Maximoff-centric Marvel page

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Blog Directory

main acc: @perseph || art acc: @le-bon-vent

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my edits || my icons

my writing

The Racism of the M C U’s Scarlet Witch

60 Years Of The Scarlet Witch

Scarlet Witch reading guide

The Maximoffs’ ethnic and cultural background

my Wanda cosplay [x][x][x] || my Billy cosplay [x]

on wicca [x][x] || Wanda and paganism [x][x] 

writing magic [x][x] || writing Wanda for non-Roma [x][x]

The Maximoffs’ powers

On Roma visibility [x] || Is Wanda a person of color? [x] || Was Wanda originally a white character? [x] || Is it better to “neutralize” Wanda because her origins are problematic? [x] || On whitewashing [x] || Why does Wanda look like that? [x]

Are Billy and Tommy Roma? [x][x][x] || Are the Maximoffs Jewish? [x][x] or Muslim? [x] || The Maximoffs and mental health [x]

Victor von Doom’s Romani origin [x]

Meggan Puceanu, Amanda Sefton, and whiteness [x][x]

Wanda*Vision masterpost [x] || Wanda*Vision slideshow [x] || that one racist author [x]

Educate yourself [x][x][x][x][x] || RCAC Romani studies curriculum [x] || RomBase [x] || RomaUnraveled resource doc [x]

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Come back, where are you?

busy with deadlines

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Do you think Marvel will re-retcon Wanda into a mutant again?

No. Get over it. I'm sick of hearing about this.

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The very first issue of Uncanny X-Men opens with the Black villain declaring her intent to broadcast public lynchings. In case you wanted to know how I feel about this series.

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Do you have any new opinion on the Outliers ? I've asked a few people (and even Gail herself) which ones do they think it has more staying power and it seems like Deathdream and Mutina are kind both the fan favorites and also writers favorites (Gail said that other writers have asked to use them both). I'm sad that Calico was seemingly the most hated of the bunch by everyone i've asked. I liked the idea of her mutation having some connection with her horse,even if still is a little bit vague,the concept was fun to me. I guess when it ends she will be either on limbo only to be SOMETIMES used by Gail,or have some obligatory Marvel Pride background appearence and that's it. I guess i'll have to wait for another writer to create an identical character with the same exact concept,in the future lol.

Ransom is by far the best-written and most well-developed character of the entire group in my opinion. I don't care for Simone's writing style in this book, and the other Outliers-- especially Becca and Hotoru-- are affected and gimmicky in a way that feels artificial, even cartoony, and makes it harder for me to connect with them. Maybe it's because he's the oldest and most mature, but Valentin just feels like the most realistic, grounded character of the group. He connects with the other X-Men in ways that I find more believable, and he's the only one with a fully-developed backstory. I have my qualms about his relationship with Idie, but I won't deny that it gives the him momentum outside of Uncanny that the other Outliers lack so far. It's really so strange to me that he's being left out of this conversation, especially compared to Mutina of all people. I can't image what that's about!

I like all four characters well enough, in terms of personality, abilities and designs. They're a likeable group, and well-balanced. Their original costumes are great, although I'm pretty underwhelmed by the recently added New Mutants uniforms. Their powers seem really cool and interesting on-page, and again, it's a good mix, but Sofia, Hotoru, and Becca's abilities are too vaguely defined for my liking, and don't make always make technical sense for mutants. I understand Becca and Sofia's powers well enough now-- although I have questions about Sophia's skill acquisition-- but I'm still a little baffled by Hotoru. I get the whole inbetween-life-and-death thing, and I can see how that would allow him to communicate with ghosts, but how does that translate to, like, flying, shadow bending (?) and transforming his cloak into a giant mass of animated tendrils? What on earth is that about?

It's also kind of ridiculous, in my opinion, that we're thirty-three issues into the series and have only received substantial backstories for two of these characters. We still don't know how they ended up in Louisiana together, or why they call themselves "Outliers" in the first place. Their introduction just felt arbitrary and not very well thought out, which is how a lot of stuff in this series has felt, including Sarah Gaunt as the opening antagonist. This made it much harder for me to buy into the Outliers compared to, for example, the kids from Exceptional, or any other past generation of mutant students.

[killcityfuckmachine]

waiting for witch’s road issue 5 baybee

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Having said all of that, Amaranth and Chthon's resolutions in Sorcerer Supreme are soooooooo bad lmao.

