There’s a WandaVision Video Game, and it’s Control

“But I’m mostly going to complain about endings.”

So I know I’m a little bit late to the party, but for the first time in literally five or six years (since Gravity Falls, actually), I actually watched a television show as it came out.  Like a normal person.  Although I guess the norm is binge-watching now, so maybe all of us that watched a show as it was released are the weirdos.  But at any rate, I got on the WandaVision ship before it completely set sail and managed to watch the last three episodes on the days they were released, because I actually somehow had the time to sit down and watch television for once.  And you know what?  I really liked it.  I mean, I almost never talk about Marvel stuff on here, not because I dislike it but because it just isn’t anything I’ve ever felt like writing about, but WandaVision is finally gonna make me change that.  But mainly it’s because I got high one night and thought to myself “wait a minute, have I seen this one before?”

I woke up the next morning with a weird note on my phone that basically just said “CONTROL IS SCARLET WITCH” in big letters (“CONTROL” referring to the recent action video game Control), and I had to scratch my head and try to remember what the hell kind of mindspace I was in when I wrote that.  Then it hit me; of course the message was drawing on perhaps the most shallow, barebones comparison I could have possibly made between two pieces of media; they both have hot redheaded women who can float and throw cars around!  Duh, I said to myself.  That much seems obvious in retrospect.  But is that there really all there is to it?  A simple coincidence between character appearances and powers?  I mean, yeah, that’s kind of it.  This isn’t JC Superstar and Hamilton or something.  But who cares?  I want to use this opportunity to explore a couple of pieces of media that I very much enjoy that also both happen to have magic gingers with questionable motives and inhuman authority figures.  Hmm.  Maybe this goes deeper than I thought.

Alright, so let’s get some definitions out of the way. For those of you who have been living under a rock and/or don’t have access to Disney+, WandaVision is the newest installment in the Marvel universe, and takes place after Avengers: Endgame. Hopefully I don’t need to remind anyone about Endgame, since, when it came out, it seemed to dominate every possible form of social media and interaction. WandaVision seems like it’s done something similar, though maybe only because it’s the first official Marvel film content since the newest Spider-Man movie, and because everyone’s been stuck watching reruns for the last year, thanks to, you know, the global pandemic we’ve been living in. But WandaVision is a sort of weird hybrid between serialized sitcom television and regular Marvel movie, with the first couple episodes being mock-ups of different eras of American television, and the last couple being, well, Marvel movie. In my opinion, the strongest episodes are the ones in the middle that produce a hybrid between the two.

The general storyline follows Wanda Maximoff, who’s the redhead with magic red powers that kind of doesn’t play much of any role in the Marvel movies except to serve as a container for loss, and Vision, the weird robot that has the yellow stone in his head, as they live in some sort of weird, quasi-suburban home. But, as with all things, it’s not as it seems, and sooner or later you find out that there’s magic spells and mind control and whatnot. Typical Marvel stuff, all things considered. But where WandaVision is so different is that the first three episodes or so have almost no crazy superhero antics; they read like surreal sitcom episodes. But things take a twist around episode four, and from there you get the typical Marvel fanfare of government conspiracies and double motives and big tanks and pseudo-science, but it all works very well together, honestly. Until the last couple episodes, anyway.

Control, on the other hand, is a video game about exploring a secret government facility dedicated to housing and controlling supernatural objects. It might sound a little bit familiar, if you’re into that sort of new weird genre like I am. But the general story follows Jesse Faden, a woman searching for her brother who ends up becoming de facto leader of said government facility after she’s granted power by a giant upside down pyramid. Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s kind of a weird game. But mainly you fly around through brutalist architecture, shooting bad guys and tracking down mysterious objects and mysteries in the hopes of discovering a way to save both your brother and the facility. It’s kind of a mix of Men in Black, the SCP Foundation, and generic third-person cover shooters. But somehow, I think it’s so much more than the sum of its parts.

I guess here’s the thing; outwardly, Control and WandaVision are pretty similar. This is really just on a surface level, in appearances and styles and certain story mechanics. At any deeper level, they diverge pretty strongly; they have vastly different tones, different intentions for the audience and the future of their franchises, different overall arcs and meanings, and different characterizations of the female leads. But there is one deeper point to them that I find similar; I hated both of their endings. I’ll get to that in a minute, though. Of course, spoilers ahead for both Control and WandaVision.

