Scarlet America

Steve and Wanda on a date!

while I don’t really ship them, stevebottoms does 

since there isn’t much content about them i thought i’d help out or something, idk

so this is sort of a “thanks for those clarksteve gifsets” i guess?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Marvel Meme Challenge: [1/?] Favorite Relationships

↳ Wanda Maximoff/Steve Rogers

“I love Captain America as much as you, Hawkeye.” 

I feel like this is a more common occurrence at Avengers Mansion than Cap is letting on here.

STEVE: Actually, going public didn’t affect me either. In fact, not having to maintain two separate lives has actually been very liberating.

PETER: Hey, I’m sure I’d feel exactly the same way if I’d been born in Nineteen Twenty-Three.

STEVE: And what do you mean by that?

PETER: Well, y'know, everybody you knew growing up must be kinda… deceased by now, right? I mean, it’s not like you going public is going to put any childhood sweethearts in danger!

One lovely lady on twitter asked me to send her links to post AOU Steve/Wanda fanfics, so i decided to post all of my favorite fics from AO3 and FF.net at once include an au ones. Enjoy!

Where the Heart Is  |  Home is where you make it. Home is where you find it. 

Five times Steve couldn’t really answer her questions |   Five times Steve couldn’t really answer her questions, and the one time he could 

I will not say ‘do not weep’ | The red rims of her eyes and the blood on her hands match her scarlet coat. Steve wonders if it makes it harder or easier, having a body to mourn over.He knows all too well there’s precious little that can be done to ease her pain, but he’ll be damned if he won’t at least try. 

Wish |  No one touches her anymore.  

Hollow Fragments  |  It would always be the same. Wanda would stand close to the wall, her fingers running over the letters of her twin’s name. While the red mist that accompanied her powers would surround her in almost a blanket of protection.  

I Don’t Want To Think About It Now (Is It All In My Head?) |  They compliment each other.   

Consequences  |  The team try to deal with the aftermath of the events of Age of Ultron and everything that comes with it.  

Stand By Me  | Wanda Maximoff is adjusting to life as an Avenger  and without Pietro. Steve Rogers has been there and knows what that’s like.Somehow, they fit together quite nicely. 

I Will Have War |  The Avengers have assembled at their new facility. They learn to work together as a team, but after several international incidents, the governments of the world concur that all superheroes must be monitored. With mutterings of The Winter Soldier and lost bloody secrets coming to light, Captain America and Iron Man face off in an epic conflict between former allies and friends. 

My Eyes (AU) |  A shower, some music and paper thin walls. Together you get how Wanda and Steve meet all because of a simple song. 

Wanda’s First Christmas |  Wanda experiences her first Christmas with the Avengers.  

never alone |  Steve’s almost asleep when she creeps into his room. “I have never been alone before.”  

Captain Scarlet |  Set a year after the events in Age of Ultron. Wanda is now a full-fledged Avenger, only problem is she still has difficulties opening up to anyone. When she and Steve get ambushed on what seemed like a low-priority mission, things begin to change and a bond between the two heroes forms.  

Aveilut  |  Wanda Maximoff tries to mourn her brother, but she’s not sure how. 

Bodily Woes |  Lately, Steve has been in the rut. It caused him to feel like the elephant in any room. His wife, on the other hand isn’t helping, since she seemed to be hiding a secret. 

Scarlet |  “Despite what Maria told me, I don’t think you’re weird.”  

Labour of Love  |  Steve is fairly content with his life. He has a fiancé who he loves very much, his missions have been successful, and his friendship with the Avengers is as stronger than ever. However, they get a surprise that Steve is delighted about while she is a little apprehensive about it. 

A Nice Day For a White Wedding  |  It’s Tony and Pepper’s wedding, only the groom is missing, there is a pregnancy test, one of the bridesmaid has a back eye, Pepper’s sister provides some temptation for two of the guys, Steve and Wanda are going through a dry patch sexually and there is no one to officiate the wedding. Not everything is quite as straightforward as everything seems however.  