Setting aside the face that she is a child, putting Amaranth in charge the Flickering Realm isn't the worst idea-- considering her true nature, she's probably even better suited than Wanda to bring balance and renewal to a realm previously ruled by chaos magic. But because her education in Scarlet Witch was completely glossed over, we haven't seen Amaranth attain much knowledge or skill growth. We've never even seen her cast proper spells. She figured out some of her innate abilities, like abjuration and magical sight, but that's it-- and I'm not sure how either of those would apply to the task at hand. So, when all we get is a brief snapshot of her sitting on some throne, it's very for the reader to imagine what she's actually doing in the Flickering Realm, and how she's actually helping.

More importantly, though, the stuff with her dad makes no sense. In Scarlet Witch, Wanda literally figures out a way to undo the madness inflicted by Amaranth's gaze, but never offers this solution to Amaranth hersef. It's possible that she ran off before Wanda had a chance to fill her in, but how that they're back in contact, Wanda has no excuse. Maybe Amaranth feels like she needs to undo her father's curse holistically, with her own magic-- but if that's the case, it's not communicated on the page at all. And now I'm supposed to think that her father is missing and she can't find him? It's the first time that's come up, and there's no explanation-- why would he go missing? What's stopping Amaranth or Wanda from finding him with a simple spell? Besides the curse, he's an otherwise ordinary guy with out powers or supernatural connections. I guess I just assumed he was in a hospital the whole time.

My point, I find it really difficult to accept any of these brief, shallow glances into Amaranth's current situation at face value, and if this ends up being the last we see of her for some time, it's going to be quite disappointing.

As for Chthon-- I totally buy him making his way to the Far Shore/nearly breaking into the House of Ideas. It makes sense that he'd book it as far away from Earth and Wanda as possible after breaking out, and while I think it's important for the Elder Gods to stay connected to Earth, if Oshtur can explore the Outer Planes, I think that an unbound Chthon can make his way around, too.

My real problem is with the Sleeping Beyond. It's an unsatisfying solution because it really comes out of nowhere, but it also kind of makes Wanda look like a hypocrite-- she puts all this energy into advocating for the Flickering Realm's freedom and finding a way for it to heal, but then she turns around gives Chthon... basically a new version of the Flickering Realm? Letting him torment a whole reality just because it's not her reality? It reminds me of how I felt about Lore. You get these villains who seemingly can't be changed and can't really be blamed for their nature, and Wanda seems to be content to let them follow that nature as long as it's not hurting her or endangering her world-- but they are still causing an incredible amount of harm. I can't tell if I'm supposed to think this is an oversight on Wanda's part, or Orlando's.

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Scarlet Witch (2024) #6 || Vision & Scarlet Witch (2025) #2

This recurring bit about scrying is so confusing to me-- in fiction, scrying usually works more like remote viewing than any kind of past/future divination. In real life, it's a lot more like reading tea leaves than anything else-- you pick a medium like water, flame, smoke, or a dark mirror, and divine messages from the patterns and images that you see. There are a lot of methods, and depending on who you ask, some people may claim experience more direct visions, but that's the basic modality.

What Wanda is doing in both of these scenes looks like textbook psychometry, which is actually a normal and fairly straightforward skill that a lot of psychics, witches, and other magical practitioners develop. What she's doing with Amaranth, specifically, is quite common-- reading an object or person's past is much simpler than reading their future, and a lot of people don't do predictive divination at all. The way she reads Eric's corpse in the second image is clever, but it's still predicated on the misuse of the term "scrying" and the weird insistence that gazing into the future is the default mode for this type of divination.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like if you're at all familiar with these practices, whether that's in real life, or just the way they usually show up genre fiction, these choices feel arbitrary and jarring. It always makes me wonder what Orlando's research, or even just his thought process, looks like when it comes to the magical worldbuilding in this series.

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I think the reference between Winding Way + Wundagore Mountatin comes from Sebastian Szardos.

Okay.... so, for anyone who didn't read Avengers (2018) or doesn't remember all of weird Avengers history stuff that Jason Aaron made up, Sebastian Szardos was an American soldier in World War 2 who briefly served as the Sorcerer Supreme. Obviously, he's meant to be a distant relative of Margali Szardos, but the only background we really get is this--

There's another character named Theodosia Szardos, who was a witch that became the host of the Phoenix Force sometime around 1000 AD. She is described in a one-off line as "the Phoenix Witch of Wundagore", but we don't get much backstory from her, either.

