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Wanda: All magic has a cost, as you know… and a good witch, warlock, or mage makes sure they pay the cost of the spells they cast. I mean, look at me. After today’s fun and games – a few more lines and grey hairs for sure. The mirror shows how my spells are aging my soul – how soon I’ll die, even if to the outside world I still look young.

Agatha: Don’t flatter yourself. You don’t look that young.

Wanda: I’ll ignore that remark.

Agatha: If you like, I may repeat it later, though.

Scarlet Witch Vol. 2 #2 by James Robinson & Marco Rudy

Marvel is going through a(nother) phase where it insists on tinkering with the rules of magic by… giving it actual rules in the hopes that this will make readers embrace the mystical side of Marvel, which is often seen as confusing and convoluted and without limits. The trouble with magic in superhero comics is that there are so many writers involved that, without draconian oversight, which superhero comics do not have, things become inconsistent and incomprehensible and how do Wanda’s powers work again?

The gist of this recent magical restructuring, as it exists in Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch, is two-fold: 1) magic is “broken” and 2) all magic has a price. Giving magic a cost of some kind, a negative consequence, is a classic way of keeping it in check, keeping characters who could hypothetically do anything from being able to stop any problem at any time. It also lets you play with the idea of self-sacrifice in the name of the greater good. In this case, the price is physical and spiritual. Doctor Strange has been getting horribly sick after doing spells in his solo, and Wanda is rapidly aging. You may remember “doing magic makes you age faster” as the plot of the 2006 movie The Covenant.

Not that I remember The Covenant!!

Zero. He’s got a wife, son.

I mean, Virginia did kill somebody and she’s technically more of a slave than a wife, but, uh, she still exists. Despite my best angry blogging, Tom King’s Vision book has been well-received and Marvel is trying their hardest to make it popular. This version of Vision is probably going to stick around for a while. Does that mean that Tom King won’t kill Virginia off or split her and Vision up himself? Not necessarily, but for the foreseeable future, Wanda and Vision are going to live separate lives. 

They will keep having occasional interactions because of their significance in each other’s histories, but it’s important to understand those interactions for what they are: nods to the past, not signs of a future. People seem to think any panel that has the two of them is set up for a reunion, and that has not, thus far, been the case. There’s no reason to think anyone at Marvel wants to put them back together, and some people (named Tom Brevoort) have been clear that they don’t want that.

Could they get back together way down the line? Sure, but chances are good it wouldn’t last. They’re not Reed and Sue. They haven’t been together since the 80′s. They’ve gone in different directions, and the Wanda who exists now is, conceptually and thematically and psychologically, very different from the Wanda who was married to Vision. The one true, earnest effort to put them back together ended with the writer, Geoff Johns, having another character say it was impossible to imagine them being together and then dropping the plotline. Another attempt to reunite them might go better than that, but superhero comics are shaky ground on which to build long-lasting relationships.

To your second question: I don’t think the general public cares about Wanda or Vision or romantic relationships in the MCU. We’re talking about two relatively minor characters fighting for limited screentime in ensemble movies. We’re also talking about a franchise whose canon romances have failed to connect with audiences. They generally get overlooked, except in Age of Ultron where the reaction was negative. The most popular het pairing in the MCU, by far, is Clint/Natasha, and that was only ever a red herring.

If Wanda/Vision does become canon, it will probably be the same kind of underwhelming subplot that the other canon relationships were. There might be some backlash about the huge age gap between the actors or the specific handling, and certainly, there will be fanboy “ew”-ing over the fact that he’s an android. How loud that is depends on how their romance is treated. In the comics, their relationship has its vocal supporters, but most people 1.) don’t care about either one of them or 2.) don’t like them together. Or both.

616-wise, he’s not really her type. He’s not sad enough. He needs to cry more. That sounds like a joke, but it’s not. Wanda is drawn to that tragic-but-stoic vibe, and Strange has some of that but it’s not as prominent.

I got a few questions about the preview and this reworking of Wanda’s powers, and I’m gonna try to address all of them here.

The short version is that, off and on since the early 70′s, Wanda has had two power sets. I’m not talking about the various names her powers have been given (probability manipulation, chaos magic, etc.), but the idea that she has two separate powers. She has her natural powers that she was either born with or gifted with at birth by the demon god Chthon. That is sometimes called her “hex power” or just her “mutant power” (way back when she was a mutant!!). But she also learned nature-based, elemental magic from Agatha Harkness. That magic is sometimes completely separate from her hex power and sometimes tied up in it in ways that are difficult to explain.

