seen from Japan
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Russia
seen from Russia
seen from Mexico
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from Canada
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Martinique
seen from Kazakhstan
In Avengers #18 Wanda buys tickets to see "Twelfth Night" for her and Pietro, and thinks how all her life she dreamed of being an actress and "how I love the theater!" And in #21 she took Pietro to see "Dolly". I don’t know if her love for the stage is ever brought up post-60s, but I keep it in my own portrayal <3
Wanda Maximoff Headcanons:
Was pulled from her canon after the end of Wandavision, with all of her memories intact.
Is trying to understand what it means to be the Scarlett Witch, and all it entails.
Doesn’t love being in a new place, but is trying to embrace it as best she can.
Got a job managing the Lost & Found bookstore; she thought it was fitting.
Avoids “Vision” whenever she sees him coming, but keeps tabs on him anyway.
Wanda’s wikis can be found here & here.
Ok so, I knew Django Maximoff was a carpenter. But when he shares his backstory in Avengers #182, he refers to himself as being the “shaman” to the Romani tribe that he and the Maximoffs were a part of. He also does indeed have magical powers, such as trapping the souls of Pietro and Wanda in puppets he’d carved from the magical wood of Wundagore Mountain and a magical item called the Nivashi Stone which he describes as “our sacred talisman”, summoning animal totems against the Avengers, etc. So, uh, this gives me two thoughts: - It’s super weird that Django having magical abilities has nothing to do with Wanda’s own, nor her training in them. Like they’re totally unconnected. He’s a Romani shaman and raised her and has magic, she has magic and gets trained in it, but these things have nothing to do with each other. It’s. . .weird. It’s like if my dad was a lion tamer and I grew up watching him tame lions all the time, and then I learned how to tame lions from someone totally different later for utterly unconnected reasons. - Up til now, my hc for Wanda’s religious upbringing was as follows: “ Roma nearly always adopt the dominant religion of where they are, which in Eastern Europe is usually Christianity or Islam. Many Roma also retain Hindu-based beliefs from when they came from India thousands of years ago, albeit changed through the centuries. I headcanon my Wanda was raised in a sort of syncretic mix of all three. She canonically has an interest in pagan nature worship as well, but that’s only after she starts practicing witchcraft, which my version has not.” But if her father was a shaman (assuming that’s even actually an appropriate/accurate word for Roma people, which I’ll look into) then that suggests she’d be raised in a much more animistic belief system than Christianity or Islam, probably leaning far harder into pre-Christian folk beliefs. I’ll have to do research to figure out what would be most appropriate/accurate/likely, but yeah, jotting this down.
Avengers #75 When they (Pietro, Wanda, Toad) find an ancient spellbook, she is Wandais compelled to read the spell, freeing Arkon from his world. And her interactions with him in just a few pages show a lot about her. She gives him a chance to speak first, asking Toad to stay quiet til they know who he is. And once he does make a big scary speech. . .she says he must be a fool if he thinks that's going to cow her and the others (Pietro and Toad) into silence. So Wanda's not going to attack at first sight but she's not going to be cowed either, even if he could be of great power. She's also kinda sassy, A+. In the page I posted here, she knows that he caused Pietro to find that spellbook, and her to read it, and she wants to know why. So she's reasonable, she’s not attacking him first thing, but she also wants answers. We also see she's clever---she points out Arkon called her and her group mutants, and that he knew she had lost her powers, and demands to know why. She picked up on that. Arkon notes she's just buying time for Pietro to recover, which is more clever yet. In the following issue, #76, Arkon has captured Wanda and taken him back to her world to be his bride. Still powerless, she cooperates in that she isn't fighting him, but she does reason with him, pointing out how unlikely it is she could love a man who kidnaps her and destroys her world to save his own. So she doesn't fight when she knows it's a lost cause, she keeps her head, she appeals to reason. But when it doesn't work, she straight up says she will ALWAYS loathe him. He's still not budging, she asks if he has no iota of human kindness. She tries a lot of tactics very quickly, basically. TL;DR Wanda’s not just EMPATHETIC but she’s very. . .clever with people/bad situations. I’m bad at explaining what I mean, but she’s smart like a hostage negotiator is smart, and in a way that is very important for a superhero to be.