So, the surface-level stuff. Wanda Maximoff, also called Scarlet Witch by the end of the show (or she’s Scarlet Witch’s host? Alter-ego? It isn’t quite clear), is a super-powered redhead who can levitate, throw around cars, fling chunks of rubble, mind-control people, was seemingly chosen by some cosmic entity, has a weird relationship with the government, does her best to help people (questionably), and is unable to save the one she loves most. Also, all her magic is red-tinted and she comes from a background of loss. Jesse Faden, from Control, is a super-powered redhead who can levitate, throw around cars, fling chunks of rubble, mind-control people, was seemingly chosen by some cosmic entity, has a weird relationship with the government, does her best to help people (questionably), and is unable to save the one she loves most. Also, all her magic is red-tinted and she comes from a background of loss. Yeah, I just copied and pasted that entire paragraph.

So, yeah. From a surface standpoint, Jesse and Wanda are pretty damn similar. The main differences end up being things like motivation, character tone, portrayal, and a few circumstantial changes, like location and scope of their powers. For example, Wanda can control an entire town and can create life seemingly at will, and is also a witch, meaning she gets magic spells and a crazy book and stuff. And her story takes place in a weird distorted suburbia, where her only enemies are grief, sleazy government agents, and another, different, purple-colored witch. Jesse can do none of those things, and instead of other witches, she fights, uh, mind-controlled government agents inside a concrete monstrosity and primarily flings filing-cabinets at monsters. There is a lot more fighting in Control than in WandaVision, and I don’t think that’s a problem for either piece of media. But, I can almost guarantee that if there ever was (or will be) a Scarlet Witch video game, it would play pretty similar to Control, just instead of a gun, Wanda would shoot magic from her hands. They are effectively the same character.

Now, having said that several times now, and qualified it several times, let me qualify it again; Jesse and Wanda are very different characters in very different settings. They’ve both got some sort of chip on their shoulder, but Jesse goes about this in a confident, no-bullshit way that’s simultaneously engaging, empowering, and funny. Whereas Wanda seems to be in constant emotional denial, trapped in a box of grief and trauma that she’s unable to escape from and will go to practically any length to ignore. And that’s the issue that I have with WandaVision; not that Wanda is unlikeable or unrelatable because of this, but because of how likeable and relatable it makes her. And then it all gets thrown out the window by the end of the series.

Human beings are creatures of grief. We are born, we live, and we die, losing loved ones, friends, family, hopes and dreams along the way. Making a superhero like Wanda, someone who went toe-to-toe with Thanos and held her own, live with and confront that grief (even if she’s grieving a sentient reformed murder-machine with a space stone for a heart), is incredibly meaningful to so many people. It creates a pathos that, I’d argue, most Marvel films don’t really have, or don’t go to any lengths to explore. Which is why watching Wanda come to terms with her grief, and also, as the audience, realizing just how much awful shit she’s done because of that grief (i.e. enslaving and torturing an entire town in order to ignore it) is heartbreaking. As people have said a couple of times now, WandaVision works best as a story about grief. But while it’s very upfront with the fact that grief can make people do terrible, terrible things, it very cleanly ignores the fact that those actions, while understandable, are not justified. Because, by the end of the series, when Wanda has “saved the day” from a problem she created, she gets off with barely a slap on the wrist. She tortured people so badly (even unintentionally) that they asked her to kill them. And the show expects us, as an audience, to just brush that all away with “oh, she sacrifcied so much.” What?

Honestly, the moment Agatha (another witch who’s been watching Wanda) got introduced, everything started to dissipate for me. I was so sure that Agatha was going to end up being not real at all, and that Wanda had created her as a scapegoat for her own guilt, which is also an incredibly human thing to do. And then when Agatha started exploring Wanda’s past, I thought, “ok, this is real, but at least the exposition is kind of neat. Maybe they’ll make Agatha more interesting than just a generic, power-hungry villain, and she can help Wanda undo the damage she’s done.” Nope, the series ends with Agatha getting locked away in the town with the same torture-mind-control that Wanda had been using, Monica (a government agent trying to help Wanda) straight-up apologizes for what Wanda’s done, and the Scarlet Witch flies off into the distance. There is no justice for the people in that town, no greater character development for Agatha, a character in the comics with a much more complex relationship to Wanda, and no sort of karmic reprimand to what Wanda has done.

My issue with the ending of the series is less about the justice stuff and how much damage Wanda has done, and whether or not something should happen to her, but my issue is more that the beginning of the series set up the possibility for a much more interesting, complex, human story. I think the first six episodes really lived up to every possible expectation I could have had for the series, but then it entirely dropped the ball at the end. I feel like it was forced to simplify and categorize everything into easy good/evil boxes, like it had to fit some sort of mold that was forced onto it by Marvel on high. Which is unfortunate, because, like I said, the first two-thirds of the series are something really, really special, and I’m glad they exist, and I got to mostly experience them at the same time as everyone else. But it all feels a little hollow, knowing how it all ends.

