Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 43

Fanwriter/Fancaster Spotlight: Paul Weimer

It’s time for the next entry in my Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project. For more about the Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project, go here. You can also check out the other great fanzines and fancasts featured by clicking here.

Today’s spotlight is a bit different, because I don’t interview a specific fancast and fanzine, but rather a prolific contributor to several fancasts and fanzines.

Therefore, I’m pleased to welcome my friend and fellow 2020 Best Fan Writer Hugo finalist (and excellent photographer) Paul Weimer to my blog. Paul contributes to The Skiffy and Fanty Show and nerds of a feather, both of which were featured here, as well as SFF Audio and Dive Into Worldbuilding, which were not.

Paul in his natural element behind the camera, as photographed by Peter West Carey.

Tell us about your podcast or channel.

I am on several podcasts and channels:

I am a member of the Skiffy and Fanty Show, created by Shaun Duke and Jen Zink, which is a general wide ranging SFF podcasts that tackles interviews, books, movies and more.

I am a regular on SFF Audio, which focuses on audiobooks, particularly older works.

I also appear frequently on Dive into Worldbuilding, a weekly videocast that talks about worldbuilding in SFF

Who are the people behind your podcast or channel?

Skiffy and Fanty is led by Shaun and Jen, and features a variety of other participants, writers, creators and fans.

SFF Audio was created by Jesse Willis, a fan in Vancouver strongly interested in SFF works falling out of copyright. He maintains a large archive of such stories, as well.

What format do you use for your podcast or channel and why did you choose this format?

Skiffy and Fanty and SFF audio are both audio podcasts, free ranging discussions. Dive into Worldbuilding is a video endeavor that publishes live to youtube.

The fan categories at the Hugos were there at the very beginning, but they are also the categories which consistently gets the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines, fancasts and other fan projects are important?

Fans have been central to SFF since 1939. Without fans, without people agitating for books, for reading, for authors, the whole SFF community would not exist. Fanzines, fancasts, fan writers and fan enthusiasm make SFF the vibrant place it is.

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online and fancasts have sprung up. What do you think the future of fan media looks like?

I continue to think that the ways fans engage with each other is going to evolve and change. I think too the pandemic is going to change how we have and deal with things like conventions. I predict boldly there will be more conventions which are entirely virtual and that space will evolve and change over time.

The four fan categories of the Hugos (best fanzine, fan writer, fan artist and fancast) tend to get less attention than the fiction and dramatic presentation categories. Are there any awesome fanzines, fancasts, fan writers and fan artists you’d like to recommend?

Modestly, I myself am probably more eligible as a fan writer than I am in the fancast categories, since I write a boatload of SFF articles and interviews and reviews. Besides me, I value the voices of yourself, Alasdair Stewart, Adam Whitehead, Aidan Moher,Jason Sanford, the Worldbuilding for Masochists podcast, Charles Payseur, Alex Brown, Journey Planet, Nerds of a Feather (disclaimer, I am one of their writers), Claire Rousseau, The Breaking the Glass Slipper podcast, and a lot more. The fan community is fractally large, the deeper you go, the more complex and bigger it gets. Fans are everywhere!

Where can people find you?

http://www.princejvstin.com is my website but really, googling “princejvstin” on the internet finds me.

One more photo of Paul behind the camera in Nepal, captured by Peter West Carey.

Thanks, Paul, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Do check out Paul’s various ventures, cause he does great work across various media.

***

Do you have a Hugo eligible fanzine/-site or fancast and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

Fanzine Spotlight: Astrolabe

It’s time for the next entry in my Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project. For more about the Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project, go here. You can also check out the other great fanzines and fancasts featured by clicking here.

So today, I’m pleased to feature the SFF newsletter Astrolabe.

Therefore, I’m happy to welcome Aidan Moher of Astrolabe. Aidan Moher also edited the blog A Dribble of Ink, winner of the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Fanzine.

Tell us about your site or zine.

Astrolabe is a semi-monthly newsletter delivered free to your inbox. It’s stuffed full of features, reviews, book recommendations, fandom musings, retro video games, the coolest stories from around the web, and general geek goodies.

Past issues have covered what video games have taught me about worldbuilding, how Terry Brooks literally changed my life, a deep dive into non-fiction feature writing, the sick feeling you’re not reading enough, and the perils of going viral.

You can find it at aidan.substack.com. The main newsletter is free, and I’ve also got a $5/month subscription option that comes with exclusive content—like full transcript interviews, longer features, etc.

Who are the people behind your site or zine?

Just me!

Well, sort of.

I launched Astrolabe as a solo effort and published 11ish issues that way, and I’m still the solo editor/main writer, but I’ve recently launched a new series called Transmission Received. I want to bring plenty of new voices and perspectives to Astrolabe by inviting people for a focused discussion about a particular topic. One of my favourite things about being an editor—going all the way back to my days with A Dribble of Ink—was bringing forth stories and providing a platform for many voices. Transmission Received is a chance to tell many, many stories. Each edition will include a main feature interview in regular Astrolabe issues, and then I’ll follow up two days later with the interview posted in full. It’s a great way for readers to get a tight look at the topic, and also a deeper dive into my conversation with whomever I’m speaking with.

The first Transmission Received featured Chris DeMakes, the vocalist and guitarist from legendary Gainesville, Florida ska band Less Than Jake. I caught up with DeMakes to chat about creative momentum during troubling times, why you shouldn’t even think about your t-shirts before you’ve written a single song, and his advice for creative people struggling to get their project off the ground.

Why did you decide to start your site or zine?

From 2007 – 2015, I ran a popular SFF blog called A Dribble of Ink. I closed it down for a variety of reasons (changing tides in blogging, a growing family of kidlets, a desire to do more paid freelance work, etc.), but I always missed having a platform and an audience eager to dig into the nerdy stuff I love to talk about. So, as my routines changed and I found the space to think about editing my own platform again, I decided I wanted to bring my love of SFF and gaming together in a new format. One thing I discovered over several years of dedicated freelance writing is that there’s a TON of cross-over between fandoms, and I wanted to create a place that felt like a home for fans across a spectrum of geek culture.

What format do you use for your site or zine (blog, e-mail newsletter, PDF zine, paper zine) and why did you choose this format?

A newsletter seemed like a natural choice for a bunch of reasons: a) they’re popular, b) they don’t require the constant, daily output of blogs, and, c) you only have to convince someone you’re worth it one time. Even back in 2015, I was finding the constant necessity to promote blog content exhausting. Each new article felt like a fight for attention, and with the way social media algorithms are evolving, even reaching your dedicated and most engaged readers was becoming more difficult. With a newsletter, I just need to fight to reach someone one time, and once they’ve signed up, they see ALL my content when I want them to see it. Even though newsletters are a one-way form of communication, I feel a lot closer to my base of readers—like we’re a little family of geek friends who all love the same things.

The fanzine category at the Hugos is one of the oldest, but also the category which consistently gets the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines and sites are important?

Oh, gosh. Where do I start?

It’s no secret to anyone who’s followed me over the past decade that the fan categories are immensely important to me personally, and that I feel like they get short shrift from a lot of nominating WorldCon members. For a convention that’s hugely fan-driven, the ambivalence toward fan projects/creators vs. professional projects/creators belies the concept a bit.

I think people are drawn toward huge, popular projects like moths to a flame—it’s good to feel involved in a zeitgeist, it’s fun to go to a bookstore and see something YOU personally voted for with a big HUGO WINNER sticker on its cover at the front of the store. Fan projects don’t have the same wide reach as professional projects for a lot of reasons, but I think they’re the heart and soul of the Hugos because they represent the passion of the fan community. They’re the collective effort of the fans out there busting their butts day-after-day creating brilliant non-fiction, art, YouTube videos, music, podcast, fanfic, blogs, magazines, and everything else that forms the emotional core of SFF fandom.

As fans, we commit a huge part of our lives to our fandom and expect nothing in return—we put hours and hours and hours into posting online, writing fanfic, posting Goodreads reviews, etc. because it means something to contribute to the larger conversation. It makes us FEEL good to spend time doing something simply because we love it so much.

The fan creators recognized on the Hugo ballots represent the highest echelon of fan creators—those who put out such good work (for free!) that it rivals professional work. Fan creators are the glue that holds fandom together, and, most importantly, they’re the ones of the cutting edge of discussion, opening doors for new fans, and, hopefully, a more inclusive fandom, because they’re not beholden to marketing budgets, quarterly profits, and ad revenue.

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online. What do you think the future of fanzines looks like?

I think we’re already seeing a fast and beautiful evolution of the fanzine community toward a broader range of multimedia platforms. For a long time we had just paper zines, then we had PDF zines, then blogs came around. It was sort of one thing leading into another, but over the past several years, the field has become so diversified that we have all of those things that came before, but also newsletters, BookTube, podcasts, and I’d even lump some streamers into the mix. I consider a fanzine—as far as stuff like the Hugos are concerned—to be basically anything from a fan creator that covers SFF with a non-fiction angle, and I want to continue to see a broader and broader range of creators recognized for their work.

The four fan categories of the Hugos (best fanzine, fan writer, fan artist and fancast) tend to get less attention than the fiction and dramatic presentation categories. Are there any awesome fanzines, fancasts, fan writers and fan artists you’d like to recommend?

Are there ever! It’s no secret I’m a huge fan of Nerds of a Feather, Lady Business, and Book Smugglers, all three of which have been recognized to varying (well deserved) degrees at the Hugos. Over the past year, I’ve really paid a lot of attention to SFF newsletters, and I hope more people subscribe to places like Andrew Liptak’s Transfer Orbit, Amal El-Mohtar’s Amal Content, Sarah Gailey’s Stone Soup, Isabel Yap’s hot yuzu tea, Charlie Jane Anders’ Happy Dancing, Matthew Claxton’s Unsettling Futures, and Alasdair Stuart’s The Full Lid. I’ve also really enjoyed Hilary Bisenieks’ Tales from the Trunk; it’s a podcast that sits down with writers to dissect one of their trunked stories, and it’s an absolute treasure trove of writing advice and insight into the SFF community.

