Captain America: The Winter Soldier - The first tag
The Avengers 2: Age of Ultron tag:
--okay, this turned out so long that it gets to be its own post, so I am moving the TL;DR summary up here:
Marvel is full of fucked-up body trauma; nobody realizes this because most of the trauma is enacted on the bodies of white men; making Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch experimental subjects fits nicely into the MCU's preoccupation with body manipulation by government and corporate forces.
Long version:
- ObComicsBackground
The monocle'd monologuer is Baron Strucker, a Nazi scientist who later works for Hydra. The twins are Pietro and Wanda Maximoff, aka Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, who joined the Avengers just after most of the original team quit. For a while, it was Cap, the twins, and Hawkeye, and the twins and Hawkeye were recently reformed criminals. The first wave of big anti-Avengers PR in the Marvelverse called them "Cap's Kooky Quartet."
Pietro and Wanda are Romany and joined the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants after their family was murdered during an anti-mutant witch hunt. Pietro goes really fast. Wanda reshapes reality. Everyone likes Wanda, because she's a sweetheart, and nobody likes Pietro, because he's a jerk. They decide on their own to reform (mostly on Wanda's own, but Pietro goes where she does). Eventually, it's retconned revealed that Pietro and Wanda are actually Magneto's children, originally unbeknowest to either them or Magneto. Wanda eventually falls victim to the Marvel writers' extreme discomfort with women who are too powerful and goes crazy because her imaginary robot-fathered children were sent to hell. (Comics, everybody!)
- ObComicsBackground#2
In the Ultimates reboot, it turns out that mutants are not a natural evolutionary development but the result of the same military programs that included the super soldier experiments and many other nonconsensual human experiments.
- Avengers vs. X-Men
FOX has the movie rights to Marvel's mutants. FOX can use the characters because they're mutants and are prominent in many X-Men storylines, and Marvel can use them because they have frequently been Avengers (especially Wanda) and are prominent in many Avengers storylines (especially Wanda). Marvel just can't call them mutants or link them to Magneto (who cannot exist in the MCU).
- Military-industrial body horror
Obviously, we don't know how these characters and stories will be reconfigured for the MCU. All we've got is: Baron Strucker was behind Hydra but has bigger plans and is happy to have Hydra mopped up by Fury et. al. as a distraction. He's using Tesseract/Infinity Gem technology to perform human experiments, which have killed most of the subjects and given the two survivors superpowers. The secret origin of mutants is one of the few things I like about the Ultimates universe, so I am delighted that it looks like the MCU is trending that way. It fits in with the ongoing thread of human experimentation and body modification and with the exploitation of vulnerable bodies for military, political, or financial profit, which is a theme we see throughout the MCU, including Agents of SHIELD.
The MCU is full of body horror, or at least of complex issues around bodily integrity and violation. Most people just don't seem to see it because most of these bodies are the bodies of white men, which are not seen as fields for this kind of discussion, except perhaps in certain horror movie contexts. Steve Rogers' entire body is remade. Bruce Banner's entire body is remade and is out of his control. Tony Stark suffers serious bodily injury and becomes a cyborg. Bucky Barnes loses an arm, which is replaced with a machine, just as his consciousness is. And the bodily changes -- the injuries and violations -- are treated as metaphors for emotional and psychological states, rather than as narrative subjects for exploration. Men's minds are subjects. Men's relationships to their bodies are supposed to be inalienable. The difference between the way Iron Man 3 treats mental disability and the way it treats physical disability is just one recent MCU example of how gendered assumptions shape narratives.
Women's relationships to their bodies are supposed to be always already alienated, which is probably why most of the exploration of what that kind of physical change (damage) means has come out of female-dominated fan spaces.
- Race, gender, and all that jazz
I wasn't suprised that Marvel cast two white kids for half-Romany and half-Jewish kids, but I am surprised they're not keeping Wanda's signature curly hair. That said, the 90s Goth Girl outfits we've seen so far are way better than the original Scarlet Witch costume, even if I don't see why she can't have a shirt that buttons up over her bra.
There is not actually any comics-based support for the Scarlet Waif Witch being a Jossian madwoman-waif at this point in her origin story. Brian Bendis turns her into one for Avengers Disassembled and The House of M, but that is extremely late in Wanda's history. And I actually do love River and, to a lesser extent, Drusilla, but I am dreading more Jossian takes on insanity.
And also Joss's take on the evil Nazi scientist, because the current tag and that Russian mobster guy in Firefly are bad enough already.
cups brewed at DW