Turning the Trope of Overpowered Women

Going into this series I had my doubts, Wanda is one of very many characters in the comics that suffers from an “Overpowered Women” trope. The main requirements for this trope are A. The female hero is only considered overpowered when she is also considered mentally and/or emotionally unstable B. Once she returns to a “stable” state of mind she loses access to her new found powers and occasionally C. When in her overpowered state the woman is also seen as villianouness or evil (not a requirement for the trope, simply a trend I’ve found). The first half of the season seemed like they were leaning hard into this trope but by the end of the series they turned this overused, sexist trend in comics and made it empowering.

I will admit the first half of the season greatly concerned me, when Wanda blasts Monica out of Westview it very much looked like they were going to lean into the trope rather than defy it. As hot as Wanda’s head tilt is, it generally means you’ve just pissed her off and she has a very violent emotional response. The second time we see her respond violently and emotionally is when SWORD sends a drone into the hex in episode 5 and Wanda threatens Hayward with his own mens weapons, at this point I was very concerned that we were leaning into this trope far too much. My third little bit of nervousness supporting this was in episode 7, we finally see the more emotional side of Wanda, she is no longer pretending and it looks like she's losing her mind and giving into her depression and as such she is also losing control of the carefully crafted world around her. The fact that the more emotional Wanda appeared to be the less control she had, definitely didn’t give me hope.

What WandaVision does is actually call out this trope, whether they did it knowingly or not I don’t know, Agatha tells Wanda in the series finale,

“Same story, different century there will always be torches and pitchforks for ladies like us”.

We actually see Wanda’s grief fuel her power to create Westview in Episode 8 and it isn’t until episode 9 do we see this trope turned on its head. Instead of letting her emotions control her, she tames herself. No one swoops in to save her, no one has to take her down, she realizes what she's done, comes to terms with her grief and actually grows in her power when she controls her emotions.

We don’t really see how this trauma has affected Wanda until the middle of the season. Episode 7 gives us a very clear depiction of her grief and depression but up till then we hadn’t seen anything but the walls she had put up in the form of Westview. The way Wanda describes her grief in Episode 8 is beautiful and raw, “It's like this wave washing over me again and again it knocks me down, I feel like I'm gonna drown in it” and this very real description of grief is vulnerable and in my experience exactly how depression feels. In Episode 9 Wanda has an encounter with the people of Westview that forces her to evaluate how the handling of her trauma has affected other people. We also seem to see her break as she allows Agatha to absorb her power but really what we see there is Wanda not only accepting her power but growing into how to use it. She also tells Agatha “I don’t need you to tell me what to do, I know exactly who I am” this is just before she takes on the full manifestation of Scarlet Witch (and somehow gets even hotter) I love this scene because it truly shows Wanda coming to terms to who she is without someone else, independent of Pietro, Vision, the Avengers, her kids. She finds out who she is on her own and it's beautiful.

I really hope that the next appearance of Wanda holds true to the beautiful and strong character that Jac Schaffer and team built, Wanda has always been badass but as it has will all female characters that suffer from this trope, her character is often done a disservice WandaVision is the MCU’s first step toward fixing that.