As for “Best Fan Writer,” everyone mentioned above is brilliant, but I think this is the year Jason Sanford wins for his work on Genre Grapevine. His coverage of SFF fandom and publishing is unparalleled. He’s an absolute treasure.

Where can people find you?

Besides Astrolabe, I’m also very active on Twitter and have a website that rounds up all of my various writings for different outlets. I stream Astrolabe content to Twitch, and archive it all on YouTube. I’m… all over the place. In addition to Astrolabe being eligible for “Best Fanzine,” I’m also personally eligible for “Best Fan Writer,” and “Timeless: A History of Chrono Trigger” is eligible for “Best Related Work.”

You can find a big round-up of my best work from 2020 by visiting my official eligibility post.

Thank you, Aidan, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Subscribe to Astrolabe, cause it’s a great newsletter.

***

Do you have a Hugo eligible fanzine/-site or fancast and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

New Kurval Sword and Sorcery Story Available: The Wolf of Rajala

I’m interrupted my schedule of Fanzine/Fancast Spotlights for a new release announcement. This one is for another Kurval sword and sorcery story, since the character has been occupying my mind of late.

To recap, during the 2020 July short story challenge, I had an idea for a sword and sorcery story that would not fit into my established Thurvok sword and sorcery series, so I created a new character named Kurval, barbarian usurper turned King of Azakoria. Kurval was initially intended to be a one-off character. However, I like him and he allows me to tell stories that just don’t fit Thurvok and his friends, so it was clear that he would show up again. Which he promptly did.

The Wolf of Rajala is the second Kurval story set before his time as King of Azakoria, though after he left his homeland of Temirzhan in The Plains of Shadow. At this time in his life, Kurval is plying his trade as a wandering mercenary and monster slayer for hire.

The initial inspiration for this story really was that I came across a great piece of artwork by Dominick Critelli featuring a swordsman facing off against a giant wolf in a wintery forest and thought, “That would make a great cover for a sword and sorcery story.” So I wrote a story to go with it.

However, after I had written the initial confrontation between Kurval and the wolf, I hit a wall. Because “Kurval fights a giant wolf and wins” is rather boring. And a dead wolf suddenly changing back into a human wouldn’t have shocked anybody in the 1930s, let alone today. After all, Weird Tales was full of werewolf stories in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

As I looked through a rundown of werewolf stories published in Weird Tales with accompanying illustrations and covers, I noticed that a remarkable number of them seemed to feature werewolves and naked women. In particular, Margaret Brundage’s cover for the March 1933 issue of Weird Tales, which features a naked woman running through the snow with a pack of wolves and illustrates “The Thing in the Fog” by Seabury Quinn, caught my eye.

“What if my werewolf were a woman?” I wondered, “And what if she actually had a very good reason for harassing the people of Rajala? How will Kurval, someone we know cares about justice, react?” The rest of the story grew from there.

In the end, The Wolf of Rajala not only features a matriarchal werewolf pack – no, all characters with speaking parts in this story except for Kurval himself are women.

So accompany Kurval as a faces…

The Wolf of Rajala
Before Kurval became King of Azakoria, he was a wandering mercenary and monster slayer for hire.

One day, Kurval is hired to take out the monstrous wolves that have been besetting the village of Rajala. However, he quickly finds that the wolves are not what they seem. He also realises that the wolves have a very good reason for attacking the villagers…

This is a novelette of 8700 words or approx. 30 print pages in the Kurval sword and sorcery series, but may be read as a standalone. Includes an introduction and afterword.

 

More information.
Length: 8700 words
List price: 0.99 USD, EUR or GBP
Buy it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Netherlands, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Mexico, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks, Google Play, Scribd, Smashwords, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Buecher.de, DriveThruFiction, Casa del Libro, Vivlio and XinXii.

Fanzine Spotlight: Women Write About Comics

First of all, I’m blogging at Galactic Journey again today, where I report about a theatre scandal that rocked my hometown in 1966.

Futhermore, it’s time for the next entry in my Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project. For more about the Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project, go here. You can also check out the other great fanzines and fancasts featured by clicking here.

So today, I’m pleased to feature Women Write About Comics, a site where women and people of marginalised genders write about comics and related subjects.

Therefore, I’m happy to welcome Wendy Browne of Women Write About Comics to my blog:

Tell us about your site or zine.

WWAC (pronounced “Wuh-Whack, according to the poll results) is an Eisner Award-winning online journal that offers diverse insight into the world of comic book culture and the comic book industry at large by amplifying the voices of women and people of marginalized genders. We’re committed to giving our readers diverse, interesting, critical, and fun content on comic books, the comic industry, books, comic book culture, and a look into differing geeky lifestyles.

Who are the people behind your site or zine?

More than 300 women and people of marginalized genders have written for WWAC since its inception. Right now, our main editorial team consists of:

Wendy Browne, Publisher; Nola Pfau, Editor-in-Chief; Kayleigh Hearn, Big Press Reviews Editor; Kate Tanski, Comics Academe Editor; Kat Overland, Small Press/Webcomics/Indie Editor; Adrienne Resha, Comics Academe Assistant Editor; Gretchen Smail, Moving Pictures Editor; Corinne McCreery, Pubwatch and Assistant Editor; and Zainabb Hull, Editorial Assistant.

Why did you decide to start your site or zine?

The site was founded by Megan Purdy in response to the age-old question, “Why don’t more women write about comics?” which she and her friends would hear and read regularly as part of their time spent on comics forums. WWAC was initially a fan blog with a particular interest in Carol Danvers but has since expanded significantly.

What format do you use for your site or zine (blog, e-mail newsletter, PDF zine, paper zine) and why did you choose this format?

We’ve maintained a blog format and shifted into an online journal. We now offer reviews, reports on mainstream and local conventions, comic book-inspired recipes and crafts, features discussing socio-political happenings in and around the comic book industry, and much more. As part of an overhaul a few years ago, we added a newsletter to help expand our readership and make sure our readers aren’t missing out on all the good content that we produce each week.

The fanzine category at the Hugos is one of the oldest, but also the category which consistently gets the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines and sites are important?

Fanzines offer critical perspectives that invite fans to engage with the media in new and different ways. Fanzines foster meaningful discourse and encourage the respective industry to adapt to the needs of a growing, diverse fanbase.

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online. What do you think the future of fanzines looks like?

Fanzines will continue to adapt to the online world, venturing into such media as podcasts and video blogs and more, but I believe there’s still a place for physical works, even if only for the novelty.

The four fan categories of the Hugos (best fanzine, fan writer, fan artist and fancast) tend to get less attention than the fiction and dramatic presentation categories. Are there any awesome fanzines, fancasts, fan writers and fan artists you’d like to recommend?

Any of our writers at WWAC deserves all the kudos for their passionate writing on the subjects of their choosing. I’d also like to spotlight sites like Shelfdust, Xavier Files, and Comfort Food Comics for their work.

Where can people find you?

www.womenwriteaboutcomics.com
https://twitter.com/wwacomics
https://www.facebook.com/womenwriteaboutcomics
https://www.instagram.com/wwacomics/

Thanks, Wendy, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Do check out Women Write About Comics, cause it’s a great site.

***

Do you have a Hugo eligible fanzine/-site or fancast and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

Fanzine Spotlight: SFFWorld

It’s time for the next entry in my Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project. For more about the Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project, go here. You can also check out the other great fanzines and fancasts featured by clicking here.

So today, I’m pleased to feature the speculative fiction review and news site SFFWorld.

Therefore, I’m happy to welcome the team behind SFFWorld to my blog:

Tell us about your site or zine.

We are SFFWorld, a website and forum that has been running for over 20 years. We are interested in all aspects of science fiction fantasy and horror, review material that takes our interest and create discussion around such material. Over those 20+ years, SFFWorld has published over 2,000 “official reviews,” hundreds of interviews, as well as several author features like our “Authors of the Roundtable.”

Who are the people behind your site or zine?

The site is run by volunteers. Dag Rambraut is the owner and is from Norway, who deals with all of the technical stuff. Rob Bedford (@RobHBedford on Twitter) is our longest-serving Staff member and is the Lead US Reviewer, living in the USA, as does KatG who deals with the Forums and in particular is involved in the Writing Forums. Mark Yon covers reviews from the UK end and is also involved in the Administration of the Forums. Mark Chitty, also in the UK, is a regular reviewer who joined us from his website Walker of Worlds a few years ago. Shellie Horst is a reviewer who tends to pick up the small press books for us. Randy Money is our ‘expert’ on all things Horror and each year gives us a plethora of material old and new to look at throughout October.  Andrew Leon Hudson is our current Staff Member involved in the editing and publishing of our Anthologies, which is something we’ve taken on in the last decade.  We have also had a number of other wonderful people help us out over the years when they can.

Why did you decide to start your site or zine?

The website started with Dag back in 1997. It was a hobby, created initially to share good books, films and TV and comment on the bad, current ideas and thoughts about the genre, which Dag loves.  Shortly thereafter, our discussion forums opened up which grew into a thriving community of fans, many of whom have become friends over the years. Many, many people have found some of their favourite “next books to read” in our forums and had the chance to meet some of their favourite authors, too. The discussion forum is still active, though much of the focus has been on the content we’ve been providing. We are mainly a book review site, though we dabble in film, TV, webcasts and the like if something takes our fancy.

What format do you use for your site or zine (blog, e-mail newsletter, PDF zine, paper zine) and why did you choose this format?

I guess it’s partly because we’ve been going longer than many of the formats that have come along after, such as blogs and Social Media. The book reviews and the Forum came first for us, as it was what was available. We like the website as it is an immediately accessible format and allows us to communicate with others around the world at all times of the day and night. Perhaps most of all the Forums allow us the space to be as brief or as lengthy as we want. We have an active Writers area which uses the space well to create new material, which they then discuss and critique in a nice way every month. It’s usually all good-natured and supportive.

The fanzine category at the Hugos is one of the oldest, but also the category which consistently gets the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines and sites are important?

