I know we're only three episodes in, but I have Some Thoughts about WandaVision and how it reflects our pandemic life.

First, and maybe most important, in WandaVision time is quite palpably out of joint. It's not entirely clear when we are—neither in terms of the MCU nor in terms of lived time. Time has been suspended and upended, a disorienting sense of everything happening at once.

Time, as Wanda experiences it, gets replaced by fictional narratives, a glut of television shows that color, design, shape, and inform her lived reality. She inhabits a kind of rolling dreamscape of television tropes, both visual and narrative. (So do we right now.)

Wanda and Vision's lives are circumscribed by a small, somewhat indistinct geographical area, and they're inhabited by recurring characters who increase the show's sense of social claustrophobia. Wanda and Vision can't seem to escape their narrow reality. (Sound familiar?)

Yet Wanda and Vision's pocket of surreality gets periodically punctured by shadowy, inexplicable, and vaguely threatening figures who don't "belong" there. So Wanda wishes them away, rewriting her existence to suit her own fantasies.

Sometimes along with Wanda, and other times not, we viewers get shards, fragments that hint at the presence of other, larger forces that could be nefarious or not, could be agents of the surveillance state or not, could be something or not.

As these bits and orts of potential threat show themselves, Wanda and Vision work harder and harder to create an idealized normalcy—a house, a job, a family, friends, a community. But the work feels to have an apocalyptic futility, even as they don't want to admit it.

Not easily categorizable, WandaVision is most easily a traumady, a comedy-style show that's animated by trauma even as the characters try to paper over their pain and their loss with laughs. I think Emily Nussbaum came up with the term in talking about Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

Wanda has lost her home, her brother, her lover, and her life, not necessarily in that order. Her world is nothing but ceaseless trauma. Wanda's drive to create a life that refuses to acknowledge her many losses is rational—you can only take so much pain before you break utterly.

In summoning WandaVision, a world that's ordered by television tropes, painted in TV's primary colors, and propelled by nostalgic narratives, Wanda keeps her pain at bay, even as the real world threatens to invade. Retreat into fantasy has its psychological advantages, ya know.

Let's just say that I'm over-identifying with the Scarlet Witch as I live my cloistered, fearful, and heteronormative pandemic life. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.