"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Favorite Characters: Wanda Maximoff a.k.a. The Scarlet Witch (The Avengers)

 
I’ve said before that the Maximoffs were one of the highlights of Age of Ultron for me, and I’ve already done a Relationship Spotlight featuring the twins, but Wanda really needs a post of her own as well.  Gotta revel a bit in her dark, tragic, uber-powerful witchy glory!  (Wanda-related spoilers, including Captain America:  Civil War.)

Wanda’s origins are nearly identical to Pietro’s.  Saw her parents suddenly killed in brutal, bloody circumstances and came devastatingly close to dying herself.  Grew up leaning on her twin and letting him lean on her in a war-torn country.  Volunteered for experimentation when the remnants of Hydra came calling, offering a chance to (from her perspective) avenge her parents’ death by going after Tony Stark.

While exposure to Loki’s scepter made Pietro a speedster, it gave Wanda a myriad of loosely-interconnected powers (at times, they can feel a bit “as the script demands, but Wanda’s powers are so cool that I mostly don’t mind.)  She can induce visions that unlock people’s most hidden fears, traumas, and insecurities, she has some level of telepathy, she’s telekinetic and can throw some seriously massive things around, and she can produce this unnamed energy force good for general-purpose zapping.  When she joins the Avengers in the final act of Age of Ultron, she becomes one of its most powerful members.

And yet, the franchise has maintained some strong, understandable reasons why she’s not a walking deus ex machina who solves all the Avengers’ problems.  On a practical level, she’s still very new to having her powers and can’t always control them as well as she needs to.  Not that she comes off like a novice when she’s in the field – she’s remarkably adept – but with powers as formidable as hers, the slightest miscalculation can have severe consequences, and an incident just like that provides the jumping-off point for the Accords debate in Civil War.  She knows that her powers can make even her friends fear her, and she’s not so sure they’re wrong to do so.

Because, more so than doubting her control of her powers, Wanda doubts the quality of herself as a person.  She already carries a lot of guilt for her role in the creation of Ultron, which led to such catastrophic destruction in Sokovia, and the inciting incident at the start of Civil War only fans the flame.  Like Black Widow and Bucky, she’s some terrible things – some intentionally, some accidentally – and feels the weight of those past actions reverberating through her present (I get that massive guilt is often a big part of the superhero origin story (see Stark, Tony, and Parker, Peter, for two more examples,) but those three are off the charts.)  Her desire to gain powers was fueled by grief and a longing for vengeance, and the enormity of those powers fueled her dark impulses and helped her travel a long way down bad roads.  She’s since started her journey back toward the light and has been working to be a force for good in the world, but she knows that darkness is still inside her somewhere.  Seeing others fear her, she can’t quite tell if she’s still fundamentally the same person that she was before experiments or if she’s become something else entirely.  I love every bit of watching her try to figure that out, and I can’t wait to see where she goes in future films (which will be, what?  Infinity Wars?  2018-19?  Yikes – you’re killing me, Marvel.)

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