It is odd that an award that started all those years ago as a fan award at the Worldcons now gets the lowest number of votes and nominations – especially when the genre has broadened out so much in recent years. But we think that the growth of the genre and its global popularity would not be there without the fans all rooting and parading their particular interests. It is not possible to cover everything these days, but the fact that a group of people with common enthusiasms can discuss those interests together is very important.  I guess the other element is that what fanzines and sites do is allow those not directly part of the industry to talk about their passions to others with similar ideas. They allow an individual or indeed a collective voice to speak its mind that might not be otherwise heard. In other words, these things are a great tool for building a community.

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online. What do you think the future of fanzines looks like?

Well, I guess we benefited from this as we began on dial-up just as people were getting the Internet in their homes. Now with mobile phones and tablets, we have the ability to be more easily available and immediate than ever before. The future is clearly digital, although the growth is audio material – podcasts and the like – suggests that it may not be entirely through words.

The four fan categories of the Hugos (best fanzine, fan writer, fan artist and fancast) tend to get less attention than the fiction and dramatic presentation categories. Are there any awesome fanzines, fancasts, fan writers and fan artists you’d like to recommend?

You’re right – we try to keep up with the changes, as we’re fans as well as website coordinators. Rob Bedford has contributed to articles at Tor.com and SFSignal.com, as well as having run his own blog over the years. For fun Mark Yon has been writing of British magazines New Worlds and Science Fantasy from the 1960s at Galactic Journey (www.galacticjourney.com), which you know as well, Cora!

Where can people find you?

The website is at www.sffworld.com, from where you can access the reviews, the Discussion Forums and take part in the Writing section. We’re also available on Twitter (@SFFWorld) and on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/sffworldcom/ ).

Thanks, everybody, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Do check out SFFWorld, cause it’s a great site.

***

Do you have a Hugo eligible fanzine/-site or fancast and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

WandaVision offers up “The Series Finale”

It’s time for the final installment of my episode by episode reviews of WandaVision, Marvel’s sitcom parody/Dickian faux reality paranoia. Previous installments may be found here. Also, may I remind you that Disney is still not paying Alan Dean Foster and others.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

After a brief recap, this episode picks up right where the previous one left of, with Wanda facing off against Agatha a.k.a. “Agnes”, who’s holding the twins hostage. Wanda also wants it to be known that she is not a witch, thank you very much.

After a red and purple energy bolt throwing magical slap fight, Agnes managed to drain some of Wanda’s lifeforce like she did with the Salem witches last episode, leaving Wanda with a withered hand. Wanda, on the other hand, throws her car at Agatha and manages to free the twins. “Run to your room”, she tells them, which they do thanks to Tommy’s superspeed. But when Wanda goes to investigate, all she finds under the car in Agatha’s garden are Agatha’s boots in a Wizard of Oz homage. Agatha herself has escaped, for now.

But before Wanda can go after Agatha, she is distracted by the reappearance of Vision. However, it’s the white version of Vision that Hayward rebuilt from the disassembled original, the Vision who’s nothing but a living weapon without emotions or memories. The first meeting between Wanda and White Vision plays out almost as it does in the comics. An overjoyed Wanda hugs White Vision. But while White Vision in the comics merely has no idea who Wanda is and what this strange woman wants of him, the MCU White Vision has been programmed to kill Wanda and promptly tries to strangle her and/or break her neck. Come to think of, there is a lot of strangling going on in this episode.

Luckily, the real Vision shows up just in time to rescue Wanda and we get a quick family reunion of Wanda, Vision and the twins. Wanda apologises to Vision for not telling him the whole truth, Vision says that it doesn’t matter. However, they still have to deal with not one but two supervillains, White Vision and Agatha.

So the battle continues with the Visions slugging it out in the sky above Westview and later in the Westview library. However, the battle is decided not by brawn but by brains, when red Vision uses the Ship of Theseus problem to make White Vision question his identity. White Visions laments that he has no memories, whereupon red Vision restores his memories, most prominently those of Wanda. Very confused by all this, White Vision takes off. I strongly suspect we haven’t seen the last of him, unless Paul Bettany is sick of spending hours in the make-up chair. In his review, Camestros Felapton wonders whether the Ship of Theseus scene is a reference to the inexplicably popular multi-Hugo winning afterlife sitcom The Good Place, which has a thing for philosophical discussions, while Tor.com reviewer Emmet Asher-Perrin views it as a take on the time-honoured tradition, going back at least to Isaac Asimov’s early robot stories of the 1940s, of reasoning a robot or computer to death. Both are possible, though I simply like the fact that even though the final episode was very much superbeings slugging it out, the resolution to both conflicts was more innovative than “The person with the harder punch wins”.

Some people seem to be a bit disappointed that the pay-off after nine episodes was yet another CGI heavy superhero fight. However, in spite of the sitcom trappings (which have been gone the past two episodes anyway), WandaVision is still a Marvel superhero show at heart. And we all know that superhero stories, whether Marvel’s or DC’s inevitably climax in a big, no holds bared fight featuring multiple beings with superpowers. So I honestly wonder why so many people seem to be surprised that WandaVision ended with a massive superbeing fight, since that’s as much of a genre requirement as the laugh track is a genre requirement for sitcoms. Several people also seem to be disappointed that the many fan theories did not come true (but then fan theories rarely do) and that there was no big twist at the end. But then, as Font Folly points out in his review, twists are overrated.

While Vision and Vision are duking it out, Wanda confronts Agatha in the town centre. Most of the familiar Westview residents are there – the mailman, Norm, Herb, Harold, Dottie, Mrs. Hart, Beverly, etc… Agatha now releases Dottie from Wanda’s spell. We learn that Dottie is really a woman called Sarah who just wants to hug her eight-year-old daughter again and would even let her daughter play with Wanda’s twins. Agatha also releases the rest of the townspeople, who all beg Wanda to let them go or let them die, because they are hurting and also experiencing Wanda’s nightmares every night. Wanda is horrified – after all, she never wanted to hurt those people. She also deactivates the Hex to let them go, which unfortunately causes Red Vision as well as the twins (for of course, Billy and Tommy did not stay in their rooms, while their parents were having a superhero fight – which kids would?) to begin to dissolve.

Now Agatha twists the knife even further and points out that Wanda can either save her family or the people of Westview but not both. However, Agatha has the solution. If Wanda will only surrender her powers to Agatha, Agatha can repair Wanda’s spell. Anybody with half a brain of course knows that Agatha is lying.

Meanwhile, Hayward is still doing his best X-Men villain routine. He has arrested Jimmy Woo, but Jimmy uses his escapology skills (Darcy is not the only one with those) to free himself from his handcuffs and steal the phone of one of the S.W.O.R.D. goons, which he then uses to phone up the FBI and calls for help. I wonder why he didn’t do so before. However, the FBI still needs some time to get to Westview. And time is something the characters don’t have, because once the Hex starts to break up, Hayward orders his troops to move into Westview. “Different century, same thing”, Agatha remarks, once Hayward shows up, “They’ll always try to burn witches.” As a survivor of the Salem witch trials, Agatha should know.

Meanwhile, Monica has been captured by the fake Pietro and was dragged to a weird attic room. When Monica asks where she is, Pietro says it’s his man cave, because he needs to escape “the missus” from time to time. Now Monica realises that the house isn’t Agatha’s home at all (logical, because Agatha only arrived shortly after Wanda created the Hex). It’s the home of the fake Pietro who is really an actor called Ralph Bohner and Agatha/Agnes’ unseen husband. So fake Pietro is not Pietro Maximoff borrowed from the Fox X-Men universe, but just a brilliant bit of stunt casting. It’s not quite clear how Ralph Bohner came to have Quicksilver’s superspeed, but maybe that was Agatha’s magic, too.

Monica uses her newfound superpowers and realises that Agatha is controlling Pietro/Ralph via the necklace he always wears. She rips it off and frees the terrified Ralph from Agatha’s and Wanda’s control. Then Monica sets off towards the town centre to help out with the fight. She arrives just as Hayward arrives with his goons and his guns.

Since there are now multiple villains and threats to deal with, Wanda, Vision, the twins and Monica split up to deal with the threats separately. Vision deals with White Vision, Wanda with Agatha, while the twins and novice superheroine Monica deal with the lesser threat, namely Hayward and his goons. “We never really prepared you for this”, Wanda and Vision tell the twins, “But you were born for this.” And indeed, as second generation superheroes, they were.

Billy uses his powers to freeze the soldiers, while Tommy uses his superspeed to steal their guns. Hayward is furious to have been shown up by superpowered ten-year-olds. He gets out of his car, draws his pistol and fires at the twins, which is a true boo-hiss moment, because whatever else Billy and Tommy may be, they’re still ten-year-old kids. However, Monica steps in front of the boys and stops the bullets with her new superpowers. One gets past her, but Billy uses his telekinesis to stop it. A furious Hayward now jumps into a car to run down Monica, Billy and Tommy, but Darcy shows up with the ice cream truck she and Vision appropriated and rams it into Hayward’s car.

Meanwhile, Wanda uses a repeat of the trick she used to take out the Avengers in Age of Ultron and shows Agatha her worst nightmare, which is the night the other witches tried to burn Agatha at the stake. Now Agatha really does seem panicked, but she still has an ace up her sleeve. She tells Wanda that she is the Scarlet Witch, a witch with no coven and enormous powers stronger than that of the Sorcerer Supreme, a title currently held by Doctor Strange. Furthermore, Wanda is fated to bring about the end of the world, as is written in the Darkhold, Agatha’s Necronomicon style grimoire. The other witches, though they had their lifeforce sucked out by Agatha, promptly rewaken to do the same to Wanda, because Wanda is obviously even worse than Agatha. I find that I don’t like these witches very much.

So Wanda is tied to the stake and the other witches begin to attack her. However, Wanda manifests horns which look very much like her classic headpiece. She frees herself and tears Agatha out of the dreamworld into the real one, where Agatha and Wanda slug it out for another round. Wanda hurls her powers at Agatha, telling her that she does not want them. Agatha absorbs Wanda’s powers and lifeforce, while Wanda literally withers. Once Wanda is seemingly depowered, Agatha informs her that she lied (now there’s a surprise) and that she cannot fix Wanda’s spell and Westview. “This world will always be broken”, she tells her, “Just like you.”

