sholio: sun on winter trees (Default)
Sholio ([personal profile] sholio) wrote2015-05-02 07:25 pm

Okay, I have more to say about Age of Ultron

There are two things I wanted to talk about in more depth, one thing I liked and one I did not.

Things I liked: Wanda!

It took me a little while to warm up to her, but by the end, Wanda was one of my very favorite things about the movie, possibly my single most favorite thing, and I was so shocked by that! I went into the movie feeling very uncomfortable and weird about the movie aging her down to barely-out-of-her-teens, and making her the victim of skeevy experiments to boot. It just felt kind of icky and awful. And she wasn't even a character I was particularly attached to in the comics, so basically I went in without much interest in her, and expecting to feel uncomfortable with a lot of what the movie did with her.

But Wanda in the movie was SO GREAT! I loved that ultimately, her arc was so central, and she got so much agency in it. It's all about HER choices and what SHE wants. She starts off letting her hatred of the Starks rule her, and kicks Tony off onto his creation-of-Ultron path because of it. She and Pietro get to have revenge on Strucker for torturing them (off camera, but still). And then she's the one who recognizes what Ultron really is, and has a change of heart, and goes to stop Tony and then ends up reluctantly working with him. (On the same side, at least.)

Then during the battle, she ends up getting overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what they're up against, when Clint finds her hiding and offers her an "out", and then she makes that choice to be an Avenger, and gets her wonderful hero's entrance with the dramatic mood wind, flinging Ultrons left and right. And at the end, she loses the thing that's most important to her, and she's prepared to go down with the ship, but the Avengers won't let her. It almost breaks her, but not quite, and somehow she gets back up and she's ultimately part of the new team, moving forward with the new SHIELD.

I wish we'd gotten to see more of her at the end of the movie, after Pietro's death. But the movie gave her really excellent, solid characterization, and set her up beautifully for exactly the kind of "rising from the ashes" character story that I adore.

Like I said in my last post, I want all the Wanda fic now. ALL THE WANDA FIC. Because there is so, so much story to tell with her! She's only ever been a weapon, and she's only ever been close to one person, and now she has to learn to live without that person and to be something more than a weapon.

And I want ALL the fic about Natasha helping Wanda because she's been there herself, and Wanda making friends with the Avengers and learning how to be part of a team, and Wanda taking college classes to try to figure out if maybe being an Avenger is just a stop along the way instead of her end goal, and Wanda and Vision figuring out how to person together, and Wanda bonding with Bucky over their shared background as Hydra experiments, and Wanda and Tony learning how to be proper allies. Wanda fic! Wanda vids! Pretty much just ALL THE WANDA FOREVER. (Also a Scarlet Witch movie, plz. MARVEL, HERE IS MY MONEY.)






Things I did not like: the Natasha/Bruce storyline.

Which I only disliked mildly while I was watching the movie (aside from a moment or two of pure knee-jerk DO NOT WANT during the scene in which they talk about having babies) but the more I think about it, the more my hatred for it grows. Like I said in a comment to the last post, really the only things I liked about Natasha in the movie were the Natasha + Clint stuff (which nailed my Natasha-Clint headcanon dead on) and the little bits of Natasha + Steve we got. And that's so frustrating! I love Natasha, in both the MCU and the comicverse. But her storyline with Bruce ended up being all the worst things that a canon romance can be. It felt terribly shoehorned in, flat, and graceless. Even her final scene with Fury is about Nat and Bruce, not about Nat and Fury, who really need some closure on their relationship but ended up not really getting it BECAUSE BRUCE. And it ended up sticking Nat into a stereotypical female role -- she's literally the person who is responsible for calming his rage, and she's suddenly out of nowhere torn up about not having kids ... and the thing is, THIS COULD ALL WORK, for a different character or with some graceful tweaks to Nat's existing characterization, but the way it came across in the movie, for me anyway, was just a general pile of awful and DNW.

It's sort of like ... I can see how, with different writing, it could have worked? Like, maybe Nat has worked through enough of her childhood trauma, thanks to her friendship with the Avengers and slowly stabilizing self-concept, to the point where suddenly she's getting hit with a whole new set of trauma, previously obscured by the rest of it, wherein she's realized that she wants all the things she was denied (children, a family, a stable life). But we never got the setup for that. Or maybe getting into her first serious relationship since changing sides has made her want things she never wanted before. But she and Bruce aren't even really a couple yet!

