How Wanda Maximoff Became the Ultimate Karen
Photo by Ashlee Brown on Unsplash
The show Wandavision (2021) marked the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) Phase 4 — a master plan Marvel Studios and Disney have for over 24 movies and TV shows over the next 4 to 5 years. It also signifies the first live-action MCU show on the Diseny+ platform. Now that the first (and maybe final season) has ended, we are left deciding what exactly this show means, both for the MCU and as a standalone piece of art.
At the center of the show is the titular Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen). She is a magical being of immense power who drives much of the story's events. In her struggle to grieve her former partner, Vision (Paul Bettany), who was killed during the events of Avengers: Infinity War (2018), she transforms the entire town of Westview, New Jersey, into an idyllic sitcom community — replete with a theme song and comedic gags. Although fun to watch at first, the lengths Wanda goes to process her grief leads to some dark and regretfully problematic places. There is no line she will not cross to avoid acknowledging her pain, including treating the townspeople of Westview as playthings.
As the credits for WandaVision’s finale roll, we are left with a show that seems to excuse the many, many atrocities Wanda commits under the pretext of processing loss. Inflicting hurt, it seems to imply, is okay as long as the person doing it is hurting too.
An MCU property is always difficult to dissect because the franchise is so much larger than any one piece of media — something meant both literally and metaphorically. These works, by design, tie not only into a cinematic universe over a decade in the making (as well as almost a century of comic book lore) but also a much larger debate about the Disney company’s place in the media landscape. Many critics are not happy with how this company has shaped a bevy of topics, ranging from IP law to jingoist portrayals of the military. This subtext exists for any conversation about the MCU, whether we want it to or not.
Wanda further complicates this narrative because her portrayal has historically played into a series of sexist tropes as well. She was originally a villain in the comics — a child of Magneto, serving in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants — before becoming a member of the superhero team, the Avengers. The idea of her being a threat, however, lingered for decades. The early 2000s had several story arcs where Wanda goes mad and cannot properly handle her powers. The most notable examples of this are the Avengers Disassembled and the House of M storylines, where Wanda suddenly remembers her former children and warps all of reality to get them back. This power is depicted as being beyond her control, and ultimately she culls much of the mutant population on a whim.
This trope of the unstable, overpowered women is a common one in comic books, and really, media in general. We see it replicated with the character Jean Grey from the X-Men. She becomes possessed by the Phoenix Force in the Dark Phoenix Saga (1980) and loses control, accidentally exterminating billions of people. The sweet schoolgirl Carrie (Sissy Spacek) in the 1976 film of the same name goes on a homicidal killing spree with the emergence of her telekinetic powers shortly after her first menstruation. Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) in the HBO show Game of Thrones (2011–2019) annihilates thousands of people in the city of King’s Landing after losing several close attachments. When you look at our media’s recent and not-so-recent past, there are many examples of women going crazy and burning everything to the ground.
This idea in our collective mythology that women cannot control themselves ties into the archaic concept of hysteria, which itself is named after the Greek word for womb, hystera. Many ancient Greeks believed that the uterus roamed throughout the body, putting pressure on other organs. Women were believed to be weaker creatures as a result. Hysteria was blamed for everything from kleptomania to run-of-the-mill sickness. It basically became a catchall for everything men found wrong with women, and we are not far removed from that legacy. Hysteria remained a diagnosable mental illness in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980.
It’s obvious in retrospect that these views were guided by intense misogyny. Many of the classic “cures” for hysteria include such gems as placing good smells by the vagina, stimulating an orgasm, and marriage. Women were often treated as a thing to be cured, rather than people to be understood. When you blame all the evils of the world on a woman opening a box or jar, or biting into a fruit, it’s not hard to see how that mentality comes to infect not just our theories of medicine, but our stories as well.
In the comic book version of the marvel universe, Wanda fits the mold of Eve or Pandora. She restructured the universe by wiping away mutants from the world, and that impression has not left her character. We see a shell of this archetype in the WandaVision series as well. As antagonist Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) tells Wanda in the final episode, The Series Finale: “It’s your destiny to destroy the world,” hinting that the MCU may not be finished with using Wanda as a harbinger of destruction in the future.
While not abandoning all the tropes we mentioned, the creative team behind WandaVision appears conscious of the fact that making Wanda hysterical in the current era is not a good look. Showrunner Jac Schaeffer told the publication Total Film point-blank: “It was extremely important to me that we not do the lazy thing of having a superpower lady who can’t handle her powers and goes crazy.” The show tries not to portray Wanda as unhinged or hysterical but rather as someone suffering from trauma. This decision doesn't make her loss of control intrinsic to her wielding power (at least not entirely that) but related to unaddressed psychological damage. She regresses into the sitcom world of Westview not because she is a woman but because she has suffered abuse.
Yet the loose plot beats of Avengers Dissambled and The House of M still remain largely intact. The loss of a loved one — in this case, Vision, instead of her children — causes her to spiral out of control and reshape reality so she can have him back. Wanda may not be treated as a mad dog that must be put down for the good of the world, but she still loses control of her powers because of her emotions. She recklessly (and, one can argue, selfishly) projects her repressed feelings onto the material world. Though admittedly on a much smaller scale than in the comics, she hurts countless people in the process of trying to come to terms with this grief — and we do not see true accountability occur by the time the final episode airs.
