Review: Underland by Maxime J. Durand

A cosmic horror setting without cosmic horror characters is a brilliant combination

You may remember that in 2007, Brandon Sanderson wrote that magic in fantasy stories should have logical rules that make sense, and later, in 2012, N. K. Jemisin wrote that the whole point of fantasy stories is that magic exists beyond all logic and sense. With all due respect to the inimitable quadruple-Hugo-and-quadruple-Locus winner, on this specific topic of fantasy literature the esteemed Ms. Jemisin is totally wrong and Mr. Sanderson is totally right. Magic is more interesting (rather, it's only interesting) when it has rules. And one demonstration of the wonders that can result from a strictly systematic magic system is Maxime J. Durand's dark fantasy novel Underland.

Originally posted as a web serial, Underland follows the quest of multiclass summoner/necromancer Valdemar to find a new world for humankind. Centuries ago, an evil moon blocked out the sun, dooming the world to the terrors of the night. Suddenly overwhelmed by unimaginable monstrosities, civilization quickly collapsed, and humans migrated to underground caverns where they'd be safe from the cold and the ghosts that roam the dead surface. Once resettled, humans discovered the magical potential in their own blood, and used it to rebuild a semblance of the stability they had before. Today the human territories are under the absolute rule of Dark Lords, immensely powerful mages with debatably compatible agendas. But other creatures already lived in the Underland before humans arrived, and some aren't willing to be nice neighbors. To be fair, too often humans haven't shown the noblest behavior toward other sentient creatures. What looks like peace conceals numerous tensions that may snap at any time.

But the worries don't stop at the mundane. In their study of magic, some have unwisely contacted extraplanar powers that can't be trusted, much less controlled. Such spells have been declared illegal, but that hasn't stopped the proliferation of clandestine cults that seek an escape from life underground. One cult in particular involved an entire family, the Verneys, who were exterminated by an order of knights dedicated to keeping those mysterious entities from invading the living world. The only survivor from the Verney family was Valdemar, back then a child, who now secretly experiments with planar travel to find a more inhabitable place for humankind to move to. Suspected of trying to continue his criminal family's loathsome rituals, he's been put under arrest, but one of the Dark Lords has taken an interest in his abnormally strong magical skills and has offered him the tools to finish his research... at an unspecified price.

Web serials are usually friendly bedfellows with fanfiction, and Underland unapologetically bears the marks of its self-published origins. The novel is evidently shaped by Dungeons and Dragons: its setting brings to mind the classic Underdark expansions; it is populated by the usual suspects—dark elves, dark dwarves, troglodytes, golems, and liches; some of the extraplanar locations namedropped in the text resemble those used in the game; and the plot is punctuated by quests, side quests, and downtime training. The rest of the worldbuilding samples liberally from Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and the Lovecraftian corpus to depict a setting precariously enveloped by unsuspected powers that are just one wrong incantation away from crossing into material reality.

The prose in Underland is effective at setting a macabre tone. Consider this chapter opening:

He dreamed of rats that night. They crawled in a grotesque pit dug in black oily stone, squeaking and gnawing on the flesh of the innocent.

The author knew to keep the alluring aesthetic of cosmic horror without the worst ingredient of cosmic horror, which is its attitude. This is a world of gory witchcraft, unnatural transformations, painful rituals, obscene ruins, threatening dreams, widespread pestilence, boiling blood, imprisoned demons, moldy tunnels, abhorrent experiments, and costly secrets. And yet, the author is deliberate in his selection of focus characters. Even though the book's setting has all the recognizable signs of cosmic horror, its characters are very emphatically not cosmic horror characters. Even though nothing more than a thin veil separates visible reality from tenebrous chaos, the mages we meet in this novel don't adopt the attitude of helpless desperation that is so annoying in traditional cosmic horror. They don't believe that the hidden forces that control the universe are beyond human comprehension; they don't accept the eternal superiority of the ancient gods; they don't fear the mysterious; they don't tremble in awe at the unearthly. It's like walking through the tired grimness of Black Mirror and finding Ted Lasso living there. With a beautiful, admirable ethos of humanism, these characters approach the unknown and make it known. Instead of submitting to the supernatural, they study it, find its practical applications, deduce its laws. These mages may be gifted with fantastical powers, but their sharpest tool is human reason.

And here we arrive at the greatest pleasure of reading Underland: watching our protagonist use creatively the rules of magic to make up combinations of spells that are wholly surprising yet follow logically from the established facts. It's an irresistible type of nerdy catnip to inhabit the inner thoughts of a smart hero as he reasons his way out of impossible plights. Either with inventive solutions born from a desperate moment of improvisation, or with procedures coldly planned with meticulous care, Valdemar is an inspiring hero who understands the unlimited power of lifelong learning.

His impressive talents notwithstanding, Valdemar is far from a perfect person. The execution of his entire family has stunted his ability to form connections to other people, and in some scenes his unconventional moral intuitions come off as appallingly heartless. At the same time that he makes progress in the challenging techniques of advanced sorcery, he undergoes an equally strenous education in interpersonal contact. It has a moving effect to watch this formidable spellcaster, who is no stranger to commanding demons and transmuting his blood into an interdimensional portal, discover for the first time the simple joy of making true friends who support his dreams without judgment.

Although the text always highlights the moral questions where Valdemar's position has defects, it's worth noting that, as a whole, the society of Underland rests on some surprising assumptions that go against the grain of what fantasy literature has usually considered acceptable. In Underland, to seek immortality is not viewed as inherently evil. Multiple methods exist to cheat death, including soul receptacles, mechanical bodies, youth potions, and even undeath, which causes no scandal. It's actually taken for granted that everyone who can afford it will resort to one of these methods, and that it would be inexcusably foolish not to. This is another manifestation of the novel's underlying humanism: just as mystery is the enemy, and thus shall be overcome, death is the enemy, and shall likewise be overcome.

Underland is the first part of a duology that continues in Underland 2. The reader must be warned that this novel ends in a cliffhanger, but what a howling hell of a cliffhanger it is. Now, it may be argued against this choice of ending, and against the novel in its entirety, that the author relies too much on the fact that Lovecraft's œuvre has become public domain, and such an accusation wouldn't be without merit. The reader may also feel distracted by the repeated appearance of narrative conventions inherited from Dungeons and Dragons, which carry unwelcome baggage in the form of bioessentialism, territorial expansionism, and unquestioned monarchism.

Once these missteps are admitted, there remains plenty to enjoy in Underland. Its unusual treatment of the aesthetic of cosmic horror is a refreshing change of direction from the undue reverence that puny mortals are typically expected to profess for the darkness. Even in the deepest bowels of the earth, the undying flame of human reason lights the way.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Durand, Maxime J. Underland [Podium Publishing, 2022].

Review: Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The epic quest to defeat the enigmatic Architects now extends beyond this reality

Confession time: I hate cosmic horror. I detest it with a fervent passion. I find its conceptual foundations intrinsically repulsive on a visceral level. The notion that the underlying truths of the universe are impossible to grasp and dangerous to glimpse by mortal minds strikes me as a ridiculous underestimation of human capabilities. The suggestion that the vastness of the starry expanse reduces all human desires to insignificance goes against every humanist principle I hold. The unquestioned assumption that human beings ought to fear the unknown is one I oppose on principle, as the ultimate insult to human reason. The intended aesthetic effect of awe before the immeasurable might of ancient transdimensional overlords offends me as contrary to human dignity.

Which is why I absolutely adored Adrian Tchaikovsky's latest novel Lords of Uncreation, which concludes the story told in the monumental masterpieces Shards of Earth and Eyes of the Void. Finally, we have a novel that understands that, when you meet an eldritch abomination from the unfathomable nothingness between universes, the correct human response is to laugh in its face.

The story so far: the galaxy is in panic because of the return of the Architects, gigantic alien beings who destroyed Earth and doomed humankind to a nomadic life between the stars. Our protagonist Idris Telemmier has been gathering experts in xenoarchaeology to refurbish incompletely understood ancient machinery. The plan is to launch a counteroffensive that would hit the Architects in their home turf. Only two problems: (1) said ancient machinery is irresistibly attractive to every military power in the galaxy, and (2) the home of the Architects is located in the negative space where both physical things and the human mind lose their link to reality.

This third novel in the series jumps right into action and never releases its grip on the reader as our heroes get caught in an unrelenting chase to stay in control of their superweapon as every faction tries to get their hands on it, and stay in control of their sanity as they visit the hostile realm of the unreal. Yet Idris hopes to convince his colleagues that ending the war shouldn't require paying back genocide for genocide. And here one of the strengths of the novel becomes evident. It's great when you can notice how deeply an author loves his characters. Lords of Uncreation takes care to portray Idris with all his convoluted interiority, achieving the unlikely feat of making an ageless telepathic unsleeping cyborg with the power to save the universe and the self-esteem of a termite feel close and relatable. As a war survivor who was brutally weaponized and is now wanted as an asset, Idris is barely functional. The scars of his trauma and the anxiety of having only a temporary freedom were already a difficult burden to carry before his mind opened to the revelations of unspace and contracted an obsession with exploring the forbidden regions of that not-place.

Drawing from a profound empathy for human suffering, and with the extreme care of a master wordsmith, Tchaikovsky proposes a more mature way to look at characters who have gone through painful events and then have to face new, comparable hardships. Not only Idris, but his companions the duelist lawyer Kris and the clone warrior Solace demonstrate an inner strength earned in fire. I refer to extreme care because it would have been too easy to romanticize their trauma and treat it as an advantage in their subsequent adventures. Tchaikovsky knows to steer away from that simplistic recourse. While his characters do gain strength from the hard lessons of their past, at no point does he pretend that they're better off for having suffered. What their bad experiences give them is not a thicker skin, but a broader perspective. These are not the kind of heroes who learn to shrug off blows, but heroes who go on to ensure others don't have to receive them.

The moral stance of Lords of Creation is grounded on an unwavering affirmation of the value of human life even in a universe that is infinitely bigger. As an illustration of what might be called optimistic nihilism, our heroes come face to face with uncaring monstrosities older than the universe and, instead of losing their minds from the despair of realizing their smallness, they stand their ground and refuse to kneel. It's not that they've become strong enough to punch Cthulhu; it's that they feel at home in the universe and wish to deal with its other inhabitants as fellow creatures. The fate of humankind is not to serve, but to thrive.

However, the competing factions of humankind have their own ideas of what that thriving looks like. Through this novel, our heroes have to defeat not one but two separate eugenic conspiracies that threaten to derail the course of future history. This theme of refusing to grant some lives more worth than others is reaffirmed in the climactic confrontation with the titular Lords of Uncreation, who for the previous two novels have been sending the Architects to reshape the universe into a perfect work of art, mere mortals be damned. And here the central theme of humanism vs. fascism finds its clearest expression.