I’ve talked about this a little before (and maybe I should explain it more?), but the magic Agatha Harkness taught Wanda is What If Paganism Gave You Superpowers. It’s not Harry Potter magic that’s divorced from spirituality and based around genetically-inherited gifts, and it’s not Doctor Strange magic, which pulls from pseudo-Eastern mysticism and the specific history of the Marvel Universe.1 It is based on Neopagan nature worship that is practiced in our world and the magick that goes along with that. The incarnation from the second volume of Vision & the Scarlet Witch is meant to be Wicca, and that’s when you really see Wanda talk about the goddess and Pagan sabbats and more religious elements.

The big difference here is that her second set of powers (the ones she learned from Agatha) are being called “chaos magic,” whereas before the term chaos magic was tied to her Chthonic powers. Chthon himself even said in Mighty Avengers that chaos magic was his and that people didn’t believe in it because they were trying to stomp out his influence. I prefer that canon to this new one. “Chaos magic” just sounds Chthonic, right?2 It sounds dangerous, and I don’t like tying up the spiritual and woman-centric aspect of Wanda’s powers with that dangerous side.

As for the idea that preview is anti-man somehow, that notion of ancient female-centric spiritual practices that were feared and suppressed by men is not an uncommon one in Wiccan and Pagan circles. I’m not surprised to see Wanda express it in the same way that I wouldn’t be surprised if she was into crystal healing or burning incense. 

The old Magic Wanda stories were done by Steve Englehart, who didn’t want female characters to be too feminist, so she never said anything about magic being suppressed by men, at least not that I can remember. It’s not hard for me to imagine even Englehart’s Wanda feeling this way though. Her magical experience has been very female-centered. She learned magic from a woman and taught it to another woman. There are very few men in the Agatha Harkness-driven magical world.

Possible additional evidence: The spiritual belief system in Vision & the Scarlet Witch is duotheistic. There is the Horned/Sun God and the Goddess Diana, but aside from one scene where she explains Yule, we only ever see Wanda mention the goddess, not the god. Other characters mention the god, but he doesn’t seem to be much of a factor to Wanda.

That said, I don’t see any of this as being against men. It’s about empowering women and acknowledging the ways they have historically been disenfranchised by the patriarchy. It’s not like Wanda created a slave-husband who she coldly derided and forced to live a miserable existence. That would be truly awful.

1. This is more complicated than I can get into in this post. Doctor Strange has Pagan influences as well, but what people remember most about his mythos is made up stuff like the Vishanti and the pseudo-Eastern mysticism. Likewise, Wanda’s own internal mythos has influences from Lovecraft, as well as tons and tons of demons, but that is more or less separate from the Pagan-flavored stuff Englehart did.

Avengers Vol. 3 #4 by Kurt Busiek & George Perez

Vision was only “dead” for a while. Through the magic of comics, he got his old personality, emotions, and memories back, though he didn’t feel obliged to tell Wanda the exact truth about that. Characters die and come back a lot in comics. Their spouses generally aren’t considered widows after they’ve come back to life, but it’s a complicated situation and not one you can compare to the average person’s life. If they were still together, then she would be his wife, but they’re not so it’s harder to put a label on it.

I kind of sort of talked about this here, but I didn’t really like my final verdict then and I don’t like it now. I’m not sure I have a better answer though. 

In ye olden Silver Age days, she wanted to be an actress, but her one attempt to break into show business, while the Avengers were temporarily disbanded, didn’t go well.

Man: Pretty faces are a dime a dozen in show business, sister! So why should I hire a girl with a hex power?

Wanda: But, I can sing…!

Man: So can a canary! Good-bye!

Avengers Vol. 1 #22 by Stan Lee & Don Heck

This was during a time when the Avengers were considered “public menaces,” and no one wanted anything to do with them. It hypothetically could have gone better if she hadn’t been persona non grata at the time. So maybe, possibly she could have been an actress.

Yeah, that would have been ideal. Unfortunately, as you said, “Peter”’s twin will probably look somewhat like him, so it will likely be another white actress. That is, assuming they’ll even include her in the movie, or that Fox is allowed to use her, which we can’t know for sure.

I would settle for a cameo, yes. If that doesn’t happen, she could be in New Mutants. Or they could include her when they reboot the universe in however many years.

I’ve asked this before, and had no takers: can you point me to a single story, just one, in which the “fact” that Wanda and Pietro come from a Jewish background is in any way relevant?