There's... a few things going on here, and one of them is definitely anti-Romani stereotypes and historical distortion. I wrote more about that in this post. Both the Szardos family name and the Mount Wundagore setting are used, in this instance, to signal a generally witchy, magical background without any consideration for whether or not they make sense, either historically or in connection to Margali. Unfortunately, they really don't. Margali has never had any personal or ancestral connection to Mount Wundagore, outside of her former alliance with Maria Russoff-- and even that was a bit of a contradiction. Aaron could have used any other name here, like Calderu, Maximoff, or even Harkness, and it would have made just as much sense, if not more-- but it doesn't really matter, because this is all just set-dressing.

My point, this whole thing was extremely thoughtless, and I think you should take all of it with a grain of salt. The fact that Mount Wundagore and the Winding Way are both mentioned in the same sentence doesn't mean they're connected, and Aaron never establishes any actual ties there. Since both of these subjects do actually have established histories that don't overlap anywhere else, I just don't think this one-off line should really be taken seriously.

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One of the biggest recurring problems with Orlando's run of Scarlet Witch is that he seems to be operating from, like, a narrative scarcity mindset because he's never been afforded the security of knowing that the current series will continue beyond the five- or ten-issue mark. I think that's why the finales always feel so cramped, and why so many interesting characters or concepts have dropped into the middle of the series without any follow-through.

This is more apparent than ever in Sorcerer Supreme, and I think it's why he's had to tack on these unsatisfying resolutions for characters like Amaranth or Chthon-- and while there are some other factors at play, I think it's also part of why his treatment of Wong and Clea feels so forced and shortsighted.

I don't say any of this to absolve Orlando for any sloppy writing or technical shortcomings, especially in the current series, but when you look back at the entire run with this context in mind, the tight, efficient plot structures and consistent character arcs that he does pull off are that much more impressive. It really bums me out that Scarlet Witch wasn't given the freedom it deserved. I think that it's good, but, under different circumstances, it could have been great.

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Kieron Gillen writing Loki for the first time in over a decade and it's for ... the Marvel Tōkon story mode.

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What do you think of writers that judge Wanda for her introduction? That assume that Wanda (and Pietro) started off evil?

Again... what do you think?

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what do you think of people that hate wanda for m day

I mean... how do you think I feel?

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Favorite character that has been utterly assassinated ? I'll go first and say Layla Miller...my beautiful girl had so much potential.

That depends on what you mean by assassinated. In the real world, "character assassination" refers to a form of defamation-- an attack on somebody's personal character. This is usually done to ruin the target's reputation, relationships, and so forth. In fandom, we typically use this term to describe storylines which arbitrarily vilify a character or undermine their integrity, often to the point where they are no longer functional as a hero or protagonist. Of course, it is possible for characters to transition from heroes to villains, or even anti-heroes, in a way that is satisfying to read and supports a strong narrative. Sometimes... it just kinda sucks, and when it comes to ongoing serial media like comics, this kind of narrative damage can make it difficult to other writers to use that character in the future.

I'm not an expert on Layla Miller, but I think what you're describing is more like character derailment-- though, honestly, Layla went straight from House of M to Peter David X-Factor, so I'm not sure she ever stood a chance. Regardless, sometimes characters are altered to the point of being unrecognizable, or feeling completely disconnected from their original iteration. Just like with assassination, this sometimes leaves characters in an awkward place where writers just don't know what to do with them, and, for one reason or another, they fade into the background.

I think the only personal fave of mine this type of derailment has ever happened to is America Chavez, which I've written about several times. Wanda and Pietro were subjected to major character assassination in 2004 that took years to recover from, and both of them, especially Wanda, are still plagued by bad faith interpretations. But when I think of total assassination, I think of characters like Hank Pym who, for better or for worse, will probably never return to the hero he once was. That was a much more gradual process than what happened to Wanda, and I think it will be much harder to walk back. Nothing like this has ever happened to any of my favorite characters, personally.

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There is a subset of gay x-men fans who make that a big part of their identity that hold a very confusing amount of spite for gay characters that aren't? X-Men? Like why do you all hate Wiccan + Hulkling so much lmao

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I think you misunderstood my question. Cause other times when Lore appeared, yes, she looked demonic, but making her look like MCU Wanda is whitewashing and a disrespect to the Romani Wanda. Dauterman could have portrayed her differently, but not like MCU Wanda. And there not have a irony in Lore design Dauterman doesn’t care about the Romani Wanda — he’s an fan of MCU Scarlet Witch and Olsen.