Walter Benjamin's description of fascism as the insertion of aesthetics into politics can be rephrased in this way: fascism is the desire to politically enforce an aesthetic. If you pay attention to far-right discourse, its obsession with "disorderly" society and "disgusting" sexualities and "unclean" literature and "impure" blood is always described in the language of aesthetic preferences. Fascism doesn't want good citizens, just good-looking ones. In Lords of Uncreation, upon hearing the final antagonists describe their grandiose plans for the universe and their inflated sense of superiority, one senses an echo of every tyrant who appointed himself as society's curator.

The winning strategy for our heroes turns out to be, refreshingly, community. The universe is saved by the joint effort of all who give up factional divisions and choose instead cooperation. The cosmic abandonment that the human mind feels in unspace is made more bearable in company. The terrors of the transdimensional void don't hold a candle to the nightmares that lurk inside us, and if we've been able to survive those, we can survive whatever the universe throws in our direction.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Lords of Uncreation [Tor, 2023].

Review: Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The sequel to Shards of Earth brings bigger revelations, deeper questions, and riskier adventures

In the first book of the Final Architecture series (which I reviewed with high praise last year), the fearsome Architects, alien megastructures capable of destroying planets and responsible for humankind's current state of cosmic homelessness, had suddenly returned, and the only countermeasure that was useful against their uncaring advance—the mysterious ruins of a long-gone civilization—appeared to have lost their repellent effect. The only hope that remained was the telepathic power of the Intermediaries, surgically altered humans with the ability to perceive the layer of unreality beneath the fabric of spacetime. But the surviving Intermediaries are now aging war veterans, and the Architects will not listen to newly-made Intermediaries who have undergone the cerebral torture against their will.

So our revered hero Idris Telemmier, member of the original slate of Intermediaries, twice savior of the known civilizations and very much tired of it all, is the most prized weapon in the galaxy. And everyone wants to get their hands on him. The early chapters of the novel consist of a relentless pursuit, full of spy games and secret agendas, because each faction calculates that gaining control over Idris will give them the key advantage against the Architects and, ultimately, against the rest of intelligent species. The balance of power in the galaxy is precariously volatile, the return of the Architects has put every major government on maximum alert, and Idris just wants to be left alone. As soon as he's done training a new group of Intermediaries (who, he emphatically insists, must be free volunteers or else their powers will be useless), he's ready to retire and forget about wars and politics and the fate of the universe.

Alas, the universe is not done with him. True, most factions want to steal him as a weapon, but he's also useful as a seer, an irreplaceable channel of communication with whatever dark purpose the Architects are working for. As the plot takes our crew of protagonists aboard the salvage ship Vulture God through more and more elaborate ruin sites, Idris gradually begins to sense the true relationship between the material universe and the void of nonexistence where the Architects live. And the answers are irresistible catnip to his altered brain (and, to be frank, to the reader).

Whereas the first novel in the series, Shards of Earth, felt like it was inspired by Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, in that it explored the tango of attempted negations inherent to any contact between two conscious entities, this new entry appears to take after Sartre's Being and Nothingness and its exploration of how important conscious thought is as the condition of possibility for negation. In other words, the concept of "not" only makes sense to a mind that can reflect on being. Once you start classifying the world according to categories, you notice negative space around each being: the attributes that make a cup a cup are the same that make it not a penguin. To be something is to not be everything else. But it is only through a thinking mind that this abundance of nonexistence is even possible. The world doesn't get filled with negations until it gets defined. Without a mind to impose categories, one arrangement of atoms would be as good as any other. It wouldn't matter if Earth were a livable place or a twisted wreck of magma. That is why, in the first novel, the world-warping Architects only retreat when they realize that we do care about arrangements of atoms. It is our consciousness which bestows the universe with meaning. It is our consciousness which distinguishes between things, and within that distinction lies our most terrifying creation: the "not." To even begin to make sense of the world, to apprehend it, requires us, in a way, to surpass the realm of the real and reach into the nonexistent. This is what Hegel terms, and Sartre quotes, as the role of an Intermediary.

In the setting of Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture series, FTL travel is performed by Intermediaries who guide the jump from the real universe into an empty nothingness folded into routes. (Here we have to come back to Sartre, who defines physical distance as a negation of contact, and the destination as a negation of further movement.) In stunningly poetic passages, the novel describes the negative void between things as the very fabric that links them and holds them in place.

In the unspace postulated by Tchaikovsky, intelligent minds intuit a lurking presence, contact with whom would be absolutely intolerable. To put it in Sartre's words, "nothingness haunts being." But conversely, conscious thought is the only thing that has an effect on unspace. If, following Sartre, nonexistence is incapable of sustaining itself, it's even possible that Tchaikovsky's unspace didn't begin to exist until intelligent species emerged in the universe (we'll have to wait until the conclusion of the trilogy to find out whether this speculation holds).

Here we may find a clue to decipher why Tchaikovsky's characters suffer an intense state of anguish while in unspace. According to Sartre, the human attribute that brings the "not" into the world is freedom, the possibility of making a choice (because each choice comes at the cost of negating other possibilities). And it is precisely the infinity of all the negated possibilities that makes us feel anguish upon being aware of our freedom (this is Sartre quoting Kierkegaard) or, indeed, anguish upon being aware of the nothingness (this is Sartre quoting Heidegger). The human mind collapses under the weight of everything it could be and is not.

The arc that Idris follows in this sequel is a fascinating one: he yearns to retain his freedom, both legally and morally speaking, from any of the various governments that are making unabashedly obvious plans for war and would love to acquire his services, but the lure of the truth about unspace keeps dragging him back to the wrong places, where he's wanted by all kinds of the wrong company. For all parties involved, this is a basic fetch quest: to get Idris by whatever means, rinse and repeat. But Tchaikovsky never lets it get boring. A clandestine auction of stolen government data quickly erupts into a shooting match plus murder mystery; a routine pilgrimage to a holy site is interrupted by cataclysmic weapons that laugh at the laws of physics; a simple interview at a university ends with a nail-bitingly tense chase and a ritual duel; a search-and-rescue operation leads to a four-way starship standoff over an ancient planet with lethally resplendent flora. Each of these scenes is built with an almost cinematic eye for the combination of intense pacing, truly alien setting, and meaningful stakes that makes every piece of the puzzle matter.

And I still haven't mentioned the rest of the cast: the robot archeologist Trine makes a return, with their unmistakable snark; the clone soldier Solace is as torn as ever between her patriotism and her personal sympathies; the sharp-tongued Kris gets much welcome development; the alien arthropod Kit continues to provide the pragmatic viewpoint with exactly as few words as necessary; and the foulmouthed Olli is still the best representation of a disabled badass I've seen in ages.

Eyes of the Void is all the best things about space opera: political machinations, unlikely alliances, shady cultists, body augmentation, literal world-shaking enigmas, extradimensional shenanigans, deep philosophy, and lots and lots of pew-pew. It provides more than enough answers to reward the extensive journey, but keeps the best ones carefully hidden for the upcoming conclusion.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10.

Bonuses: +1 for expertly holding the narrative rhythm like a music conductor.

Penalties: −1 because the political machinations in the early chapters are a bit too hard to follow at first.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Eyes of the Void [Tor, 2022].

'Doctor Strange 2' is visually delightful and narratively bland

The MCU is looking less and less like a continuous story, and more and more like a subscription plan you can never opt out of

Despite the refreshing shift in visual style brought into the MCU by director Sam Raimi, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is far from the milestone it was expected to be. The ongoing saga of the Avengers was supposed to expand into a wealth of possibilities with the addition of alternate realities, character variants, and reclaimed franchises just acquired by Disney from Fox. But what this movie delivers is smaller than the sum of its parts.

Early announcements for Multiverse of Madness appeared to promise that the story would center on the character of Stephen Strange and the consequences of his reality-breaking spell in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Indeed, this seemed like the right moment to bring back the lingering threat of Mordo, the wizard-turned-wizard-hunter we met in the first Doctor Strange movie. This was turned into an even more enticing prospect by the limited series What If, which gave us a taste of what damage an unhinged Doctor Strange might do to the world if he succumbed to thirst for power. Instead, Multiverse of Madness can barely be called a Doctor Strange movie. The script and the camera treat him as if he were the protagonist, but he is never properly given an arc. With América Chávez as the only hero with a pivotal moment of choice to define her character, and Wanda Maximoff as the self-offing villain who learns the lesson of the day, Stephen may as well not have been in this movie. This is actually an origin story for the character of América Chávez, clumsily inserted in an overly long epilogue for WandaVision.

It's not really worth it to analyze this movie from the character of Stephen, who is only here to stand with a worried face while other characters recite exposition. Even the repeated question about his happiness is left unresolved, because it really doesn't matter. Even a half-hour of What If had more to say on the topic, and it pretty much exhausted its possibilities. So let's look at Wanda.

Since WandaVision aired, opinions on Wanda's character have been extremely divided: one side is ready to empathize and forgive, and the other side points out that her grief, while valid, does not give her a pass for hurting others. I'm in the second camp, as I detailed in my review last year: Wanda's traumatic past gives an explanation, but never a justification, for her actions. She is undeniably the villain of Westview, and now she's become the enemy to defeat. Contrary to the protestations of many on the internet, this is a natural evolution from where we left Wanda last time we saw her, and it is to the credit of Multiverse of Madness that it doesn't buy WandaVision's attempt to pretend that Wanda has learned and grown from her experience. So it might be argued that this movie is about the cost of pursuing an unreachable fantasy, but that was already done in WandaVision, or maybe it is about the cost of meddling with forces beyond human grasp, but that was already done in No Way Home. Both in theme and in actual things happening in the plot, this movie is a redundant and fully skippable entry in the MCU.

Spider-Man: No Way Home proposed the question of what is a responsible use of world-altering magic, but Multiverse of Madness is quick to throw that question at the feet of Wanda, not Stephen. Even when she offers to send him to a universe where he's reunited with his old lover, there's never a sense that he's susceptible to that temptation. This should have been the movie where Stephen has to reflect on his hubris, but what we get is vignettes from other versions of Stephen who have already gone down the path of dark magic and are only there to scare Stephen into staying on the good side. There's no real growth for him. There's no hard choice. He fulfills a role less important than that of a secondary character, and we're meant to believe this story is about him.

This hollowness at the core of the story makes the rest of the flaws more noticeable. There's no thematic statement in this movie that wasn't already clear from WandaVision, and whatever little gesture of maturity Wanda shows here shouldn't have needed an entire movie to develop. The actual function of this movie is to establish América Chávez as a key figure for some upcoming project where she will turn out to save the multiverse. This movie is not its own story. It's a two-hour-long teaser for Phase 4.

This habit of producing movies whose sole function is to promise future movies is becoming a vice in the MCU. The middle portion of Multiverse of Madness is bloated with alternate characters who only show up to earn five seconds of cheers and then die with no consequence to the story. To bring Patrick Stewart back as Charles Xavier, only to kill him in the most unceremonious manner, is already disappointing enough after Logan gave that character the perfect farewell, but on top of that misstep, the casting of John Krasinski as Mr. Fantastic is a transparent play to mass appeal. This movie is not conceived as a story with a statement to make about its characters or its themes. It is simply calculated to please.