WandaVision may have been trying to soften our perception of Wanda by pivoting to a story of her grappling with her trauma, but a new problem arises in the process. We are left with the portrayal of an extremely privileged woman, someone so privileged she can literally bend reality to her will, who hurts others to process her own feelings.
In other words, a Karen.
Wanda is very clearly buckling under the weight of years of trauma by the time we get to WandaVision. When we look at her participation in the MCU, she has very valid reasons for that pain: she was a refugee, a test subject and victim of Hydra’s weapon program, and a person who lost both her brother and her lover Vision. Deciding to center a story on that ordeal is not inherently bad, and we frankly need more narratives that talk about people processing grief and pain.
This account is complicated, however, by the fact that Wanda is not an ordinary person. She is so powerful she basically borders on godhood, and as we have already established, she uses that power to transform the town of Westview into an idyllic sitcom. She casts a magical Hex over the entire town that allows her to control every aspect of it, including the townspeople inside.
There are countless different ways people react to trauma. Sometimes people withdraw inwards. They isolate themselves from close attachments and engage in escapism through various means, including but not limited to narcotics, video games, television. One study indicates a correlation between binge-watching and depression and anxiety. Wanda is shown using sitcoms in such a way from a very early age, watching The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966) as an escape from the traumas of war-torn Sokovia. Her magical manipulation of Westview can be seen as her engaging in the ultimate form of media-driven escapism.
Another way people can react to trauma is to inflict abuse on others. There is a link between those who bully and those who are bullied themselves. Some research indicates that a minority of people who are abused will abuse others, and of course, the ability to perpetuate that harm depends on how much privilege you have over the person you are abusing. We see abuse is rampant in romantic relationships, workplaces, and really any relationship with an imbalanced power dynamic. A minority of abuse victims inflict harm on their own children, contributing to an intergenerational cycle of abuse.
Your ability to inflict harm directly correlates with the power you hold over someone else and Wanda holds power over everyone in the town of Westview. She controls what the townsfolk can do, where they can go, and even what they can think. She has actively suppressed much of their identities to fit her escapist fantasy, and they want to be freed. As one town member named Dottie or really Sarah (Emma Caulfield Ford) pleads to Wanda upon being temporarily released from her hold:
“I have a daughter. She’s eight. Maybe she could be friends with your boys. If you like that storyline. Or the school bully, even. Really anything, if you could just let her out of her room. If I could just hold her, please.”
There is a term for someone that controls every aspect of another individual's life — and that’s a slave master.
Wanda has enslaved this entire town, and it's horrifying to watch. Yet, we don’t see her truly grapple with the repercussions of that decision. She understands that the townspeople hate her, but she doesn’t stay there to be held accountable for her actions. She flies off, retreating to a secluded mountain cabin to learn more magic.
In fact, the situation is made more tenuous when one of the series regulars, Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), tells Wanda that the horrors she has unleashed on the town are a natural outgrowth of her powers. “They’ll never know what you sacrificed for them…Given the chance and given your power, I’d bring my mom back. I know I would,” Monica reassures Wanda.
Monica, for context, is a Black woman, having to reassure a former white slaveholder that everything is okay. It’s an interaction that’s very painful to witness because it’s left ambiguous whether this woman of color is meant to be validating others' enslavement or merely bringing back someone from the dead. This problematically grounds the conversations in Wanda’s feelings. We are meant to think that her feelings of guilt are enough.
Wanda then vows to make things better. Not by trying to right the immense psychological trauma, she has caused to this community, but to gather more power. “I don’t understand this power, but I will,” she tells Monica. Taken out of context, this sentence is the perfect metaphor for privilege — someone unconsciously harming the community around them, not understanding what they are doing wrong, and then trying to right that harm by gaining even more power.
If she were truly interested in doing right by this community, she’d maybe start questioning if she should be free to wield so much more power in the first place.
WandaVision was an attempt by Disney to take Avengers Disassembled and the House of M's narrative beats and update them with modern sensibilities. They wanted to tell the same story, minus the sexist baggage and the vehicle they choose to accomplish that objective was an earnest exploration of trauma.
This idea was not inherently wrong, but the portrayal became a lot dicier when that person also enslaved an entire town to process said trauma. It created a story of both a victim and an abuser — one who ultimately does not do the work to repair the damage they have caused and yet still flies away as a hero.
This unresolved anxiety was not inevitable. We could have had a story where Wanda does all of the events in this series and then ultimately tries to make amends for that harm. It would have been beneficial to see the story of a privileged person who has undergone abuse, learning that that harm is not a justification for harming others. We could have seen Wanda pay a form of reparations to the Westview community she has harmed, providing a model to the viewer for how accountability should work in the real world.
Instead, Wanda blasts into the sky — the MCU setting up the pieces for some new fight — the town of Westview receding over the horizon.
This tension exposes a fault line that cut across the MCU before this show even aired. Someone like Wanda or Iron Man might seem desirable when they are firing off spells at a space tyrant or traveling through the multiverse to undo a galactic genocide, but decidedly not as much when they unconsciously trap an entire town or accidentally build a murderous AI. They have so much power that when they make mistakes, even unintentional ones, the consequences are catastrophic.
It’s not enough that our heroes process their feelings. They have to give up some of their power, too.