Being an X-Men fan in the 21st century hasn’t been easy and Scarlet Witch is a huge reason why. When most fans think of the marginalization of Marvel’s merry mutants, they think of the mid to late ’10s, when the publisher began to push the Inhumans because they didn’t have the X-Men’s films rights, which they wouldn’t get back until 2019. However, you can trace this back to the mid ’00s, when Scarlet Witch uttered three fateful words in the story House of M: “No more mutants.” These three words began the downward spiral for the X-Men, leading them into darker and darker storylines that fans eventually got extremely tired of.
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House of M changed everything for Marvel, and Scarlet Witch became a major character in the Marvel Universe for the first time. Since then, she’s gotten more important, to the point where she’s about to become the Sorcerer Supreme. The House of Ideas have went out of their way to erase all of the stigma behind her genocidal acts, and have tried to ingratiate the character of Wanda Maximoff with X-Men fans again. However, I’m here to say something important: X-Men fans don’t have to forgive Wanda; in fact they shouldn’t. She’s always been a terrible person as a character, and it’s about time we stopped pretending she isn’t.
Scarlet Witch Has a History of Terrible Acts that Are Always Forgiven for No Good Reason
I’m not going to sit here and say that Scarlet Witch is actually evil. Wanda Maximoff has had a very hard life, and the sort of upbringing she had can lead people to dark places. She started her superpowered career with the villains on the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, where Magneto treated her like garbage and the other members of the team creeped on her. This certainly did a lot of damage to her psyche and that, combined with her basically godlike powers, is a huge reason we’ve gotten so many stories where the superheroine snaps and does terrible things. However, let’s be real: we have to start admitting that Scarlet Witch is actually a villain, or at least villainous.
A lot of Wanda fans try to hand wave around the fact that she murdered her fellow Avengers and committed an act of genocide by talking about her mental issues. There’s something to that, obviously, because even in the real world we give people leniency for the kind of issues that people like Scarlet Witch have. While we don’t put them in prisons, we usually do consign them to mental institutions, places where they can get the help they need. Nothing like this ever happened to Wanda Maximoff. Everyone just made excuses for why what she did wasn’t “wrong”, and she was back with the Avengers, never having to face any consequences or try to heal.
One of the things I’ve noticed about the way creators had Scarlet Witch react is that she never actually seems to feel bad for committing genocide against the mutant race. It honestly seems like the character is more worried about how everyone looks at her than what she did. Uncanny Avengers was a perfect example of this. She denied that she did anything wrong, and was more angry that Rogue would be mad at her for, again, committing genocide against mutants. After that, she joined the Apocalypse Twins not because she felt bad for the mutants, but because she wanted them to look at her as a savior and not as a monster.
In Trial of Magneto, she allowed herself to be killed so that she could use her magic to create the Elysium Fields, a place where the souls of mutants could be reached and brought back for Krakoan resurrection. It never seemed like she was doing it to make up for what she did, it was more about the way the people of Krakoa looked at her. She no longer wanted to be called “the Pretender” and wanted to be praised, like she was by the Avengers every time she didn’t kill someone or snap and be evil. Marvel has basically made the Scarlet Witch into a spoiled child; she’s favored by the Avengers, and is used to be forgiven for everything. Her actions don’t bother her all that much. What bothers her is being held responsible for her actions.
Scarlet Witch Is the Worst Kind of Person
Once upon a time, I liked Scarlet Witch. I found the way that she wrestled with her pain to be interesting and I was heavily invested in the character’s development after “Avengers Disassembled: Chaos”. I even read the rather abysmal Excalibur (Vol. 3) to find out what was going on with her. Since then, I’ve been constantly disappointed by how Marvel has dealt with her actions in stories like “Chaos” and House of M. They did everything they could to absolve her of all her wrongdoing and she never really showed any remorse. They skipped past the interesting parts to get back to her status quo.
Marvel seems to want X-Men fans to forgive her, especially with the big push the character has been getting over the years. I think Marvel knows that a lot of fans just don’t want to read about her because of the things she’s done. Look, there’s a reason that instead of giving her an ongoing, they have to keep giving her miniseries; people don’t want solo Scarlet Witch stories. The House of Ideas needs fans to like her, and it’s not working.
The reason? Because they’ve never given us an actual reason to forgive her. They’ve just expected us to. Scarlet Witch has done terrible things to both the Avengers and the X-Men, but there has been no remorse. It’s always, “It was Doom’s fault!” or “It was the Life Force!”, all to get fans to blame everything but her character. We X-Men fans have never been given a good reason to forgive her, and that’s what Marvel has never realized.
What do you think about Scarlet Witch? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
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Image courtesy of Paramount+
