DIADEM⟢

[carmesi]

Character Information

Character: Wanda Maximoff
Canon: MCU / The ending of Avengers: Civil War, where she's imprisoned in The Raft
Age: 25
History: Link
Possessions: The clothes on her back, and nothing else.
Weapon: Just her powers, so none!

Powers/Abilities:

PSIONICS Although her psionic abilities exist along the tier of telepathic abilities, these powers are magical in nature given that she received them through the cosmic energies of the Mind Stone. Whenever she engages in her psionic powers, they manifest in a red mist that covers her hands and body. Using theses powers requires her to focus and use the movement of her hands to direct the psionic energy.

⬡ PSIONIC ENERGY MANIPULATION Wanda is able to use her magic in blasts and waves, being able to bend at will whatever target she aims at. This energy manifests itself in a red color around her hands, and she can thus manipulate the energy it creates. TELEKINESIS falls as a standard under this category. She can use telekinesis to move objects and even individuals, being able to use her psionic energy manipulation to affect and control molecules and particles. She has used these powers for feats as simple as moving wooden blocks while suspending them in the air, to stopping a train from its high-speed derailment. The stronger she’s gotten, the more capable she is in using her powers to lift and move heavier objects, including people, and has shown to be capable of using this branch of powers to telekinetically repair objects at a molecular level. Basically, if the object has mass and a structure, Wanda can most likely manipulate it. In the same way that she can repair and bind objects together through her telekinesis and psionic energy manipulation, Wanda can also use her energy to completely DISINTEGRATE objects.

⬡ FORCEFIELD GENERATION Wanda can make a barrier of red energy around herself to protect herself and others, and deflect attacks. Not only has she used this as a defense mechanism, but she has also used it as a barrier to protect herself when falling from great heights and land safely should she crash land. This is generally very useful, as she isn’t a close-contact combatant, and gives her a defensive edge over those who are.

⬡ FLIGHT Wanda can modulate the energy around her hands to create a sort of blast to help propel herself up in the air. She does not fly by willing herself to do so, but by manipulating the gravity around herself. She can levitate several feet up in the air and travel by this means.

⬡ MENTAL MANIPULATION Through her psionic abilities, Wanda can also apply a fair deal of TELEPATHIC abilities; she can read minds, communicate telepathically, and experience the thoughts and memories of others as well as using a type of illusory hypnosis and leaving those under her ‘spell’ in a sort of trance. She can manipulate memory, thoughts, actions, emotions and the senses of others at will; she would also use this to EMOTIONALLY MANIPULATE others by eliciting fear and emotional pain. However, this is an ability that she tries to not use as often.

Application Questions

Who is the most important person in their life and why? What might be different if this person hadn't been around?

The most important person in Wanda's life in this canon point is her twin brother Pietro. First and foremost, they are fraternal twins, and while much of their past isn't well known, this fact alone implies that they did most everything together. At the age of ten, when their home was bombed and their parents were killed, Pietro was the only other survivor of the blast, and ever since she had no one else but him. This experience, traumatic as it was, brought them all that much closer together; whatever their path was from then until their first appearance in the MCU proper, they were always together. Wanda is prone to feelings of guilt and grief, skewing more towards pessimism, so her brother being alive with her meant that she had purpose. Whatever she lacked, he possessed, and vice versa.

It was Pietro who had convinced Wanda that allowing themselves to be experimented on was the way to help save their country, their home. Even when she had her doubts about it, it was his insistence that pushed her to agree. With the experiments came the exposure to the Mind Stone, which was what ultimately unlocked her latent powers. If Pietro had not survived the blast with Wanda, she would never have unlocked her powers, she would never have joined the Avengers, and she would never have had her arc in the MCU overall. She would have remained a protester in Sokovia, or another civilian trying to live as best as she could despite the war.

Whatever the case, Pietro did die in the MCU, and we can see what the effects of his absence on Wanda are. Wandavision expanded upon this time period, where she's grieving and isolating herself between training with the Avengers, stuck in her room rewatching sitcoms, unable to really face her grief and having a hard time working on how to function without him. This links up with Avengers: Civil War, as she starts to gain confidence in her skills, but errors in missions makes her hesitant and more likely to pull in onto herself. Pietro would be the one to shake her out of those throes of insecurity, and his presence always gave her the courage to be assertive. Now, without him, that kind of inner strength is a little harder for her to come by.

