With each new episode, WandaVision makes a point to showcase just how strong Scarlet Witch is getting, and it could be because it's gearing up to position her as the mother of mutants across the globe. Wanda has been a recurring character in the MCU since 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron, and in that time she's experienced an exponential growth in power from once simply being able to manipulate minds and move objects. However, even with all that power, she hasn't been able to save the people in her life, such as her brother, Quicksilver, or even her lover, Vision. After being forced to destroy the Mind Stone (along with Vision's consciousness) to save the world from Thanos, Wanda could only watch in horror as the Mad Titan reversed time in order to take the Mind Stone from Vision himself, performing the Snap and killing Wanda and half the universe's population in the process.
Even now that the people lost in the Decimation have returned, Wanda still seems to be bearing the scars of her trauma, both from Thanos and before. The series picks up mere weeks after the ending of Avengers: Endgame, dropping audiences into a black-and-white domestic fantasy based on the tropes of 50s sitcoms, in which Wanda and Vision are a happily married couple in the middle of a cheery neighborhood named Westview. However, after the most recent episode, audiences are now aware that there's much more going on behind the scenes, as the intergalactic peacekeeping organization S.W.O.R.D. is now actively monitoring Scarlet Witch's situation.
With everything going on, it's easy to see that Wanda's powers have grown into the realm of her full-blown reality manipulating abilities from the comics, allowing her to imprison the town of Westview and even create her own children within her ill-fated fantasy. While that in and of itself is terrifying, there's also another, subtler implication there: If Wanda's powers can rewrite reality and ostensibly bring people like Vision back from the dead, it's entirely possible they could create other superhumans, too.
The concept of Wanda warping reality is directly influenced by the classic comic book storyline "House of M," which played out over the course of eight issues back in 2005. While WandaVision is nowhere close to a straight adaptation, the core idea of both series shares similar strands of DNA, with Wanda constructing a pocket reality after severe mental trauma. Just like in the show, Wanda's powers trap the citizens of the Marvel Universe in a transformed timeline that they have no recollection of entering, but the big difference in the comics is that "House of M" takes place on a global scale (something the MCU might replicate if all of Marvel's Phase 4 is a House of M adaptation).
But most comic book fans recognize that "House of M" isn't as iconic as it is just because of Wanda's alternate reality shenanigans. At the end of the book, after Wanda realizes what she's done and just how traumatized she and her brother, Pietro, have been thanks to their father Magneto's extremist views on mutant-human relations, she lashes out and utters the phrase "No more mutants," which initially seems to reverse her changes and transform the world back to normal. However, readers and heroes in-universe quickly realize the disturbing truth of Wanda's words: she didn't just erase her changes to the timeline, she actually de-powered a massive swath of the mutant population, turning a species that once ranked in the tens of thousands to just hundreds, nearly rendering mutants extinct. Scarlet Witch's actions in "House of M" eventually became known as the "Decimation" to the mutant community and would have long-standing and far-reaching consequences for years to come. Yet, it's possible the live-action universe could reverse-engineer this event to introduce mutants to the MCU.
Both Scarlet Witch and her brother, Quicksilver, were introduced into the MCU in 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron, where it was revealed that their powers came from experimentation using the Mind Stone. The MCU has continued to build on a connection between Wanda and the stone that essentially birthed her powers, especially in Avengers: Infinity War, where it was confirmed that her powers were the only thing strong enough to destroy the Stone as they were made of the same energy. However, it was recently confirmed in the pages of the newly-published book The Wakanda Files (Shuri's scientific journal exploring the world of the Avengers) that Hydra chose to settle in Sokovia because a large portion of its population possessed preexisting genetic anomalies that made them promising candidates for experimentation. By that logic, MCU Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are already mutants, at least in theory. This reveal has massive significance for the world of the MCU moving forward, especially when considering the idea that there are potentially thousands of people on Earth with latent mutant genes.
Episode 4 of WandaVision introduced several major players within S.W.O.R.D. moving forward, and also gave audiences a glimpse at the inner workings of their investigation into the Westview phenomenon, but there was also an important reveal slipped into the episode that is easy to miss. During her investigation, Darcy discovers that the town of Westview is emitting low levels of a very specific radiation signature referred to as Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. CMBR is an actual phenomenon in the real world (tied to leftover energy from the expansion of the universe), but it's also directly tied to the Infinity Stones in fiction because of the fact that they were born into existence during the Big Bang. This means that Wanda's powers emit the same cosmic radiation that turned her and her brother into superhumans in the MCU. In the comics, cosmic radiation and extradimensional energies have been responsible for giving dozens of characters powers, such as the Fantastic Four and Monica Rambeau, the latter of which is currently in WandaVision and the former soon to be introduced into the MCU.
While the town of Westview is what Wanda's powers look like operating on a contained scale, there's no reason to believe she couldn't expand her area of influence onto a much bigger scale. Wanda's powers have never stopped growing, and as far back as Age of Ultron she was capable of detonating enormous shockwave-like blasts of energy, something she used to take out almost an entire army of Ultron drones in the moment she felt Pietro's death. It's entirely possible something happens in the finale of WandaVision that pushes Wanda even further, causing her to blast out her powers on a mass scale and activating latent mutant genes in a huge swath of the population - particularly as it looks as though the show is setting her up to be someone S.W.O.R.D. considers a threat in the MCU.
Wanda lashing out against that would be a perfect response to the trauma and experiences that Wanda has already gone through in the MCU. Not only has she lost her parents, her brother, and her love, but her abilities indirectly led to a tragedy that caused the world to view her as a menace and question the autonomy of superpowered beings. It would make perfect sense for her to want to disrupt the status quo by adding more superpowers to the equation, forcing the people in charge of structures like the Sokovia Accords and S.W.O.R.D. to contend with the fact that the world is rapidly changing around them in ways they'll never be able to control.
On top of this is also the recent birth of Wanda's own children, characters who will presumably grow up to become the MCU versions of Young Avengers Wiccan and Speed. Growing up with Scarlet Witch as a mother and powers of their own, her children face a severe risk of being ostracized for their connection to her, so creating an entire new species of beings might have also been a protective reflex on Wanda's part. For better or worse, the mutant community frequently sticks together in the face of the prejudice and fearmongering that regular humans throw their way. While WandaVision hasn't directly confirmed this path as their endgame, having Wanda Maximoff be the mother of mutants in the MCU would be the perfect way to pay homage to her legacy as a major force within X-Men comics, as well as finally giving her the respect and storytelling depth she's always deserved in the MCU.
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February 04, 2021 at 05:00AM