Not to mention the sheer ick of having the Red Room's "graduation ceremony", the thing that all the girls' training is pointed towards, being ... taking away their ability to reproduce. Not that forced sterilization isn't awful, because it is! But there's just something about the way the movie made it central to the Red Room, and to Natasha's memories of the Red Room, that I absolutely hated. I generally dislike plotlines that center around reproductive horror, and while the existence of Red Room-related reproductive horror is entirely in keeping with both the comics and the whole Red Room concept, the sudden central-ness of it is not.

And aside from all of THAT, I am still deeply, deeply frustrated about the scene between Natasha and Bruce in the Bartons' home. Spun in a slightly different way, it could have genuinely hit the notes of poignancy and healing that it was apparently going for. A lot of the emotional notes from that scene are the exact ones that Steve and Tony's final scene at the end is actually hitting, with Steve talking about how he is no longer really the person who wants stability and family. And yet, it was such an amazingly tone-deaf scene. What possible reason has Natasha EVER given Bruce to think that she cares about having babies except that she's female? For a different female character, that's entirely something that might be a central issue with the relationship. But nothing in Natasha's past characterization even hints at it. And, speaking as a woman who worked through a lot of ~feelings~ about infertility and never being able to have kids, I can't quite do justice to the gut-punch of Natasha's "We're both monsters" to Bruce. Her later dialogue softens the blow a bit, talking about her fear that she'll never be more than what the Red Room made her -- because that, that is the Natasha we've been given in previous movies. These are concerns she has! But the whole scene just came across so, so ... aargh. It's like MCU!Natasha, as established, has been replaced by a pod person whose life suddenly revolves around relationships and kids. The thing is, you could put her into situations where those things come up for her, or gently lead her there with subtlety and restraint, but this had all the subtlety of Thor's hammer to the face.

Aargh.

On the bright side, the movie did nothing irredeemable to destroy Nat for me, and since the relationship never really got off the ground and they're separated at the end, it can easily be handwaved or ignored if future writers don't want to deal with it. Which I rather hope they don't, at least if they can't do it in a way I'm more comfortable with.

schneefink: River walking among trees, from "Safe" (Default)

[personal profile] schneefink 2015-05-03 09:49 am (UTC)(link)
Completely agree about Natasha/Bruce.

About Wanda, I really loved her in the movie, but I have problems with her backstory. I loved that she decided to work against Ultron when she found out what he plans to do. But she was voluntarily working for Hydra, who were planning to kill thousands if not millions with project Insight and generally rule the world - and Wanda had to know that, because she's a telepath, and she doesn't strike me as the type of person who wouldn't read her employers' minds out of respect. And she was fine with that, and with Hydra's other plans? It's only killing absolutely everyone that's going too far for her?

One possible explanation is that the movie suggests that her and Pietro's powers are still quite new, so maybe when they volunteered they didn't know about Hydra's plans, and when they found out they were just waiting for a good moment to leave. Idk, I'm still not completely happy with it.
musesfool: Kate Bishop aka Hawkeye of Young Avengers (the strings are incurably playing)

[personal profile] musesfool 2015-05-03 02:27 pm (UTC)(link)
My understanding was that they thought they were signing up with SHIELD and didn't know it was HYDRA until later (when everyone else found out?), and I'm also going to guess that even if she's had the powers for a while, she was only able to control them for a much shorter period of time, and so couldn't know if what she was seeing in their minds was everyone or a few bad apples or what. And that's without knowing whether they were being kept in a place that had some sort of shielding (while Magneto doesn't exist and isn't their father here, I wouldn't be surprised to find that similar technology to his anti-telepathy helmet exists in the MCU).
recessional: a photo image of feet in sparkly red shoes (Default)

[personal profile] recessional 2015-05-03 03:55 pm (UTC)(link)
Why would it, yet? Wanda's the first telepath we've seen. I mean I'm sure it's at the top of everyone's dev-list NOW, but.
musesfool: Steve & Natasha (it will take all your will)

[personal profile] musesfool 2015-05-03 04:05 pm (UTC)(link)
If I'm Strucker and I've just created a telepath, anti-telepathy technology moves up to #1 on my to-do list. As soon as he knew what her powers were, wouldn't he make sure he could protect himself from them? Or maybe it's just that I find telepathy super-creepy, so making something to combat it would be #1 on my list.
recessional: a photo image of feet in sparkly red shoes (Default)

[personal profile] recessional 2015-05-03 04:11 pm (UTC)(link)
I suppose, altho my gut instinct is it's going to take a lot longer to make the anti-telepathy tech than to make the telepath, and prior to her (and then you have the question of what he knows about her powers, which for the 'pathy would depend on her telling him) there's no reason to that I can think of.

