For once, Remender is scarily close to correctly characterizing a character… but it’s still full of fails.
Is it just me, or is Wanda sounding a lot like dear old dad here? The whole ‘take all the mutants to Jupiter to live in a mutant-only world’ reminds me of Asteroid M. She also seems to have been convinced that humans and mutants will never get along. This whole situation is very much a Magneto thing and Wanda has, in the past, done some insane things in the name of just making everyone stop fighting…
But here’s the thing. Wanda knows that not all humans are bad, she is friends with some very human Avengers, for good or bad. And the whole “House of M” thing wasn’t exactly her idea. She was in a vulnerable state and her brother gave her the idea. When everyone was coming to kill her, she latched onto the idea and gave it form, even turning herself ‘human’ in House of M to highlight just how much less-than-worth-loathing Wanda had stored up. House of M failed, No More Mutants wasn’t any better, but both times she was just trying to do something, anything, to stop the fighting, and the pain.
So yeah, in some respect you can see her latching onto the Jupiter thing in the same vein… but I think Wanda would have learned from everything that happened during House of M, plus being an Avenger in general, that a) you have to treat the cause of the human/mutant divide, not the symptoms, and b) never, ever, ever trust the bad guy, doesn’t matter what they are saying.
At the moment, Wanda seems to be walking back through the same old loop without any real character advancement. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again but expecting different results. That is Wanda right now. And she very much deserves way more than this.
I wasn’t that upset by that. I think Wanda is so completely desperate for atonement, and in such despair that she’ll grab any opportunity to do some good that sounds reasonable enough. We’ve seen in UA5 and 9 that she was losing hope that the Unity Squad could fulfill its mission, so advocating complete separation is not that absurd. I might sound absurd at first, when you consider she’s spent a greater part of her life among humans then mutants, but when you see how her life turned out, it is understandable that she would make such a choice. And I’ve always thought her much more like Magneto than she ever admitted, so it is kind of perversely satisfying to see her doing something he already tried. The one problem I had here is that she would trust mass murderers that quickly.
Yeah, the characterization is there, you can see why/how she might do it. But it just doesn’t play right. Especially her, as you said, trusting mass murders so quickly. Maybe if it was someone less ‘evil’ coming up with the plan then it wouldn’t strike such a wrong cord. And if the whole romance thing wasn’t shoe-horned in there too. Ugh.
Wanda and Wondy did have a thing in the past, and I’m not completely opposed to it happening again. But I think he might be the teased death that has been teased (because when is it not Simon?); plus, the first few issues up until the Age of Ultron tie-in kind of suggest Remender has plans for her and Cap (plus the similarities he’s been making between their trajectories in the Cap solo series), and I doubt he’ll abandon that this soon. In that sense, yeah, that scene was pretty pointless, but I like to think of it as giving old Simon a last bit of hope before sending him to his death again =P
I don’t read Cap’s solo, but considering what he’s done in the beginning of this run, I can see it. And it’s just another ‘wtf’ moment because Wanda was getting it on with a human (super soldier but still human) and yet she is now convinced they are all so bad they have to leave? It all makes sense… individually… but together, it’s like a bag of cats.