Is there an event in your character's life that they'd do differently? How so and why?

There are quite a few events that Wanda wishes she would have done differently, mostly because her life is marred with (in retrospect) bad decisions, and they all have pretty big consequences to her character and have significantly changed her life in many ways. I'm picking two, because ultimately it comes down to the same thing: being confident, having a glass half-full mentality, and wanting to do good—except everything goes wrong.

The first of the two events is when Pietro comes back to her during the battle against Ultron, to check on her, to make sure she's alright and get her out, and Wanda telling him to go with a little, cheeky smile on her face, as if to say she's got this; that he can get everyone else out of Novi Grad first and then come look for her. The second event is when her attempt to contain the explosion from Crossbone's suicide gone awry, and she ends up killing innocent civilians in the process.

In the former, she would have rather not sent her brother away and to have been at his side; she could have protected him from the bullets, she could have made it so he didn't feel it necessary to put himself in danger to save the lives of the boy and Clint. Whichever the scenario, it most likely replays in her mind endlessly when memories of her brother surfaces; the what if of it all, and how she indirectly played a role in it. For the latter, it is clear that her being part of the Avengers and having trained with them gave her the confidence to trust that what they were doing was right; clearly, results show the opposite, and the Avengers, mainly herself, were blasted by the news for the role they play within world politics. At this point in canon, it wouldn't be surprising to think that she's highly reconsidering her role within that group and whether she's earned her place there, or if she even belongs there at all. For this particular event, she isn't sure, even now, on what she would have done differently; she had to take action and she did, saving Steve's life but in exchange of many innocent others.

All in all, these events where she has shown herself to be confident, hopeful even at things ending well, have resulted in her heavily reconsidering her actions and whether she can't do anything but the wrong thing, despite best intentions.

What's the greatest challenge you foresee your character facing in the setting?

Wanda's canon point, before being rescued from The Raft, puts her in a particularly sore spot in her story within the MCU. Despite doing what she felt was right, she's ended up locked up, placed in a straightjacket and with a cuff to her neck to keep her from using her powers. All she can do while in her cell is think of her decisions, her regrets, and grow with resentment over how she was treated. She's not turning the page and becoming a villain, though; instead, she is fully aware that the reason she's ended locked up is because of her powers as an enhanced individual and how this makes people uncomfortable and scared of her.

Because of this, the greatest challenge she'll encounter in this setting is to keep her powers at bay and try her utmost to not make use of them. This will clearly not be something she'll be able to keep to, but I look forward to her having to come to terms, even if she doesn't like it, that her powers are a part of her, and an intrinsic part of her at that. She'll be challenged by needing to work towards having ownership of herself, of her powers, and becoming the enhanced individual that she can be comfortable as. Getting to trust others in order to achieve this will be difficult for her, and she'll have to learn that she can't handle all of it by herself.

As something of a long-term goal, I would want her to develop her powers and strengthen them in a similar vein as they were in the MCU, but this time without the grief and the loss, but through a better control of her Chaos Magic as she works towards learning to trust her powers and gain confidence in making use of them in a way that helps others rather than just hurting them.

What's the easiest thing you foresee your character adapting to in the setting?

Because her lived experiences in Sokovia during the war meant that she grew up without all the normal things others her age elsewhere would have been exposed to, and because her time in America meant her immediate involvement with the Avengers, Wanda will be fascinated by the mundane and trivial of day-to-day living. Her eagerness to learn and to be 'normal', regardless of her powers, will put her in an amiable position to become acquainted with grinding jobs, will make her open to new experiences for both learning and entertainment, and will make her prone to want to bond with others who present themselves to have good intentions towards her. Despite her own reservations, she will take to building a community for herself that includes no knowledge of her past grievances, to just ignore how she feels about that, her powers, and how loss still heavily affects her due to what role she did or didn't have in it. If she can pretend to be normal, she can put everything that makes her aside, and build herself up to be different.

Whether this blows up in her face eventually (because she will have to make use of her powers at some point, and at least two people know of her powers in the TDM at this point) is irrelevant to her in the initial stages of the game. Having her grow to know that those here won't be scared of her powers will be a big lesson that I'll want her to learn in any case. :)

Samples

Sample: TDM top-level