The MCU keeps doing its women dirty
“You break the rules and become a hero,” Wanda Maximoff tells Stephen Strange in a heavily memed moment early in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. “I do it, I become the enemy … That doesn’t seem fair.”
That self-serving quote from the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe movie doesn’t really hold up if you think about it for more than two seconds. It’s a false equivalency between two characters who are inherently on unequal footing. Wanda selfishly enslaved an entire town out of grief, while Stephen Strange sacrificed half the universe in a gambit to save it. Within the movie’s framework, her logic doesn’t make sense. But her grievance does point at a real trend in the ways female characters are treated across the MCU. As a micro observation, it doesn’t work, but on a macro level, the connotations point to a problem. While Doctor Strange breaks a lot of new rules in Multiverse of Madness and still rises as a hero, Wanda becomes a simplistic, one-note villain — and becomes the latest MCU woman to fall.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and MCU movies in general.]
It emerges early in Multiverse of Madness that Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) is the main villain of the story. In a quest to find a universe where the children she imagined for herself in WandaVision actually exist, she’s hellbent on capturing multiverse-hopping teenager America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) and stealing her powers. As the villainous Scarlet Witch, Wanda has some truly terrifying scenes and more specific motivations than some past MCU bad guys. The fact that she turns into a villain isn’t necessarily the issue. But her full plunge into evil speaks to an unfortunate trend in how the MCU treats female
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