Then Agatha calls up her powers to deal Wanda the death blow, only that nothing happens. Now Wanda reveals that she’s tricked Agatha. The Hex is still active, albeit smaller than before, and Wanda has etched the same protective runes that Agatha used in her basement lair into the walls. “Only the witch that cast the runs can use her magic”, Wanda tells her, “Thanks for the tip.” Wanda also gets a new costume, which is a great update of her classic Scarlet Witch costume. I’ve always found Wanda’s costume in the Avengers movies somewhat underwhelming, though the classic comic costume obviously wasn’t an option for a superhero movie made in the 21st century. This new costume, however, is much better and incorporates elements of the classic costume such as the cape and the headpiece.

Agatha is now thoroughly beaten and depowered, but she still tries to bargain with Wanda. “You need me”, she tells her, because Agatha has all the magic training and knowledge. Wanda, however, manipulates Agatha’s mind and turns her back into the nosy neighbour character she played in the fake sitcom. “You live her now”, she tells a horrified Agatha, “I know where to find you.” It’s a fitting punishment for Agatha and besides, Marvel – and we – get to keep the brilliant Kathryn Hahn around for further use. I do feel a tad sorry for Ralph a.k.a. fake Pietro who’s now stuck with a partner he never chose.

It’s a well-known that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has something of a villain problem, since the villains are almost always less memorable than the heroes and exist mostly so the heroes have someone to fight. There are exceptions – Loki, Thanos, Killmonger – but they are rare. Agatha, however, was one of the most memorable villains we’ve seen so far in the Marvel Cinematic and TV Universe – just as brilliant, insane and memorable as Loki. And can we have a Loki and Agatha team-up please? Cause that would truly be a match made in hell.

As for Kathryn Hahn, so far I only associated her with her role as the grief counsellor Lily in Crossing Jordan more than a decade ago. And while there was nothing wrong with her performance, it also wasn’t particularly outstanding. Her role was basically the stock understanding best friend character. Kathryn Hahn’s performance in WandaVision, however, was brilliant, both as the nosy sitcom neighbour Agnes and the over-the-top supervillainess Agatha. I do hope she gets an Emmy and/or Golden Globe nod next year. Ditto for Elizabeth Olsen, who portrayed a woman wrecked by grief, a superbeing with ambiguous powers and motives, and five different variations of a sitcom wife/mother all in the same show. And Paul Bettany was wonderful as the android who thinks he’s a sitcom husband. And his comic timing in the magic show episode was brilliant.

I’ve seen some grumbling online that “those Marvel stans” apparently truly think that a mere superhero show would be in any way award worthy, when there is real acting(TM) going on in the usual awards bait programs. Considering that most of the TV acting Golden Globes, which were awarded last weekend, went to The Crown and Schitt’s Creek, I honestly wonder what those people are smoking. Now I have no idea what Schitt’s Creek is (likely exactly the sort of family sitcom WandaVision is parodying), but The Crown strikes me very much as an example of make-up and costume doubling as acting. Also, what is more challenging, convincingly portraying an amnesiac android, a malicious 17th century witch and a grieving, unstable woman with superpowers pretending to be sitcom characters or playing some of the most photographed and recorded people in history? Never mind that many of the actresses Elizabeth Olsen’s parodied in WandaVision have won Emmys and Golden Globes, so why is their performance more valuable than hers?

It’s not exactly news that the major film and TV awards – the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the Emmys – tend to snub genre films and TV and particularly the actors who appear therein, exceptions such as Peter Dinklage, Gillian Anderson (her win for The X-Files, not The Crown) and Tatiana Maslany notwithstanding. Meanwhile, how many TV actors have won Emmys and Golden Globes for playing stock characters like “the grumpy cop”, “the kindly doctor” or “sitcom Dad” and “sitcom Mom”? Are all genre performances award-worthy? No, of course not. But I think that Elizabeth Olsen, Kathryn Hahn and Paul Bettany would deserve recognition. Ditto for Pedro Pascal in The Mandalorian, who for much of the series only had body language and his voice to act with (and Din Djarin doesn’t exactly talk much) and yet managed to do so much with so little. Fine performances can be found in all genres of films and TV shows. And “An actor was made up to resemble a famous historical figure who looks nothing like them” does not necessarily mean that a performance is great, even though the Oscars, Golden Globes and Emmys seem to think so.

Richard Lawson’s review at Vanity Fair is a typical example. Lawson is disappointed by the WandaVision finale, because it ties in too much to the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (well, it is a Marvel show, duh?) and was just an entertaining rollercoaster ride in the end instead of something deeper. Never mind that WandaVision tackled plenty of themes other than “See superheroes beating each other up”, e.g. grief and trauma and how to deal with it, the fakeness of the US sitcom, the quiet horror of the American suburb, the hollowness of the American dream, the familiar people fearing and hating what is different theme from 58 years of X-Men comics, etc… Meanwhile, what deeper themes does a regular sitcom tackle beyond Michael J. Fox weeping over the death of a character who only appeared in that one episode, while the laugh track still plays in the background?

Richard Lawson writes:

It was probably best to not watch WandaVision through a humanistic, emotional lens to begin with. The show was, at its best, a fantastical what-if lark, a show that let us spend some time with a couple of second-string Avengers characters in a curious new setting. Marvel wasn’t actually invested in mining deeper truths about life in the world. That was, in essence, marketing. Marvel also tried really hard to convince us that one of the Captain America movies was a 1970s conspiracy thriller, and not just another (good! fun!) Captain America movie. WandaVision advertised itself from within, adding a new layer of argument each week that it was about something more.

My reaction to this is, “Why on Earth should we not watch WandaVision or any superhero movie or show through a humanistic, emotional lens?” But then I have been a longterm reader of the comics and am invested in the characters. I know these people, so of course I am invested in them. Meanwhile, I am not invested in the interpersonal drama of the British royal family or in the travails of a white middle class guy with cancer who feels the burning need to become a murderous drug dealer because of reasons. At their heart, superhero comics are long-running soap operas, only with superpowers, fights for the fate of the universe and all sorts of cool stuff added in. So of course, we’re invested in these characters. It’s okay, if Richard Lawson is not invested in these characters or their stories, but he shouldn’t claim that superhero stories can never be more than entertainment, when many of them are. And besides, what is The Crown if not entertainment?

Back to Westview, where it’s all over save the mopping up. The Hex is still retracting and both Wanda and Vision know what this means. So they go home, tug Billy and Tommy into bed one last time. Then they kiss and say good-bye in a touching scene, before the Hex vanishes, leaving Wanda alone in an empty lot once more. As Wanda wanders through the Westview town centre (she no longer has a car, because she threw it at Agatha), the people of Westview all glare daggers at her. Monica briefly talks to Wanda and tells her that those folks will never understand what Wanda gave up for them. Monica also tells Wanda that she understands grief and that given the chance, she would bring her mother back, too.

I suspect I should feel more sympathy for the people of Westview who were after all drawn into Wanda’s personal trauma through no fault of their own and literally put through hell. However, when they glare at Wanda at the end, all I could think was, “Here’s the next torches and pitchforks mob – Agatha was right, after all” and “Boy, I so didn’t miss the endless ‘Everybody hates and fears mutants’ stuff from the X-Men comics.”

I’m not sure why I had this reaction. Part of it may be that Westview itself looks very much like the dark side of America. Without Wanda’s reality manipulation, it’s very much a shithole, a fading and rundown town, whose inhabitants probably voted for Trump, because they thought he’d make Westview great again. We’ve seen loads of Westviews in the past few years, whenever some newspaper or magazine decided to run a feature about the forgotten white America and why those people were forced to vote for Trump. And yes, I know that not everybody in Westview is white, but the town is very much that sort of place, though a bit more diverse. So in short, Westview elicited negative emotions, which stem both from four years of “Won’t someone think of the neglected white America?” articles and from more than twenty years of X-Men comics. And indeed, it’s interesting that WandaVision is leaning so heavily into the “Feared and hated by a world they’re trying to protect” theme of the X-Men comics, both with Hayward and the people of Westview, when the Marvel Cinematic Universe has largely ignored that aspect so far and was all the better for it.

Also, Wanda now has a new costume and some nifty new powers, but otherwise she’s back where she began. She’s lost Vision – again – and she’s lost her kids, too, (though they’ll be back eventually) on top of everything else she’s already lost. Hell, she’s even lost Pietro a second time. She’s still grieving, still unstable and now even more powerful, which is not a good combination. The post-credits sequence sees Wanda alone in a cabin in the wilderness somewhere. Her astral form is studying the Darkhold, which she appropriated from Agatha, while her physical form is moping, when she hears her kids calling for help.

There’s a second post-credits sequence, too, where Monica meets up with an FBI agent, who reveals herself to be a Skrull and informs Monica that an old friend (Nick Fury, Captain Marvel?) needs help in space. Monica grins. Sadly, we don’t get a lot of Darcy and Jimmy Woo in this episode, but I hope we’ll see them again somewhere else, because they’re both great.

Considering that I initially wasn’t even sure whether to bother with WandaVision at all, I largely enjoyed the show, even if I found the ending rather depressing. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will have to be very good indeed to live up to this one.

Regardless of what the Richard Lawsons of this world say, Marvel is actually quite willing to take chances and tell a large variety of different stories within the framework of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the movies, we’ve had war movies, gonzo space operas, Wagnerian fantasy, 1970s style political thrillers, afrofuturism, caper movies and much more. And yes, they’re all about superheroes in the end, but that’s like complaining that sitcoms are about families or cop shows about cops.

WandaVision is certainly an example of Marvel taking a gamble, because here we have Marvel taking two of the most complicated characters in the comics, plugging them into a genre that normally is about as far from superhero stories as you can get, namely the sitcom, adding in a big dash of Philip K. Dickian weirdness as well as a couple of other genres (X-Files style mystery thriller, paranormal fantasy) and pulling it off. The pay-off may have been not quite as good as the build-up, but the fact that Marvel made a show about the family life of an East European immigrant magic user and her android husband work at all is almost a miracle in itself.

Fancast Spotlight: Androids and Assets

It’s time for the next entry in my Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project. For more about the Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project, go here. You can also check out the other great fanzines and fancasts featured by clicking here.

I have decided to expand the scope of the project to also cover fancasts, because the fancast category could also use a boost. And besides, the borders between fanzine and fancast are porous anyway.

