Tweet Share Share Comment TV, the cliché goes, is an escape, a trapdoor to a sunnier reality—or at least a different one. For us mere mortals, the escape is always metaphorical; our earthbound bodies don’t budge from the couch. But for the right superhero escaping into TV could be a more literal proposition. Scared and grieving, living in a grim and hopeless world, what’s to stop a reality-altering super being from waving her hands, scrunching her nose, and dropping into the seemingly safe confines of a 1950s sitcom? This is the premise of WandaVision, in which the Marvel Cinematic Universe gets serious about the small screen and deposits two secondary Avengers, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), the sorceress known as the Scarlet Witch, and her husband Vision (Paul Bettany), a debonair android, into sitcom history, two superheroes adrift in TV Land.

Fandom is not necessarily extreme: the current moment is extreme. And fandom is as much part of the solution as it is part of the problem

“The sense of ownership reflects the way humans have always engaged with stories,” he says. “We use stories to make sense of who we are. We use stories to debate our values, fears, and aspirations. We display our attachment to stories in various ways and we define ourselves through which stories mean the most to us. There’s nothing odd about this. What is odd is the idea that corporations want to claim a monopoly over the storytelling process, resist input from their audience, and lock down stories from further circulation and elaboration.”

“The connection you have with a recap audience is just that you both are noticing those things.”

“I feel like we’re coming back around to an era where recaps could take off again,” he says.

“What I was seeing online was that there were a number of fans out there that were building these websites that were devoted to these amazing theories,