Relationship Spotlight: Wanda Maximoff & Vision (The Avengers)

Loki just premiered today, but I’m holding off to write about it until its season ends (and by that time, Black Widow will be out too. It’s an MCU feast!) I’m still in the mood for a Marvelous Wednesday post, though, so let’s return for a bit to the MCU’s first Disney+ series. As I mentioned in my WandaVision review, I’ve liked both characters well enough in the MCU movies (Wanda moreso than Vision, but he’s no slouch either,) but WandaVision opened them both up in such wonderful ways. Over the course of nine episodes, the characters – and the actors – prove that they’re more than capable of carrying their own story together. Also vital? Their relationship with one another, which really comes into its potential in the miniseries (Wanda-Vision-related spoilers.)

Relationships in the MCU films are tricky. I feel like Marvel has done a lot of interesting things with friendships, both in terms of ride-or-die BFFs like Steve-Bucky or unexpectedly-delightful friend pairings like Thor-Bruce. They’ve also mined a lot of gold from familial relationships, whether we’re talking actual family like Gamora-Nebula or quasi-surrogate-family figures like Tony-Spidey. But when it comes to romantic relationships, it seems Marvel rarely gets it fully off the ground. I feel like, in the movies, the only one that’s ever fully worked for me is Steve/Peggy, and even though there are others that I like (Scott/Hope, T’Challa/Nakia,) they’re more about liking the characters and how they complement one another, more than how the actual romance between them is depicted. Not to mention the aggressively-shaky ones like Natasha/Bruce or Steve/Sharon. The MCU does so many things really well, including with characters and relationships, but far too often, their romances don’t quite stick the landing.

In the movies, Wanda and Vision fall in the middle of the road for me. There are scenes between them that I really like, such as Vision talking to Wanda about the Mind Stone and her powers in Civil War, and by the horrible end for them in Infinity War, I’m sufficiently wrecked. Vision begging Wanda to kill him in order to save the universe, and then poor Wanda being forced to watch as Thanos rewinds time and kills Vision again, destroying half the universe anyway? Holy tragedy, Batman! But there are other times when it feels like the films are trying too hard to show us that a thing is a thing, probably because the two have such limited screentime in the movies and they have maybe eight minutes across different films to sell us on a romance between them so we’ll be devastated at the end of Infinity War. And those trying-too-hard moments fall flat, leaving us with a pretty hit-or-miss relationship for them.

But then, along comes WandaVision. I expected the show to be weird and trippy, and I expected it to dig into Wanda’s trauma, which I was totally here for (I love me a complicated character arc.) What I didn’t expect was how much I would come to enjoy Wanda and Vision as a pair. Their early sitcom exploits are so utterly charming – broad jokes, whacky situations, and all, what sells it are the two of them as an adorable team, the newcomer oddballs in town who are constantly on the edge of being found out by their Idyllic Suburbia neighbors, who only make it through each episode by their tenacity and love for each other. It genuinely makes me so happy to watch them careen their way through a neighborhood talent show together or freak out through a whirlwind one-day pregnancy.

Of course, one of WandaVision’s most crucial traits is the fact that it’s not actually a picture-perfect fairytale sitcom, and so things don’t stay light and frothy forever. Wanda and Vision’s relationship is tested in major ways – even though I know how hurt she is and that she didn’t intentionally create Westview, it’s still heartbreaking to see Wanda try to gaslight Vision in the middle of the series, attempting to convince him that his doubts and suspicions are all in his head. When he won’t be managed and insists on going off on his own to investigate, she falls apart, scarcely able to hold things together as she worries about what she’s done to them. And, as it too often does, it ends tragically for them. Because Vision is a part of Westview, part of the false reality that Wanda created, he can’t stay when she takes down the barriers, and they’re forced to say goodbye to one another yet again.

In amongst those fights and hardships, though, the love between them remains. If Wanda was truly doing this all for herself, she wouldn’t take it so hard when Vision leaves, and if he didn’t still have empathy for how much she’d been through, he wouldn’t be so desperate for them to get back to one another. In the end, they stand together as their house disintegrates around them, holding to the hope that they’ll find each other again if they possibly can.

And in addition to giving us this beautiful depiction of Wanda and Vision as they exist in Westview, the show also takes the opportunity to fill in a bit of their love story that we missed in the movies. Vision comforting Wanda after Pietro’s death is a foundational moment for them that obviously happened between films, and post-Endgame/pre-WandaVision, it’s so sweetly painful to learn that Vision had bought a lot for them to settle down on in New Jersey, to see Wanda stand in the space he meant for them to share and watch her grief pour out of her until it warps reality around her. Just an excellent job in crafting this romance.

Favorite Characters: Vision (The Avengers)

Vision has had limited screentime in the franchise so far, but I’m already a fan.  Even though, on a lot of levels – hyper-intelligent, remote, crazy-uber-powerful AI – he seems like he should be all one largely-unrelatable thing, he’s really not, and I’m excited to get more of him in Infinity Wars (Vision-related spoilers for Age of Ultron and Civil War.)

Appearing for the first time just before the big final blowout in Age of Ultron, Vision is instantly terrific, at once both a total machine and so human.  He has a body that, while made out of metal, was formed by a machine that produces organic material for skin grafts, organ replacement, and the like.  He was supposed to be a vessel for Ultron’s artificially-intelligent mind, but Tony is able to switch Ultron out with J.A.R.V.I.S. at the last minute, and yet Vision isn’t truly either of them; although he has J.A.R.V.I.S.’s voice, he quickly demonstrates that he’s his own… whatever he is.  The whole person/machine/being is powered by the strength of the Mind Stone.

There’s a lot about Vision that seems elevated, a higher form of existence.  His powers are insane, he has thought-processing capacities beyond any human, and he has this Zen-like calm about him, this sense of distance that can only come from being above the petty concerns of lower beings.  Tony and Steve argue that his ability to pick up Mjolnir “doesn’t count” as being worthy because he’s not actually a living organism, but in that moment, when Vision lifts the hammer without a second thought, it gives off definite This Guy is Above Us vibes.

But at the same time, Vision isn’t just this detached machine that’s all about logic.  He’s gently curious, nudging at the question of who/what he is and what his existence means.  But he doesn’t go about it in the typical “robot” teach-me-what-it-means-to-feel way.  He goes about it in a way that really does make him feel like a living machine, artificial but human as well.  That’s probably why he makes such a connection with Wanda, because she’s also questioning who she is.  With Vision, it’s about his existence/origins, and with Wanda, it’s about what her powers have made of her, but it’s still two very similar concerns/explorations.  The idea of those two together wouldn’t work for me nearly as well if Vision didn’t feel so genuine.

Overall, Civil War does a great job giving Vision these little human touches.  I love seeing him wear regular clothes around the Avengers compound, and I like his fumbles with Wanda – forgetting the way humans generally prefer it when you enter through a door rather than phase through a wall, and attempting to make paprikash for her on a purely-academic level since, as a machine, he’s never actually eaten anything and has no idea whether he’s making it correctly.  He’s still a bit of an outsider on the team at large, but he feels real enough that it doesn’t seem forced when the others talk to him like a person.

Oh, and I just adore the moment in his first scene when, as everyone is freaking out about whether or not he’s safe and Thor is sticking up for him, he just quietly looks Thor over and then modifies his own appearance to give himself a cape.  I love it.  There’s something so earnest about it, this newborn AI wanting to emulate someone he looks up to.  Based on what little I knew about Vision going into Age of Ultron, I was apprehensive about his character, but that moment right there was what let me know he was going to work for me.