Here goes nothing.
Magneto married a woman named Magda, who, upon discovering he was the Mutant Master of Magnetism (TM), runs away from her husband into the mountains while she is pregnant with her two twins, a boy and a girl, and collapses in the mountains, conveniently on the door step of the High Evolutionary, who changes animals into bipedal human like beings as a hobby. Magda gives birth to Wanda and Pietro and dies. They are raised by their cow mama Bova, until it’s decided that Wungadore is no place for human children.
Wanda and Pietro go off to live the gypsy lifestyle. They demonstrate mutant powers, and are recruited ironically by their own father for the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Neither children nor father know of their relationships.
Magneto treats everyone in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants mean, thus giving credence to the word evil. Battles with the X-Men ensue, and neither twin feels good about being in a group that has evil in the title, but they stick anyway. But Magneto is kidnapped (along with the Toad) and Wanda and Pietro are suddenly free.
So, Wanda becomes Hawkeye’s friend, the Avengers are going through a rough patch, and Cap puts together a second generation of the Avengers team that’s sort of like an informal superhero probation squad. All of the ex-cons make good, saving the planet and stuff like that, and Wanda Maximoff becomes a super heroine.
With me so far?
All righty. So there’s a lot of this and that. Wanda breaks a few hearts, gets kidnapped, gets rescued, falls for an android called the Vision, has issues with her brother, trains with a REAL witch Agatha Harkness, beefs up her unpredictable hex bolts power, gives birth to two fake children, and loses the Vision because he becomes unemotional.
Then, we discover that all of this horrible stuff, plus pressures from a variety of evil magical demons, force Wanda into mentally unstable places. More horrible psychological things happen, and a variety of well-intentioned damage control measures are undertaken, which prove to feed Wanda’s instability. And then Wanda decides to bring Wonderman, who was the imprint for the Vision’s emotions, back to life. And she brings Hawkeye and her brother back from the dead (yes, they have died off screen). And she depowers, among other mutants her dad.
And then, since Wanda has gone insane and is manipulating reality willy-nilly, Dr. Strange is called in. Wanda is sent away with Magneto after she’s taken “care of.” And that’s about the time I get off this train, because I can see the dead end at the place where the train drives off the cliff.
***
Unlike the Black Widow and the Wasp, the Scarlet Witch is a constantly manipulated mess who ultimately becomes a plot device. As a girl I liked the Scarlet Witch. First of all, she was a witch. Secondly, she had a great costume. But she has never been her own woman, always defined by Quicksilver, Magneto, or the Vision. In a way, she is the anti-feminist Avenger. She’s also one of the most powerful Avengers, but the overtones and commentaries on a woman being unable to handle such power is clear. I would have preferred that she had made some clear decisions about her destiny. I could have respected if she had decided to become a villain, but she constantly reacted, and each decision she made further compromised her internal integrity until the writers seemed to be using her for little more than shock value.
I blame Brian Bendis and John Byrne. The Avengers: The Children’s Crusade is a too little, too late attempt to redeem Wanda as a person and a hero. Once again, she is manipulated by factors like amnesia and manipulation from male villains. Wanda never gets to make a decision for herself. She continues to be a reactive character.
I can only hope that if the movies decide to include the Scarlet Witch, she will receive better treatment at the hands of script writers than she has at the hand of comics writers.
Yep, with you entirely on that. Like the Scarlet Witch for a long time, until Byrne started the rot with his storylines in West Coast Averngers, and it all went horrendously downhill from there.
I’ll always have a soft spot for Cap’s Kooky Quartet. The scrappy, underpowered criminal rehab experiment. At least it was fun.
Byrne did indeed begin the rot, and Bendis finished it off. The senior Marvel staff appear to have a pathological hatred of normal human relationships; when two characters get too settled in together, they must be not only split up, but suffer horrible consequences. WItness the latest Spider-Man marriage reversion disaster.
I think there’s room for a film to redeem Wanda as a character. But I also heard that, because Fox still owns the rights to the X-Men, Marvel can use Wanda but cannot so much as mention the word “mutant.” So that would kinda suck.
So much this.
I actually think Bendis does great on other books; his Avengers are thus all the more amazing to me for the tone-deaf way he writes the characters except for his favorite babies (Luke Cage, Spider-Man). The way Marvel has killed off Janet (basically to make everyone else sad, and fight harder) and written “womb madness” on Wanda’s forehead in indelible ink makes me want to take away their toys.
How can someone have fake children?
Well…. Wanda wanted children so bad that she stole two soul shards from a demon to create fake children. Not having kids biologically would be the downside of being married to an android. And I guess Wanda hadn’t heard of adoption or sperm banks. So supernatural means were best.
Of course, she did this all subconsciously. Stupid male writers.