They’ve been friends for something like ten years in the comics (my math, it is not great). They didn’t meet until she joined the Avengers. He didn’t recruit her; that was Tony. For anyone who doesn’t know, it was the two of them, Pietro, and Clint, and they were the funnest, most disastrous Avengers team. He was a Silver Age jerk, and she had a crush on him. Specifically, she liked that he was strong (but gentle!), and also, she liked watching him work out. There are some people who read that era as ‘well, he was their dad and he took them in,’ but that isn’t how I read it at all. He wasn’t their dad. He was slightly older and in charge. And he was a Silver Age jerk about it.

There is also this idea that he’s some kind of father figure to her in general or that he’s like a brother to her, which isn’t true. Wanda has had more than enough fathers, and she and Steve don’t refer to each other as “brother” or “sister.” Other characters sometimes refer to them as being “like family,” but I kinda think they’re friends, not family. Nothing about their relationship feels particularly familial to me, and if people are trying to say they’re like siblings to imply their relationship is platonic, well, that ship has sailed. And anyway, Steve calls other white dudes “brother” all the time, and people have no trouble glossing over that. But I digress!

The crush eventually goes away, and they settle into this friendship that’s rarely in the foreground but stays consistent. She has this unwavering faith in him. It’s not hero worship. She just believes in him and doesn’t doubt him at all. And that’s born of all the years they knew each other, and this trust that they built. He trusts her and believes in her too, even after… everything. He thinks she’s badass too, except when he’s being too protective and forgets that she could totally kick his ass. But he’s not afraid of her the way that maybe a rational person would be.

There’s this ease to their relationship, overall.

STEVE: Wanda. Can I help you?

The Scarlet Witch doesn’t even bother to ask how he knew she was in the control booth.

WANDA: What are you doing in here, Steve?

STEVE: Just thinking.

Captain America Annual 1999 by Joe Casey & Pablo Raimondi

She’s sitting around watching him practice, and he somehow knows she’s there, and she doesn’t even question how he knows anyone is there, let alone her. Of course, he knows.

They sometimes disagree, but it’s never a huge deal, with the possible exception of the end of Avengers West Coast where she was probably as mad at him as she’s ever been. Even that didn’t feel mutual. It was more her being pissed off at him. They have some philosophical differences. It is a rare but not unheard of thing for her to be portrayed as having a more European mindset when it comes to politics and that’s used to contrast her with the American characters. There are also times when he’s not being a very good leader, and she has to tell him that. But he listens to her, even if he has to go sulk first.

I think the primary difference between their friendship and a lot of the other relationships Wanda has had with men in her life is that he never acted like he owned her. He was never trying to control her or having sex with her when she had amnesia (ahem). Steve just always respected her as a person and her opinions.

STEVE: Wanda, we’ve known each other a long time, and I consider myself a friend to both you and your bother. But I have to tell you that the idea of choosing between two loves is only Pietro’s. If you were to lose him in order to gain the Vision, it would be his choice… not yours. You don’t have to play his rules.

Avengers Vol. 1 #110 by Steve Englehart & Don Heck

See how he supports her and gives good advice and yeah, I love everything about this panel.

There are other things I feel obligated to mention: One time, he bought her a magic book as a present, but it was haunted! She once healed his jaw by stroking his cheek! Sometimes, he draws her and it makes me happy! There is also this minor implication that he could tell how powerful she was before anyone else. I don’t know if I buy that, but I think he noticed she had more potential than she seemed to have.

And then… Disassembled. Without getting into all the details and the different interpretations, they, uh, made out? He’s off doing something dangerous, and she keeps showing up to save him, even though he tells her not to. He’s being way too protective and kinda condescending (the way he sometimes gets with his girlfriends), and then she kisses him. And he kisses her. And she spends the night at his apartment and wakes up wearing his clothes, but they don’t have sex.

This is all complicated by the fact that she was messing with his head at the time, showing him visions of herself and of Bucky (who was still supposed to be dead at that point). I don’t think she was doing it on purpose, but she did it nonetheless. There’s a lot of different ways of looking at what happened. I’m not going to come down on any one side since we don’t know. Remender said he was going to clear all of this up, but then he never did.

