Sometimes I think about the fact that Wanda Maximoff, as a child, was BURIED ALIVE with her twin and the corpses of her dead parents for TWO DAYS staring at an unexploded bomb. TWO DAYS. At the age of TEN.
Like. No fucking WONDER she was so angry and ready to burn shit down in AOU. She came through that level of trauma and then subsequent YEARS of growing up in refugee camps in a warzone. The fact that she still did care about people, though and was willing to put herself back in that situation – with bombs and explosions and the only family she had left on the line – to take down Ultron and make things right? Says a lot about her.
Right?
First, she loses her family.
Then, she’s tricked by HYDRA into letting herself be experimented on.
THEN she loses her ONLY FAMILY, her TWIN who has been the only person she has had through the last decade of her life, with whom she is so close that she physically feels it from across the city when he dies.
She is ready to die. Ready to let go and be buried with Sokovia and the rest of the family she’s lost. But Vision rescues her and makes her keep living.
She joins the Avengers to atone – to use her abilities for good and to save lives, so others won’t have to go through what she did. And for a while, she has a team; friends. But then Lagos happens and even though Wanda was trying to save lives, and probably reduced the death count by dozens by levitating the bomb away from the marketplace, everyone places the blame on her instead of on Rumlow, because it serves their political agendas. Because she is seen as a freak; as a threat; as a weapon. World governments look at her exactly the same as HYDRA did; she is a tool to be wielded or locked away.
Once again Wanda is told she’s a monster and that everyone dies because of her – a narrative she’s undoubtedly internalized by now after everything with HYDRA and Ultron and Pietro. And then half her team seems ready to believe it too. People she’d come to trust lock her up with no trial, no process – with a straightjacket and a shock collar on – leaving her to be buried alive once again, this time under the ocean.
Then, after being broken out, she finally – FINALLY – finds a little bit of peace. A little bit of happiness. A little bit of love. Vision is also seen by others as an object; as strange and fearful. He gets her in ways probably no one has since she lost Pietro. And he doesn’t look at her with fear or worry or hate; he looks at her like she’s a person, and a good one at that.
Then she’s forced to kill him.
She is forced – for the good of the universe – to murder the man she loves, the only person she has left after losing everyone else she’s ever loved, the one person who has kept her from giving up and dying in the past. She looks him in the eyes and kills him.
AND IT’S FOR NOTHING.
Because Thanos undoes it and then kills him again right in front of her and she WATCHES HIM DIE TWICE and it’s meaningless.
A lot of people have commented on how, in the moment of the snap, Wanda looks relieved. It breaks my heart, but–
MCU: “We had to give Scarlet Witch the basic psychic powers of Jean Grey, because trying to explain how probability-based powers work on film would’ve been too complicated.”
wanda literally destroyed an entire infinity stone while holding off a five stoned thanos…. she really is the most powerful avenger and you can @ me on that
jinlinli 