No, I understood perfectly, and I meant what I said. Lore is not whitewashed, because she is neither drawn as a white woman, nor is there any textual indication that her racial background is any different from Wanda's. Her new outfit bears some aesthetic resemblance to the MCU character's, and you can argue that this is distasteful, but it literally is not whitewashing. This is a serious topic, and we need to use our words correctly if we expect to be taken seriously.

I'm aware of Dauterman's MCU fandom, and I realize that he is probably not on the same page as you or I when it comes to MCU Wanda. It's disappointing, but, while I do expect everybody to have basic principles and awareness, it's not always realistic to expect industry professionals to be engaged in the same kind of critical dialogue as fans. Dauterman and Orlando are responsible for redesigning Wanda and Pietro as visible people of color in mainline comics, and although I do think that they could be doing more, this was a huge step forward for Romani representation, and they've both expressed sensitivity and thoughtfulness on this topic. To say that Dauterman "doesn't care" is simply disingenuous.

Lore's new design is not a one-to-one replica of MCU Wanda in any capacity, nor is she based on Olsen's likeness. They share a basic silhouette and a general sense of spookiness, but that's really it. I can see why some people might interpret it as an homage, but at a certain point, we're talking about subjective opinions. I've said my piece and you're not likely to change my mind, so please don't argue with me about this any further.

I want to leave you with two examples of situations that are actually harmful or problematic--

in Marvel Rivals, Wanda is portrayed as a Romani woman of color with brown skin, however, there are MCU costumes based directly on the film which actually alter her appearance to that of a white woman. This is optical whitewashing, and it sends the message that racial inclusivity and Romani representation are optional or disposable.

The other examples I want to bring up are Luciano Vecchio's variant covers for Marvel's 2024 and 2025 Pride special. On both covers, Wiccan is drawn with his MCU costume and actor likeness. It's completely out of place, as he's the only character who gets this treatment. One might argue that Billy isn't "whitewashed" because he's always drawn white anyway, but to me, arbitrarily replacing the comic character with a movie counterpart that represents years of Romani + Jewish erasure is extremely tasteless and shows a lack of integrity. This is especially egregious on the 2024 cover, which is a riff on the iconic image of Captain America punching Hitler, translated here as a crew of racially diverse LGBT characters striking down Red Skull. Billy is the most prominent gay Jewish character in Marvel comics, and he's the only character in this image with Romani heritage. How are these aspects of his character being treated as disposable in a piece that is literally about opposing Nazis?

I hope you can see how these examples are both offensive in specific, material ways that Lore's design simply is not. Either way, I don't think I have anything else to say on the topic, so I really don't want to continue this conversation. Please do not follow up with more arguments.

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Did you read the new Uncanny X-Men issue? Maybe I'm saying some bullshit but I think it is the best writing for Pietro in years since Saladin Ahmed. Gail surprisingly wrote him decently and got his personality and affect for kids right, also the colors here are stunning for him, I hope it became a pattern for him in all books like it is for Scarlet Witch.

I'm not loving the series, and I'm especially not loving this story arc, but as far as Pietro and Monet are concerned, this issue was... fine. Calling it the best treatment Pietro's had since Ahmed is a huge stretch.

Their basic characterization made perfect sense, but a lot of the writing in this book is just weird and choppy. I feel like Simone keeps switching things up with the whole Graymalkin situation-- are they leaving it there? Is Monet in charge? If not, who? So that's kind of irritating.

Monet's interaction with Alice put me on edge-- I know that this is a part of her character, but it seemed strange for her to be shortsighted and entitled after being so clear-headed and down-to-earth for most of the prison arc. Moreover, staging a conversation like this between two Black characters was a risky choice for a white writer, and I'm curious to see how Black readers feel about it. There are a lot of layers to the optics here.

It's true that Pietro has a strong paternal instinct, and while we might normally expect him to be a little more prickly at first, I think that having him jump straight into caring/protective mode, and even try to proactively bond with the kids, was a great way to show his growth-- but when he's this nice up front, it feels like his catty digs later in the issue are coming out of left field. His jab at Becca on the training grounds was really shocking, and I genuinely can't figure out why Simone would have him switch up like that