We first meet Wanda cinematically in the post-credits scene for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, during which she and her twin brother Pietro are shown in neighboring experimental cells. They are clearly in the midst of wrestling to manage the new powers unlocked in them by the Mind Stone (still Loki’s scepter at this point); Pietro barrels against the barriers of his cell at supersonic speed, while Wanda appears to be straddling multiple realities as she plays with the probability of physical behavior, rotating and destroying the test blocks levitating in the air above her. They are both threadbare and worn, clearly part of Strucker’s project for a good deal of time, and have undergone intense physical, mental, and emotional stress. This is our first indicator of exactly how much pressure to which Wanda and Pietro are willing to submit in order to achieve their objectives and follow their beliefs.
This, however, only scratches the surface of Wanda’s strength of will and conviction.
Wanda is, above all, loyal to family. She will go to any lengths to protect and avenge that family, to defend its rights, and to champion its freedoms. The interesting thing about this is that family comes to be defined for her in multiple ways across the two films we have seen her in so far. As her definition of family evolves, so does her maturity and open-mindedness; one could say the latter informs the former as much as vice versa.
Her first definition of family, as we see in Avengers: Age of Ultron, centers around Pietro and their shared grief over the loss of their parents thanks to a Stark Industries explosive device detonating in their apartment building. It is insular, self-involved, and characterized by a ferocious skepticism of outsiders in all their forms. Wanda has only ever known a war-torn country and the support of her brother, her other half, and it colors her outlook on the rest of the world in shades of rage and distrust. Unlike Pietro, she does not expend this energy with boisterous remarks or shows of bravado; instead, we find her — at the beginning of Ultron — to be quiet and calculating, almost eerily so.
Without having had a prior personal introduction to the Avengers, Wanda knows enough in the film’s opening scenes to approach them at first when they are isolated, to test for their weaknesses, and to let those weaknesses become their own undoing. She wastes neither time nor resources on forcing an outcome, when she can use her own already incredibly powerful intuition alongside her telepathic gifts to see that an opponent can easily become his own worst enemy if left to his own devices, as she does with Tony Stark. In this way her skills and approach provide an insight into something insidious in her nature, and when combined with her ability to manipulate fear, we see how, left without guidance or support, this power can become monstrous, indeed.
It is important to observe, however, that Wanda believes in the good in what she does, despite the means, and this brings us to her next definition of family. She does not target the Avengers as a mindless puppet of Strucker’s. She does not hone in on Tony Stark because he makes an easy target and she enjoys striking fear in others, no matter who they are. Reflecting back on her history, we realize that Wanda and Pietro are diehard patriots of Sokovia, part of very public protests against the invasion of Stark Industries (and the Avengers by association) into their homeland through the supply and detonation of wartime weaponry. Wanda and Pietro have no other family, and so they develop a strong kinship with their fellow countrymen and involve themselves seriously in the business of removing the Avengers’ influence from Sokovia. This team of “heroes” has proven themselves to know little restraint when it comes to intervening in world affairs, and the twins (along with their fellow patriots) do not see an end where the Avengers agree to remain abroad in sight.
There is no rerouting them. To protect their country, Wanda believes, the Avengers must end.
The fight for her is not about politics, as it may seem to world observers on the surface. It is about regaining her agency. Wanda wants to reclaim what Stark took from her as a child: the right not to be afraid in her own home, among her family, her people. She fights to regain the rights she believes all humans deserve: freedom from war and oppression. Freedom.
It is a very personal battle for her, as we see throughout the progress of Ultron; her motivations are always tied deeply with her emotions, with what drives her heart. Although Wanda is an alarmingly excellent tactician — patient, unnervingly observant, almost always ten steps ahead — both her skills and her actions are propelled forward by what she feels. In no way is she cold and closed off to passion. One can easily conclude in the first film, in fact, that her emotions both lead her astray and help to save her.
We see elements of these opposing strengths, of mind and of heart, when she and Pietro face the Avengers again in the Salvage Yard off the coast of Africa, where Ultron has enlisted their aid as he raids Klaue’s base for Vibranium. Wanda goes after each Avenger one by one, gracefully, almost like a dance, hypnotizing them with their own worst fears as a means of distraction. She nearly succeeds without a scratch until Clint Barton clocks her in the head with a tasing arrow; she is incapacitated until Pietro removes it and whisks her outside. The audience clearly sees the rage in her eyes and the wounded pride at having been bested, and she could have easily allowed Pietro to do as he proposed and “go back to kill him.” There’s a brief moment where anything could happen.
Instead, Wanda regains her composure despite the immense pain she is in and insists she wishes to follow through with the formal attack: “No, I’m over it. I want... I want to finish the plan. I want the big one.”
The plan was to set off each Avenger. Bruce Banner, who would arguably create the greatest damage to the team both publicly and structurally, would not go untouched. Wanda’s mind and foresight intervene in a moment of heated emotion, and keep both twins on track.
Her heart, however, wins out by the end of the film. It is her compassion and respect that remains for not only Sokovia but for the rest of humanity, itself, that prompts her to part ways with Ultron once she is finally able to see inside his mind. The need to defeat the Avengers was so strong that, despite showing clear reservations about an ally without a consciousness she could probe, Wanda was willing to aid and abet Ultron and even, perhaps his burgeoning ulterior motives. Once she sees that his plan to “aid mankind” is to annihilate them, all bets are off. She is horrified, physically pained by the vision she sees in his dreams as he attempts to make a transition into a Vibranium-sculpted body.