As you may have noticed, I haven’t been posting on my Marvel blogs for a while. Those of you who regularly discuss comic books with me are aware of my general disappointment with Marvel these past few months. They cancelled All-New X-Factor and She-Hulk, they killed and brought back characters just to be used as plot devices again and again, they gave up on any pretense of caring about character development over “epic events”, they sank my ships, demoted their classic symbol of the fight against oppression… they let corporate synergy and their failure to comprehend 21st-century demands substitute good stories. For much of this year, some of the Marvel books I used to love have either started to bore or to annoy me, but after today, I’m now angry, angrier than I’ve ever been at a piece of entertainment.

By now, most of you know what happened on AXIS #7 (from this point on, there will be spoilers). If we’re being honest, we all knew something like this was coming, we’ve known for two months, ever since that "No More Mutants" teaser in NYCC. I’m among those who tried to stay optimistic, to believe that Marvel wouldn’t betray their fanbase and their history this way, that, even if they made Wanda and Pietro Inhumans, there would be a logical explanation for that, preferably from their mother’s side, and all would be well. Instead, they decided to throw over thirty years of internal struggles, of identity issues, for three characters, all so that the comics would be better aligned with whatever mess they have planned for the Maximoffs in the MCU, where they can’t use Magneto or their mutant connections for their backstory? I’m sorry, but that’s too much for me. And before you say there could be another explanation for why Wanda’s spell didn’t affect Magneto, I would agree with you if not for all the other influence the MCU has had on the comics, or how the solicits for next year’s Uncanny Avengers has let us know “important reveals” will come up about Wanda’s and Pietro’s past, and that they have something to do with the High Evolutionary, and certainly continue on the Axis and “No More Mutants” subject. 

"Damn Remender!", you say. If only it was so easy as to just blame him for these changes, if only we could know that a different writer would waste no time in fixing this mess! But, for once, this is not on him. He’s the guy that killed Wanda and Rogue last year, that’s true, but huge changes like Steve Rogers losing the super-soldier serum, inverted Tony Stark, the Maximoff Twins no longer Magneto’s children, or mutants? Those decision’s come from higher up, probably following on directives from Marvel’s - or Disney’s - executives. So if we want to blame someone, we should probably blame the executives, and capitalism, and whoever made the bad decisions that led to Marvel going bankrupt in the 90’s and selling the X-Men movie rights to Fox, the beginning of what we’re seeing now. 

And yes, I know that Wanda and Pietro haven’t always been Magneto’s children, and that they’re so much more than that, and I agree with you. But they have been his children for over thirty years, they have struggled with the resulting identity crisis from learning that the man they hated so much was their father, just like Magneto struggled with the knowledge that he hurt his own children many times over to achieve his goals, even coming to acknowledge (more than once, which is nearly unheard of for him!) how he wronged them, and how that might not have been his best choice. Being related has defined who these characters are today, has led to more growth than any other retcon in their histories, and still had the potential for so much more. And, like it or not, many of us, the people who got into superhero stories in the 90’s or after, first heard of Wanda and Pietro by their connection to Magneto. I, myself, first saw them in the episode of the X-Men Animated Series where they learn that Magneto is their father, and, a bit older, I fell in love with them after reading about their struggles with this knowledge. Yes, they’re so much more than just that, but those characters have gone through so many changes in the last decade, so many different motivations, personalities, team affiliations, that the simple fact that “Wanda and Pietro are Magneto’s children” remained the only constant in their characterization, the only thing to give comfort to old fans, to reassure us that they were still the same characters we loved, even when it didn’t look like it. And now that’s gone, along with the whole excuse for the chaos that was the Decimation and the Twins’ history in the past decade. Thrown away, just like their connections to real-world minorities will probably be soon enough. Marvel is letting me know they don’t want my time or my money, and I’m happy to oblige.

I have spent the last several hours struggling, but I’ve come to a decision: I’m putting my Marvel blogs on hiatus. I don’t know how long that hiatus will last, or if I’m ever returning to them, only that they stopped being a fun obsession to become a burden. And this is not just about the Maximoff reretcon; as I said above, many other of Marvel’s decisions have been making me feel alienated for months, but I didn’t want to make the hiatus official for fear of upsetting anyone. I’ll still be on Tumblr, over at maximoffmartell, if you’d like to talk to me about anything or follow my thoughts on what recent comics I’ll still be reading. I’ll never stop loving these characters or being grateful for the wonderful times I’ve had with all of you, followers. But it’s time to move on.

See you around.

Love.