Let’s talk about Wanda in MoM
It's crazy to me how many people don't acknowledge the Darkhold's influence on Wanda when discussing her actions. It's repeatedly shown throughout the movie that the book preys on your obsessions (Sinister Strange's desire to be happy through Christine, 838 Strange's desire to defend his planet from threats.) Hell, if you watch Agents of SHIELD, they also touch on how the book corrupts based off of the personality of the user and their desires.
The issue with Wanda however is that unlike the majority of the past users, who were in assumedly normal places mentally before the use of the book, Wanda was a COMPLETELY BROKEN PERSON. If Sinister Strange started off where our Strange was mentally and got corrupted to the point of multiple, petty murders, imagine what the book did to the psyche of a Wanda who had just fallen in love with and lost her children in the span of a couple days. Not to mention the incredible amount of trauma she had endured and had to relive in those days as well.
In the Hex Wanda was willing to justify her actions because she didn't want to lose her family (Paraphrase: "But you're all happy!") this is COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDABLE, she was desperately searching for a way out of the problem. A problem of: torture a town or lose my family and she desperately wanted the answer to be "everyone is happy, so everything can stay the same." and again I get that, I get the desperation in that hope, and it breaks my heart.
But then she realizes that that isn't the case and, being the good person she is, can't allow the suffering of others for herself and takes on yet ANOTHER hit to her psyche and lets her family go. She hasn't coped with this loss, she hasn't dissected this hurt, she flies off with the Darkhold ignorant to its influence to learn more about herself. But now she has the book and much like the trees and the land around her, much like the black lines weaving their way through the red in her costume, much like the life being stripped from her finger tips, her mind is being transformed and manipulated and rotted.
In Westview, her sympathy allowed her to see that the ends didn't justify the means. But the Darkhold FOR OVER A YEAR is telling her that maybe they do. The Darkhold is preying on that one part of her mind that so desperately pleaded "But you're all happy!" It nurtured the part of her mind that told her that her family was the most important thing worth fighting for while stripping away the part of her that empathized with the citizens of Westview and their pain. She doesn't see the hurt of others anymore, the Darkhold has given her justification after justification for her actions ("She's not a child" "What if they get sick.") The book has taken her inclination to desperately search for a reason why her happiness isn't a burden or a problem and increased it to its max.
The Darkhold only allows her to care about her family because that is the part of her soul and her person that it needs her to be attached to in order to continue its manipulation. Which is why when she sees Billy and Tommy's reaction of fear toward her that's what snaps her out of it, because it is the only connection to herself the Darkhold has allowed her to retain. When she utters the words "I would never hurt you, I would never hurt anyone" she pauses and reflects on that statement FOR THE FIRST TIME as Wanda Maximoff. for the first time in the film she is seeing her actions not through the lens of the Darkhold, but through the lens of the woman that let the people of Westview go, the woman that cares and empathizes with others, and she breaks down. Then Wanda, not the Scarlett Witch, does what she always does and sacrifices herself for the greater good and destroys the corruptive Darkhold for good.
I personally think it is a beautifully tragic and complex arc that, in my opinion, makes Wanda one of the best characters in the MCU and I will be genuinely upset if she is actually gone.
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