@TheGreyOutcastX said:
I think X-fans have had this discussion the most. Avengers fans usually jump to say yes forgive her and welcome her back to the team. That is the worst thing you could ever do. The Avengers have the notorious past of welcoming back fallen member so long as they look like they want to repent. It gets swept under the rug, and they will act like it never happened.
I said this in another thread about Wanda. You can't let her actions whether they were out of insanity or not go unanswered. That would be a slap on the wrist which is an insult to the readers. It makes it seems like heroes can get away with acts that rival what villains do. That heroes don't bother to reign in their own. That they face no consequences. Look at Illyana. She tricked the X-Men into aiding her in her vengeance against the Elder Gods. She nearly got what was left of mutantkind killed. Scott did what had to be done, and locked her away, and later put restrictions on her actions to insure it wouldn't happen again. Wanda should not get special treatment. She needs to repent, she needs to see and experience what she did to mutants and through that rediscover her own mutant identity. One act alone is not enough.
If she wants to redeem herself, if she wants to fix her mistake, if she truly wants to repent, she must come face to face with those that she harmed and little by little fix and aid mutantkind. Time she put being an Avenger on the back burner and clean up the mess she helped create. Earn forgiveness, don't waste your time asking for it.
I actually agree with this completely but also feel that if Wanda were more of a fan favorite like Wolverine that fans would much quicker to forgive and forget, and thus the writers would tailor the storyline to follow suit (heroes forgiving and forgetting, well maybe not Cyclops). She is definitely partially to blame for the events she caused but has everyone forgotten two of the main other people responsible as well?
Perhaps having the biggest hand in this entire situation was Quicksilver. He warned Wanda that the Avengers/X-Men were coming for her and were likely going to kill her but she was going to let whatever happened happen. She was actually willing to die for what she had done in Disassembled, a product of psychologically suppressed trauma; she LOST her children that she could NEVER had (having children was impossible with her android husband at the time, thus when she used her abilities to get pregnant it was an opportunity no woman in a similar situation wouldn't consider a sheer miracle) and her memories were stolen from her. I'm not a mother, but I've been around enough to know that a bond between a mother and her children is one of the most powerful things in fiction and the real world. To lose her children, and by having them be absorbed by a demonic entity? That's some serious damage that was only put at bay when Agatha Harkness decided to erase the poor woman's memories of ever having had children. She killed her husband and her friend Scott Lang and was remorseful enough to welcome death at the hands of her friends and family. She had lost her family at the point... other than her father... and Pietro. In desperation to save his sister, he convinced her to change reality to create a world where all of the arriving heroes got what they wanted so that they wouldn't come after her. Her mind was fragile and the idea of bringing peace to the people she helped seriously hurt was too appealing to her, plus her most trusted relative encouraged and conceived the idea. So she did it. It obviously didn't work out and Pietro was killed, yet another of Wanda's dwindling family killed... by her father. Can you imagine the type of trauma having your own brother whom had been a part of your life all your lives be brutally killed by the man you barely even like, a man whose supposed to be your father? Magneto was willing to kill his own child out of embarrassment and pride, a pride that has reinforced his crusade against humans and towards the advancement of mutant kind in society (thus HIS part in the House of M, mutants being elevated in society as the primary race... and the entire story being called the House of M as in MAGNUS?) The fact that she erased the vast majority of the mutant race instead of... I don't know... destroying the world (which she could probably at least achieve 99% considering the success rate of the depowering spell) is a miracle conisdering the fact that her ENTIRE family was taken from her, except the tyrant she was supposed to call her father.
I'm not saying she's not completely justified in her actions. Not even close. But try to look at it from her side, try to imagine going through all that and, what? Still being a super hero and having everything all honky dory? I don't think so. Half the things these characters go through would've lead to the same kind of breakdown Wanda had if not worse, the writers are just good at making them all seem to get over them so easily or not be realistically affected by them. With Wanda, they managed to make her character much more human than it ever was and make her one of the most flawed, and consequently human, characters in Marvel comics. So I'm saying she's to blame, but she's not the only one and cut her some slack. She's been through things that most people couldn't hope to survive in the first place.
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