Thread by @LetsTalkWanda

An introduction to the Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff!! A thread 🌌

Wanda's comic book origins are a bit complicated and have been retconned a handful of times over the years. Because of this it's become sort of an amalgamation of her differing origins. She first appeared in The X-Men #4 (March 1964) during the Silver Age of Comic Books.

Wanda and her fraternal twin brother Pietro (Quicksilver) appear as founding members of the Brotherhood of Mutants alongside the dreaded Magneto.

Wanda and Pietro were originally depicted as the children of Golden Age superhero Whizzer. A retcon in the 1980's revealed Wanda and Pietro to be the offspring of the mutant Magneto, who were then left in the care of their adoptive Romani parents Natalya and Django Maximoff.

A final retcon in the early 2010's revealed that Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are not Magneto's children after all, but they were kidnapped from birth and used as subjects of genetic experimentation by the High Evolutionary, then misled to believe Magneto was their father.

Wanda and Pietro's Romani parents were persecuted and killed while the children were at a young age, forcing them to live nomadically for much of their early lives. It's during this wandering the pair is influenced and recruited by Magneto to join the Brotherhood of Mutants.

Though Wanda first appeared as a villain, she has since become a longtime core member of the Avengers.

The twins were born on Mt. Wundagore, and due to the mountain's mystical energy, it gave Wanda the ability to use magic in addition to her other powers.

Wanda's main power is the superhuman ability to manipulate and warp reality at will, granted to her by the High Evolutionary's experimentations and further amplified by the demon Chthon (imprisoned within Wundagore Mountain) when she was born.

She accomplishes this by manipulating a force known as Chaos Magic. Her "hexes" were, by extension, simple, indirect manifestations of this magic, destabilizing probabilities by affecting energy fields and matter, ultimately inducing chaos.

While Wanda is stable and healthy, she wields her powers with proficiency and is capable of triggering and controlling multiple occurrences at once; one of her most famous feats was reviving Wonder Man seemingly from another plane of existence.

While she serves as a conduit for the Earth's Life Force, her power is so great that, she was able to generate armies from nowhere and has also altered the entire Earth-616 reality at will, and permanently shifted the nature of all possible futures without realizing what she did.

She is actually considered the very Nexus Being of the central universe of Earth-616, serving as the entity that personifies the realm's character and serves as the focal point or anchor of that reality.

Initially, Wanda had the ability to manipulate probability via her "hexes" (often manifesting physically as "hex spheres" or "hex bolts") which manipulated energy fields and matter to varying degrees. Her hexes can cause a wide variety phenomena, including but not limited to:

Other powers and abilities include: Teleportation (of herself and others), telekinesis, matter manipulation on a molecular level, psychic defense, expert knowledge of sorcery, expert combatant, as well as being an expert tactician.

Wanda and Avengers teammate Vision are sometimes depicted as lovers and have had a very significant relationship in the past, even being married and having children (though they weren't technically real) at one point.

Although she is currently sane, her mental stability is still something to be considered. Wanda has undergone mental breakdowns, episodes of mental illness, and severe suicidal depression relating to her powers and personal traumas.

I consider Wanda to be one of the most underrated characters in the Marvel Universe. She has a rich (albeit sometimes confusing) history and has played in integral part in the MU for a long time now. She's a very unique character with so much to love!