In the people-pleasing department, it's at least commendable that Sam Raimi was allowed to dial up the colors of the otherwise boring look of the MCU. His use of fade transitions and close-ups between character beats adds a much-needed touch of uniqueness to the narrative. This feels like a movie that has a director behind it instead of an impersonal corporate machinery.

However, the visual inventiveness of Multiverse of Madness is not used to its full potential. We quickly jump through a dozen universes made of paint, made of comic book ink, made of flesh cubes, but for the most part we stick to only a couple universes that have a walkable New York and a recognizable set of characters. Again, these decisions follow the preestablished needs of Phase 4. Each of these movies has only so much space where they can expand before they risk deviating from whatever big narrative is being prepared behind the scenes. There's only a tiny chance to experiment, to ask hard questions, to challenge the audience. Multiverse of Madness had infinite places to go, but it's too afraid to wander off on its own way.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +3 for giving Raimi the creative freedom to leave his personal mark on the film.

Penalties: −1 for inconsequential cameos motivated purely by fan service, −1 for choosing the wrong protagonist to focus on, −1 for not taking the risk of sending the heroes to more visually bizarre universes, −1 for refusing to have an interesting point to make.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

'Eternals' wants to save the superhero genre from itself

It's doubtful that Marvel Studios will appreciate, or even understand, what Eternals has to say about the horror of living in a superhero franchise

It's a revelation to see how much Eternals is unlike the rest of the MCU. It feels strangely like a normal movie, which shouldn't be noteworthy, because we really shouldn't be this accustomed to expecting characters to smash each other in the head in every scene, but to follow the discussion around Eternals is to realize how severely the MCU has warped our way of watching. It is the first MCU movie to get a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes (48% at the time of writing this review), which makes it, completely undeservedly, the worst-rated entry of the MCU (not counting television). Upon closer look, the criticisms thrown at Eternals reveal a particular type of anger, which stems from a particularly twisted set of expectations. Supposedly, Eternals believes too seriously in its themes, has too much talking, is too abstract, leans too far into substance, is not violent enough, has too many feelings.

Let it sink in that this is the rare superhero movie directed by a woman, and reread those complaints.

In fact, those are exactly the qualities that make Eternals one of the most important entries, and I'm not exaggerating, in the history of the superhero genre. It wasn't until I watched Eternals that I noticed how tired I was of Marvel's trademark ironic detachment. It's refreshing to have characters who don't hide behind a barrier of quippy banter, who aren't afraid to own their emotions, who care about what their battles say about who they are.

Solid characterization was always going to be difficult. Eternals had to fulfill the mammoth task of being simultaneously the origin story, the teamup blockbuster, the team breakup tragedy, and the world-ending epic for an entire new crop of ten almost unknown superheroes, in a cinematic universe that pretends every obscure character needs A-lister treatment. But there was no alternative; it wasn't viable to introduce these characters in their respective solo movies, because their place in the fictional world makes no sense outside of this team. Perhaps Eternals would have achieved better pacing as a Disney Plus series, but as one single movie, it's remarkable that it manages to make almost all of its heroes feel like full persons. And it does so via relevant moral disagreements.

As a rule, the MCU has very badly dropped the ball when trying to grapple with the ethics of superheroism, opting for a juvenile power fantasy every time it has played with hard dilemmas that called for a more thoughtful approach. Eternals sees the oversimplistic moral calculation of Avengers: Infinity War and raises a more pointed set of questions: if heroes have a responsibility toward living beings, does that extend to future lives? And should their concern for those potential future lives outweigh the importance of present ones? And does it matter in the decision if the future lives are thousands of times more numerous than the present ones that may have to be sacrificed? These are not the speculations of fantasy. The problem of the potential value of future lives is an extremely delicate point of contention that has been debated by philosophers for decades, and that has had, still has today, and will continue to have real consequences for real people.

It will be argued that these are unnecessarily heavy interests for a movie where a character is called Sprite and another has pew pew fingers. But Eternals doesn't fool itself. It knows that the MCU is a ridiculous place to ask the big questions. In fact, the conscious mismatch between its themes and its setting is a central part of how Eternals is made, and it shows precisely in the characters of Sprite and Mr. Pew Pew Fingers.

On one hand, Sprite is an illusionist. Over the centuries of the Eternals' mission on Earth, she has been feeding the human hunger for inspiration via stories. If the Eternals are behind all our ancient myths, Sprite has been behind the telling of the myths. On the other hand, Kingo is a movie actor and director. He used to live in hiding with Sprite, but became tired of hanging in the limbo between truth and deception. So he opted for full-time deception: he's been pretending to be a dynasty of Bollywood stars for roughly a century. Indeed, both are beings of legend: Sprite cannot have the normal human experience, while Kingo doesn't even try. They exist in the world of stories.

This matters because, in Eternals, what threatens to invade the physical world is the world of stories. Our heroes yearn for normality, but beasts that belong to primal nightmare keep interrupting their dates, their family meetings, their careers. This occurs more explicitly with Kingo's sudden interest in filming his friends. The Eternals' lives become a threatened home, not unlike the fortress Phastos has built in his house: a shelter of domesticity besieged by conventions of cinematic spectacle that are emphatically unwelcome. These characters are trying to go through their lives, but their boss Arishem needs them to stick to their predefined roles, while Kingo keeps annoyingly insisting that their lives be made into a movie. When the obligatory faceless monsters show up during a family discussion in the Amazon jungle, they don't feel like an adventure, but like an inconvenience. Eternals is a movie, and it has superheroes, but it resents having to be a superhero movie.

Now why would a Marvel production want to do that?

Because Eternals, you see, is actually about the horror of being a Marvel character.

Most hero stories are about the search for purpose, but few dare address this openly the despair of having your purpose written in a script. The surprise reveal of this movie is that the titular Eternals don't exist to be full persons, but to be action figures in a war with a preordained result. They're not meant to have lives; they're just meant to make it to the end of the world and then be refurbished and repainted for the next end of the world, with nothing left of their previous personalities. Much like the tragic heroines of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, they're created to be pieces of cosmic machinery in a plan guided by the most ruthless of utilitarian calculations. The awkward excuse for their absence from every other Avengers-level crisis refers back to the same metanarrative directive: those other conflicts were not about them. They were not their story.

If you've ever wondered why Tony Stark went back to superheroing after burning all his suits in Iron Man 3, as if he had forgotten his entire personal growth in that movie, here's the explanation: as a Marvel character, he's not allowed to have an inner life. He just has to make it to the end of the movie and go back to the makeup department to get ready for the next movie. It's only in Eternals that this curse is shown in its full monstrosity: Marvel characters are doomed to repeat the end of the world again and again, and all the lives they're supposedly saving only have value as food for the cosmic machine that controls their fates.

Marvel fans complain that not enough stuff blows up in Eternals. Yes, that's the whole point. Stuff blowing up would just be another repetition of the endless cycle that makes the MCU a Gnostic hell, its characters trapped by a heartless creator who only cares that the rules of the game be obeyed. Ajak and Ikaris constantly refer to Arishem's Grand Design. Well, the Grand Design is the MCU and its voracious need to keep growing by recycling its heroes, throwing them at one cataclysm after another, because that's the only way it can feed itself. This movie is so informed by the obligations of franchise that its new slate of heroes drop onto the world from a literal floating slate. The Eternals' rebellion against the Grand Design (as well as their repeated destruction of Kingo's cameras) symbolizes Eternals' resistance to being a Marvel movie. These characters don't want to be action figures. Fans who complain that the Eternals always want to discuss their feelings miss the point: that's what characters in a story are supposed to do. It's not that the movie lacks a villain; the established rules of MCU storytelling are the villain that gets in the way of these heroes' happiness. It's nice that Ajak decides that Earth is worth saving, but it's depressing that the reason why she decides it's worth saving is that it produced superheroes.

This symbolic framing of Eternals as a war waged by Marvel characters against Marvel Studios helps decipher what otherwise are incomprehensible character choices. Kingo's puzzling exit from the final fight is actually in consonance with the rules of his assigned role: as the character who is most aware of the conventions of superhero fiction (it's no coincidence that his superpower is making literal pew pew fingers), he chooses the right moment to leave the movie and repackage himself for the next one. He survives by following the game. Sprite goes the opposite way: her victory is that she's no longer a Marvel character. She was stuck as an unchanging piece in a game she didn't ask to play. So she wins by refusing to play any longer.

Give some thought to the fact that what saves Sprite, and the world, is the power of transformation. The message couldn't be clearer: the MCU needs to change, because the alternative is the existential abomination (and the narrative laziness) of treating people as instruments. It's a horrifying twist that Arishem, the ultimate producer of the show, gets to literally take these characters out of the movie and dress them up again for their assigned roles in the next one.

Coming to terms with that absurdity is the breaking point that drives Ikaris to kill himself after his defeat: the people of Earth were never people to him, just instruments. Accordingly, he saw his own life as a mere instrument of the Grand Design. Once the mission was frustrated, he couldn't accept that he was responsible for choosing his own purpose; he needed to have it scripted for him. So he followed the plot of his own myth, and flied toward the sun. (Director Chloé Zhao knew exactly what she was doing when she took inspiration from Zack Snyder's Man of Steel when designing her nihilistic and ultimately self-negating version of Ikaris, because that is the logical consequence of a Snyder-style Superman.)

This is the kind of shaking up that the MCU desperately needs. This is the kind of outsider perspective that can save superhero movies from endless self-cannibalization. But in all likelihood, Marvel executives (and fans) will bemoan the lack of explosions, fail to get the intended warning, and go back to the regularly scheduled show. They don't want to miss the end of the world—again.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Second Look: The City We Became by N K Jemisin

 A second look at N.K, Jemisin’s 2020 Hugo Finalist novel, THE CITY WE BECAME

In 2020, Adri Joy reviewed N K Jemisin’s The City We Became, available here at Nerds of a Feather.

With the novel now a Hugo Finalist, and me, as the author, as a native New Yorker having re-read the book recently in audio, I thought a second look  at the book was in order to explore other facets of the novel, and the audiobook in particular. Do read Adri’s excellent review first, as I will be covering somewhat different ground here. 

While I had highly enjoyed reading the book in ebook last year, my choice of re-reading it audio, first a way to fill some loose hours in my listening schedule and a way to tag back into the book in order to rank it as a Hugo Finalist on my ballot. I was, however, riveted from the beginning for a number of reasons.

The choice of narrator, Robin Miles, is an excellent choice. Miles has worked with Jemisin before (notably on the Broken Earth trilogy) and has a very good voice for Jemisin’s word choice and sentence style. It’s a wonderfully immersive performance on her part, and her voice kept me listening, to the point of NPR style “Driveway moments” throughout the production. This is a book I could have done even better listening to it on a long driving trip.

The use of sound in the audiobook was inspired. While this is not a full cast production, and just has the aforementioned Miles as narrator, the production is not content to just use her considerable vocal talents. The audiobook employs some sound effects and tricks to help immerse the reader into, particularly, the cosmic horror of the novel in a way that the print novel doesn’t quite manage. (To be fair, the print novel has the map, which the audiobook does lack, but I think that with the choice of that map or the audio tricks and use of sound, it really is a dead heat as to which is better). 

