Looking back at Wanda Maximoff’s MCU intro 🔴🧙🏻
“Age of Ultron” wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t great for the Scarlet Witch.
Here I am … still waiting for Dr. Strange to make a cameo on WandaVision.
The conversation online has (rightfully) shifted to one of Marvel’s strongest characters: Wanda Maximoff. But, alas, emotions are high and I’m not here to talk about WandaVision — it’s too soon. Time gives us perspective and what is the MCU but persevering?
With that in mind I decided to dive into Wanda’s MCU introduction with “Age of Ultron.” The Avengers film that makes you wonder “was the villain a robot?” and gives us the cringeworthy line “Everyone creates the thing they dread. Men of peace create engines of war. Invaders create Avengers. People create... smaller people? Er... children! I lost the word there. Children.” (Ooohhh so deep and quirky!) But we must! It does present important storytelling details.
Speaking of details, I suck at describing them when writing fiction. The smell of a room? The feel of the walls in a dark prison? I could care less as a reader but I do realize people like detailed descriptions so I must work on that. So in the past few weeks I turned to one of the best descriptive writers: Edgar Allan Poe. So at the end of this issue you can read “The Pit and the Pendulum.”
In this issue we discuss:
Joss Whedon’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron”
Rory Power’s “Wilder Girls”
A classic short story by Edgar Allan Poe
Resource: The next part deals with Wanda Maximoff as a secondary character to a larger plot so why not watch this great video by Hello Future Me on “Writing Great Side Characters.”
Looking back at ‘Age of Ultron’
Sequels are hard, man.
In light of the WandaVision finale, which became available to stream on Friday, I took a look back at the introduction of her character in the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) in “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” The camps are divided on this one and from my perspective, casual viewers of the MCU don’t like it or find issues with pacing, while fans took the strong elements a sophomore entry can only hope to give (i.e. sustaining the level of intensity of the first movie, setting up the intention for the next one, introducing new major characters). But both camps can agree: they did Wanda dirty.
“He’s fast and she’s weird,” was all that was said about Wanda and Pietro Maximoff in their introduction. And for most of the movie Wanda was used as a plot device for the development of the already established characters. Her and her brother’s vendetta against Tony Stark, their turn to HYDRA, even the death of Pietro are not as impactful as they should have been because AOU aimed to do A LOT. Which leads me to the point of what we usually talk about: storytelling.
On all accounts AOU succeeds on its intended storytelling goals. Did it have a high-enough stakes to gather the Avengers together? Yes. Did it further explore each character’s psyche and motivations? Yes. Did it show the cracks between the relationships in the group? Yes. Did it set up every single plot point for “Civil War,” “Infinity War,” “Endgame,” and “WandaVision”? Also, yes. So, in fact, we owe a lot of to this movie.
There are a lot of valid criticisms for it, like a weak antagonist and cringe-y dialogue, but the disservice it does with Wanda is because of classic storytelling issue I struggle with myself. Telling and not showing. Throughout the movie we’re “told” everything we need to know about Wanda and Pietro yet at the end we’re supposed to feel her pain when she loses her brother. But up until that moment all we know them as is the radicalized kids who were experimented on and then had a change of heart at the last minute. The emotion elicited from the audience with Wanda’s storyline is not earned.
Thankfully, we get to explore that in “WandaVision” and episode 8 is one of my favorites because it shows you what you were already told about her story. The storytelling in this case relies heavily on acting and visuals but it still gets the point across in 40 minutes while also furthering the show’s plot.
In a post-mortem assessment, AOU succeeds for a lot of its characters — just not Wanda. (Which, honestly, fits with her whole narrative.) It does leave us with an important reminder: If you want the viewer/reader to care about something you have to show them what they should be caring about.
Should I skip it? Tbh if you read this far it’s because you saw the movie already so … yeah … Look over there! 👇
‘Wilder Girls’: More like ‘Milder Girls’ am I right?
Bursts of brilliance drowned by unfocused plot.
That was a little harsh, yes. And I’m sure a lot of people would enjoy this “feminist ‘Lord of the Flies’” but it will leave you wanting more — which normally wouldn’t be a bad thing if the “more” you wanted was to further develop the world you were transported to. Instead, the book leaves you wanting more from the story it told.