I don’t think you can. So far as I can see, no such story exists. So this feeling of Jewish empowerment exists solely in the minds of readers who projected it onto those characters via the background of Magneto. So eliminating that link doesn’t actually eliminate anything tangible, just an idea that some people had in their minds rather than anything on the page.

But I can say that I pay close attention whenever people talk about Jewish superheroes, and when I heard the twins were going to be in Age of Ultron, I was thrilled, precisely because of that, and it made me read more about them, particularly after I read The Magneto Testament and fully understood how deeply ingrained the Jewish and Roma cultures were in their familial history, even if not in their day to day life. (As I understood it, they were ALREADY Roma to begin with- Magda was their mother before the most recent retcon, wasn’t she?- so they simply had two heritages and were raised more strictly by one.)

The fact that their ethnic background wasn’t relevant to the particular stories didn’t matter; my being Jewish often isn’t relevant to my day to day activities, either, but it informs those activities nonetheless. Whether or not it was intentional on the parts of the writers, artists, and editors, these characters’ Judaism colored my understanding of their actions, the same way it informs my understanding of Ben Grimm’s and Kitty Pryde’s.

Two things: 1. If you haven’t, you need to read this post first. 2. I wrote this in a hurry and I’m sure it’s missing some stuff, but I have to go.

This is a complicated question because superheroes. comics are complicated and vast and self-contradictory. Characters shift over time, and part of the reason for the shift in Wanda and Magneto’s relationship is the shift he has made as a character and how perceptions of him have shifted.

For some writers (Nicieza, Stern), the answer to this question was undeniably no. It was a loud, screaming, “Django Maximoff is my real father” no, but in recent years, that’s gotten more complicated.

If I were to track the development (starting with the reveal of him as her father), it would go like this:

Mantlo (in the first volume of Vision and the Scarlet Witch) wrote the issue where it was revealed to the characters they were related. He showed her being compassionate towards Magneto, emotional about the reveal but not negative, at least not after she found out. He’d probably say that she would come to love Magneto because he’s family.

Stern wrote Avengers #234, which has a flashback scene to the reveal in V&tSW. He decided that, right after crying and being overtaken with emotion, Wanda came to the conclusion that no, she just hates Magneto, the end. Already, in the second issue, we’ve gone from “maybe” to “definitely no.”

Then you have Englehart in the second volume of Vision & the Scarlet Witch who showed her allowing him to be part of her life, but also yelling at him, as Englehart Wanda was known to do. This was the first time their familial relationship was truly complicated. She invited him to Thanksgiving dinner, but it was more out of a sense of guilt and then she yelled at him. Everything was awkward. Wanda was also angry at Magneto over Magda’s suicide during this time, but she never confronted him about it. The answer here is unclear. (Also, shortly after this, Magneto was shown to have pictures of Wanda and her kids on his desk. Their relationship wasn’t all bad.)

Next was John Byrne in Avengers West Coast, but I’m not sure what he thought of Wanda’s relationship with Magneto other than that he thought Wanda was Magneto and mostly he just didn’t want her to have kids anymore. (A different story for a different time.) They got along during this story, though he was using her and she was randomly evil and… Can we just not count this?

Magneto was in a weird state for much of the 90′s. There was a clone that seemed to be him with amnesia and also there was a giant monster thing that was a combination of him and Xavier… But the 90′s did contain a couple of AUs (Wolverine: Days of Future Past and Age of Apocalypse) where it was clear that she loved him. In those AUs, at least.

Wanda met with Magneto’s clone in one issue of Avengers that Mark Waid wrote in the 90′s. She thought it was him with amnesia, and she was afraid of him more than anything. But she empathized with him and protected the Magneto clone when she realized he wasn’t like the person she had known as a kid (even though she didn’t know it really wasn’t him). I think Waid might say yes, she loves him.

The 90′s also had a couple of flashback issues that dealt with her time in the Brotherhood, which contradicted each other as to whether or not she sympathized with him on a personal level while she was working for him.

In early 2000, Kurt Busiek wrote an issue of Avengers where Pietro, who had been working for Magneto in Genosha, showed up at the Avengers mansion. Wanda was upset he was there at all. She felt Magneto had stolen her brother away from her, and she started screaming at Pietro that all Magneto had ever done was use her and she hated him and Django Maximoff was her real dad anyway!!! She rejected him as her father outright and definitely did not love him. It was that discussion that would define how writers saw their relationship, especially Nicieza in Magneto Dark Seduction, until Bendis came along.