Immersion of the city and its characters  is carried by both the sound design and the narrator. Take each of the incarnated boroughs. In each, Miles brings the voice to life, almost painfully so in the personage of Staten Island for reasons I will explain below, but they are not only distinct in overall diction, but also accent. Staten Island’s accent, Brooklyn’s accent, Bronx’s accent are all three different flavors of the diction of New York that really come through. It isn’t so surprising that, given their origins, that Queens and Manhattan don’t show this distinction in diction, but the “native” New Yorkers of the boroughs showcase the variety of accents in New York. I am glad that Jemisin made the choice of having Queens be an immigrant, so that she, and her subsequently voiced accent, is not the nasal Queens accent that viewers of The Nanny mistakenly seem to think is the dominant or only one in New York.

One of the joys of re-reading a book is to come across the favorite bits, the set pieces, the small moments, the character bits, the tapestry of words that stick with you. The audiobook of The City We Became delivered that re-immersion into the world of the novel in spades. From Manny’s awkward introduction to the city (which reminded me, now a bit of The Freshman) to the confrontation on the FDR Drive, to the “Ding Ho”, to the utter out of NYC place beauty that is the abandoned City Hall Station, the novel and all of its goodness came back to vivid life. It made me homesick all over again. And I realize to my horror and shame something I didn’t realize when I read the book--I’ve never been to Inwood Park and seen Shorakkopoch Rock for myself. I need to correct this the next time I am in NYC. The novel, especially in its audio production, loves and adores New York City and its fractally complex multi-faceted nature. New York really does contain multitudes and the novel gets that. Manhattan, Queens, Bronx and Brooklyn each feels like itself, and also New York, and it is joyous.

And then there is Staten Island. Disclaimer: I AM from Staten Island, it is my home borough and in deep ways, that borough still is deep in my DNA, the good and the bad. The darker sides of Staten Island, its proud self reliant standoffish independence, its wanting to be walled off from NYC, if not the rest of America, really came through in this audio edition and hit me in a way that the print book did not. At first it was nostalgia and memory, with Aislyn in the Ferry Terminal, and then into the less charitable sides of what Staten Island is like. I grew up next to very many people like Aislyn and her family, particularly her father. One might even more uncharitably say that if I had had a sister, she could have been a lot like Aislyn, for good and for bad. The City We Became in audiobook gets that Staten Island experience, that Staten Island mentality, mindset and feel in a way that was a bit of a punch to the face. And yet, the fate of Staten Island, however a reader might think is somewhat deserved, is a tragedy to me that pains me, and I am very curious how it carries forward into subsequent books.

Overall, then, listening to the audiobook has had the salutary effect of raising my high opinion of the novel even further. I daresay that the novel is better and more effective in audio than its already impressive result in print, and I will be looking to get the subsequent volumes of the trilogy in audio as well as ebook. Even more than the text, the audiobook of The City We Became brought me fully and irretrievably to the city that I may have left bodily years ago, but has never, and will never leave me. In the acknowledgements, Jemisin says that this novel is an homage to the city and she hopes she got it right. 

This ex-pat New Yorker, this ex-pat Staten Islander, thinks that she certainly did.

---

Reference: Jemisin, N.K. The City We Became ,[Daw, 2020]

 POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Microreview [book]: Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

An intricately layered and intriguing story about the encounter between our limited intellect and an incomprehensible otherworldly menace

Imagine you're an ant, living your tiny ant life in a nameless anthill. Then workers for a landscaping company suddenly show up and start digging up your home, forcing you and all of your kin to run for their lives. The mysterious newcomers use the sand to make cement and leave a pretty-shaped, well-proportioned statue with pleasing angles and nice colors in the place where your home used to be. When you visit neighboring anthills, you discover the same catastrophe has been happening for quite a while. No one knows why the gigantic creatures do that, but it's clear there's nothing ants can do to oppose them.

Now imagine that anthill is our planet, and you'll have an idea of the lives of the characters of Adrian Tchaikovsky's new space opera novel Shards of Earth.

Arthropod analogies are usually crude oversimplifications, but I'm sure Tchaikovsky would appreciate this one. His fiction is a vehicle for his longstanding obsession with invertebrate anatomies and societies, and the crowded Shards of Earth devotes plenty of space for creatures of this type. But this is not just a space opera about humans and lobsters exploring the galaxy and running away from mad cultists (although that's one part of it). It is a psychological journey through the process of reclaiming one's autonomy as a free, thinking and feeling entity, a journey made harder by the inescapable fact that such recognition of the self is dependent on the consciousness of a separate self. This may take the form of robot emancipation from human control or (more terrifyingly) humanity asserting its presence before an uncaring force.

In the universe of Shards of Earth, humankind lives spread across several worlds of varying inhabitability, a condition known as the Polyaspora, just over a century after Earth and our first colonies were turned into ruins by a wave of colossal alien megastructures made of an indestructible material, equipped with gravity-manipulating technology, and capable of rearranging matter at the atomic level to transform everything that comes near them into a perfect but dead work of art. They don't vaporize or crush or flatten: they beautify. Entire planets, with their cities and biospheres, are warped and twisted to make these curious-looking spiral flowers of devastation, monuments to their inhabitants' helpless fragility. In the human tongues, the unstoppable makers of these sculptures are called the Architects.

What ended the war with the Architects was the near-sacrifice of the Intermediaries, a select group of artificially-enhanced telepaths capable of penetrating the invaders' minds and make the simple case, We are here. Please see us. This experience is deeply traumatizing and often fatal for those who undergo it, no less because any spaceship that dares to come close enough to an Architect for an Intermediary to be able to make their mental plea is also close enough to be unmade and remade as an exquisite piece of abstract debris. When one Intermediary finally made contact and forced the Architects to notice the thinking nature of humanity, the Architects, after eighty-four years of horror, simply left.

The novel takes place thirty-nine years after this costly victory. And it seems like the Architects are back.

Although this is a universe that has telepaths and FTL travel (and where only the former can safely do the latter), its rules lean toward the hard end of the science fiction spectrum. So it came as an interesting surprise to me when I recognized which philosophical underpinnings supported the base of the fictional building. I must confess I never expected a space opera so rich with solid biological and geological detail to draw inspiration from Hegelian absolute idealism of all things, but here we are. Beneath the political machinations and successive backstabbings (and some literal stabbings) provoked in the panic over the Architects' return, Shards of Earth is also doing something more ambitious: it's making a statement about the nature of freedom and the conditions required for it to be an effective reality. Numerous factions in this universe are confronted with decisions regarding their freedom or the surrender thereof; there are the robots that gain independence from humans, but there are also the new generations of telepath pilots working under slavery contracts, and a clone army of female soldiers loyal only to their genetic lineage, and a strange religion that promises safety from the Architects in exchange for political submission to a regime of alien bivalves. There is a recurring theme of master/slave dynamics throughout the text. If my reading of the novel is correct, freedom in this universe is understood as requiring a gesture of mutual acknowledgment.

But, as it turns out, mutual acknowledgment is the most dangerous thing that exists.

In chapter 4 of his Phenomenology of Spirit, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel spoke of what he called a "master/slave" dialectic, the process whereby consciousness becomes self-consciousness via the interaction with another like itself. According to Hegel, self-consciousness exists inasmuch as it is recognized, but the process of recognition needs to be mutual. Two interacting self-consciousnesses can only recognize themselves when they recognize each other. While the category of other is initially defined in negative terms, as the things that are not-myself, this interaction of minds calls for letting this other make a claim to selfhood, that is, to admit that a thing that is not-myself is legitimately another self. This process necessarily looks unequal to each of the participants, because each can only fully perceive itself. Hegel describes this mutual proving of worth as a life-and-death struggle, an assertion of existence that is only prevented from resulting in the negation of the other's existence by that other's own assertion. Therefore, achieving full recognition requires exposing one's life, risking for a moment its negation by the other. He called this a "master/slave" dialectic because each participant in the interaction of minds exerts power over the other, both seeking to negate and exposed to being negated. Crucially, each participant plays the role of mediator in the interaction, or, depending on who is translating Hegel, an Intermediary.

Likewise, Tchaikovsky's novel describes the mental contact between the Intermediaries and the Architects in terms of an exposure of the self, an almost-annihilation that lays bare every truth about human life. The protagonist, a veteran telepath of the first Architect war, experiences this mental communication as a battle where he faces unblinkingly the fullness of his fear of death and where the prize to be conquered is a tiny instant of being seen. That's all it would take to save the galaxy's billions of souls, but each attempt taxes him to the last drop of his willpower. It takes all that he is, all that he has, all that he can, to go the long and treacherous way to hello.

In Shards of Earth, it is rare to be seen as one truly is. Factions with evocative names, whose poetry alone makes the reader want to know more about them (Broken Harvest, Mordant House, the Parthenon, the Betrayed), routinely spread lies and propaganda about one another, misrepresenting their respective roles in the war to gain an advantage before the next one. As inconvenient as it is to be seen inaccurately, it pales to the horror of being fully seen by an unseen other, which in this novel's universe is what intelligent creatures experience during FTL travel. In the realm beyond ordinary space called unspace, objects do not physically exist, but minds perceive a hidden presence watching them at all times. Over time, this sensation is beyond the mental strength of all but Intermediaries. If the Architects represent an aberrant form of the Hegelian other which cannot be negated but can indisputably negate you, the presence lurking in unspace represents a Hegelian other which is already denied, for it is not there, yet you fear what it may mean for your realness if that nonexistent other were to acknowledge you.

Because robots, too, are vulnerable to unspace, they are declared to be intelligent and ultimately granted independence from humans, nominally as a reward for having participated in the war. To put it in Hegelian terms, they cease to be things because something else, no matter its hiddenness, perceives them as not-things. The moment of recognition is the moment of freedom. This noteworthy reversal of the master/slave relationship is, however, in agreement with the Hegelian philosophy of identity, and is mirrored in our protagonist's refusal to be bound to any one faction after years of fighting the Architects. As Hegel explains, "The individual who has not risked their life may well be recognized as a person, but they have not attained to the truth of this recognition as a self-sufficient self-consciousness." In the Hegelian system, as well as, apparently, in Shards of Earth, risking your life is necessary and sufficient to earn you your autonomy.

You don't need to have read German idealism to enjoy Shards of Earth. It remains an endlessly entertaining adventure about the struggle for human survival. It has amazing alien landscapes, and fortunately for us, it pauses for long enough to give each of them enough description for you to get a complete picture before jumping to the next world. It has complex alien societies, most of them inspired, in classic Tchaikovsky fashion, after Earth invertebrates, but made believable and relatable by the power of wordcraft. It has plenty of political intrigue to give you your fill of spy mystery. But behind it all, it has copious food for thought. It explores what it means to truly reach another being and not lose yourself in the process. Feel free to lose yourself in this wonderful book. But be sure to come back.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +2 for meticulous worldbuilding, +1 for not once losing its firm hold on the reader's interest.

