A Sokovian orphan who volunteered for the experiment that gave her her power, and who turns out to be the most dangerous person in the story the moment she has nothing left to lose.
Wanda Maximoff was born in Sokovia in 1989 and grew up in a small flat with her twin brother Pietro and her parents, watching American sitcoms on box sets her father sold so the family could practise English. A missile hit the building and killed her parents. A second one, with Stark Industries stamped on the side, landed in the room where the twins were trapped and did not go off. They looked at it for two days.
The detail the films are careful about, and that is easy to miss, is that nobody experimented on her against her will. She and Pietro volunteered. Hydra had the Mind Stone and were looking for people who wanted something badly enough to survive it, and out of everyone who went in, the twins were the two who came out. Her power is the only one in the story that was already there before the science touched it.
That is why she keeps being the exception. Every other Avenger is either built, enhanced, trained or born to it. Wanda is a witch who was going to be a witch, and the story keeps making the mistake of treating her as a colleague with an unusual skill set until the moment it stops being able to.
Show detailsWhat happened at Westview
Between Avengers: Endgame and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Wanda goes to a small town in New Jersey to look at a plot of land Vision had bought for the two of them, and in her grief she puts the entire town inside a decades-spanning sitcom in which she is married and has two sons, Billy and Tommy. The town’s real residents are inside it with her.
She lets it go in the end, and the boys go with it. The sorceress Agatha Harkness, who came to find out how anyone could do such a thing at all, is the one who names what she is, and the name is older than she is: the Scarlet Witch, an identity the story treats as ancient and foretold rather than acquired.
This is the context the film assumes you have. Without it, the person who walks into Multiverse of Madness looks like a sudden turn. With it, she is a woman who has already lost her children once and has just found out that somewhere, in some version of the world, they are alive.
For the record, the article this entry is drawn from says Wanda has appeared in seven films of this continuity, and names six of them. This catalogue lists the six it can point at.
Show detailsThe character two studios both owned
Marvel had licensed the X-Men and the whole idea of mutants to 20th Century Fox in the 1990s, and Wanda and Pietro sat exactly on the line. Fox claimed them because they are mutants and the children of Magneto. Marvel claimed them because their history in the comics is bound up with the Avengers.
The studios settled it by agreeing that both could use them, on the condition that neither pointed at the other’s property. Fox could not call them Avengers. Marvel could not call them mutants, or mention Magneto. That agreement is the reason nobody in Avengers: Age of Ultron ever says the word, and it is one of the clearest cases in this material of a legal document shaping what a character is allowed to be.
Major spoiler
She kills Vision herself, at his request, to keep the Mind Stone from Thanos. Thanos then reverses time with the Time Stone, kills him again in front of her, and takes it anyway. Nothing she did counted.
Major spoiler
She dies. After hunting America Chavez across two universes and killing most of the Illuminati of Earth-838 to do it, she stops when the versions of Billy and Tommy she came for scream at her to get away from them. She brings Mount Wundagore down on herself, and every copy of the Darkhold in the multiverse goes with it.