This compassion for her fellow man, and her realization that she is no longer doing the “good” and “right” thing, leads her ultimately to put aside her differences with the Avengers and join their efforts to stop Ultron once and for all. Her emotions run deeper and deeper, become more catastrophic, as the scenes of war in her home country progress. She is easily affected by the terror around them, the magnitude of what she has done to bring them to this point, and how poignantly she fears that the fault rests with her, alone. Wanda is not evil, she is not a natural-born terrorist; she is misguided, isolated, and hurt. One could easily conclude she is highly affected by the current of fear in the air around her from her fellow citizens as well, given the strength of her telepathic gifts. All of this — along with the best damned pep talk from Clint Barton you've ever heard — pushes her finally to set the fear aside and attempt to put right her wrongs.
She loses control of everything, however, when Pietro is killed. At that moment Wanda becomes nothing more than a nuclear ball of psionic emotion. Her energy blasts do not typically show themselves to exist on such a grand scale, but we see with the power of feeling, of crippling grief, that their scale may in fact be near limitless.
Family. Her family is gone. Ultron took all that was left of it from her. And she forfeits everything, her own life, to seek the AI out and avenge her brother. One can tell the depths of her despair are so great that she would rather perish on the crumbling mass of Sokovia than go on, telling Ultron she is already dead.
She almost succeeds in her quest, but Vision — a member of her soon to be new family, rescues her. The end of Ultron shows her assembling with other teammates she previously fought against, ready and willing to hear her next commands, to learn.
Family takes on its third and final meaning: Steve, Natasha, Clint, Vision, and the rest. The Avengers.
Families struggle. They experience rough patches, they have fights, they disagree on politics, principles, power balance. In Captain America: Civil War, Wanda watches her new family go through a struggle so severe, they end up on opposing sides of the battlefield. Until now, while training with the Avengers, she has done her best to hone her powers, learn restraint, and let her emotions interfere less in times of crisis. We can see how much it affects her when she loses this battle with herself in Lagos, and an energy shield that was meant to protect a crowd on the ground in Lagos from an impending explosion instead detonates inside a high rise building full of people after a moment of panic. Wanda saved many, but lost others.
She is labeled a menace, and at this point, the United Nations produces the Sokovia Accords as a means to govern and micromanage the Avengers, in an effort to prevent further casualties of enhanced humans taking action like those in Sokovia and Lagos. Wanda is to be tagged and bagged, so to speak: a freak with a leash, along with any others like her.
Her guilt over the fallout shows itself to be immense, though she gives no overwrought displays of emotion; instead, she isolates herself further and further from the group, staying in her room, unable to tear her eyes from the news stories about her failure. Even when Steve attempts to assuage her concerns, professing he had a hand in the disaster himself, Wanda is not relieved.
She does not want to be feared, as she tells Vision, but at the same time, she only knows how to be what she is. We begin to see a new thought process here: that perhaps punishment is not what she deserves, and that there are certain events we cannot control — even when as astronomically gifted as Wanda.
When the time comes to escape the imprisonment in the Avengers Facility imposed upon her by Tony Stark and aided by Vision, Wanda does not hesitate. Lines in the sand have been drawn, and again it comes down to freedom and basic human rights, the same battle of principles she fought in the first film. How much shall we let others oppress us, even if we love them? Even if they are family? She will not be made powerless again — and she will especially not assist others in removing her agency.
Wanda ends up on The Raft for this perceived mutiny, this insubordination, in a straitjacket and a shock collar that is clearly meant to keep her (painfully) from using her powers. But she followed her Captain and her principles willingly there, and one has the sense she would do it all over again. As we see Steve come to the rescue of his comrades at the end of the film, it is clear how haggard and abused Wanda is by this new cage and all its entrapments.
The look in her eyes, however, is not dead — but hard. This will never happen to her again.
In summation: certain insecurities about the world’s fear of her made themselves painfully clear during the events of Civil War, and while they pushed her into seclusion and self-doubt about whether she could be more than a monster in other people’s eyes, they did not ultimately cripple her. Wanda realized she could do nothing other than embrace every part of herself, fight for her beliefs and for her freedom, and let the chips fall where they may. Every risk she took upon escaping Avengers Headquarters was calculated and confident, even when it meant dealing a significant blow to one of her closest companions, Vision.
Wanda has never been one to trust easily; she assesses, studies, moves a chess piece (or destroys the board, depending on the circumstances). Her telepathy suits her nature, and for a time she used it solely as a weapon. After the events of Civil War, her trust will be twice as hard to win as it was before. In some ways this makes her a perfect candidate for this project, if the community is ever in need of an objective party to act as a risk management consultant on new (SILENT!!!) projects.
The haunted community, in turn, may help Wanda open up again, loosen her boundaries where appropriate, and allow her avenues to take for a sense of redemption after the disaster in Lagos. She will likely devote a good deal of time to community construction building, helping others communicate with her telepathic skills, and to reaching gradually back out to her teammates.
comprehensive list and description of her gifts.
I will absolutely include a permissions post for Wanda on her journal, particularly for anything regarding telepathy in any facet.
Mods may also issue power nerfs as they see fit.
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