Penalties: −2 for just throwing the reader into an incredibly complicated galaxy of opposed factions and species with little warning. There is a detailed chronology at the end of the book, which finally lays out who is angry at whom and why, but it would have been a lot more welcome at the start.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Shards of Earth [Tor, 2021].

WandaVision could have been the greatest thing to ever happen to TV

Just like its titular protagonist, WandaVision had incalculable creative potential it didn't know what to do with

What did we just see?

What strange creation burst onto our screens?

It was an erudite metafictional work that played with the rules of television language and blended its formal limitations into meaningful parts of its content in ways that would have delighted Marshall McLuhan.

It was a deconstruction of television's role as the most effective vehicle by which Western culture codifies and reproduces its normative expectations of the bourgeois family.

It was a celebration of the ritual of sitting in front of television as a family-building experience.

It was the finally legally viable, much-theorized, long-awaited, first official link between the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the X-Men.

It was an allegory of Gnostic mysticism.

It was a deep exploration of the psychology of trauma, crafted by taking abstract notions of bereavement, idealization, nostalgia, fantasizing, denial and derealization, and making them tangible elements that could be legibly used as pieces of emotional narration.

It was a captivating display of Elizabeth Olsen's full acting range.

It was all geekdom could talk about for two months.

It was but an intermediate chapter in a larger, unending franchise it was designed to segue into.

It was a missed opportunity.

But what is the MCU, if not missed opportunities persevering?

Part 1

Which witch watchers are real witch watchers?

Since the release of WandaVision's first episode, its viewers aligned into two factions: one, composed of dedicated fans, deeply versed in comics lore, experienced in hunting Easter eggs, avid for all-explaining theories, and enthusiastically supportive of the Marvel narrative formula; and another, taken from the wider general population, less equipped to catch the references (and less inclined to look for them), not so invested in controversies over canon, and attracted to the show mostly by the curiosity that any experimental piece of storytelling was bound to generate. Both groups had their own reasons to love WandaVision, as well as their own reasons to become disillusioned with it.

The first group could barely contain their excitement. Were we going to see Mephisto on screen? Or maybe Chthon? Or Immortus? How about Wonder Man? Is this Nightmare's doing? Or the High Evolutionary's? Is the rabbit Nicholas Scratch? Will Monica Rambeau's engineer friend turn out to be Reed Richards? Could Dottie secretly be Moonglow? Or is she Morgan le Fay? Will Ultron make a comeback? Are we finally getting mutants? Who is the secret cameo? TELL ME!!!!!!!!!!

(My favorite theory was that intergalactic TV producer Mojo was the big villain. Oh, well.)

This group had no patience for the playful sitcom setting of the show's first episodes: they demanded answers. Some of them earned their moment of internet fame for complaining that they couldn't watch all nine episodes in one sitting, which sparked plenty of discussion on how Netflix has spoiled us and how Disney knows exactly how to manage hype for maximum effect (see: the weekly release schedule of The Mandalorian, which fans were OK with). Members of this group didn't come to WandaVision for the small personal moments, or the symbolism, or the homage to television history, or the visual artistry. The experience they were hungry for was the completion of a jigsaw puzzle: where WandaVision fit in the bigger narrative of the MCU, which other productions it was paving the way for, which storylines from the comics were going to be adapted, which favorite villains were due for an appearance.

These viewers got very upset with WandaVision's style.

The second faction may have included many Marvel fans as well, but these were more varied. Older viewers with a fondness for classic sitcoms, Disney+ subscribers raised on princess tales, Marvel newcomers who never had money for comic books, film buffs fascinated by non-conventional formats, students of communication science, grief counselors, anyone, really. This group didn't much care for the hidden MCU references; they watched WandaVision for the ways in which it rewrote the rulebook of audiovisual storytelling.

This second group didn't mind the sitcom scenes. That was the part they liked best.

The curious effect of this divide is that each faction enjoyed WandaVision for exactly the same elements that irritated the other faction. To hear their criticism, the show had both too much family drama and too little, too much flashy superheroing and too little.

Sometimes, that kind of disagreement can degenerate into an argument on who is qualified to comment. No one is immune to this kind of narcissism; I must confess a little piece of me dies every time someone talks of Mission: Impossible as if it had been invented by Tom Cruise. To me, that's not Mission: Impossible. To me, it's Jim Phelps and the self-destructing laser discs. But I also know there are fans for whom it's Dan Briggs and the self-destructing tapes. So I have to recognize I don't own the stories I love, and if Mission: Impossible means Tom Cruise and life-threatening stunts to you, have fun.

Comic book fans need to remember this. The process of adaptation implies bringing a story before a different type of audience, and no one has the right to ask to vet your credentials before you can give an opinion on a piece of art that you have experienced. Some comic collectors aren't particularly into cinema, and some moviegoers don't frequent comic bookstores; that's fine. But Marvel Studios has tried too hard to appeal to both extremes of a divide that need not exist. You shouldn't have to have read any Marvel comics before discussing a Marvel movie, but if you have, that only gives you some context, not any higher expert status. If you're a media studies professor, that gives you sharper analytic tools, but not exclusive authority.

As for me, I'm a television addict. WandaVision gave me and my tribe exactly what we wanted.

Part 2

American dream

The United States can be infuriatingly self-centered. It tends to take for granted that its culture is the sum of human culture, that its worries are the sum of human worries, that its fate is the sum of human fate. Such unquestioned assumptions can have a corrosive effect if you're growing up in the Third World and getting your ideas about life from a nonstop diet of American media.

Those of us born and raised outside the US know far more about it than the US cares to know about us. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a dearly beloved classic that insults India in appalling ways you don't get until you listen to actual Indians. Romancing the Stone has been praised as an exemplary case of scriptwriting, but its botched representation of Colombia should consign it to the trash bin.

And still, we on the outside can tell exactly which parts of The West Wing are realistic and which are impossible wish fulfillment. But that takes years of consuming and processing lots of other shows and movies and news pieces and novels. You don't get a full sense of Japanese society from watching only high school anime. And you don't get the US if all you've seen of it is the sanitized wholesomeness of sitcoms.

That's the stunted stage where Wanda Maximoff remains stuck. In her case, the laborious process by which every child develops their cultural competence was interrupted by violence. She had her brother's company as a valuable anchor, but her understanding of friendship and loyalty was warped by Hydra's indoctrination, and her understanding of romance was forged by I Dream of Jeannie. Of course, millions of Americans grew up with I Dream of Jeannie and didn't model their own lives after a suburban fantasy, but young Wanda had no other referents to learn from. Her country was at war. There was not a normal society to welcome her after the loss of her parents. All she could use to build her personality on was fiction—a heavily distorted form of it. It's unlikely that she ever watched The Americans, but when she tried to have a normal married life in the suburbs, she was putting on an act.

I can empathize with her situation. I wasn't born in Sokovia, but I was born in Colombia; I know a thing or two about growing up in a society where nothing works and the few times you see people treat each other with kindness occur between laugh tracks. To the average American, the sitcom says, Look at these clueless fools bumbling their way through life; aren't they hilarious? To the exhausted inhabitant of a poor country that is falling apart, it says, Look at these happy faces in their enormous houses; don't you wish that were you?

In comic books, ersatz versions of Eastern Europe (Sokovia, Latveria, along with Kasnia on the opposite aisle of the bookstore) have served as convenient settings to depict the unwashed Other in contrast to the Free World without getting in too much trouble with actual history. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the likes of Sokovia acquired a new usefulness as unstable hellholes where you could write war plot after war plot with no end in sight. It would be worthwhile to study what the generations raised on these hypermilitaristic stories think of daily life in Third World countries.

(I'm sure the results would be illuminating. I know what you think of Colombia.)

So we have here a double-edged distortion, a see-through funhouse mirror: what American cultural productions tell the rest of the world about the US, and what the US tells itself about the rest of the world.

WandaVision explores the character of Wanda as a war survivor, as a war criminal, as a bride, as a widow, as a daughter, as a mother, as a superheroine, as a supervillain, as a cosmic force and as an abuser, but before doing all that, it has to explore Wanda as a fan, as a consumer of pop culture. Do Sokovians produce their own movies? We'll never know. Wanda sure didn't watch any. Whatever lessons she absorbed about her potential in adult life came from a culture that had no interest in her.

Part 3

Riot girl

It's possible that movie studios never find the right way to tell the Dark Phoenix Saga. It's a peculiar kind of storyline that doesn't fit well with the core message of the X-Men, which is that people should only be feared for what they do, not what they are. The case of Jean Grey illustrates that it's dicey to label someone as a world-ending threat; once you cross that line, as the comic writers did when they chose to make her literally blow up a planet, it's pointless to apply empathy. You're either a character or a monster. If you can't be reasoned with, you have to be eliminated. This is the poisonous line of thinking that conspiracy theories love to feed on.

It's too easy to dehumanize the superhuman and derail the entire message of a story. The archetype-defining tale of female power that is Sailor Moon treated the world-ending warrior that is Sailor Saturn with more humanity than any Marvel production has treated the Phoenix-possessed Jean Grey. The key difference is the authorial choice to have the powerful woman not be in full control of herself. This approach resonates with the sexist history of psychiatry, which used to attribute every problem in a woman's life to a misplaced uterus. If she can't govern herself, the reasoning goes, it's someone's job to step in and do it for her.

This failure mode for social relations is the main conflict of Captain Marvel. That was a peculiar sort of hero's journey, mainly because it didn't follow the standard form of the hero's journey. It focused on the ways powerful women are feared and therefore manipulated to act against their own interests. In this modified heroine's journey, the victory condition is not to strive to acquire new power, but to know yourself and realize the power your already have.

As the ancient Gnostics would put it, salvation comes by knowledge.

Or as the Mahayana school of Buddhism put it, enlightenment comes by realizing that you are already enlightened.

(More on this below.)

WandaVision adds a twist to this story format (one that we also saw in Dark Phoenix): the manipulation of a powerful woman by another powerful woman. Toward the end of the series, the more experienced witch Agatha Harkness expresses her astonishment at Wanda's natural talent. Creating the fantasy world of Westview should be beyond the abilities of someone who hasn't heard the basics of magic theory. After some more probing, Agatha concludes that Wanda fits the profile of a foretold destroyer: the Scarlet Witch, who according to legend is invested with the chaotic power of raw creation. Now, creation in itself doesn't sound like a bad thing. Two-thirds of the world worship a creator, and some of the more traditional (and overused) portrayals of womanhood celebrate the symbolic attributes of fertility in its potential for creation and renewal. But Agatha is alluding to something more fundamental: the primordial horror of rewriting reality. Much like the Phoenix, the Scarlet Witch is a force of the universe.

We're familiar with that notion. In the real world, many ancient myths mention a protean being of eternal chaos that had to be defeated before an orderly world could be made. Crucially, this monster was often female. To those of us committed to full equality of rights, it feels strange to think that there's anything scary about female power. But it's not hard to explain how so many civilizations could have gotten that idea. Do you remember what I said above about Americans thinking that they set the standard for culture? Other forms of privilege work the same way. In this case, it's men thinking that we set the standard for authority.