Ahaha I got asked this in Discord about Wanda: “From what I gather Wanda and Pietro were originally the biological children of Magneto (who is Jewish) who were adopted by a Romani family? Then the dad thing got retconed. But they’ve always been at least half Romani? Most of the time they’ve been ethnically Jewish as well, with Magneto being their father? She started out with red telekinetic bolts but then switched to reality warping? God damn you Marvel for being unable to stop retconning.” OH MY POOR FRIEND They then had to suffer this LENGTHY EXPLANATION and NOW YOU SHALL TOO
“ The twins are introduced in the 60s. They're not related to Magneto or anyone else at that point, nor are they Romani or Jewish, just "from the heart of Central Europe" They're described as orphans iirc. We later learn in the 70s that actually, they are the long-lost biological children of The Whizzer aka Robert Frank and his wife Miss America aka Madeline Joyce (not to be confused with America Chavez, a much later character) They were actually called Wanda and Pietro Frank for a little while after discovering this. Then about twenty issues later we meet Django Maximoff, the man who raised them, and a few issues away from that, we meet Bova. Bova is a humanoid cow woman created by the High Evolutionary, who has a habit of "uplifting" animals like that. Bova was also the midwife who delivered Pietro and Wanda. She explains that their mother was a woman named Magda fleeing her husband who had strange powers and didn't want the twins to fall into his hands, but it's not revealed who the husband was. She explains how she tried to give the twins first to Robert Frank, because she had ALSO delivered his wife's baby, but both Madeline and the Frank child died in the process, and Robert ran away in grief before he could hear the whole story, hence why the twins and he thought he was their bio-dad. So the High Evolutionary had Bova give Wanda and Pietro to Django and Marya Maximoff, a Romani couple, instead. It's not until 1983 that Magneto reveals his discovery that they're his children. At some point around this same time Magda gets established as Romani too. Magneto and Magda being their bio-parents is pretty static for the next few decades. In 2014, an event called Axis happens that I don't know about but it results in Wanda casting a spell that effects everyone she's related to, and Magneto isn't effected, showing he's NOT her bio-father after all. In 2016 the Scarlet Witch miniseries reveals Magda's not her mom either, Natalya Maximoff, sister of Django, is. Bio-father still unknown. But most fans haven't recognized this retcon because it's stupid. As for her powers that's a trip too, strap in. She's introduced in the 60s with the ability to fire hex bolts. They're often described as "probability manipulation" but they're really more very specific, localized telekinesis. Makes people trip, guns jam, screws in a structure come loose, etc. Minor disasters that negatively impact her enemies, but she wields it really well and effectively. I honestly liked that better; it seems like it can only be an annoyance, but because she's creative and a quick thinker in crisis, it does a LOT of damage.
In the 70s, she meets Agatha Harkness, the nanny of Franklin Richards who it turns out is a badass witch, and she says Wanda actually is a witch too, a real one, and she wants to tutor her. Unlike the WandaVision series, which I haven't seen and don't plan to, she's not evil. She starts tutoring Wanda sincerely. Wanda begins to learn magic, which augments the power of her hex bolts. Wanda later discovers that the reason she has magical aptitude is that she was touched by the dark god Cthon at birth so that he could use her as a vessel for his return, and he posses her. Getting posessed by Cthon or other magical beings happens a lot to Wanda after this point, as does various losses of her agency/free will.
While she's famous for "chaos magic" now, the term isn't actually used for her til 1998, over 20 years after she started practicing witchcraft. The chaos magic does allow her to warp reality to a certain degree. The reality big huge warping she's famous for doesn't happen til the 2000s, with House of M, when she rewrites the entire world. A common misunderstanding is that this is how her power NORMALLY is. It's not. She was yet again posessed by something, in this case the Life Force of the ENTIRE PLANET, which was a big boost. It's not her normal state.
What she can do now though is still nothing to sneeze at. Like she's very OP at this point just at her default. It'd be easier to list what she CAN'T do than what she can. I go with her having the backstory that's most well-known and lasted longest and makes the most sense (Magda/Magneto bio-parents, raised by Maximoffs) And just her hex bolts as her power, they're cool enough. Plus like. . . I don't think she needed chaos magic and reality warping and a ton of trauma and loss of agency to be cool. I'm kinda sick of the tendency in superhero media to give a woman a ton of raw power but at the expense of her sanity/agency/control/etc. Just gimme someone with a strong interesting personality who makes her own choices!”
btw I think everyone should be aware that for like four issues in the 90s, Wanda’s soul was sent back in time to share a body with her ancestor, a lady pirate captain named Red Lucy Keogh who was a single mother of twins (Quentin and Lenore) and a TOTAL BADASS and it was cool
btw lowkey reminder that my Wanda isn’t from Sokovia or Serbia, she’s from Transia. Sokovia is a creation of the movies, and Transia of the comics. . . it’s where she’s always been stated to come from once she was given a specific home country besides just being “from the heart of Central Europe” or ambiguously Balkan. . .I don’t know when her place of birth got changed to Serbia, I think probably in the most recent retcon where Natalya was made her mother? But mine sticks with Transia.
Does anyone have a canon for why Wandas hair gets lighter and lighter as she grows??
