For two months now, I’ve gone on Twitter after episodes of WandaVision, and everyone has been speculating about what’s to come. The astrophysicist that Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) mentioned? That has to be Reed Richards because a new Fantastic Four movie is in the works. Sure, they haven’t even finished a script and director Jon Watts is still working on Spider-Man: No Way Home and a major piece of casting like that almost always leaks out in some form, but I was promised by the Internet that John Krasinski would play Reed Richards, which of course means that his real-world wife Emily Blunt was also being cast as Sue Storm aka The Invisible Woman. The Internet said so, and because Monica said the word “astrophysicist” that means Fantastic Four. Twitter told me so.
Also, because Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) is dealing with magic, that also means Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) has to show up. We know that Olsen is part of the cast of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and so Doctor Strange had to appear in WandaVision. That’s not even a question; the only question is when Cumberbatch was making his cameo appearance so that we could get ready for the next Marvel movie. Even though it’s not next and doesn’t even come out until 2022, we need some kind of teaser. If you don’t tease the next Marvel thing, then what are we even doing here?
So imagine my utter rage and disappointment when WandaVision turned out to be a grief drama. UGH. FEELINGS. If I wanted to watch Elizabeth Olsen in a TV series about grief, I would watch Sorry for Your Loss, which I haven’t, but I’m just saying it’s an option. But my superhero shows are supposed to be about giving me more superheroes. It’s supposed to be a teaser machine where instead of enjoying the current narrative, I need to be sold on the next narrative. What does Wanda’s emotional state possibly tell me about whether or not Mephisto is going to come along later?
By treating Wanda’s story as one about grief, loss, and healing, Marvel denied me the chance to connect my comic book knowledge to the movies. Do you think we read comic books for fun? NO. We read them so we can amass a bunch of knowledge about storylines and then feel secure that we’re ahead of the curve when the movies come along to repeat those storylines. I haven’t been burned this badly by Marvel since The Mandarin turned out to be just an actor in Iron Man 3. Why would you play with my expectations, Marvel? To surprise me? To bring me joy? The only joy I feel is when my fan theories are proved correct so that people know I’m smart.
I don’t watch Marvel stuff to feel feelings or to think about my emotions or consider my place in the world or my relationships with others. I watch them for two reasons: 1) To acknowledge comic books (the more obscure the better, so as to reward my efforts), and 2) to tease future Marvel projects at the expense of the one I’m currently watching. We all know that the best part of Avengers: Age of Ultron is when Thor (Chris Hemsworth) goes on his vision quest because that clued us into the Infinity Stones even though stones had already been mentioned the previous year in Guardians of the Galaxy. I also think we can all agree that Iron Man 2 is the best Marvel movie because it does so much heavy lifting in setting up future Marvel movies. And in my opinion, there has not been a better Marvel scene than the one in Thor where Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) is in a bucket to introduce us to Hawkeye.
WandaVision denied us all of these great kinds of moments that were not promised by the show in any way, but they were promised to us by the fandom, which is obviously more important than the thing they’re supposedly a fan of. If you’re not listening to the fans, then what are you even doing? Crafting a story with a strong character arc to explore a universal emotion that resonates deeply with the viewer? Who wants that?! Looking back at WandaVision, all I see are a bunch of missed opportunities. Instead of using the series to introduce the X-Men, they just turned it into a gag about a guy named Ralph Bohner, which, while objectively hilarious, did not support my fan theory, so the show failed. WandaVision made me look foolish, and all entertainment must support my ego.
I really hope that Marvel learns from the errors they made with WandaVision. We can’t allow studios to enable creators to entrust their audience with emotions and thematic resonance. The whole point of an interconnected superhero universe is to abandon the main plotline as soon as it gets to selling us on the next thing in the interconnected superhero universe. Rather than selling us on Fantastic Four or Doctor Strange 2 or the arrival of mutants—things that we have already been sold on and will watch no matter what—WandaVision was about feelings and characters and that’s just unacceptable. I do not watch superhero movies and shows to think and feel. I watch them so that my fandom is affirmed, and being a fan means always looking ahead to the next thing rather than spending time in the present. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to start theorizing about when we can expect Chris Evans to make a cameo in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.