The person who should have been given the suit in the first place, who spends a whole film training the man her father chose instead.
Hope van Dyne is the daughter of Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne, a senior board member of her father’s company, and the most qualified person in the room for the entire first film. She is also not allowed to do the job, for reasons that turn out to be about her father’s grief rather than about her.
The second film corrects it by putting her name in the title, and the character improves immediately. She is better at the work than Scott Lang, she knows it, and the films stop pretending that is a source of tension and let it be a fact.
Show detailsA suit that was already hers
The Wasp identity comes from her mother. Janet van Dyne wore it first, went into the Quantum Realm on a mission in the 1980s and did not come back for thirty years, and Hank Pym’s refusal to let his daughter near a suit is a direct consequence.
That makes the handover in the second film something other than a promotion. It is an inheritance that had been withheld.