Superhero stories have been helping, very gradually, to normalize the portrayal of powerful women as role models instead of as ticking bombs. The problem for the MCU is that rewriting reality is kind of a done thing, now that Thanos has come and gone. The character of Wanda risks entering the Dragon Ball spiral of escalating power levels until there's nothing left to throw at our heroes that can seriously challenge them and still make for a compelling story. The Dark Phoenix Saga was reportedly conceived to prevent Jean Grey from slipping into that dead end. However, it's a plot that has been told in so many cartoons and movies that Jean Grey has become a tragic figure, doomed to become the Phoenix in every adaptation where she appears.

Not because of ancient prophecy, but because of established Marvel lore (and corporate acquisition, and popular demand), Wanda was always doomed to become the Scarlet Witch.

In the comics, the Scarlet Witch is called a Nexus being, a fulcrum point where all universes converge. Since we already know Wanda's next adventure in the movies will be a thing called the Multiverse of Madness, we can assume her Nexus status will come into play. But if the writers are not careful with how they handle ever rising threats, this superpowered character could turn into something that's even more dangerous to a fictional setting: a boring one.

Part 4

A syncretic creation myth

In the short story The Library of Babel by Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, the universe is described as a hivelike lattice that stores printed volumes with all possible combinations of the alphabet, which necessarily means it contains all stories (including a copy of The Library of Babel). It also has all versions with typos and all forms of meaningless gibberish, with no combination less valid than another, because it’s always possible that “dhcmrlchtdj” happens to mean something in an undiscovered language.

So, the universe is a beehive. And its cells have every variation on every possible story, such that even nonsense has a meaning that doesn’t depend on your understanding.

Now you can see why I was pumped up by the reveal that Wanda's world, built from stories, had a hexagonal shape. Add a mysterious beekeeper to the show, and I'm sold.

The idea that we live in a world of fiction has been explored far more extensively in Asian media than over here. We are heirs of Aristotle, who taught that things are what they are. But in cultures influenced by Vedic literature, the doctrine called Maya holds that we live under a perceptual illusion, and the true nature of reality is kept hidden from us. In the West, Gnosticism preached something along those lines, but after it was defeated by Christianity, writers basically forgot that Plato had ever mentioned a cave. There's the occasional oddity, such as Pedro Calderón de la Barca's stage play Life Is a Dream, but for the most part, no one took Descartes' deceiving demon seriously and Western narratives very rarely explored this idea until The Matrix catapulted it into mass popularity. The Jumanji franchise has recently stepped into the conversation about characters from the real world thrown into a hellscape of pixels, but in Japan, isekai is a well-established genre with a vast tradition.

The Gnostic version of Jumanji (now there's a sentence you didn't expect to meet in your life) goes like this: human beings suffer because this world is broken. It's the defective work of the Demiurge, an imperfect being who, while overcome by passions, unwittingly made a world of falsehood in a clumsy attempt to imitate the ideal world. What we perceive as solid matter is an evil substance, at war with the pure realm of thought. In the Cerinthian tradition, the Demiurge itself is not evil; it doesn't even understand its own nature or power. Where all Gnostics agree is that this state of affairs cannot be fixed. The only solution to our suffering is to be released from the prison of falsehood so we can return to where we came from.

In WandaVision, the enmity between matter and thought is made literal in the dual character of Vision. Both versions of him proceed from the Mind Stone, but now they are split and opposed. As a final showdown in a superhero blockbuster, we certainly didn't expect a disembodied mind and a mindless body to debug the wording of a programming instruction via thought experiment from Ancient Greece, but that choice of tactic is such a Vision thing to do that we'd do well to pause and consider the ideas presented in the discussion.

Against the physical form of Vision stands the idea of Vision. But it's not a pure Platonic idea: it's one mediated by Wanda's psychic state. The idea of Vision can only exist through Wanda's thoughts, and he vanishes if he steps outside of her constructed mindscape. In a beautiful touch from the writers, this character is a literal embodiment of the common metaphor of responding to the death of a loved one by keeping their memory alive.

On the other hand, we have Vision's original material body, rearranged into something other than its prior self. This occurs, in fact, to any matter that enters Westview: it is altered in its external attributes, but not in its essential nature.

Matter and thought, both being the same thing. A zombie and a ghost, both being the same person. The command to destroy Vision is an urge toward self-annihilation; but the Vision has already been destroyed. What exists now is and is not Vision.

We need a way out of the trap of duality.

In the Indian philosophical system of Advaita Vedanta, the opposition between essential thought and essential matter is rejected as illusory, and the way to dissolve this error and realize the interconnectedness of reality is by reasoned introspection. That which is empirically real and that which is conceived as real are replaced by that which is real in an absolute sense. There never was an opposition.

So Vision reasons with himself, and that brings his liberation.

Part 5

Do your homework

Everyone who loves television (or narrative theory in general), even if they're not Marvel fans, should watch WandaVision. They should. Period. And it’s an enormous pity that such a fantastic production is all but inapproachable for those who haven’t watched a couple dozen movies beforehand. WandaVision can be immensely rewarding at times, but it depends on a lot of assumed knowledge. You need to have seen Age of Ultron to even know who the protagonist is, but she doesn’t get a proper dramatic arc until Civil War, whose plot you won’t follow if you haven’t seen Winter Soldier, which requires knowledge of The First Avenger. And still that won’t suffice. Her romance with Vision doesn’t emerge until Infinity War, which you won’t understand without first going through the whole lot of Homecoming, Ragnarok, Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther and Doctor Strange. Finally, Wanda’s story of traumatic loss is not complete without Endgame, but this one revisits scenes from The Avengers and The Dark World, so you also need to check those; and even then, Endgame makes no sense without Captain Marvel and Ant-Man and the Wasp.

*takes deep breath*

And I still haven’t gotten to the huge deal that is the casting of Evan Peters as Wanda’s pretend brother, which will mean nothing to you unless you’ve seen Days of Future Past (plus a short conversation in Apocalypse), but to understand Days of Future Past, you need to have seen First Class and The Last Stand (plus the post-credits scene of The Wolverine), but the plot of The Last Stand is a direct continuation of the first two X-Men films; and to even begin to make sense of why I’m bringing up a completely separate franchise into the conversation, you need to be acquainted with the legal entanglements that spread Marvel characters across different film studios, as well as with Disney’s shopping spree of intellectual properties.

(I probably wouldn't even have been interested in the X-Men movies if the national broadcasting networks of my country hadn't decided to buy the 90s animated show.)

I thank all the gods that these movies don’t also expect me to cross-check the piles of books where these characters first appeared. I'm told I'm better off this way, because Wanda's timeline in the comics is a hopeless mess of retcons, but my point remains: WandaVision is definitely not for the casual viewer. I'm sure there are hundreds of little jokes I missed because I never watched the old sitcoms that inspired its first episodes. I enjoyed the show all the same, but I have to admit how many years of movie plot it relies on. The mass of previous knowledge that Marvel productions are starting to demand of the audience is reaching concerning proportions. Those most devoted among the fans will be happy to complete all the required reading in preparation for each new film, but something worth analyzing is happening to pop culture.

In centuries past, it used to be the case that you couldn't hope to be thought of as a cultured person unless you knew your Homer and your Herodotus and your Cicero and your Seneca and whichever other authors became influential enough to make it into the canon. It was even possible to read everything worth reading in one lifetime. But of course, human beings kept writing, and creating new classics, and revising the canon, and making the task of getting your artistic education more and more complicated. You can't fully enjoy the Divine Comedy if you don't know who Virgil was. Don Quixote is best appreciated in comparison to the medieval tales it parodies. The typical inhabitant of the West knows that the Bible has influenced literature, but most people not raised in English have no idea of the gigantic legacy of the King James Version.

With the passage of time, the amount of media consumption that you need to have accumulated in order to be capable of more media consumption threatens to, well, consume all the time you have available. It's not just that the box office is saturated with sequels and remakes; it's that our current culture is a self-sustaining web of references and responses and winks to the audience and knowing allusions that creates an entry barrier for the uninitiated. Even the most original of 2020's big productions, Tenet, is emotionally unreadable without some familiarity with the established conventions of the spy thriller genre and the variations on the femme fatale trope that have been developed and reworked over decades of cinema (and to follow the worldbuilding, you must have the laws of thermodynamics fresh in your head).

Since Marvel Studios has sucked all the oxygen from pop culture to the point that it has basically become the pop culture, it can afford to not care that it's creating a hyper-niche of insider knowledge. For many fans, this will be a point of pride. But WandaVision doesn't behave as a piece of cheap entertainment for the masses. Its production draws from a staggering level of expertise and demands a comparable wealth of media literacy that alienated its own followers.

No one's asking Marvel to make art film. No one seriously thinks Marvel plans, or aspires, or needs to make art film. Scorsese has a solid point in that regard. But this time they made the tiniest motion in that direction, and it immediately enraged the binge watchers and the plot decoders. WandaVision proved that Marvel is capable of a more ambitious, more thoughtful type of story. But the studio has to have realized that it can't commit all the way it if wants to keep punching bad guys in spandex.

So, something like WandaVision will probably not be attempted again. Marvel knows what the fans want, and that is its curse.

Part 6

In Sokovia, television watches you

 

One-and-a-half decades of ridiculous revenue have given Marvel Studios an acute sense of what we expect and what we are likely to find enjoyable. At every step, WandaVision holds the reins of the relationship with its viewers. It knows it can get away with a moderately risky bet on metatextual allusions with vintage aesthetics and laugh tracks, because most of us will eat it up gladly. With an (almost) inconditionally loyal fanbase, why not try the hardest sell of all: a story about stories?

It is, of course, not a new concept. The trend toward obsessive self-referencing has been snowballing for a while now. The film version of Bewitched is a magic comedy about the production of magic comedies. Inception is a heist thriller about the production of heist thrillers. The Cabin in the Woods is a voyeuristic gorefest about the production of voyeuristic gorefests. The Last Jedi is an epic myth about the production of epic myths. And so on.

WandaVision is their proud descendant, but it’s more. It aspires to a greater sophistication, to not only revisit and dissect the clichés of television shows, but to reflect on the medium as a whole. By this point, the producers know how we overanalyze and dissect and theorize and obsess over every frame of every episode, and they have learned to anticipate our reactions, to account for our jumping to conclusions, to participate in the game with us. WandaVision is fully aware of the manner in which it is watched, and turns that relationship into part of its own narration.

Producers and viewers have grown too smart for each other. We know their tricks, and they know we know them, and we know they know us, and with each iteration it gets harder and harder to make something surprising, or just interesting for that matter, under such unrelenting scrutiny.

This web of mutual expectations resulted in WandaVision including a ton of red herrings that weren't related to any part of the plot; their function was to tantalize the portion of the viewers who were more familiar with the comic books. Speculation mushroomed across the internet with wild theories that proved to be all wrong. That they were wrong was not the point. That Marvel got you to spread the word was the point. Your obsession keeps the machine running.

