Let’s Pretend

If you’re like me, and have seven bucks a months to spare for some entertainment, you probably watched WandaVision, and you probably sat through more hours of “people talking about what was going on” than you did the show itself.

This is a known feature of all of Disney’s Marvel offerings - everyone wants to find the little easter eggs, hints, and pointers that will shed some light on the Next Big Thing. Along with the posturing and theorizing that goes alongside any episodic content - especially that which offers up questions before answers, this all gets filed in the internet bin of “Fan Theories.”

Fan Theories, to me, are an offshoot of Fan Fiction. A sort of Contingent Fan Fiction. If your theory plays out, it is no longer Fan Fiction. If not, forever the fiction it must remain.

So I have one. But forever fiction, because I must admit that this is not what the show was about. But much as I pointed out that Marvel’s 2015 “Secret Wars” was no-so secretly about the war between fans and creators in this previous comic essay, I would like to ask you to think of WandaVision as being about the tension between Fan Fiction and Canon.

How so?

Many of us know the joys of Fan Fiction, - in which you and you alone taking the sprawling, interconnected bits of lore and solved mystery, the bare bones of a setting, the shattered shells of beloved characters, and give them life! Sure, you may use innocent bystanders and people from other Intellectual Properties, and you may get some details wrong, but you do it! And it feels good! You give your beloved characters a twist - set them in a sitcom, or run them through the paces of a relationship you wish they had. Maybe you give them children, jobs, friends that look suspiciously like your mailman or your coworker.

And it all goes well, for you. There’s this perfect little world you build on, and maybe you invite people in - or they read it and basically, break in. They point out the flaws. They bother you. You kick them out, but they keep coming back. Maybe they mean well. Maybe they don’t.

And in the end it’s not really yours, is it? You come to find out that there’s something else at play, some corporate beast, older than you, intent on draining what it can from those it finds ‘unworthy.’ This beast has already worked it’s way across the decades, stealing and siphoning, and now it comes for your perfect little fiction. Reality - the shared hallucination that millions of others will be exposed to, rather than your little theory - reasserts itself. “That character is dead.” It says. “She never had children.” It says. “The mailman is just some guy.”

And everyone else believes it, because that is the canon, that is how it plays out. You wandered into the realm of a powerful witch, and your magic was no good there.

But in the end you can always retreat to those who think like you, who believe your theories. Create your own little world elsewhere, even if it is a little less populated. Just beware for the day when the copyright lawyers arrive, freshly summoned from the pit.