So today, I’m pleased to feature the Androids and Assets podcast, which discusses the politics and economy of science fiction.

Therefore, I’m happy to welcome Stephen and Marshall of Androids and Assets to my blog today:

Tell us about your podcast or channel.

Androids and Assets is a podcast about the political economy of speculative fiction. It is a crazed experiment, and is a truly unique attempt to engage Fandoms in fierce political discourse. We mostly look at fantasy and science fiction and examine the choices in the background of the story. What do they use for money? What sort of government is in place? Is this modern capitalism simply moved to a fictional world? Is that an intentional choice to critique capitalism or is it an unquestioned acceptance of our current system?

Basically if a work is about the future and makes any comment on the social relationships of people to wealth, power and each other we want to engage with it.

We process creative works through a lot of different lenses. So maybe we are making a historical analogy, talking about Foucault or we are doing cost analysis of a spaceship. We take wild liberties with the show’s broad conceptual mandate. We are also very lucky to often have guests to come on and talk about their works. We interrogate them about what they were thinking and what they were trying to tell the audience through their work. It has been wonderful to engage with so many great creators who are so willing to engage with our questions about quantitative easing and post holes.

We are also doing a complete watch through and discussion of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in what might be described as a separate show. Every other episode we release is called Emissaries of Profits and we talk about Star Trek and DS9 and grapple with what the show tells us about the Federation and what people were thinking about in the nineties.

Who are the people behind your podcast or channel?

If the show is a crazed experiment we are happy to be the mad social scientists. Stephen is an orthodox Marxist He’s interested in history, philosophy and psychology. Marshall is a heterodox Marxist, our resident economist and an insightful amateur historian in his own right.

Above all else we are good friends with a passion for SFF and a hatred of market centric capital, that sees wealth as an end in itself.  We see wealth as a tool for improving people’s lives and that it needs to be shared through a scientific and democratic form of governance. The institution of property cannot be inviolable in a just society

Why did you decide to start your podcast or channel?

Because we’re two white dudes in the 21st century.

A little more seriously, we talk about these things all the time and thought other people might also want rage against unrestrained capital through the Cypher of SFF.

What format do you use for your podcast or channel and why did you choose this format?

We always have a thesis trying to link a fiction work to a real world phenomenon. Sometimes the pursuit of that thesis takes us to strange places. Our podcast is formatted as a conversation. It is pretty free flowing and lightly (sometimes more and sometimes less) edited. Even when we have a guest it is less an interview and more a discussion about the work.

If you like deep dives into minutia and rapid fire hot takes on SFF franchises you may like this show.

The fan categories at the Hugos were there at the very beginning, but they are also the categories which consistently gets the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines, fancasts and other fan projects are important?

Media is best shared with others. It is more fun to discuss and critique things we love (or don’t) with others. We’ve had our opinions on books and movies changed after a good chat. Fan projects help shape opinion and help people find new things to enjoy or new ways to enjoy things they already love.

Inevitably fan communities will attain a totalizing hybrid holographic/drug fueled mass consciousness until then… we need this.

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online and fancasts have sprung up. What do you think the future of fan media looks like?

Predictions about the future are incredibly difficult. I’m certain that as media evolves, fans will be right there alongside it. But, we are confident in the inevitability of a totalizing hybrid holographic/drug fueled mass consciousness

The four fan categories of the Hugos (best fanzine, fan writer, fan artist and fancast) tend to get less attention than the fiction and dramatic presentation categories. Are there any awesome fanzines, fancasts, fan writers and fan artists you’d like to recommend?

We are happy to share the media discourse with our good friends at the Hugo Book Club Blog, The Hugo Girl! Podcast, Spectology and Escape Pod. They are all worth checking out and worthy of awards.

Where can people find you?

androidsandassets.ca

@assetdroid on Twitter and Instagram

We are also reachable through most major occult rituals.

Thank you, Stephen and Marshall, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Do check out Androids and Assets, cause it’s a great podcast.

***

Do you have a Hugo eligible fanzine/-site or fancast and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

 

Fancast Spotlight: SFF180

It’s time for the next entry in my Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project. For more about the Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project, go here. You can also check out the other great fanzines and fancasts featured by clicking here.

I have decided to expand the scope of the project to also cover fancasts, because the fancast category could also use a boost. And besides, the borders between fanzine and fancast are porous anyway.

So today, I’m pleased to feature the SFF180 Booktube channel.

Therefore, I’m happy to welcome Thomas Wagner of SFF180 to my blog today:

Tell us about your podcast or channel.

SFF180 is a YouTube channel that is part of what’s called the booktube community, consisting of all the YouTube creators who talk about books and reading. Much of booktube focuses on Young Adult titles, but you can find channels that cover nearly every reading niche you can imagine. My channel covers predominately original fantasy and science fiction for adult audiences, and it had its origins in a book review website I ran from 2001-2015 called SFReviews.net (which I am continuing under the new domain sff180.com).

Who are the people behind your podcast or channel?

Just myself. I have a channel artist, Matt Olson, who creates the thumbnail art for my videos. Thumbnails are how a YouTubers lures potential viewers to their content, quite like a well-designed book cover, and my thumbnails are fairly unique in that they’re original art, as opposed to simply a screenshot of myself holding up a book and making a face!

Why did you decide to start your podcast or channel?

I was running out of creative steam at the website and looking for a new platform and new medium through which to talk about SFF books. I was actually inspired by friends of mine who run YouTube gaming channels. At the time I started my channel, I had no idea that there was any such thing as booktube.

What format do you use for your podcast or channel and why did you choose this format?

Since I’m not sure what you mean by format exactly, I’ll just describe my approach to the content I make. I have a weekly (when it’s possible to be weekly) flagship series called Mailbag Monday, in which I showcase all of the review copies publishers have seen me that week. I decided early on that having at least one reliable, regular upload on the channel would give viewers something they could look forward to viewing habitually, and bring them back each week. Beyond these, I do book reviews, editorial reviews when I want to comment on some current issue in the SFF community, convention vlogs, and other content as I see fit.

The fanzine category at the Hugos is one of the oldest, but also the category which consistently gets the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines, fancasts and other fan projects are important?

Fan activity has always been central to the SFF community, from the days of the earliest conventions in the 1920s and 1930s. SFF fans realized that they had a specialized, nerdy hobby, and immediately sought ways to reach out and connect with other fans. From this, convention culture was born. The era of the internet and social media has made such connections much easier than they were in the 20th century, and fans now have so many more creative ways to express their fandom and reach out to fellow fans — blogs, YouTube, Instagram, online fanfic, and so on. Anything that builds community is vitally necessary for the health of the genre.

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online and fancasts sprang up. What do you think the future of fan media looks like?

Utterly unpredictable, except to say that wherever communication technology goes, fandom will follow. The current rise of TikTok, for example, has seen many communities moving onto that platform — there is now BookTok. When a new, popular platform arises, whatever it may be, fan media will make it work for them.

The four fan categories of the Hugos (best fanzine, fan writer, fan artist and fancast) tend to get less attention than the fiction and dramatic presentation categories. Are there any awesome fanzines, fancasts, fan writers and fan artists you’d like to recommend?

Naturally, I would like to recommend so many of my friends and fellow creators on booktube: Kalanadi, Kitty G Books, The Shades of Orange, Thoughts on Tomes, ONYX Pages, Triumphal Reads are all very good channels. I would like to listen to more podcasts than I do; it is mostly a question of time.

Where can people find you?

http://sff180.com
https://youtube.com/c/SFF180
Instagram: @sff180.booktube
Twitter: @SFF180
Facebook

Thank you, Thomas, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Do check out SFF180, cause it’s a great YouTube channel.

***

Do you have a Hugo eligible fanzine/-site or fancast and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

First Monday Free Fiction: Our Lady of the Burning Heart

Welcome to the March 2021 edition of First Monday Free Fiction, which is also posted on the first day of the month this time around.

To recap, inspired by Kristine Kathryn Rusch who posts a free short story every week on her blog, I’ll post a free story on every first Monday of the month.

This month’s free story is Our Lady of the Burning Heart, the story of a would-be burglar who tries to rob a church and has an experience that not only puts the fear of God into him but also makes him go straight. And if that sounds too religious for you, don’t worry, because it’s not really that kind of story at all.

Our Lady of the Burning Heart

Liam Connor walked down Market Street, pondering a dilemma of immense proportions. For Liam needed money and he needed it fast, cause Dan “the Man” O’Brien, bookmaker and bonebreaker, had threatened to break some of Liam’s bones, if Liam did not pay back the twenty thousand he owed Dan “the Man” within twenty-four hours.

Liam didn’t want his bones broken. However, he didn’t have twenty thousand dollars. He didn’t even have twenty dollars. In fact, after turning his pockets inside out, he found that he had exactly two dollars and forty-seven cents to his name. And two dollars and forty-seven cents wouldn’t even serve as a downpayment for Dan “the Man”. So Liam needed to procure money, a lot of money, twenty thousand dollars worth of money, to pay off Dan “the Man”. And he needed to procure that money within twenty-four hours.

Now there were very few professions in the world where one could earn twenty thousand dollars in a single day and unfortunately, Liam was crap at all of them. Indeed, Liam had never been able to hold down a job, any job, for more than a few weeks. He knew only two ways of making money and that was by stealing or by gambling. And Liam wasn’t very good at either of them, otherwise he would never have racked up twenty thousand dollars worth of debt.

However, Lady Luck had smiled down on Liam for once. Just in the most dire hour of his need she had handed him a sure-fire bet. For there was a horse running in the fifth race at Suffolk Downs tonight, a horse named Fiddler’s Fortune. Fiddler’s Fortune was a complete and utter outsider who had never won a minor race, let alone a major one. But Liam had it on one hundred percent certain authority that Fiddler’s Fortune’s streak of losses would end tonight, even though the odds of that happening were two hundred to one.

If Liam were to bet only a single grand on Fiddler’s Fortune in the fifth race tonight, he’d be able to pay off Dan “the Man” in a single swoop. If he were to bet more, he’d even have money left over. A lot of money. More money than Liam had ever seen in a single place in his whole lifetime.

