Things Marvel Wants You To Forget About Scarlet Witch

Scarlet Witch started out as a mutant who had "hex powers," which basically meant that she could do anything that the writer desired. Even in a comic book series that featured mutants with the powers of eye lasers or being a toad man, her powers were incredibly ill-defined. Beyond wearing all red, Wanda Maximoff really wasn't much of a Scarlet Witch at all until writer Steve Englehart had her study under Agatha Harkness — an actual witch — in 1974's The Avengers #128. While tutelage under Harkness gave the Scarlet Witch access to powers that skewed closer to Dr. Strange than Jean Grey, she was still technically a mutant whose main power was "hexes."

As it turned out, the reason for her magical talent was due to a Cthulu-esque Elder God named Chthon who gave her a natural affinity for magic in order to shape her to be the perfect vessel for his physical form after her birth. Writer Kurt Busiek would later retcon Chthon's influence to be the entire reason behind the Scarlet Witch's ambiguous hex powers in 1998's Avengers #10. In the story, Wanda learns that if not for the Elder God's involvement, her mutant power would be standard energy blasts.

At this point, you may be asking what these new magical powers actually allow her to do. The answer is basically anything the plot demands, in a surprisingly faithful evolution of Kirby and Lee's original conception of the character. In various stories, she's brought people back to life, subconsciously made children out of portions of the Devil's soul, overwrote all of reality into an alternate reality of her choosing, and completely erased the entire mutant genome from the universe. We'll get to that later.

As Marvel superfans might know, Wanda and Pietro's father is definitely Magneto, the master of magnetism. Well, sort of. He was officially confirmed to be their father in 1983's The Vision and Scarlet Witch #4, finally answering the five year lingering question of who Wanda's biological father was. This latest development seemed to be the most permanent, finally giving the Maximoffs a more or less lasting patriarch that would remain for the next thirty years.

In 2014's AXIS, a Marvel crossover event that featured the moral alignment of various heroes and villains getting reversed, Wanda discovered that Magneto wasn't actually her father. In addition, she discovered later that she and Pietro weren't actually ever mutants at all, but regular humans who had been experimented on by the High Evolutionary at birth to create superpowered siblings. In this most recent retcon, Wanda's biological father is currently settled to be Django Maximoff, the traveling Romani who had raised her. Coincidentally, that revelation happened right around the time that Twentieth Century Fox had established conclusively that they owned the film rights to both Magneto and "mutants" as a concept ... but there's probably no connection. If there was a connection, we might expect her to once again be revealed to be Magneto's daughter just as soon as the rights revert back to Disney.

While Vision and Wanda were married, they even managed to have children: twin boys, Billy and Tommy. If you're asking how a "synthozoid" and a mutant witch can have children, that's a very good question. The answer is obviously magic. Unfortunately, Wanda's children would be as vulnerable to retcons as the rest of her family: it turned out that while the children technically existed, they only existed while Wanda was actively thinking of them. Any moment that they weren't on her mind, they ceased to exist. To make matters worse, they were stolen by the demonic Master Pandemonium while they were existing in Avengers West Coast #51.

Master Pandemonium absorbed the twins, giving him the unintentionally hilarious visual of a man with babies for arms (this is not a joke). In actuality, the babies were pieces of Mephisto's soul (the Marvel Universe equivalent to Satan) that had been blasted off in an issue of Fantastic Four. When Wanda wanted children, she subconsciously siphoned off parts of Mephisto's broken souls to create her children. Agatha Harkness (the literal witch who taught Scarlet Witch magic) was able to banish Mephisto by erasing Wanda's memory of ever having children, which, thanks to her subconscious reality warping abilities, meant that they stopped existing.

Unlike many of Scarlet Witch's insanely complicated and tragic family stories, this one actually has a happy ending, though! The souls of Billy and Tommy were reincarnated into new families, where they grew up and eventually joined the Young Avengers. Billy took after his pre-reincarnation-mom by wielding magic as the young hero Wiccan, while Tommy took after his "uncle" Pietro with his white hair and speed powers (he took the more unoriginal name Speed).

In 2005, the Marvel crossover event House of M showcased an entirely new continuity for the heroes of the Marvel Universe. Spider-Man's Uncle Ben was alive, Mutants were the dominant life form on the planet while humans were the minority, and Wolverine regained his entire memory after decades of amnesia. The twist turned out to be that the Scarlet Witch completely overwrote reality to give everyone in the universe their dearest wish (or near to it). Since Wolverine's dearest wish was to remember his true past, that paradox allowed him to keep his memories of the original universe. Thinking that Magneto had orchestrated the reality rewriting in order to accomplish his long-time goal of mutant superiority, Wolverine got a team together to convince Scarlet Witch to turn the world back.

In one of the most shocking moments of Marvel history, Wanda responded to the stress and guilt by erasing the mutant genome and turning almost every mutant in the world into a powerless human. Of course, most of the named X-Men kept their superpowers, but it was still a radical departure from the massive number of mutants that existed in the Marvel universe prior. As for Scarlet Witch, the storyline had two major effects: it effectively removed Scarlet Witch from any ongoing comics (aside from an occasional cameo or line of dialogue) for the next decade, since her magic-based genocide basically made her a mutant Hitler. Secondly, it ratcheted up her power levels to ridiculous amounts. Both her culpability in the story and her literal ability to perform the reality warping would be retconned away in later stories. Which is fair; once a character becomes powerful enough to create their own alternate realities, it's hard to really justify any sort of conflict.

Remember above when we mentioned that it was strange that Scarlet Witch had never bonded with Nightcrawler over getting chased by a mob in Eastern Europe? Well, it turns out they did bond over it, just not in the main 616 universe. In Earth-2182, they got together and had a daughter, Nocturne, who would eventually become a part of the reality-hopping super team the Exiles. While on the team, Nocturne made good use of her mutant power to possess other people and fire hex-bolts; although these bolts were more like energy blasts than the magical sort that her mother used. Nocturne would eventually end up in the main 616 universe, where she would join New Excalibur, get reunited with her thought-comatose lover, and suffer a stroke. That list kind of makes it seem like Wanda's bad luck is genetic, but at least she wasn't made out of the devil's soul.