Bendis' Scarlet Witch

What are your thoughts on the matter? Does he really hate her?

>he answered my question
Sweet, I thought for sure he'd ignore it.

Kudos, it's not easy to get a non-gif response from Bendis.

A professional writer can't capitalize his sentences properly or spell the word "wringer."

He answered a couple of my questions too. Kinda proud considering I'm one of the few actual fans of his in this board.

Does he really hate the Scarlet Witch?

Well I take that back now that I read it. He didn't really answer shit.
>I don't know one person that writes a character they hate
I gave you an example of one, you fat fuck.

To answer the question of the thread, I don't think Bendis hates Wanda, I think he wanted to make her 'bigger' than the sum of whatever Avenger she was fucking that arc so that something like what Byrne did couldn't happen again.
Bendis has always killed his darlings, Jessica Jones, Peter Parker, Jessica Drew, all went through some real bullshit under his pen and they were his favorite characters.

I do think SOMEONE in editorial hated Wanda though, there's no other way to explain how she disappeared for 7 years.

>putting myself aside, I have never met a creator that worked on a character they hated.. or was trying to quote unquote destroy the character.
>putting myself aside

Is that a hidden yes?

The problem is that I never felt like his writing about Wanda was ever actually about her--she was more of a means to an end (his new Avengers lineup, the mutant status quo) because he did all the tearing down but he never did any building back up, never really did any exploration of what she felt about this shit or her motivations for doing it (other than "oh shit my kids are gone/my daddy is evil"). She didn't gain anything from his wringer, she only lost.

>he never denied it
It's true

>Does he really hate her?
No. He's just a shit writer.

I would say he doesn't hate characters or if he does he hides it but he does have huge fucking biases and tries to get some character out of the way.

Take Age of Ultron, a Avengers story about Wolverine at the expense of Hank Pym. He tries to focus on A-list characters at the expense of c-list because I feel he thinks c-list characters can never mater like the a-list or his pet characters. If he has to use a c-list than he tries to make them work how he wants them too. Like Hawkeye killing, Blackheart jobbing to Miles. If you don't matter to him than he will ruin you.

That's BS. Plenty of writers destroy characters out of spite, or sabotage the character so they can't be used again.

This. House of M only has Wanda in the beginning and end; it's 90% Wolverine. She's a plot device.

There is almost no exploration of Wanda's psyche other than "muh babies" and "muh daddy".

He removes Chaos Magic, the most logical cause of Wanda's problems, just so he can pin the blame firmly on her.

Bendis receives a well written, thought out question, and he replies with a grade school quality answer. Seriously, he writes like he's still he's a teen.

What a fucking hack.

Who cares who Bendis hates, it doesn't change the fact that his writing is garbage these days. He can't even do Spider-Man right anymore.

Based Russos have undone his evil machinations. Praise be.

7 Years in the wilderness, Fox rights issues...yet somehow, somehow, Wanda is back.

Truly the work of Chaos Magic.

You just look at how the comics division shit the bed on Wanda, then the MCU schools them on how to do Wanda right.

Bendis nearly destroyed her...she's back, you failed, Bendis.

Bendis blocked me for asking Slott a question on twitter
he's a nutso

But why though? I just don't get the mentality of character assassination out of spite. I understand putting them on a bus so that you don't have to deal with their character, that's fair. But straight up ruining characters?

Even if you accept this argument there as being entirely in good faith, the conclusion is still that his "unique perspective" was to utterly fuck the character. Whether that's through incompetence or malice is irrelevant IMO.

This.
The fact that she went from mildly evil in AoU to a good person in CW looks like it was made to spite on him.

This is even worse then.
He unironically thinks Scarlet Witch would do what she did in his stories.

I mean, he's not wrong. God knows Remender's entire shtick is to make whichever character he's writing at the time suffering incarnate. Same with whoever's writing Spidey or DD at any given time. Or the X-Men. Or IM. Or Sniktbub.

Frankly everyone

way to dodge the question Bowel Movement Bendis.

Weren't the Maximoffs introduced because Wanda is Whedon's waifu so he pushed really hard for them?

He wanted to have both Vision and Wanda.
McFeely and Marcus are the ones who waifu her.
They said that Bucky should be punished for what he did, but they said punishing Wanda would be cruel and that she didn't do anything wrong.