There was only one problem. Liam did not have a grand to bet on Fiddler’s Fortune, let alone more. All he had was two dollars and forty-seven cents and even with odds of two hundred to one, that would be… — well, math had never been his strong suit, but he knew that it wouldn’t be nearly enough.

That left Liam with three choices, all equally unpleasant. One, he could bet his two dollars and forty-seven cents on Fiddler’s Fortune, hand over his winnings to Dan “the Man” and get his bones broken for his troubles. Two, he could bet his two dollars and forty-seven cents on Fiddler’s Fortune and use his meagre winnings to skip town and buy a bus ticket to a place that was hopefully beyond the reach of Dan “the Man”. Three, he could somehow try to raise a grand or two, bet it all on Fiddler’s Fortune and use the winnings to pay off Dan “the Man”.

Number three was clearly the most appealing choice. There was just one problem, namely that Liam had no more chance of raising a hundred dollars than he had of raising twenty thousand dollars. Which meant that he’d either have to skip town or get his bones broken or both, should Dan “the Man” ever find him.

And so Liam walked briskly down Market Street, head kept down and hands stuffed into his pockets against the chilly wind, and prayed for a miracle that would somehow solve all of his problems at once. To his own amazement, he got one.

At this moment, Liam just happened to walk past the Church of Our Lady of the Burning Heart. He’d been an altar boy here once, to please his pious Grandma who had been all about prayer and confession and repentance to the point that she went to confession twice a week, though Liam didn’t think she’d ever committed a sin worse than jaywalking in her whole life.

But then Granny died and Liam gave up being an altar boy and finally stopped going to the Church of Our Lady of the Burning Heart or indeed any other church altogether. He’d never believed in that whole mumbo jumbo anyway and had only gone through the motions to please Granny. But with her gone, there was no point.

He wondered what she’d think of him and the man he had become. Not much, that was for sure. Granny had always hoped that Liam would become a priest one day, the highest profession in her eyes. Though Liam had always known that priesthood wasn’t for him. He simply liked women too much and gambling and sex and alcohol that wasn’t communion wine.

Granny would be even more disappointed if she knew that Liam was about to get all his bones broken by Dan “the Man” O’Brien. After all, she’d never thought much of the O’Briens and always warned Liam about them. “Nothing good can ever come with getting mixed up with one of them O’Brien boys,” she’d always said. If Liam had only listened. But then, listening to reason had never been his strong suit.

As Liam walked past the heavy doors of the Church of Our Lady of the Burning Heart, he suddenly heard a low moaning sound. At first, he thought it was Granny come back from beyond the grave to scold him. But since that was quite impossible, he thought he was going mad from fear and paranoia instead.

Then he heard the sound again and flinched, for it sounded just like a damned soul moaning in the depths of hell. Or like Liam would sound moaning in a hospital bed after Dan “the Man” had broken every bone in his body.

The moan sounded for a third time, echoing through the still of the winter night. Liam shuddered and shook his head to clear it of all the superstitious nonsense that had taken up residence inside his brain. It was the church, he decided. The church and memories of Granny and fear of what Dan “the Man” would do it him.

A particularly harsh gust of wind swept down Market Street, driving Liam back into the shelter of the church doorway. He leant against the heavy oakwood doors, just for a moment to catch his breath, when all of a sudden he felt the door give beneath his weight. Simultaneously, another hellish moan startled him.

Once his heart was beating normally again, Liam decided to investigate. He gave the church door a little push and to his amazement, it gave. So that was the solution to the mysterious sounds. Old Father O’Hurley had left the church doors unlocked and the hellish moans he’d heard had merely been the icy wind tugging on the ancient hinges.

A grin spread over his face. The church door had been left unlocked. And inside the church, there was a collection box, not to mention silver candlesticks, a famous statue of the Virgin Mary and all sorts of other old and valuable things. It should be absolutely no problem finding something worth a hundred dollars in there. Hell, technically it wasn’t even breaking in, since the door was already open.

Of course, stealing from a church was the ultimate sin, the sort of thing that would almost certainly land him in hell. But to Liam, even hell was still preferable to the tender mercies of Dan “the Man” O’Brien. And besides, the church door was unlocked. What was that but a sign from God or Jesus or the Virgin Mary that he should go in and help himself? After all, didn’t the Bible say “Blessed are the poor”? And with only two dollars and forty-seven cents in his pocket, he certainly qualified as poor. So Liam stepped into the church and pulled the door shut behind him.

The interior of the Church of Our Lady of the Burning Heart had always been gloomy, even on the brightest of summer days. But now, on a winter evening, it was pitch black. The only illumination came from a single flickering light at the far end of the church, where the altar should be. Probably a candle left burning.

Liam shook his head. One of these days, old Father O’Hurley would burn down the church and probably all of Market Street along with it.

He traipsed towards the flickering light, for the collection box would be at the altar as well, behind the pulpit where Father O’Hurley always put it after mass. And failing that, he could always snatch one of the massive silver candlesticks on the altar and pawn it. Hell, given Father O’Hurley’s penchant for leaving the candles burning, he’d be doing the church a favour by stealing the candlesticks and thus eliminating the fire hazard.

By now Liam’s eyes had adjusted to the gloom inside the church, but the place was still scary as hell. The occasional scrap of light falling through the stained glass windows painted hellish patterns onto the pews and the floor, while bizarre shadows seemed to lurk behind every column. Every instinct told Liam to run, run away now, while he still could.

But Liam had never been one to listen to instinct. It was part of the reason why he was in as much trouble as he was.

When he finally made it to the altar, the flickering light was still casting its ghostly illumination over everything. But this close, Liam realised that it did not originate from a candle left burning at all. Instead, the source of the light was the Virgin Mary herself or rather the famous statue depicting her that stood behind the altar. The chest of the statue was glowing, glowing with a flickering light where her heart should be.

For a few seconds, Liam was frozen in place, just staring at the impossible. Because statues did not just glow in the dark. Not unless they were radioactive or something and Liam was pretty sure that the Virgin Mary wasn’t. Of course, Granny had always said that the Virgin’s heart glowed during evening mass, but then Granny had actually believed in all this religious mumbo-jumbo. Liam didn’t.

It was a trick. It had to be. A hidden lamp, just like those plastic lawn ornaments that lit up at night. Only that this statue was over a hundred years old, dating from a time when they didn’t yet have electricity, let alone plastic lawn ornaments that lit up at night. Besides, there was no electrical cord or a battery, no hint of any power source at all. Liam should know — after all he had dusted off this bloody statue frequently enough in his time as an altar boy.

And if it was just a hidden lightbulb, then why was the light flickering? Lightbulbs did not flicker, not unless there was something seriously wrong with the power source. And when they flickered, they certainly didn’t flicker like this.

For the light that emanated from the chest of the Virgin Mary flickered and pulsed like a living thing. Almost like a heart. A living beating human heart.

There was only one solution. This was a miracle, the very miracle that Liam had hoped for, prayed for as he walked along Market Street desperate and alone. But like all miracles, it wasn’t the sort of thing he had expected.

He’d hoped for money, for a way to pay off Dan “the Man”. He’d even been willing to steal from the church — a church, for goodness sake! And now the heart of the Virgin Mary was burning, burning with pain and shame and compassion, showing him the error of his ways.

Liam thought of his Grandma and Father O’Hurley and how disappointed they would be, if they could see him now, standing before Our Lady of the Burning Heart, contemplating to steal the collection box. Overcome with shame, he fell to his knees right there before the statue of the Virgin to beg for forgiveness and pray for guidance and swear he would change his ways.

Prayers weren’t often answered, but sometimes they were. And so, while Liam was on his knees before the statue of the Virgin Mary, he suddenly noticed the flickering light radiating from the Virgin’s heart striking something that was lying on the floor at the Virgin’s feet. Something that looked like a piece of paper. Almost as if the Virgin Mary was sending him a message, a message straight from heaven.

Curious, Liam reached out and picked up the piece of paper. He turned it over, still half hoping it was the one hundred dollar bill he so sorely needed to bet on Fiddler’s Fortune and pay off Dan “the Man”.

But as he held the piece of paper in his hand, squinting to make out the words by the flickering light radiating from the Virgin’s heart, Liam realised that it was not a dollar bill at all. It was a bus ticket for a bus that left town early the next morning. And not just any bus ticket either, but a bus ticket to the St. Nicholas Seminary out in the countryside.

So this was what vocation felt like. After all, Granny had always wanted Liam to become a priest. And apparently, the Lord above and the Virgin Mary agreed with her, for they had just told Liam in no uncertain way that he should go to the St. Nicholas Seminary and become a priest. And for added irony, they’d even picked a seminary named after St. Nicholas of Myra, patron saint of sailors, merchants and repentant thieves. Hell — ahem — Good Heavens, they’d even sent him a bus ticket.

Now Liam had never heard of vocation coming with a bus ticket, but then few of those who were called to serve the Lord were quite as broke as he was either. So he pocketed the bus ticket and put his two dollars and forty-seven cents down on the altar to say “sorry” and “thank you”.

Then he turned around and left the church, walking away towards his new and hopefully better life.

Behind him, the statue of the Virgin Mary smiled beatifically, her heart glowing with joy.

***

When he came to work the next morning, Father Frank O’Hurley was stunned to find the church doors unlocked. Goodness, someone might have come in, ransacked the church, stolen the collection box or the silver candlesticks on the altar or even the famous statue of the Virgin herself.

All right, so maybe they wouldn’t have stolen the statue. It was heavy, after all, Difficult to move without a forklift and a truck.

Father O’Hurley shook his head. He was truly getting forgetful in his old age. But praise the Lord, once he stepped into his church, he found everything just as it should be. The collection box was still in its place underneath the pulpit, the silver candlesticks were still on the altar and the statue of the Virgin was still standing in her place of honour where she had been standing since the church was built in the year of the Lord 1873.

Though some kindly soul had placed some money on the altar, two dollars and forty-seven cents to be exact. Father O’Hurley frowned. So someone had been inside the church last night after all. Still, considering that someone had left a donation, that was hardly something to complain about. Probably just some poor soul in need of solitude, contemplation and prayer. After all, that was what a church was for.