Set in a post-pandemic outbreak, our protagonist (Hetty) is in all-girls school on an island whose only resources are being delivered by the Navy. Immediately you want to know what this virus is that is causing all sorts of bodily mutations on the girls (and making wild animals violent), but a throw-away explanation doesn’t cut it for how much “the tox” affects the storyline.
The story is told in a first-person present tense, which I tend to believe should be used for stories with a sense of urgency. And while there was some of that in the book, not enough to merit that style given that it teetered into stream-of-consciousness a bit. That being said, the lore behind the story was much more interesting to me that the actual main characters and their arcs. I’m a sucker for strong female leads (or so does my Netflix recommendations lead me to believe) but even then I was wondering why there wasn’t more urgency for their scarce resources, lack of knowledge from the outside world, or what was happening to their disappearing cohorts.
As Bedtime Bookworm’s Jade said in her review of the novel, “the author seems to not know how to end the book” so it ends abruptly without much fanfare or a satisfying closing to their arcs.
Also, there’s a lesbian subplot thrown in there that doesn’t add much to the story, but I’ll take it.
Should I skip it? Given the past year we’ve all been in lockdown due to a viral pandemic, maybe give it some time before you pick it up. I read to escape reality and reading the words “pandemic” and “quarantine” while I was quarantining during a pandemic wasn’t exactly escapism.
Story time 📚: ‘The Pit and The Pendulum’
By Edgar Allan Poe
Impia tortorum longas hic turba furores Sanguinis innocui, non satiata, aluit.
Sospite nunc patria, fracto nunc funeris antro, Mors ubi dira fuit vita salusque patent.
[Quatrain composed for the gates of a market to be erected upon the site of the Jacobin Club House at Paris.]
I WAS sick—sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence—the dread sentence of death—was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution—perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill-wheel. This only for a brief period, for presently I heard no more. Yet, for a while, I saw—but with how terrible an exaggeration! I saw the lips of the black- robed judges. They appeared to me white—whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words—and thin even to grotesqueness; thin with the intensity of their expression of firmness—of immovable resolution—of stern contempt of human torture. I saw that the decrees of what to me was Fate were still issuing from those lips. I saw them writhe with a deadly locution. I saw them fashion the syllables of my name; and I shuddered because no sound succeeded. I saw, too, for a few moments of delirious horror, the soft and nearly imperceptible waving of the sable draperies which enwrapped the walls of the apartment. And then my vision fell upon the seven tall candles upon the table. At first they wore the aspect of charity, and seemed white slender angels who would save me; but then, all at once, there came a most deadly nausea over my spirit, and I felt every fibre in my frame thrill as if I had touched the wire of a galvanic battery, while the angel forms became meaningless spectres, with heads of flame, and I saw that from them there would be no help. And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave. The thought came gently and stealthily, and it seemed long before it attained full appreciation; but just as my spirit came at length properly to feel and entertain it, the figures of the judges vanished, as if magically, from before me; the tall candles sank into nothingness; their flames went out utterly; the blackness of darkness supervened; all sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades. Then silence, and stillness, and night were the universe.
I had swooned; but still will not say that all of consciousness was lost. What of it there remained I will not attempt to define, or even to describe; yet all was not lost. In the deepest slumber—no! In delirium—no! In a swoon—no! In death—no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed. In the return to life from the swoon there are two stages: first, that of the sense of mental or spiritual; secondly, that of the sense of physical, existence. It seems probable that if, upon reaching the second stage, we could recall the impressions of the first, we should find these impressions eloquent in memories of the gulf beyond. And that gulf is—what? How at least shall we distinguish its shadows from those of the tomb? But if the impressions of what I have termed the first stage are not, at will, recalled, yet, after long interval, do they not come unbidden, while we marvel whence they come? He who has never swooned, is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower; is not he whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has never before arrested his attention.
Before you go …
This is *gestures widely* our newsletter. If you wrote a short story and would like for it to be featured, please email me at joshuanriverajimenez@gmail.com to be considered.
I only ask that it’s compelling fiction. Big plus if it includes POC and/or LGBTQ characters or issues. I request no exclusivity and it doesn’t have to be recent.