- Warning: There are major spoilers for "
WandaVision " and "Normal People ." - Marvel's "WandaVision" has many similarities with
Hulu 's 'Normal People,' which aired last year. - Both feature romantic relationships just out of reach, a powerful pandemic-era theme.
Once upon a time, a man and a woman loved each other, but couldn't be together.
In fact, they were always an unlikely match. They were from different worlds yet found each other, only to be ripped apart by powers beyond their control.
Maybe one of them was a red-faced android named Vision and the other was an eastern European sorceress (some would say witch) dubbed Wanda. The two couldn't be together because a purple-faced supervillain punched a hole in his head, killing him, and nothing - not even a fictionalized town - could bring them back together.
Or perhaps they were classmates from a school in rural Ireland. Connell was a sensitive-souled football star from a blue-collar background and Marianne was an unpopular posh girl, who was kind of weird and arty. But because he got a really cool creative writing fellowship in New York and she stayed behind in Ireland, their love was doomed.
Yes, "WandaVision" and "Normal People" are effectively the same show, just with a lot more CGI in the
Serving as rough book-ends of the 12 months between lockdown setting in and vaccines slowly helping to reopen the world, the two series represent an emerging Covid aesthetic: not a rom-com but a rom-sad.
Lovers from different worlds is an oft-used trope in TV
The trope of lovers from different worlds is literally thousands of years old.
Greek mythology helped popularize the common storyline along with Shakespeare, whose enduring story, "Romeo and Juliet," about "two households, both alike in dignity" yet fated to "misadventured piteous overthrows," was published in the late 1500s.
The tragic romantics of "WandaVision" and "Normal People" are firmly established as unlikely pairings, but somehow they are drawn to each other.
At one point in "Normal People," when a nervous Connell tells Marianne he would be afraid to acknowledge her in public, she responds, "I would never pretend not to know you, Connell."
And in "WandaVision's" increasingly iconic moment, Vision shares just how different he is from Wanda by explaining how they experience grief.
As she grieves her brother's death, Vision tells her, "I've always been alone, so I don't feel the lack. It's all I've ever known. I've never experienced loss because I have never had a loved one to lose. But what is grief, if not love persevering?"
In stories like 'WandaVision' and 'Normal People,' lovers are fated to be torn apart
Life gets in the way for each couple with the finale of each series ending with the two parting ways - not because they want to, but because they have to.
Whether it's because Vision is actually a dead android or because Connell's poetic genius wins him a study abroad program in New York, each story plays on our optimism.
As Vision begins to tell Wanda that she has to end her spell that's keeping him alive, she finishes his sentence: "We'll say hello again." (In typical Marvel fashion, this scene contains an homage to a famous comics panel that depicts a crying android.)
Connell and Marianne have their own version of a bittersweet goodbye. "We have done so much good for one another," she says in the season - and likely series - finale. A few moments later, she adds, "I'll stay, and we'll be OK."
Airing roughly a year apart, the two series serve as virtual bookends for the pre-vaccine era of the pandemic. So why has this story struck such a chord with viewers?
"WandaVision" and "Normal People" may be part of an emerging bittersweet Covid aesthetic: the mourning of relationships out of reach, of a world that used to exist but no longer does. The coronavirus may have created a new existentialist era.
There is one crucial difference between the shows, though.
In "WandaVision," a superhero show in which miraculous resurrections are common, when Wanda tells Vision she might see him again, she might actually see him again (especially since there's a mindwiped Vision in another, white body flying around, surely to discover his lost memories a few movies or series down the line).
But when Connell and Marianne say goodbye the way normal people do, in real life, they just say goodbye and it's over.