I've said it before, and looks like I was proven right.
Bendis GENUINELY BELIEVES that Disassembled and House of M are good stories for Wanda Maximoff. He genuinely thinks he's doing more interesting things with the character that other writers before him.
It' just that the way he wrote her unintentionally made the character completely toxic for years. Bendis doesn't have any malice towards the characters he writes, just indifference and ignorance towards how it affects future use of the character.

Hi Bendis.

How did you take that as a defense of Bendis?
I'm still saying he wrote a terrible story and ruined the character, all I'm saying is that he doesn't see it that way.

To be fair, Marvel editorial cocked up badly by not giving her a book where she tried to redeem her fuck ups early on. House of M did work in the X-Men's favour since they managed to step up their game story wise.

this is pretty much what bendis does with any character that's not his pet. I don't think he hates Wanda. I mean say what you want about Byrne's bitter manchild rampage but at least he came to the table with an interest in the characters.

No Bendis wanted to shake things up and change the status quo which is a laughable goal in big two comics. The status quo always goes back to where it came from. So he goes in, as per usual, clumsily wrecks the house of cards and is surprised when people are actually interested in characters he left as a pile of emotional wreckage and tangled storylines.

What do you mean you cared about those characters?

What do you mean you liked the old status quo of a burgeoning mutant population turning into it's own culture?

because spite
imagine if someone like pat mills were hired to write cap or supes

Usually the character represents something they dislike.

For example, with Byrne, he just hated the idea of a human and android being happy together. It was like what you'd get if you put your average /tg/ HFY shitter on a comic about elves, or if you had a huge racist write X-Men. They'd sabotage as much as they could out of pure REEEEEEEE.

The Wanda fandom is even worse than the weird tumblr Damian one.

I'm not hearing a "no".

Why?

Because she's idolized as a waifu or feminist icon, but in either case the fan don't accept any possible flaws in a character. They praise shit writers as long as they celebrate Wanda as a perfect human being and diss good writers for any notion that the character isn't perfect, even if her mistakes help her grow. And, of course, if you don't like Wanda, you're either sexist or racist, or both.

Bendis is a hack tho.

>House of M did work in the X-Men's favour since they managed to step up their game story wise.

The fuck are you smoking? X-men went to shit for years due to M-Day and we're already back rehashing it. Couple of books that used M-Day well do not make up for the shitty direction the X-Men have been walking along for a decade now.

>X-Factor
>New X-Men
>Messiah Complex
>Supernovas
House of M got them from the funk they had been in since the 90s, which only Morrison seemed to completely avoid. Fuck, they had Uncanny and Adjectiveless written by fucking Austen at the time man

Bendis only hates the X-Men. His recent X-Men run just destroyed the franchise. It's far worse off than what fallout he caused after what he did with Wanda.

New X-Men predates House of M and it quickly turned to shit right after when Kyle and Yost turned it into a kid meat grinder.

Pre-HoM New X-Men was shit. It picked up after HoM when they scaled the team back and actually started doing shit

>Fuck, they had Uncanny and Adjectiveless written by fucking Austen at the time man

And after he left, the books started get better again. Only for HoM to fuck everything up. HoM got Cable & Deadpool cancelled. It forced a terrible editorial direction that all but basically X-Factor spent an entire year ignoring to the best of their abilities. The flagships have been almost entirely unreadable since then, at any given time you have had maybe two readable satellite books that were okay.

>Pre-HoM New X-Men was shit.
No it wasn't.
>It picked up after HoM when they scaled the team back and actually started doing shit
By "doing shit" you mean "systematically torturing and murdering all the kids" because Marvel decided it'd be fun to follow DC's lead.

Holy fuck, this delusion.

>Comic book writers never work with characters they dislike

This is blatantly bullshit.

If you're working within a larger world that you didn't yourself create then it is pretty much inevitable that you're gonna have to write about aspects of that world you don't personally like, this is especially true if you're working on a team book.

What happened to Wanda didn't feel like putting her through the ringer, it felt like character assassination. She didn't grow as a character as a result, it didn't really lead to any good stories, she was used poorly as a plot device with the subtlety of a sledgehammer and it caused such a mess it took nearly a decade, an entire mini event built around the concept of "we need to redeem Wanda" plus a several months long filler event that derailed the entire MCU to get people to not shit on her on-sight.

Bendis also doesn't know what contractions are.

Some writers aren't driven by arcs or development.