There is now a generation that has grown up watching the MCU the way Wanda grew up watching sitcoms. Is WandaVision a warning? Is Marvel telling viewers to avoid going the way of Don Quixote and trying to live their lives as superpowered defenders of the universe clad in plot armor? There's no way Marvel produced an extended meditation on the psychological effect of pop culture without at some point reflecting on the psychological effect of their own creations as part of the pop culture. Decades from now, someone is going to write a metafictional analysis of what it did to us to live through the age when superheroes were everywhere. Maybe Marvel is anticipating that response and using WandaVision to tell us how they prefer to be remembered. It's not like Marvel hasn't already had issues with comic book readers mistaking their stories for guidelines and hurting people's lives in the process (*cough* Punisher *cough*).

By all means, watch superhero movies. They are part of the noble tradition of science fiction, which has earned its full memberhip in the ancient art of storytelling.

And watch WandaVision. Let it blow your mind. But don't lose your head.

Part 7

Avengers: Metagame

WandaVision may be about a mutant witch and a dead robot who somehow have children, but it's also a defiant answer to those who complain that Marvel is feeding us empty calories. For many fans, WandaVision may be their first exposure to metafictional techniques that have been known and studied for decades but now linger as rarely remembered curiosities and deserve to be brought back into the mainstream consciousness.

After Daffy Duck had a fight with his animator in the short Duck Amuck, I don't remember seeing a more powerful metafictional moment on screen than Vision shouting in frustration through the end credits of the sitcom he's trapped in. This acknowledgment of extradiegetic elements to drag them inside the story was a common trick in classic cartoons, such as an opera singer pulling a hair that was supposedly stuck on the projector in Magical Maestro or a fugitive running past the edge of the film in Dumb-Hounded.

(Animation director Tex Avery was the absolute master of demolishing the fourth wall, and his oeuvre will sate the hunger of WandaVision fans who've been left eager for more. Content warning for racial stereotypes.)

The Road Runner show took this blurring of the medium in an inward direction, with its repeated gag of Wile E. Coyote painting an extension of the road onto a wall and the Road Runner seamlessly stepping into that painted road because he, too, is a painted creation.

We may sing the praises of WandaVision for employing these techniques, but it obviously didn't invent them. What does make WandaVision unique is the incredibly complex way the metafiction relates to its theme relates to its format relates to its main cast relates to its worldbuilding relates to our cultural moment. We won't be able to watch sitcoms the same way again.

Worse, we won't be able to watch Duck Amuck the same way again. From any fictional character's standpoint, the tiniest rewrites have to look like moments of cosmic horror, glimpses of a force beyond all comprehension, the cruel whims of a sadistic torturer. We all remember that time Cow and Chicken discovered that the reason why they could only see their parents' legs was because that was all that existed of them. Now imagine Samantha in Bewitched having to accept a different man in her house who claims to be the husband she remembers. Imagine Lisa Simpson recalling her meeting with Bill Clinton more years ago than she's old. Imagine Malcolm's family struggling to not notice the troubled son who speaks manic monologues into the air. Imagine Daffy Duck watching sunflower petals sprout from his face.

People who live inside the TV lead oppressively absurd lives, and it's all your fault.

Just like cyberpunk should have ended with The Matrix, it's hard to say anything new in horror after The Cabin in the Woods. At long last, the monster is you. Yes, you. Ask your SimCity avatars if you don't believe me.

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch went for this angle, but its attempt to cast the viewer as the creative monster was limited by the choices put on the screen menus by the actual author of the episode. WandaVision uses the same terrified gaze and turns it toward itself: the editable world is controlled from within, with Wanda as executive producer, set designer, head writer, casting director, continuity supervisor and star of the show. No self-insert fanfic, no performative Instagram feed, no postmodern autofiction novel will ever top Wanda's total reinvention of her life.

(Yes, I know WandaVision is made by Marvel Studios. I'm talking about the WandaVision show that exists inside the WandaVision show, and it's wonderful, albeit slightly unnerving, that I have to add this disclaimer.)

Part 8

Lucid dreaming as therapy

The logic of sitcoms is that time never advances, which is why Lisa Simpson has sat in second grade for 32 years. There’s an appeal to this. Wanda has been losing loved ones and fighting world-ending threats her whole life; anyone in her position would jump at the chance to escape into make-believe. A perpetual present where time is no longer a concern seems the perfect subconscious release for a traumatized woman who lost the war to save the universe because her enemy had control over time. Wanda's foray as auteur of her own show is a convenient excuse to not have to move beyond the denial stage of grief.

Let's forget for a moment the capturing of a whole town. There's a version of this where Wanda's magical outburst could have extended only up to the walls of her house, letting her retreat into her fantasy without affecting anyone else. Would you have blamed her? Who among us didn't, as a child, wish to live inside the TV? I, for one, always knew I wanted to be friends with Captain Planet. Wanda's idea of protagonism is just somewhat more elaborate: a self-imposed Truman Show set in the fake Good Place by way of holodeck malfunction.

However, life does not work like a story. It does not have a showrunner with an arc in mind for you. Intriguing factoids are not clues leading to upcoming revelations; interpersonal conflict is not exciting; pivotal events do not carry inherent symbolism; accidents are not poetic justice. You can't rewind and edit the parts that disagree with you, and we're all grateful that you can't write off annoying characters if they lack charismatic appeal. Stories do need to resemble life to some degree to be understandable, but they have their own rules that have nothing to do with life. I'm not a fan of horror by any means, but I know that people who enjoy horror enjoy it precisely because they know it's not the way life works, so it lets them experience intense mental states without getting into actual danger. This ability to separate fact from fiction is crucial to humans. Much of the real world plainly makes no sense, and part of functioning capably as a mature person involves learning to allow life to make no sense. If there are protagonists at all, they only have power to push events for a few years and then retire to the history books. You're statistically unlikely to be one.

The refusal to come to terms with our insignificance is so incompatible with daily life in society that it's been recognized as clinically anomalous since the time Don Quixote was published. These days, we have a more specialized vocabulary to identify a range of psychological delusions. In Truman syndrome, for example, the patient is convinced that they're being filmed 24/7, that they're expected to perform an interesting life for countless unseen viewers, and that some hired producer is guiding the plot. In histrionic personality disorder, social behavior is exaggerated to appear more intense, more memorable, more picture-perfect. Derealization-depersonalization disorder makes the patient experience their own actions as if they were happening to somebody else and they were watching themselves from a third-person omniscient point of view. If you believe you're in a story, you need help. In Westview, everyone is screaming for help inside their hearts.

As serious as these conditions are, the perception of the world as artificial has seeped into common parlance. All through 2020, the Year of Suck, the world's favorite coping mechanism was to blame the "writers" of our show for the unbelievability of the increasingly horrific events we read in the news. What this joke shares with delusion disorders is the need to make sense of randomness. This frustration must be even heavier if you have reason to believe you can control the randomness. The constant thread through Wanda's life has been the chasm between her superhuman power and her inability to control the bad events that keep happening around her. When you have witnessed the violent deaths of your parents and your brother and your boyfriend (twice!), you may reach a very fragile mental state. You may develop a strong need to hold on to the belief that behind the absurdity of the world there must exist some ultimate meaning.

In the psychological conditions I described, that meaning is imagined to exist behind a fourth wall. Who is more delusional: Malcolm, who speaks to an audience no one else can see, or Dora the Explorer, who sincerely thinks she can hear you reply?

Unfortunately, WandaVision didn't handle well the resolution of Wanda's fantasy. She refused at first the unmistakable evidence that her neighbors were in pain, and by the time she let her worldbuilding spell expire, there are no signs that she grew as a person or learned to cope with her losses or felt any responsibility toward the town she took over.

There must be a T-shirt somewhere that says "I survived the Westview anomaly and all I got were these cool new superpowers."

Part 9

What did we learn today?

WandaVision's moral argument drops the ball badly. Perhaps in an overcorrection away from the "fear the powerful woman" trope, it makes every implausible effort to save Wanda from her deserved status as the villain of the show. The script wants to frame her relinquishing of control as a concession she makes to the town instead of her obvious obligation to innocents she enslaved. Monica even says the nonsensical line, "They’ll never know what you sacrificed for them," and I want the neighbors to yell back, "Thanks for nothing!" All of Wanda's losses happened before Westview, and she can recreate her memory of Vision at any time. She didn't make a sacrifice for her neighbors; she was forced to admit that they were victims. In the Unintended but Still Questionable Acts of Mind Control for Purposes of Boyfriend Resurrection department, WandaVision fares worse than Wonder Woman 1984.

To make Wanda look less bad, the show makes strange comparisons that require the rest of the villains to make choices that are just silly. S.W.O.R.D. director Tyler Hayward stops behaving like a competent adult after the Hex grows in size, and Agatha is reduced to explaining the plot to the audience and presenting a rather vague threat to our protagonist.

Indeed, what makes Agatha bad? Next to Wanda, she comes off as pretty tame. Let's see: she killed a puppy, and... captured fake Pietro, who might already have been one of Wanda's victims anyway, and... read the wrong books? Her magic absorbs attacks and drains her enemies, but that appears to be an intrinsic property, not a choice, so we should only judge her for what she plans to do with the skill, not for having it.

What she plans to do is take Wanda's powers. OK, that sounds kind of bad. But if the chaos magic of the Scarlet Witch is inherently dangerous, does it matter who has it? The script flatly avoids the question of whether anyone should have such immense power (and you know you're in trouble when Batman v. Superman handles a theme more honestly than your story), opting for the regressive stance that power should be kept in the hands of the one who was born with it (and it explicitly goes out of its way to point out that Wanda was born with it). Agatha may call Wanda "undeserving" to flatter herself, but the truth is that no one is worthy of having world-ending magic. The show doesn't present a strong case for why Wanda should get to keep that power other than the need to treat her as the heroine.

However, I must be fair here and judge Wanda by the same standard I just applied to Agatha. As overpowered as Wanda is, she doesn't plan to end the world. (And to be extra fair, we don't know for a fact that Agatha plans to end the world.) The conflict would have been more interesting if Agatha's concern for the world had been sincere instead of a fig leaf for her envy. After all, the obvious solution to "Wanda has a magical nuke she doesn't know how to control" is "Well, teach her, duh." But, unlike in the comics, this version of Agatha is not here to teach Wanda. She's here to kill puppies and cackle menacingly, and she's out of puppies to kill. If WandaVision wanted to use a villain who was truly worried about people having too much magic, it shouldn't have used Agatha; it should have used Mordo.

So let me talk about Sailor Moon for a minute.

In the live-action show Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, the plot of the original manga is followed more or less faithfully, with enough variations to make it worth checking out. To be sure, it's cornier than the state of Iowa, but the beautiful thing about Sailor Moon productions is that they're made without one drop of cynicism. The live-action version adds plenty of original twists, the best of which is Usagi's reaction to the death of her boyfriend and reincarnated consort Endymion. Whenever she gets too upset, the spirit of her previous life takes over and she becomes an uncaring force of destruction. At the end of the series, fully possessed by grief, she transforms Earth into a lifeless wasteland because, as she explains, she doesn't need a world that doesn't have Endymion.