He picked up the two dollars and forty-seven cents and stuffed them into the collection box. Then he picked up a votive candle from his stash behind the pulpit and walked over to the statue of the Virgin Mary. He laid his hand onto the cuffs of her sleeves and pressed. A hidden panel on the statue’s chest sprang open, revealing a hollow chamber where her heart should be. Inside the chamber, there was a single burned out votive candle.

Father O’Hurley remove the burned out candle and replaced it with a new one. The chamber hidden inside the Virgin’s chest was a closely guarded secret, handed down from priest to priest. During the prohibition, so his predecessor had told him, the priest used to keep a bottle of moonshine in there. Though Father O’Hurley preferred to use the hidden compartment for its original purpose, to place a votive candle inside. He always lit the candle right before evening mass to make the statue’s chest glow. A little miracle made to order.

Of course, he’d forgotten to extinguish the candle after mass again, but then it didn’t matter much. After all, statues didn’t burn.

Though tonight, his congregation would have to do without the Virgin’s burning heart, for he’d handed over today’s evening mass to Father Rizzoli from St. Luke’s, while he was visiting a friend out at St. Nicholas Seminary. And there was no way he was sharing the secret of the statue with Father Rizzoli. The man simply couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

Father O’Hurley patted down his cassock and frowned. Now where had he put the bus ticket that would take him out to St. Nicholas again? He was certain he’d had it yesterday at evening mass. Truly, he was becoming forgetful in his old age.

The End

Here is the inspiration for the story, the Madonna of the Burning Heart, which is not a miracle, but a votive candle holder. The light of the candle shines through the porcelain and the effect is quite spectacular.

***

That’s it for this month’s edition of First Monday Free Fiction. Check back next month, when a new free story will be posted.

We finally get an explanation for what happened “Previously On” WandaVision

It’s still time for the penultimate installment of my episode by episode reviews of WandaVision, Marvel’s sitcom parody/Dickian faux reality paranoia. Previous installments may be found here. Also, may I remind you that Disney is still not paying Alan Dean Foster and others.

Warning: Spoilers and pretty significant ones at that behind the cut!

After all the build-up of previous episodes, this episode, not coincidentally entitled “Previously On”, is where we finally get some answers and also see some moments that the Marvel movies glossed over dramatised.

But before we get to the story of Wanda Maximoff, we first get some backstory for Agatha Harkness a.k.a. Agnes, your villainous neighbourhood witch. And so the story takes us back to Salem, Massachusetts (not to be confused with Salem in Westchester, New York, home of the X-Men) in 1693, where a bunch of hooded and cloaked figures are dragging Agatha Harkness into the woods and tying her to a stake, whereupon I started grumbling, “The Puritans didn’t burn witches, they hanged them (and pressed one to death, when he would not confess).”

However, when the hoods are dropped, the group turns out to be not a bunch of witch-hunting Puritans, but instead a coven of witches, who are furious that Agatha has engaged in black magic. And because the Puritans obviously didn’t decimate the witches of Salem enough, the coven decides to execute Agatha by shooting blueish hex energy bolts at her. Worse, the leader of the coven is none other than Agatha’s own mother. Agatha promises that she’ll be good, but it turns out that Salem witches are as fanatical as Salem Puritans and so they continue anyway. However, Agatha uses her own purple magic to fight back and suck the lifeforce out of the other witches. She picks up her mother’s cameo brooch, the same brooch we have seen “Agnes” wear throughout the series, apparently the only thing in Westview that’s impervious to Wanda’s magic. Okay, so cameo broochs were not a thing in the 17th century, but first showed up in Roman times and then became popular again during the neo-classical revival of the late 18th century, a hundred years after Agatha’s misadventure with the witches of Salem, and remained steadily popular well into the 20th century. Nonetheless, I do hope that Disney/Marvel makes a reproduction of Agatha’s cameo brooch, because it’s cool.

The opening scene is one we’ve seen a thousand times before. Pretty much every piece of American entertainment, which involves either witches or the supernatural, eventually turns up in Salem and gives us a “Puritans executing witches in more or less historically accurate form” scene. We’ve had scenes like that in Charmed, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (whose 1990s incarnation Sabrina the Teenage Witch was a sitcom), Poltergeist: The Legacy, American Horror Story, Practical Magic and umpteen other supernatural TV shows and movies. I think there even was a show called Salem for a while, which – judging by clips and promo photos I’ve seen – specialised in detailed recreations of young women being tortured and executed. But the trope is older than that and also shows up in the 1942 romantic comedy I Married a Witch, which was a finalist for the 1943 Retro Hugo Award, as well as many issues of Weird Tales and Unknown from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s (and even further back to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was the descendant of a Salem judge and really, really hated his ancestors). Interestingly, Robert E. Howard’s Puritan avenger Solomon Kane never visited Salem or dealt with witches in any of his chronicled tales, preferring instead to fight vampires and harpies in Africa. This striking Margaret Brundage cover for the September 1938 issue of Weird Tales featuring Puritans executing a very attractive witch does not actually go with a Solomon Kane story (as I had always assumed, even though Howard had been dead for more than two years by that point and the last Solomon Kane story appeared in 1932), but a Seabury Quinn story.

The Salem obsession in the US has always struck me as a bit odd, though it is a lovely “Fuck You” to the Puritans, who are now mainly remembered because they succumbed to a case of mass hysteria and killed a lot of innocent people and who are forever associated with the thing they hated most. Nonetheless, there is no one place in the UK or Germany or elsewhere in Europe specifically associated with the persecution of witches, probably because the practice was much more widespread and every city or town probably has at least a handful of cases. In the US, however, the witch hysteria was concentrated in Salem, though it spread throughout New England.

In the comics, Agatha Harkness really does originate in Salem, Massachusetts, and is one of the surviving original Salem witches. She also almost did get burned at the stake in a Fantastic Four comic for supposedly betraying her fellow witches, but that did not happen in Salem, but in New Salem, Colorado, and the instigator was not her mother, but her son Nicholas Scratch. That said, Agatha’s origin story in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is quite close to her origin story in the comics, with one exception: Comic Agatha isn’t evil. MCU Agatha is.

The occasional The Crucible notwithstanding, most of the appearances of Salem, Massachusetts, in fiction, comics, movies and TV shows over the year are not intended to criticise mass hysteria and persecution in general or the Puritans in particular, but just to provide a convenient bit of backstory. Hey, look, they are descended from a Salem witch or are the reincarnation of one, which is why they have magical powers. The Salem sequence in “Previously On” fit this pattern, though the fact that Agatha’s would-be executioners are fellow witches rather than Puritans does break the mold and is an odd choice, especially since the scene with Agatha absorbing everybody’s lifeforce would have worked just as well with praying Puritans. In his review, Camestros Felapton points out that having the Puritans try to execute Agatha, who is after all not just a real witch, but truly evil, might be misconstrued as a posthumous justification of the persecution of alleged witches in Salem. He does have a point there. However, every piece of fiction with the premise that the people persecuted in Salem were real witches (and that’s pretty much all of them except for The Crucible) can be viewed as a posthumous justification of the Puritans. I guess the takeaway here is, “Be careful how you use real life tragedies in your fiction.” Though after 330 years, the Salem witch trials are fair game (just as they were for the Weird Tales writers of the 1920s and 1930s and even Nathaniel Hawthorne in the 19th century), since they’ve long passed out of living memory.

After the Salem sequence, we’re back in the present day in Agatha’s positively Lovecraftian lair. Wanda tries to use her powers against Agatha, but can’t, because Agatha placed a protective spell on her lair. Agatha is also stunned that Wanda does not recognise the protective runes in her lair. Agatha also tells Wanda that she was attracted by the afterglow of so many spells cast at the same time and therefore infiltrated Westview to figure out how Wanda did it. That’s probably also why Wanda is so stunned when Agatha/Agnes suddenly barges into the house in episode 1, because she neither consciously nor subconsciously created this particular character.

Agatha’s attempts to question Wanda either as Agnes, the helpful neighbour, and later via the fake Pietro (who was controlled by Agatha, though she couldn’t take the real Pietro due to him being dead, full of holes and buried on another continent, so she took him from somewhere else, probably the Fox X-Men universe) are unsuccessful, so Agatha now wants to pry into Wanda’s most painful memories and uses the twins as leverage to get Wanda to comply.

We now get a replay of Wanda’s backstory in the MCU, but where those moments were previously only described in dialogue, we now see them dramatised, starting with Wanda and Pietro’s childhood in wartorn Sokovia. Wanda and Pietro’s father is trying to make ends meet by selling bootleg DVDs of American sitcoms. And in the evenings, he and his family watched his stock to practice their English. Now Wanda’s parents died in 1999, which is a bit early for DVDs, but maybe technological development is more advanced in the Marvel Universe. And the fact that Wanda associates sitcoms with happy times with her family is a nice explanation for her sitcom obsession.

One evening, Wanda gets to choose what to watch and settles on a specific episode of The Dick van Dyke Show (according to AV-Club reviewer Stephen Robinson, it’s this one). The Maximoffs are happy and laughing, but then tragedy strikes. Their flat is shelled, the parents die, Pietro and Wanda hide under the bed, when a Stark Industries missile lands right in front of them and fails to explode. Until now, Wanda – and we – thought that this was due to chance. Even Stark Industries occasionally produces duds. However, Agatha now reveals that Wanda used her latent magical powers to influence probability and turn a live missile into a dud. In the background, the TV is still playing The Dick van Dyke Show, which has to count as special torture.

Camestros Felapton is bothered by using the fictional East European country Sokovia as a stand-in for the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. However, considering how completely insensitively entertainment media from the US has handled the Balkan Wars – if they remember they happened at all, that is – using a fictional country is vastly preferable to messing with the recent tragic history of a real one. For unlike with the Salem witch trials, the Balkan Wars are still well within living memory and the “Don’t use somebody else’s tragic history as fodder for entertainment” statute of limitations isn’t up yet and won’t be for a long time.

