[Ed. note: This post contains end spoilers for Agatha All Along.]
Agatha all the time ended with some major revelations and the full story between Agatha and her dead son, Nicky. Everyone assumed Agatha sold her son for power, but the truth is that Death allowed her to have six more years with a child who would die in childbirth, and losing her son turned Agatha from a cynical killer into… Well, I guess an equal couple. A more cynical killer, but without a child to stop her from committing more murders.
While the backstory itself is heartbreaking, it doesn't really add anything to who Agatha is, because apparently having a child didn't even change anything about Agatha as a person. And it speaks to a larger trend in female MCU characters and their relationships with motherhood, namely how it feels like something slapped on as a character trait for some of the more complex and morally gray characters, whether to give them angst or explain why they are the way they are.
It's not that motherhood can't be a strong and defining motivation. It's just that it keeps being imposed on characters whose stories don't really leave room for it. Agatha Harkness follows Wanda Maximoff and Natasha Romanoff as the MCU forcibly assigns them a mother.
It is even more evident when you consider the ratio of female to male characters. The MCU is getting better at introducing more women to the roster. But since there are so few compared to the legions of men, it's quite telling that three of them have these embedded stories about motherhood forced upon them. The ratio is simply out of control. Don't get me wrong; I still think some of the arcs the male characters do about fatherhood are strange (Hawkeye's secret family will never cease to baffle me, and I still don't know why Thor adopted a child at the end of love and thunder). But although Tony Stark leaves his daughter behind at the end of end of the gameThe relationship of the male characters with fatherhood is portrayed not only as a mere part of their hero's journey, but in a more positive way than their female counterparts.
started in Avengers: Age of Ultronwhere the one female superhero in the franchise at the time received a In fact Weird thread about feeling like a monster because she can't have kids. only so he can bond with Bruce Banner, who feels like a monster because sometimes he is. Natasha's forced sterilization could be an interesting commentary on bodily autonomy and the theft of choice; There's something to the idea that she was basically raised to be a living weapon (and thus trained a lot of her humanity), and joining SHIELD and the Avengers is her way of reclaiming that. But the movie only focuses on the “feeling like a monster because she can't be a mother” part to make big eyes at Bruce Banner. It's a disservice to everything about her character, as it reduces her trauma and struggles to an incredibly one-dimensional view of being a woman.
It's true that we've come a long way since 2015. But Wanda's leap using her reality warping powers to create a pocket dimension for herself and Vision in WandaVision To almost forget him in search of the kids he only knew for about a week is jarring. Once again, there's potential to delve deeper into Wanda's search for family and normalcy in the face of all her loss. But in the context of Doctor Strange in the multiverse of madnessFirst they treat her like a mother, and a mother who will do everything she can to get her children back. Her children are the reason she became a complete villain. The character from the original comic goes through a similar arc, but there simply isn't enough foundation in the MCU to delve into that side of her. Especially since most of that movie is through the eyes of Doctor Strange.
And now Agatha has a sob story about being a mother, one that has no precedent in the comics (where Nick is alive and also a supervillain). The choice doesn't even add much to his arc within the show. She is a power-hungry witch who kills others to take their power, and when she lost her son, she lost the only excuse she had to do so. No Do that all the time. Her relationship with Nicky makes for some emotional moments on the show, but having her character reduced to Sad Mom (again!) is a disservice, especially since everything she has going for her could do without the kid.
I thought we were moving past this era of the MCU, especially with a whole new roster of female characters emerging. But the big reveal of Agatha's backstory seems like a strange relic of the past. In a vacuum, each of these stories would be good. But as a whole and in the broader context of other MCU characters, it feels strange. Especially since it seems like no main female character has a positive experience as a mother. In the MCU, being a mother means being dead (Queen Ramonda, Maria Rambeau, Frigga), a supporting character out of action (Muneeba Khan, Laura Barton), or deeply traumatized (Agatha, Wanda). Parents rise up and save the day; mothers fall.