Anna Daniels
Since Avengers: Infinity War hit the big-screen in 2018, fans have been analyzing it up and down to find characters to blame for the snap (or The Decimation) occurring. Numerous characters are often scoped out on social media as either being directly or indirectly responsible for Thanos wiping out half of all civilization.
Now the latest character joining this inner circle of blamable characters is Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). Because she played a strong part in the events of Thanos’s plot, fans are beginning to dunk on her for the events occurring.
Other fans are doing their best to defend her and give a more well-rounded argument beyond just her being to blame. This now becomes a bigger study in how many people are really blameworthy when things go awry on a profound scale.
The blame against Wanda is unwarranted considering how much she’d gone through
Making decisions to prevent disaster was a big problem for Wanda, mostly because of major mistakes she made with her powers in the past. From the beginning, she had an overly aggressive attitude due to her unhappy upbringing in Sokovia. After all, she witnessed her own parents die there and ended up having a hatred of America for a while.
When joining the Avengers, she became extra adamant in her magical abilities, leading to a couple of incidents that involved unintentional deaths. The guilt of this gave her an eventual breakdown, one she mostly recovered from. However, it made her circumspect on making further decisions.
Fans suggest her lack of decision-making made her freeze on earlier destroying the Mind Stone inside Vision. On Reddit, someone started a thread exclusively to pin blame on Wanda for not listening to Vision to destroy the Mind Stone to prevent Thanos from retrieving it.
Commenters immediately jumped in to call out the fallacy of this argument. Not much could be done to prevent Thanos from getting the Mind Stone anyway.
Would Wanda destroying Vision’s Mind Stone really have prevented the snap?
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyhz6MImCvA?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]
Some might suggest had Wanda just destroyed Vision with the Mind Stone from the beginning, maybe Thanos would not have done the snap immediately. An argument can still be made he would have found a way anyway since he could easily turn back time to retrieve the Mind Stone.
If anything, it would have just slowed down the time it would take for Thanos to wipe out half of all life. When dealing with someone as omniscient as Thanos, it really placed the Avengers into a disadvantage of being able to do anything other than creating delay.
As a few mentioned in the above Reddit thread, Wanda should never take sole blame for the snap happening. Sure, she probably made it happen a little faster, but the point of Infinity War was to show all the Avengers made mistakes leading to the events.
Only the time-travel plan by the Avengers brought some ingenuity to reverse the snap. Even then, it might not have quelled all of Wanda’s deep-seated feelings of guilt.
The guilt from Wanda over past events may continue into ‘WandaVision’
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEUhVeQCzos?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]
With Disney+’s WandaVision scheduled to premiere on the platform later this year (COVID-19 delays notwithstanding), there seems to be an indication Wanda is still dealing with grief. Vision is still technically dead, yet there he is in the trailer within a 1950s setting (with Wanda).
Media analysis indicates this may be some kind of virtual world Wanda set up for herself so she can be with Vision for peace of mind. Although she appears to come out of that world to fight another enemy in her modern-day guise.
Maybe this will become a form of therapy for her about still blaming herself for the snap. If only Wanda could see more than half of all MCU fans agree she was never in the wrong.
Written by: Cheat