But, hey, looks like WandaVision and Control have one more thing in common; really disappointing endings. But I guess what’s different here is that I actually really liked Control’s primary ending; it’s the downloadable content that came later that I really hate. So, the main ending of the base game is actually really, really fucking cool; it’s got a weird mind-fuck credits sequence, kind of like the Batman (I think?), there’s a crazy music video, it’s got this awesome action sequence set to heavy metal, and the final boss battle (while kind of easy), is also really fitting and very empowering for both the player and Jesse. And that’s one of the neat things about Control; it’s constantly empowering its female lead while also neglecting to sexualize her, something that video games as a whole seem to have a problem with (looking at the Tomb Raider series, primarily). It has missteps in terms of representation and proper feminist portrayal, sure, primarily that you could realistically gender-swap her with a beefy white man and it would make zero difference, and practically all of the mainstream games industry has issues with representation, too, but I’d say Control is a much, much better step in the right direction than most other huge games these days. And then, like WandaVision, the end throws this out the window.

So, in the game’s second DLC (basically, the second expansion to the game and the last storyline) sees Jesse, who now completely runs the secret government facility she once avoided, tracking down a monster in one of the other areas of the facility. Thing is, though, this monster is actually the twisted version of a character from Alan Wake, a game previously made by the same people who made Control. And, to make a long, convoluted story very short, Alan Wake is a horror novelist who gets kidnapped by an evil entity that imbues creative-types with the power to alter reality, using them for its own goals. By the end of the game, Alan Wake is trapped, with no way out, and he’s officially been that way since the game came out some ten years ago. But throughout Control’s expansion, Jesse keeps hearing Alan’s voice? How does that work? Well, there’s a reason for it, and it is not fun.

Basically, it’s implied through some dialogue stuff and hidden files in-game that Alan has been reaching out through his magic writer powers to control events around the country, maybe the world, by formulating a story that fits his needs to bring him a hero that can save him from being locked in the lake. And the kicker is that, in the game, Alan mentions that he directly wrote Jesse to be his hero. On the surface that seems cool and all, very feminist of him, “oh a woman is going to save the man this time,” but any deeper thought, to me, tears this apart. All these actions that Jesse’s done, all the decisions she’s made, all the power she’s accumulated over time, every trauma and triumph in her entire life has been dictated by some sleazy white guy with a gun and a typewriter. It’s kind of weird to see this put forth so bluntly in the game, and then the game never addresses it seriously. This has huge implications for Jesse! Is she just some pawn to another higher power, something that she very explicitly decided she wouldn’t be earlier in the game? Is she actually special in any way, or just being used by Alan for some other goals? Has anything she’s done mattered, or could it just have been anybody else, at any time, and none of it matters after all? What power does Alan have? Is he a god? Is he above the other cosmic entities trying to control Jesse? Or is it all just coincidental bullshit? Either way, it feels very disempowering to the main character that I just spent thirty hours with.

Now, maybe this is so hard for me to wrap my head around because I am some sleazy white guy without a gun but with a typewriter. I mean, the whole creative-types with power to reshape reality thing, that’s all pretty obviously a nod to the creative process that comes with directing any sort of project. You work, shape, re-shape, re-work characters and stories until they fit your needs. Maybe this “Alan Wake controls everything” is just a cheeky nod to the fact that, at the end of the day, Jesse doesn’t have any real autonomy because she is, in fact, written by a completely different, third sleazy white guy. And this raises the question of whether any fictional characters have agency, if trying to force media to any sort of context-neutral codified value system is a meaningful exercise, and if minority characters written by the majority (i.e. cishet white guys) will ever hold any real weight in terms of representation. But does Control reference this even a little bit? No. Not at all. Jesse doesn’t even have some sort of snarky mental quip about how bullshit Alan is, a characteristic she’s demonstrated about pretty much every other character, even the actual, in-game sleazy white guy. It’s so very jarring to me, and I wish it didn’t exist. They could have just… not included that. But they did. And it has zero bearing on anything but also incredible bearing on everything.

What the hell can I say at this point. I think I’ve made any substantial claims that I wanted to, and now I just feel kind of… eh. I love these two pieces of media very much, so much so that I devoted not just the time to enjoy them in their entirety but also to think about them for more than two seconds after interacting with them. So the fact that they both drop the ball so strangely, right at the end, makes them even more vexing. But, eh, I don’t know. I still highly recommend both WandaVision and Control, and maybe if you play them at the same time you can pretend that they tie in to each other. And then stop interacting with them 85% of the way through and pretend they end differently. I might do just that from now.

If I’m looking for more media with telekinetic women, I ought to give Half-Life: Alyx a try. Except I don’t have $800 to spend on a VR setup, so that’s going to have to wait until I’m financially stable. Maybe that has a proper ending, which is maybe a little too much to expect from a series that is notorious for just straight-up not writing endings. Hmm. There seems to be a theme here.