what you wanted the most and making you think that it is the only way to get it" or something to that effect. That would also explain why she was hyperfixated on the world where That Wanda was just a good mom who had clearly retired from superheroing to steal her kids, because Cthon knew that her taking those kids would cement Wanda's dark side path. Sending her to a world where say, Wanda died fighting Thanos orphaning Billy and Tommy would not have suited his plan of being as evil as possible. Also maybe they could look directly to camera while they explain it and pull down whiteboards for the slides that explain it even further.
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May 11, 2023 21:33
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I liked MOM because it was a sam Raimi flick that ignored wandavision which I didn’t care for. What is grief but murdering everyone around you with no hesitation 😈😈😈
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May 11, 2023 22:27
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Gavok posted:Hey, I wrote a thing! Thank god F4-2 was so bad...
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May 11, 2023 22:39
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theironjef posted:Also maybe they could look directly to camera while they explain it and pull down whiteboards for the slides that explain it even further. Some people in the audience would still be confused.
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May 11, 2023 22:54
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Dawgstar posted:What did Gunn have to say about the Russos' treatment of the Guardians? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOoo0xAR7kk&t=1432s
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May 12, 2023 02:40
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Other than the two guys in somebody's garage, did Gunn say anything about it?
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May 12, 2023 04:45
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Joanna Robinson on this week's House of R podcast mentioned a quote Gunn gave to some outlet saying in his opinion Peter wouldn't have hosed up in Infinity War.
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May 12, 2023 04:58
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Eh, I've never really had a problem with Peter's mistake in IW. For one, he's kind of a dipshit, but also, his story in IW is all about his suffering. Gamora asks him to sacrifice her, he honors her wishes when the chips are down, but as a double twist of the knife, not only does it not even work, he loses her anyway. And this is a character who's already lost so much. I don't really blame him for going apeshit.
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May 12, 2023 05:08
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