WandaVision is destined to break our hearts and that’s a good thing

The trailer for WandaVision is basically proof that this show is going to stomp all over all our hearts. And that’s a good thing.

The good news for Marvel fans is that it looks as though the upcoming Disney+ series WandaVision will be headed our way sooner than we ever thought possible.

Thanks to a trailer released during this year’s virtual Emmy Awards ceremony, we now know that the series – originally slated for a Spring 2021 release – will arrive at some point in late 2020. This shift pushes WandaVision in front of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and will make it the first MCU series to arrive on streaming platform Disney+.

As for the trailer itself, it’s gorgeous to look at, full of bold colors interspersed with classic black and white sitcom-style footage, reality-bending scene changes, and other trippy visuals. If you don’t have much idea what exactly is going on, don’t feel bad – neither do our series’ characters, apparently.

But we can hazard a guess.

WandaVision‘s entire existence is a question mark, given that Vision was killed off at the end of Avengers: Infinity War in a way that was final enough that even undoing Thanos’ snap in the sequel couldn’t bring him back. So….how is he in this show?

The answer seems simple enough: Wanda.

Despite the fact that many of the MCU films have backburned her character, in the world of Marvel comics, the Scarlet Witch is by far the most powerful Avenger, with abilities that are capable of breaking the world. In the famous 2005 X-Men comic story known as House of M, Scarlet Witch suffers a mental breakdown and literally remakes reality after a personal tragedy in order to recreate the children she lost.

Sound familiar? Sure, Wanda doesn’t have kids in this version of the story, but she did have Vision, and now she doesn’t.

Though she seemed relatively stable at the end of Avengers: Endgame, there’s certainly every reason to believe that Wanda’s grief might still be powerful enough that she somehow creates an alternate or splintered reality in which Vision is still alive, whether she means to our not.

This sort of twist would also explain Wanda’s co-starring role in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, the Doctor Strange sequel slated to be part of the MCU’s Phase 4.

The downside is, of course, is that it probably means Vision really is dead for keeps, and the point of all this is likely to be that someone is going to have to convince Wanda of that fact. This is, of course, probably not a dream scenario for Wanda and Vision shippers, because it means that the ultimate end of all of this is pretty much going to be more tragedy.

But that’s maybe not a bad thing.

As much as we all love the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it hasn’t exactly been great – or even consistent – about having genuine emotional stakes or follow-through. Character deaths have been rewritten, foundational relationships dropped with little warning, and decisions are driven as often by plot necessity as character development.

The MCU films have always been more interested in Scarlet Witch as a plot device than as a  person – she’s lost more than virtually any other character and that pain has only ever been acknowledged by an offhand mention at a funeral for a completely different character. (We never even really saw anyone mourn Vision or Quicksilver, remember.)  But, more importantly, it’s time for this universe to start dealing with things like grief and consequences and embrace the idea that trauma can and should change people in serious and lasting ways.

WandaVision can be as weird and trippy as it wants to. But hopefully, it’ll give Scarlet Witch and Vision’s relationship the weight and care it deserves after several movies’ worth of allowing their story to take place offscreen and counting on the shippers to fill in the blanks themselves out of sheer affection for the pairing. (No, I”m not bitter, why do you ask?)

The new slate of Marvel Disney+ series – with their extended run times that well outpace traditional feature films – offer the MCU a perfect chance to recalibrate the way they tell stories for the better.

At this point, after Infinity War and Endgame, we’ve seen plenty of explosions and world-ending threats. What we haven’t  seen? A real romance. A story with true emotional stakes. Something that will make us cry as desperately as the “Avengers assemble” moment in Endgame made us cheer, and in a way that’s earned rather than tacked on to the end of another character’s story. (Sorry, Natasha.) Isn’t that the show we really deserve to see?

Are you looking forward to WandaVision? What do you hope the series will be like?