Character Highlight: Janet van Dyne (Ant-Man and the Wasp)

*Spoilers for the Ant-Man and the Wasp films, including Quantumania.*

Janet’s presence has loomed over these films since the first Ant-Man, but while the notion of her has been important, we really hadn’t seen enough for me to be able to write about her until now. But now that Quantumania has given us much more of Janet, it’s time to dive a little deeper into the original Wasp.

When we first hear about Janet, we believe her to be dead, as does her family. Her apparent death is the origination for the wedge between Hope and Hank, both because Hope blames her dad for not being there for her when her mom died and because Hank’s fears keep him from letting his daughter take up the Wasp mantle, though he won’t tell her why. It’s not until the middle of the movie that Hope even learns how Janet really died. In fact, she’d known nothing about the Wasp at all—in the same breath that Hank tells her that her mom was a superhero, he tells her that she was lost in the Quantum Realm when she made a noble sacrifice in the heat of the moment.

So: dead mom who was once a source of conflict between father and daughter, but who’s now brought them back together. Fiction is littered with beloved deceased parents like this. But the thing is, when Scott is forced to enter the Quantum Realm during the third act and only just manages to get back out, we see the briefest flash of the Wasp, only for a second.

Which leads us to Ant-Man and the Wasp, where we learn that Hank and Hope have spent the time between movies acquiring parts to build a quantum tunnel and a craft that will help them safely enter the Quantum Realm as a rescue mission. Even though Janet is the driving focus of this movie, and although we get our first look at her as an actual character in a flashback, we still don’t really see her get to be active. She’s still an object, something to be rescued, something worth braving the Quantum Realm for.

It's not until Quantumania that we properly see Janet in action. The glimpses we got earlier gave us an idea of who she is—brave, selfless, a loving mom—but without a dynamic character to layer those traits upon, they would remain quasi-saintly thumbnails and Janet would only ever be what Hope and Hank think of her. As such, I’m glad that we see multiple sides to her in the new film. We get flashbacks to her time in the Quantum Realm, where she unknowingly helped Kang but once she realized what he was planning, she destroyed her own chance of escape to stop him. We see her hiding this past from her family, and when they’re pulled back into the Quantum Realm, she’s frantic to get them back out as quickly as possible without telling them why.

There’s so much she hasn’t told them, all in the name of keeping this shameful secret. Again, Janet did the right thing as soon as she learned who Kang really was, and in the process she condemned herself to many more years stuck in the Quantum Realm. But she still blames herself for unleashing Kang on the people there. And so she never told Hank and Hope about him, or about the fact that the Quantum Realm is populated by sentient life at all. She never told them about the life she lived there, the allies she made, or her resistance efforts against Kang.

Understandably, Hope is upset when all of this comes out—not because she blames Janet for Kang, but because she’s saddened that her mom kept so much from her, and she wonders if she really knows Janet at all. I appreciate this plotline. The snippets we get of Janet in the first two films are heroic and winning and borderline perfect, and it’s important to see her making mistakes because she’s afraid or ashamed.

And really, that just gives her the drive to make it up to those she loves. Janet is full-on mama bear throughout Quantumania, doing absolutely everything in her power to keep her people safe. Hank and Hope are stunned to see these new sides of her, but they’re also a little blown away seeing how easily she navigates the wild weirdness of the Quantum Realm. The real Janet may be flawed, but she’s still pretty darn impressive.