But that is just me.
musesfool: Pepper Potts (everything that i wanna be)

[personal profile] musesfool 2015-05-03 04:14 pm (UTC)(link)
But if Strucker et al. weren't keeping some sort of record, how did Maria Hill know what Wanda's powers were?

I don't disagree that it'd take longer, but he did have them for a number of years. *hands* YMMV
schneefink: River walking among trees, from "Safe" (Default)

[personal profile] schneefink 2015-05-03 05:41 pm (UTC)(link)
But since Avengers it became obvious that SHIELD was working together with Tony Stark, so would Pietro and Wanda really be happy working with SHIELD?

It's possible that her telepathy was still so rudimentary that she didn't find out about things like project Insight. (Though I would be very surprised if anti-telepathy shielding existed already.) But at the very least she definitely knew that whoever she was working with was doing experiments on humans that were extremely unsafe and that killed several people. Even if they were volunteers, that seems like a huge warning sign. But she and Pietro were willing to put up with that if it meant revenge on Stark.
(Why did the others volunteer? What were they told was the goal of the project?)

(Sidenote, I think it's strange that they focus their hate on the guy who built the weapons and not on whoever actually attacked their country...)
schneefink: River walking among trees, from "Safe" (Default)

[personal profile] schneefink 2015-05-04 09:17 am (UTC)(link)
Hm, maybe, but "imperialist Westerners" in the Balkans in the 90s? The main conflicts there were between ethnic groups. Sure, the UN and the NATO got involved via humanitarian interventions, but I doubt that it's seen as Western imperialism, at least the way I see the term used most often today. (Admittedly I can't say for sure, I'm not an expert on Balkan history.) And depending on how old the twins are - 20? - the worst of the wars was already over by this point. We saw that the Sokovians dislike the US, so it's likely there was some kind of intervention, but a lot could have happened in between.

But we don't know, because we don't know Sokovian history. Was Sokovia part of Yugoslavia? What happened during the Yugoslavia wars? I read that the writing in the village was Serbian Cyrillic, which pretty much makes it impossible that it was not involved in the Yugoslavia wars. A SHIELD base in the Balkans in the 90s seems surprising, it was such an unstable region and nobody would have been happy to have them there. Hydra having a long-term base in that region on the hand makes more sense, because they thrive on chaos; on the other hand it means that they have to have not insignificant influence in the region and be involved with the conflicts there to ensure their survival. Was Hydra secretly allied with Milošević? Did they supply weapons for the Serbian army in exchange for being able to conduct their experiments without any oversight? What happened after the wars?

I would love to read fic about Wanda and Pietro as Serbs. If Hydra was allied with the Serbs they could also have appealed to Wanda and Pietro on those terms: it's not too far from Nazi racism to the sort of ethnic racism that was/is present in this region, and as kids it's no surprise Wanda and Pietro couldn't see through it. There are examples of European far-right parties today trying to appeal to some Eastern European ethnicities, Serbs in particular, to gain voters, implicitly supporting the idea that they are better than others.

Here it becomes very important that the movie erased Wanda and Pietro's Jewish and Romani backgrounds, which I really really hate. Because as Jews and Romani Wanda and Pietro would have grown up faced with so much prejudice that I don't see how they would ever ally themselves with Hydra. It makes them completely different characters, and it would be so important to have these characters. Instead they are "generic" Eastern Europeans, as if something like that existed.

ETA: Maybe Sokovia is such a small nation (when did it become independent?) that it wasn't actively involved in any war, but it was bombed during the NATO intervention because Serbian troops used it to retreat and resupply (and also because of the weapons they got there, though Hydra managed to intervene so the castle wasn't bombed directly.) But because Sokovia wasn't actively at war its citizens blamed only the UN and NATO for attacking them. Maybe that could work.
(Still doesn't explain why Wanda and Pietro focus their hate on the guy who built the weapons instead of whoever fired them, but whatever.)
Edited 2015-05-04 10:46 (UTC)