Agatha All Along continues the MCU’s weird mom stuff

[Ed. note: This post contains end spoilers for Agatha All Along.]

Agatha All Along ended with some big reveals — and the full backstory between Agatha and her dead son, Nicky. Everyone assumed that Agatha sold her son for power, but the truth is that Death allowed her to have six more years with a child slated to die in childbirth, and losing her son turned Agatha from a cynical murderer into… well, I guess an even more cynical murderer, but without a kid to hold her back from more murders.

Even though the backstory itself is teary, it doesn’t really add anything to who Agatha is, because apparently having a son didn’t even really change anything about Agatha as a person. And it speaks to a greater trend across the MCU’s female characters and their relationships to motherhood — namely how it feels like something slapped on as a character trait for some of the more complex and morally gray characters to either give them angst or explain why they are the way they are.

It’s not that motherhood can’t be a strong, defining motivation. It’s just that it keeps being forced upon characters whose stories don’t really make room for it. Agatha Harkness follows Wanda Maximoff and Natasha Romanoff in being forcibly Assigned Mother by the MCU.

It’s even more stark when taking into account the ratio of female characters to male ones. The MCU is getting better about introducing more women into the roster. But since there are so few compared to the legions of men, it’s quite telling that three of them have these wedged-in storylines about motherhood thrust upon them. The ratio is just out of whack. Don’t get me wrong; I still think some of the arcs that the male characters get about parenthood are weird (Hawkeye’s secret family will never cease to baffle me, and I still don’t know why Thor adopted a kid at the end of Love and Thunder). But even though Tony Stark leaves his daughter behind at the finale of Endgame, the male characters’ relationship to parenthood is portrayed as not only merely part of their hero’s journey, but in a way more positive light than their female counterparts.

It started in Avengers: Age of Ultron, where the one female superhero in the franchise at the time was given a really weird thread about feeling like a monster because she’s unable to have kids — solely so that she can bond with Bruce Banner, who feels like a monster because he sometimes is one. Natasha’s forced sterilization could be an interesting commentary on bodily autonomy and having choices robbed; there’s something to the idea that she was basically raised to be a living weapon (and thus had a lot of her humanity trained out of her), and joining SHIELD and the Avengers is her way of reclaiming that. But the movie just focuses on the “feeling like a monster because she can’t be a mother” part, in order to have her make big goo-goo eyes at Bruce Banner. It’s a disservice to everything about her character, reducing her trauma and struggles to an incredibly one-dimensional view of being a woman.

Admittedly, we’ve come a long way from 2015. But the leap from Wanda using her reality-warping powers to create a pocket dimension for her and Vision in WandaVision to all but forgetting him in pursuit of the children she only knew for about a week is jarring. Again, there is potential there in digging into Wanda’s pursuit of family and normalcy in the face of all her loss. But in the context of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, she’s treated as a mother first — and a mother who will rabidly go to any length to get her children back. Her children are the reason she’s made the full turn into a villain. The original comics character goes through a similar arc, but there’s simply not enough groundwork in the MCU to dig into that side of her. Especially since most of that movie is through Doctor Strange’s eyes.

And now Agatha gets a teary backstory about being a mom, one that doesn’t have any comics precedent (where Nick is alive and also a supervillain). The choice doesn’t even add much to her arc within the show. She’s a power-hungry witch who kills others to take their power, and when she lost her son, she lost the one excuse she had to not do that all the time. Her relationship with Nicky does give way to some emotional moments in the show, but having her character arc reduced to Sad Mom (again!) is a disservice, especially since everything she has going for her could work without the kid.

The toxic romantic relationship she shares with Death could work without Nicky! (In fact, I’d rather we dove more into that than the dead kid.) And Billy doesn’t have to remind her of her dead son for her to bond with him. In fact, it hits harder if she finds herself caring for a possible new coven member without a sob story to explain it. Nick is there to make her freeze up every so often and look sad for a split second, and that’s it.

I thought we were moving past this era of MCU, especially with a whole new roster of female characters rising up. But Agatha’s big backstory reveal just feels like a weird relic of the past. In a vacuum, each of these stories would be fine. But all together and in the greater context of other MCU characters, it just feels weird. Especially since it seems like no main female character has a positive experience being a mother. In the MCU, being a mother means being dead (Queen Ramonda, Maria Rambeau, Frigga), a side character out of the action (Muneeba Khan, Laura Barton), or deeply traumatized (Agatha, Wanda). The fathers rise up and save the day; the mothers fall.