Marvel’s Wanda Maximoff is one of those few fictional characters that has been through so many reinventions that it sometimes gets out of hand for fans to keep a track. But that’s exactly what makes her one of the most fascinating characters. If there is any Marvel character who has lived every possible storyline as a hero, villain, goddess, reality-breaker, or trauma magnet, it’s definitely the Scarlet Witch.
Her character first showed up way back in the year 1964. She is created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but not as a hero. She was rather made as a reluctant villain in Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. She and her twin brother Pietro (Quicksilver) weren’t evil, rather they both had more of a “please stop trying to kill us, Magneto is scary” energy. A year later, she joined the Avengers, and from that point on, her whole life became one long rollercoaster.
Every time Wanda tries to heal, the universe pays the price
And here’s the thing about her powers; she started off super modest, basically with “probability hexes,” meaning she made weird, bad-luck things happen. By the 1980s, Marvel thought that what if she is made into a character who could alter reality itself? and the rest is history.
Wanda became one of the most powerful beings in the entire universe; with her unstoppable magic, sorcery, and inherited witchcraft (although she isn’t a witch), she’s got it all.
But that is not all, because Marvel has already revealed about her personal life, which is a wreck. She falls in love with Vision, which was evidently shown in the Avengers: Infinity War movie, but later gets killed. in the WandaVision series, we see she married him and magically had twin boys.
But when we talk about Marvel Comics, the kids later turned out to be partly manifestations tied to the demon Mephisto, got absorbed, disappeared, reincarnated years later, and (long story short) they eventually returned as the teenage heroes Wiccan and Speed. Honestly, Wanda’s motherhood arc alone could fill an entire franchise, and the MCU should explore this in coming years.
Of course, you can’t talk about Wanda without touching on her biggest “uh-oh” moments. Between mind control, trauma, and cosmic power, she accidentally caused the Avengers’ worst day in Avengers: Disassembled and later rewrote reality in House of M, famously declaring “No more mutants,” which depowered most of them.
Marvel eventually clarified that she was corrupted by external ideals during these events, especially given the fact that she was devastated after repeatedly losing her twin sons, Thomas and William.
Marvel keeps changing her past, but her core never wavers
And the most confusing yet interesting fact about her is her origin story. It has changed about six times, sometimes as a mutant, not a mutant, Magneto’s daughter, not Magneto’s daughter, a child of Golden Age heroes, and then not.
And now we famously regard her as the daughter of Natalya Maximoff, who is a powerful Romani sorceress who also used the title “Scarlet Witch.” Honestly, her family tree is wilder than any Marvel timeline ever made.
Across the decades, Wanda has been rewritten, retconned, resurrected, corrupted, redeemed, and reinvented. But the core concept of her character stays the same. She is a mother, a woman trying to understand the impossible power she inherited and the complicated world she lives in while trying to save her loved ones.
And thanks to Elizabeth Olsen, who brought her to life in the MCU, from Age of Ultron to WandaVision to Multiverse of Madness. Wanda is now one of the most beloved (and feared) characters in modern Marvel storytelling.
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