What Bendis did was say that Wanda did love Magneto, but that she was angry at him for… abandoning her (it makes no sense to anyone else either). At the beginning of House of M, she didn’t seem to hate him. It was him she called for at the end of Disassembled, and being around him and hearing his voice calmed her down when she was in a coma. But then he had to go and kill Pietro, and that simply would not do. She loved him and hated him at the same time, as people sometimes do.

Heinberg in Children’s Crusade just wrote her as loving him and them as not having any lingering issues. They hugged.

Then Bendis came back in AVX. I touched on his handling of that the second go around in the post linked above.

Remender tried to combine a lot of these things into “Wanda is bitter and angry towards Magneto and hates him, but is also afraid of him and feels empathy for him but is afraid to acknowledge that she loves him deep down.” And then he made her not Magneto’s daughter at all.

After all that, my answer is yes. Not a simple yes, but it’s much easier to say she saved his life during AVX because she loves him and she hides that out of fear of being left again and righteous anger over his treatment of her and her brother than it is to figure out how the answer is no. To make the answer no, you have to ignore the latter half of this list. You can reconcile her rage and the screaming and the rejections by saying there is hatred there too (and sadness and fear and pain) and that whatever love she feels for him is kind of irrational (and she knows it) and this is a vulnerable part of herself that she doesn’t want to share and doesn’t really understand. But you can’t explain why it was him she called out for at her worst moment if she hates him and nothing else.

Magneto is a part of Wanda’s family (screw you, Marvel, I reject your reality and substitute my own). She is a lot like him, but those aren’t parts of herself that she likes. He’s someone she feels great empathy for and tries to understand (though, by her own admission, she doesn’t quite succeed), but he’s also someone who is often violent and almost never good at keeping promises. She can’t risk trusting him again or letting him in like she tried to do during his first reformation period. It would hurt too much to be betrayed after everything that’s happened, and she would have no one to blame but herself. 

To complicate things further, he’s a symbol of a time in Wanda’s life when she was weak and didn’t have control, before she became an Avenger and learned magic and had real power and agency. He represents vulnerability and fear and all the things she fought to get away from, as well as the dark side of herself. And he used her, and Wanda is very, very tired of being used.

So, this happened on Twitter last night. Of all the things I thought would never happen, this ranks pretty high. 

I don’t like the Inhumans being an alternate cover.

I already hate the art. SMH.

FalconCap and Pietro can be team “Stupid fucking goggles” and can just stand near each other, looking stupid.

Why is sabertooth on a magic leash? Isn’t he inverted ergo good?

Why is this art so awful?

Do I really have to write a detailed letter of all the ways the twins being in any way Inhuman doesn’t work? Like, they are aware of Luna and her existence in the Marvel offices, yes?

I’m sorry its not your cup of tea, and if its not don’t buy it. 

And why the fuck would I read a title about Electra when I don’t give a FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK about her? I have no interest or investment in her. You know who I have a LOT invested in? Pietro and Wanda. I have been a fan since I was a child. They mean something to me, a LOT to me. His character, development, and the art that represents him all concern me. I’m not just complaining to fill up my time and I refuse to read some comic YOU like just because YOU don’t want to read my opinions.

The art is not to my taste. A LOT of people hate it. I’m sure the artist is a nice person but that doesn’t make his art more to my taste or good. Its blocky, and Pietro is too stocky, he is too thick and chunky. He is 30 and Wanda’s TWIN yet he is drawn looking 50 while she is drawn young and sexy. THAT IS JUST BAD ART. Also, his costume is stupid.

This fandom is very unhappy, and I am biting the bullet and buying this comic so I can share it with the people that are rightfully boycotting it. A few bucks spent so that a bunch of people can be kept up to date with this monstrosity. I have no reason to think this train wreck will be anything but because Rick Remender is a misogynistic writer who has never given me a reason to trust him. I have never been given ANY reason to give him and Tom ANY kind of a “chance”, but our boycott will never get this book cancelled because it’s an Avengers title. Its a basic pull. The numbers are not on our side. So while everyone I know is boycotting it, I will be throwing my hard earned money at it, and you can bet your ass I will be blogging ALLLLLL about it. I am going to mention every last thing I hate, every last thing I found stupid, and I will make sure it is linked to Rick and Tom on their social media, because Marvel needs to know what the fans are thinking while as a group we don’t give either of them more than 3.99$

So go ahead and block me, because I can tell you right now I will be getting this comic, reading this comic, and blogging about this comic, and it WILL be tagged, and if you can’t handle the fact that I have opinions that’s YOUR problem not mine.