Our next stop on Wanda’s Magical Memory Tour is the Hydra fortress in Sokovia where Wanda volunteered for human experiments. Again, the show tells us nothing we didn’t know before here, but so far we haven’t really seen these moments dramatised. Now, however, we see Wanda entering a chamber to be exposed to the Mind Stone, while two Hydra doctors (not actors we’ve seen in these parts before) look on and basically make bets whether she will survive, since so far, no one else did. The Mind Stone detaches itself from Loki’s sceptre and flies towards Wanda. She briefly sees the silhouette of what looks like Wanda in her classic Scarlet Witch costume and promptly collapses. Later, we see her again in a Hydra cell, watching what Stephen Robinson insists is The Brady Bunch on TV, though I initially thought it was a clip from Family Affair. But then, both shows date from the same era and feature little blonde girls with pigtails who have beloved dolls and brothers a little older, so the mix-up is understandable. And I have seen considerably more of Family Affair than of The Brady Bunch, because Family Affair was rerun in Germany, when I was a kid.

The absence of both Pietro (who after all also survived Hydra’s experiments, probably with a little help from his sister) and Baron von Strucker is notable in the Hydra scenes. I guess Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Thomas Kretschmann were unavailable to reprise their roles from Age of Ultron.

Now Agatha – and we – know that Wanda was born with her powers (Is this the introduction of mutants to the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Okay, so Agatha calls it magic, but she is a seventeenth centurys witch) and had them enhanced by the Mind Stone, the next stop on Wanda’s Magical Memory Tour is the Avengers compound, where Wanda is moping in her room, watching sitcoms (Malcolm in the Middle, apparently, though Bryan Cranston look mighty young in that clip) and mourning Pietro, while Vision comes in (we’ve heard before that he tends to barge into people’s rooms, unaware that this is not how things are done, though he’s trying) and tries to cheer her up. By now, it’s very clear that Wanda uses sitcoms as comfort viewing, because nothing bad ever happens in sitcoms. I know that this is a large part of why sitcoms are so popular and that they apparently are comfort viewing to a lot of people, but they’ve never worked that way for me. I’m not sure why, but sitcoms tend to make me cringe on behalf of the characters. I also recall that when I was a kid, sitcoms frequently made me angry (whenever someone was mean to the younger kids in Family Affair) or worried for the characters, e.g. Jeannie and Tony Nelson in I Dream of Jeannie were perpetually worried about being exposed and Tony getting carted off to a mental hospital, so I was worried, too. Instead, my comfort viewing are things like Star Trek (I’ve seen it a thousand times and know nothing bad will happen) or The A-Team (lots of fun and no one ever dies).

That said, it is nice to see Wanda and Vision interacting in the real world, because their relationship happened largely off-screen. We have a few longing looks towards the end of Age of Ultron, a brief scene of Vision trying and failing to make Chicken Paprika* for Wanda in Captain America: Civil War, which ends with Wanda running off and joining Captain America’s renegade Avengers (come on, surely the chicken wasn’t that bad) and then Wanda and Vision deciding to make a life together in Infinity War, before they are interrupted by Thanos. The romance between Wanda and Vision is certainly one of the stranger relationships in the Marvel Universe, though we accept it in the comics, because we’ve seen that relationship develop over many issues. The movies, however, glossed over that aspect almost entirely, especially since neither Wanda nor Vision ever had a solo movie, so it’s nice that the show fills in these gaps. And if there’s one thing that WandaVision does well, it’s making us care about the suburban family life of a Sokovian mutant witch, her andrid husband and their two kids. And interestingly, WandaVision is being watched by a lot of people who have never watched a single Marvel movie, let alone read a single comic, and therefore didn’t have any investment in the characters beforehand.

Though I also wonder why none of the other Avengers seem to care about Wanda’s mental state at all, neither after she lost Pietro nor after she lost Vision and was snapped out of and back into existence. Wanda wasn’t particularly stable to begin with, so why did none of the Avengers except for Vision check on her? Sorry, but the Avengers are pretty shitty friends.

The next flash forward shows us a distraught Wanda after she has been snapped back into existence after five years away. She is looking for Vision, because he was her partner and she just wants to bury him. It’s a simple human wish, but one that S.W.O.R.D. and particularly Director Haywood are not willing to grant Wanda. And so Haywood shows Wanda Vision’s disassembled body in a S.W.O.R.D. lab and asks hger, if she can resurrect him. Wanda tells Hayward that she can’t do that, because Vision is gone. All she wants it to bury him, whereupon Haywood tells her that she can’t have Vision, because the Vibranium that his body is made of is too valuable, whereupon Wanda freaks out and begins to glow and levitate. This was the doctored footage that Haywood showed Monica and the rest of his agents, when he claimed that Wanda stole Vision’s body. However, we now see that Wanda drives off alone, without Vision.

The dichotomy between Hayward, for whom Vision was never a person, but only a weapon and an asset, and Wanda, who is mourning her partner, is very notable in this scene. Of course, having watched Vision for three movies and seven TV episodes, we side with Wanda. To us, Vision is as much of a person, even if he’s an android, as to her. Haywood, meanwhile, is a monster without a shred of empathy.

On the passenger seat of Wanda’s car (a Buick, which surprised me, because normally the Avengers all drives Audis), there is an open envelope. Wanda looks at the contents and drives away. We see her on the highway somewhere in New Jersey, where she takes the exit that leads to Westview.

Now we and Wanda finally get to see the real Westview as it was before Wanda turned it into her own private sitcom paradise. And the real Westview is a badly run down town. The town centre is full of empty and boarded up shops. The swimming pool seen in episode 2 is dirty and deserted and the pretty suburban houses are in a bad state of disrepair. We also see some familiar faces such as Herb, the black guy, who is delivering pizzas, while Harold, the fellow with the moustache who is married to Queen Bee Dottie, is trying to get by giving piano lessons in a town where no one had either the money nor the interest to care. We also see Mrs. Heart sitting at a table in a coffee shop watching the world go by.

One reviewer – I forgot who – linked the sorry state of Westview to the fact that half of the world’s population had vanished for five whole years, which would leave a lot of deserted homes, etc… in disrepair. But personally, when I saw the real Westview, I was reminded of the dead or dying small towns in the US rust belt (of which New Jersey is a part). Towns which used to be prosperous and full of middle class people living happy sitcom lives in the postwar era, but which have long since fallen on hard times. I bet the Westview residents, at least the white ones, voted for Trump, hoping that he would make the town great again (only to find that they hate the result, when Wanda actually does make Westview great again). And of course, Westview also demonstrates the sharp difference between the American dream and the way it has been depicted in movies and TV shows and the reality of rundown towns and poverty. This culture shock is an experience that a lot of people visiting the US for the first time have, when they come across a dilapidated and rundown Westview and try to reconcile it with their rosy Hollywood image of the country. My parents had this experience it all the way back in the late 1970s in the South and many others have had it since. And remember that Wanda is an immigrant who got her image of America from old sitcoms.

Wanda drives out to the now run-down suburb to the spot where her house in the show is. But instead of a house, there is only an empty lot with nothing but the foundations left. Wanda parks her car, gets out with the piece of paper from the envelope in her hand. Now we see that it’s the property deed to this little slice of Westview, which Vision had bought as a gift for Wanda “to grow old in together”, as he’s written in a heart on the paper. The heart, of course, calls back to the heart on the kitchen wall calendar in episode one.

At this point, Wanda breaks down in the middle of the empty lot, when she realises that she has lost everything and everybody that ever mattered to her. Her powers flare and Westview, the perfect sitcom world, is born. We literally see the house assembling all around Wanda, just as we see Vision popping back into existence, wearing the same ugly cardigan that Dick van Dyke wore in Wanda’s favourite childhood sitcom. “Welcome home, Wanda”, he says, whereupon Wanda transforms herself into a 1950s sitcom housewife and decides to just go with it. And who can blame her?

Camestros Felapton points out that we have already seen a character retreating into an artificial world to escape overwhelming trauma, dragging other people into their illusion and doing a whole lot of damage in the process in season 3 of Star Trek Discovery two months ago. Considering that both WandaVision and season 3 of Star Trek Discovery would have been in production at the same time and couldn’t have influenced each other, I’m pretty sure that this is just a case of a theme floating around in the zeitgeist and manifesting itself in different contexts, such as the original Star Trek and Raumpatrouille Orion debuting within two weeks of each other in September 1966, two Robin Hood movies coming out in 1991 and two “asteroid hits Earth” coming out in 1998, after more than twenty years of no movies with this theme. Also, popular culture has been paying more attention to trauma and how it manifests for several years now.

Once Agatha learns how and why Wanda created Westview, she is appalled, because Wanda, though untrained, is so much more powerful than she is. Wanda can wield chaos magic and is capable of spontaneous creation, something Agatha will never be. “That makes you the Scarlet Witch”, she tells Wanda and then proceeds to strangle Billy and Tommy with her powers. Cue credits.

As cliffhangers go, this one is a bit strange, because everybody who has read the comics already knows that Wanda is the Scarlet Witch. After all, she has been known by that monicker since 1964, where she (and Pietro) first appeared as X-Men villains. And if you haven’t read the comics, Scarlet Witch is a just a name, which means nothing.

The post-credits scene (yes, there is one) is much moe intriguing, because we’re back with Haywood in the temporary S.W.O.R.D. retreat. Haywood is uncommonly pleased, because he has finally figured out a problem that has been bugging him. “All we needed…” he tells a female subordinate, “….was a little energy from the source.” The camera pulls back to reveal the reassembled and all white Vision open his eyes.

This actually happened in the comics, where Vision was dismantled by the pissed off governments of the Earth after trying to take over the nascent Internet, and returned to the Avengers in pieces to the horror of Wanda. When Vision was reassembled, he is not only white, but also an emotionless android who doesn’t remember his life or his feelings for Wanda or his kids.

Will Marvel go that route? It’s possible, though I doubt it. Especially since they’ve got the perfect excuse to bring Vision back, since there is now a Vision body without a personality or soul for lack of a better word and Vision’s personality recreated by Wanda, which doesn’t have a body. I suspect both Visions will fight, as will both witches with some assists from Monica Rambeau, Darcy and Jimmy Woo, and in the end both Visions will merge.

We will find out in the grand finale next week.

*This reminds me that it has been a long time, since I made Paprika chicken. Time to remedy that.