(Don't you worry. As always happens in Sailor Moon, everything is fixed as soon as Usagi remembers she has an everything-fixing gemstone.)

I bring this up because this unstoppable apocalypse of sorrow is the picture Agatha wants to paint of Wanda, but the plot doesn't support that interpretation. When Wanda learns of the pain that the Hex is causing, she agrees that her neighbors must be freed. Wanda is not a dangerous person. She has dangerous tools, which is entirely another ethical question, and WandaVision is not consistently aware of the difference. All the harm she caused was involuntary. From a consequentialist perspective, that doesn't matter; she still owes each inhabitant of Westview an apology (and a check to pay for therapy). But if we add considerations of moral agency, she's not a standard villain, but an antivillain, a character whose good intentions lead to the wrong choice.

Science fiction writer Ben Bova defends the use of antivillains with the argument that no one actually wants to be bad, so the classical villain who not only does evil but essentially is evil is not an accurate representation of how human beings work.

Socrates would have agreed.

In the dialogues Protagoras and Euthydemus, Socrates introduced the position that today's philosophers call moral intellectualism, which holds that all we need in order to make the right choice is to learn which choice is right. This is so because everyone naturally wants to be good (take that, Calvinists). According to moral intellectualism, as soon as we know what's good, we will automatically do good things.

However, this reasoning smells... incomplete. Aristotle identified what was missing: if you explain wrongdoing as the product of ignorance, you remove the burden of responsibility. Wanda's circumstances provide an explanation, but in no way an absolution, for her actions. Too often in the real world, emotional abusers wield the excuse of having had an involuntary outburst to evade responsibility for hurting others. This is the scenario Aristotle warned about. If we don't give real people a pass for being jerks while upset, we should expect better from our idealized heroes.

Part 10

Social distancing

Not only are the inhabitants of Westview trapped in a TV setting: Marvel Studios is trapped in TV, because we’re all trapped in our homes and can't go to the movies. Of course, the show was conceived and produced before the coronavirus quarantine, but circumstances in the real world have given this story additional symbolic impact. (That's the fun of literary criticism: EVERYTHING gives context.) As a cosmic being, Wanda is much bigger than the world she’s created for herself, in the same manner that the MCU is bigger than Disney+, and the central question throughout the series is whether she (and the MCU, and the rest of us) can, or will, get out.

For over a year now, we've been compelled to treat our homes as the sum total of our world. Maybe we can leave the house to take a walk. Forget about leaving the neighborhood. Because we need to make sense of randomness, and our way of doing it is to compare life to stories, our ongoing confinement has frequently been compared in the press to the plot of the novel The Plague by French existentialist Albert Camus.

I find that comparison unnecessarily gloomy. But if we insist on dragging French existentialism into a dicussion about what it's like to watch WandaVision during a global pandemic, let me recommend a more topical title.

In Jean-Paul Sartre's stage play No Exit, hell is described as an ordinary room with regular people. The protagonists can barely stand each other's company, and they say all the time that they want to leave, but when one of them finally finds a way out, he just can't go. He has unfinished business with his fellow damned souls. He wants them to validate his existence, to grant him the role of a man so he can be one.

Existentialist philosophy has much to say about the problem of mistakenly believing we are the roles our situation assigns to us. When a goverment bureaucrat denies you what is obviously fair because some regulation demands otherwise, they're not acting as a human being. They're acting as their social role. Sam the Sheepdog doesn't punch Ralph the Wolf because he personally dislikes him; in fact, they share a pleasant teatime outside of office hours. But when they go back to the workplace, whoever occupies the position "Sheepdog" has the function of punching whoever occupies the position "Wolf." The setting, and not their personal preferences, dictates which actions are and aren't possible.

That's the psychological torment of living in Westview and being forced to play a role instead of having your life, but that's also the everyday experience of any stratified society where the roles must be followed regardless of their usefulness. During the Trump era, the position "Patient" stood in a specific relationship with respect to the position "Associate Director for Communication at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention," which in turn stood in a specific relationship with respect to the position "Head of State." When the latter of those roles has the function of telling the second one what to tell the first one, and that first one has the function of relying on the other two for basic survival, you readily notice that human well-being hinges on something that transcends how obediently the roles are played.

The very usage of the word "role" demonstrates yet another way in which narrative thinking distorts our ability to describe the world. It makes us judge each other by what categories they fit in, instead of what they actually do. In fan culture, the position "Comic Book Collector" has claimed certain functions with respect to the position "Casual Viewer" that are not stipulated in any law of society. In the most vicious corners of the internet, made-up roles like "Fake Fan" and "Newbie" are abusively assigned to people perceived to fall outside of the stratified order. Well, this Newbie says that Wanda is not the heroine of WandaVision. Her actions indisputably condemn her. She's only given the role of heroine by the writers of the show, and we're expected not to notice when she fails to play it.

(Fun trivia: the original French title of No Exit is Huis Clos, which literally means "closed door," but is also a technical term referring to legal procedures carried out in private. In English, the equivalent expression is the Latin phrase in camera, which literally means "in a room," but which acquires an interesting resonance when one considers that all the violations of privacy in the hell that is Westview happen on camera.)

Now that the plague runs free around the world and we've become deadly to each other, one can reluctantly agree with Sartre when he says that hell is other people. In Westview, that other people who make up hell live inside your head.

Part 11

Stay tuned

As long as we can't leave our homes, theaters will have to wait. But Marvel can't. The post-credits tease of the WandaVision finale promises the return of Monica Rambeau in future productions, and lest anyone miss the message, this scene is set in a movie theater, reassuring the audience that this visit to TV land was temporary and we'll all be swarming back into cinemas soon enough. I don't see how Marvel expects us to do that, what with things the way they are, but at the end of the day, Marvel is a corporation. Compared to Disney+ subscriptions, the box office is where you make the big money, and Marvel has already suffered through a whole year without releasing any films. So you can expect 2021 and possibly 2022 to deliver a fire hose of new content. As the MCU is fond of saying, the Scarlet Witch will return.

More than the moral confusion, this is what ultimately breaks the charm of WandaVision. It was never going to be allowed to be its own thing, as much as it deserved the chance. That corporate choice makes perfect sense as a corporate choice, but it leaves a disappointing taste. The faction of fans who live for the fights and the explosions will have The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, while those of us who saw ourselves reflected in Wanda's emotional struggle will head elsewhere (or rewatch WandaVision as a yearly ritual).

This leads back to what I was saying earlier about Marvel's sense of where it fits in the culture and what kind of stories it's interested in telling. While all this is happening, Paramount+ is planning a rainbow of Star Trek productions targeted at all kinds of audiences. This can work because the Star Trek setting is explicitly built on openness and diversity. It has plenty of room for drama and comedy and mystery and adventure and romance and whatever else the producers wish to add. The MCU doesn't feel like it can accommodate so much. Marvel has found its One Weird Trick, which has so far proved spectacularly profitable and endlessly reusable, and I wonder when fans will get tired of always getting more of the same.

WandaVision uses established narrative devices that date back decades, but it's very much not more of the same. In its first episodes, it was something glorious. It was cheerful and bittersweet and intriguing and moving and silly and profound and funny and smart and awesome. It started losing all that when it gradually drew us out of the fantasy and made it just another part of the MCU. By the end, it was flashy and energetic and epic, but it was no longer one of a kind. Now we have a much stronger Scarlet Witch who will surely have bigger adventures from now on, but in the process, we lost something precious.

Then again, my favorite Marvel movie is Doctor Strange, so what do I know.

For those of us who fell in love with the weirdness of this experiment, there's some hope in the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and probably also in Spider-Man: No Way Home, where the Scarlet Witch is supposed to have an influence or even show up. (I'm using this tentative language because the marketing strategy for No Way Home has been designed as Schrödinger's Press Release to counteract Tom Holland's adorkable habit of spoiling his movies, so we can't yet make any claims about who's going to be in this one.)

We can hope. We'll say hello again.

Part 12

There's no pleasing everyone

I've been harboring the not very original suspicion that utopia and dystopia are the same genre. If you look at any utopian narrative, you'll find that some sector of society is unhappy with the system. Conversely, in any dystopia, there'll be some sector of society for whom the system works nicely. It's impossible to create a social structure that will satisfy 100% of the population. Social life is made of disagreement, so any regime that aims to serve everyone will look broken to someone. Utopia and dystopia are the same.

In Westview, Wanda draws from the idealized dramatizations of the American middle class to create a perfect world where she can have it all. As fake Pietro remarked, everyone has a home and a job, and when compared to what the real Westview looked like, you've got to admit Wanda did one hell of a redecoration—the operative word being "hell." People who really lived through the eras represented in sitcoms can tell you all about the maddening slowness of progress in civil rights and the continued erosion of workers' purchasing power relative to productivity. Truly, America Was Never All That Great.

Nostalgia for an imagined idyllic country is one symptom of a larger problem: the refusal to accept change. This is made obvious both inside the screen of WandaVision and out here among the people who discuss comic book adaptations. In the age of the Sonic redraw and the Snyder Cut, fans have developed a hypertrophied sense of entitlement that needs to be toned down. The obsession with comic-accurate adaptations stems from a misplaced overvaluation of the way stories used to be told.

And here's where I have to utter a little blasphemy: there's no such thing as "comic-accurate." It's simply not possible. The nature of adaptation requires countless creative decisions that complement and reinterpret the source material. The only things that can be comic-accurate are the original comics—and even they are continuously subjected to new readings. Everything else is another creation, and the movies are under zero obligation to follow what the comics did. More importantly, the comic does not have a privileged position as the definitive version of a story. Sailor Moon Crystal worked hard to be 100% comic-accurate, and the result was a mechanical plot without a soul. WandaVision is not House of M, and that's fine. Fans need to learn from Vision and accept that the reconstructed shape of a story can be as true as the parts that rest in a museum, accumulating rot.

When Agatha takes Wanda on a tour through her formative memories, we see her watching an episode of Malcolm in the Middle where the father tries to build a canopy outside the house and it falls on his head. Vision asks whether the aesthetic impact of the scene lies on the grievous injury. Wanda, more aware of the conventions of slapstick comedy, points out that the nature of the setting doesn't allow for grievous injury. The same notion reverberates through her experiences in Westview and might be valuable for the rest of us (especially entitled fans who get angry when their favorite theories are disproved): even if what you have constructed falls to pieces, it won't kill you.

Life is not that kind of show.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10 It created its own category, where it reigns alone. Nothing compares. Nothing ever will.

Bonuses: +1 for a relatable handling of difficult emotional topics, +2 for inventiveness, and +2 for the amazing work of period faithfulness, down to the way of moving the camera and framing the shots.

Penalties: −2 for consistently choosing the least exciting explanation for each mystery, −3 for failing to give Wanda consequences for the harm she caused, and −3 because it introduced a fascinating concept only to abandon it for the demands of the franchise.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10 Its need to connect to an established continuity put too many roadblocks before the brilliant places it could have gone.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.