tis but a scratch

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There are many examples of terrible parents in MCU; Howard, Odin, Ego, Thanos etc. The newest member of this club is Evanora. I believe there is a certain kind of cruelty and prejudice in a parent who condemns their child to death. Specially when the said child begs them for help over and over again.

Evanora, the head of Agatha’s coven accuses her of betraying the coven by stealing knowledge above her age and station and practicing the darkest of magic. Agatha answers that “I did not break your rules. They simply bent to my power”. This implies to me that she has found loopholes in the rules and used them and/or she was so powerful that the magical rules didn’t work for her.

After this admission, the witches start chanting and Agatha recognizes what they’re doing and panics and starts begging to them. Interestingly the first thing she says isn’t begging for her life. It’s a warning for the coven’s safety.

“No, I can’t control it! If only you would teach me! Help me! Please!”

Then she turns to her mother and begs her, pleads with her. But Evanora starts chanting with other witches too.

“Mors monstrum natura”

Which if I have translated it correctly(I don’t know Latin. I used Wikitionary to find the meaning), means “death to the monster of nature”. Agatha’s expression is so heartbreaking when she realizes her own mother condemns her to death.

When the coven try to execute Agatha, at first she screams in pain, but as she had warned them and to her own surprise, her power which she could not control, reacts and starts taking the coven’s power from them.

Then Evanora joins the execution. But Agatha still has enough compassion to not let her mother be affected.

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Again she begs her mother that she can be good. But Evanora rejects her.

As some fans has noticed, this moment is a parallel to the scene where Odin rejects Loki and denies his love and approval from him, when Loki physically and mentally is hanging on the edge of an abyss. This causes Loki to commit suicide.

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But there are other similarities that Odin and Evanora share.

Odin raised his children with the belief that Jotuns were monsters, while one of his children was adopted from that race. He hid the truth about Loki’s race from him, claiming he wanted to protect Loki from the truth. Meaning the truth, which was Loki being Jotun, in Odin’s mind was so horrible that Loki needed protecting from!

In TDW, Odin doesn’t give Loki a fair trial. Because he has already made up his mind about him. He calls Loki a creature he doesn’t recognize and “Laufeyson” based on the canonical tie-in comic. Odin tells Loki that his birth right was to die as a child, cast out onto a frozen rock.

He tells Loki that the reason he won’t execute him is Frigga and sentences Loki to never seeing his mother again and solitary confinement for life. This for a crime Odin himself committed in a worse way in the past. A crime which was done when Loki’s mind was under the influence of the mind stone and he was under duress and threat of torture.

Evanora doeas the same to Agatha. Agatha in that scene, seemed like a young and curious witch who is a little arrogant because of her amount of power. She probably sought knowledge and experimented with dark magic because of these characteristics and her thirst for knowledge. But she was not evil. As she warns the coven that she can’t control her power and repeatedly begs them and her mother for help and teaching. But Evanora has already made up her mind about her. She doesn’t ask Agatha for her reasons, or what exactly happened. What they brought Agatha to, wasn’t a trial, it was a planned execution. Evanora sees her child as a monster and probably fears her because of how powerful Agatha is, and condemns her to death.

Still after all their parents done to them, Agatha and Loki still feel some kind of affection for them.

Loki, after erasing Odin’s memory brings him to a retirement home so he can be comfortable and you can clearly see how sad he was after Odin’s death.

And Agatha takes her mother’s pendant hesitantly, and wears it all the time afterward.

As a token from the mother who created her worst fear. Because the execution was where Wanda’s magic(which shows someone their worst fear), took them in the final battle.

She is not interrogating this man not while tied to a chair. She is tied to a chair because that is exactly where she wants to be, because apparent vulnerability on her part is part of her interrogation. She uses the exact same trick on Loki later, when she leads him into gloating over having successfully pushed her buttons (and I have a theory that he did actually push her buttons, that she was genuinely distressed by the things he said to her because Loki is old enough and smart enough to know when someone is lying to him) and turns his gloating around on him, uses it to dig into the cracks of him, because that is what she does, and she can do it even when her target is expecting it. (Really, Loki knows that’s why she’s there. He was expecting to be physically tortured first, and for her to come be sympathetic later, if you recall, but Loki and Widow both know that wouldn’t work.)