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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