Some writers just want to watch things they don't like burn.

Didn't Bendis once say that he didn't like Jack of Hearts, and then lo and behold first thing he did when he was given the reins to Avengers was blow him up and kill Ant-Man off too while he was at it?

He hates tigra, hank pym, wasp, wonder man, she hulk, iron machine, scarlet witch, vision, Scott lang, warpath, magma, jubilee, multiple man, colossus and storm

>she hulk, iron machine
I assume you mean War Machine. Just because they're dying in Civil War II doesn't mean he hates them.
He's using Rhodey extensively in Invincible Iron Man and there's no sign of disrespect or dislike there, he's treated with as much dignity as someone like Bendis is capable of.

> he's treated with as much dignity as someone like Bendis is capable of.

None, then.

As a Wandafag I can safely say I don't care if she's portrayed as imperfect, I just want her to be usable.

The one-two punch of Avengers Disassembled and House of M made her completely unusable in the comics for years. That's the problem. A story about Wanda turning evil? Fine, at least it's a story.

But Bendis didn't write that story. The thing Wandafags don't like about Disassembled/HoM is that she is barely in the stories at all. Most issues of HoM are about Wolverine. We've never had that story from her point of view. Which is why fans of the character think of her as a plot device in those stories, because Bendis never tried to get inside her head.

Also I'm pretty sure she's not considered a feminist icon... maybe things are changing due to the MCU, but because Wanda is a Silver Age character with passive powers and little physical strength, my experience is guy superhero fans like her better than girl superhero fans. She's definitely a pre-feminist character, anyway.

While Bendis' methods of storytelling are questionable, I think he's right about fans assuming he hates the characters when he writes drama about them and comicbook fans are a bunch of babbys who misinterpret that.
He was asked the same around the time he was making Daredevil's life a living hell, but at the time he was competently writing his story, unlike Wanda's case.

That said, I think the editor (Tom Brevoort) has to be blamed more than Bendis. He's a writer, he pitches stuff that he thinks will be cool. It's the editor's job to protect the characters for the long term.

So when Bendis or someone got the idea of having Scarlet Witch wipe out all but the most popular mutants, someone should have said: "But if she does that, she can never be used again except as a villain." They could have found a way to do that ending without making it an act of malice on her part.

They didn't, because this was a period when Marvel simply wasn't thinking about the long-term implications for its characters. The following year they did Civil War, where they didn't seem to care about how unsympathetic and horrible the characters were made to act. (The big difference with the movie is that all the characters are kept within the bounds of audience sympathy, because these characters are much more valuable to the MCU than they were to the comics in 2006.)

But no, the basic idea of Wanda going mad is not out of bounds. Hell Geoff Johns was dropping some "something's wrong with Wanda" hints in his run. She, Vision, Hawkeye and other characters who had been in the book too long were probably due to be retired for a while anyway. I don't think Bendis hates her, I just don't think he cared if she was usable again.

Really, I think they should have just explained it all as being Immortus fucking with Wanda again, and using her as a tool to get rid of the mutants.
Makes more sense than the explanation Heinberg gave.

You're lucky you don visit tumblr then, she's become a feminist icon since her new solo, I think. That's her only book they'll accept too, all her other appearances have been criticized.

My experience is gay guys tend to like her (Allan Heinberg made his self-insert a gay kid who idolizes Wanda and gets to be her sort-of-son). The Scarlet Witch/Vision romance was kind of embraced as a metaphor for "unconventional" relationships, relationships where people don't know how they can have sex, etc.

There is no way on earth Bendis loses sleep at Wanda, Vision, Ant-Man being popular. He just doesn't care that much.

Wanda semi-accidentally stumbled into an important role in the MCU because Joss Whedon wanted her and they've been late in introducing other superpowered women. I imagine even if she starts to go OP in future movies the filmmakers will want to protect her more than she was protected in the comics. But that's because she was not a very important character in the comics world of 2004-5.

"The Life Force" could not possibly have been Heinberg's first choice. It's the most hilariously lame name for an all-powerful entity ever.

Rumor is that originally it was going to be the Phoenix Force.

I'm sure it's also just a coincidence how any character a different writer hooks up with Kitty Pryde has their lives/characters destroyed once Bendis starts writing them.

...

Lol, he fucking typed "quote unquote" insted of just using the fucking quotes like I just did.
That's a pro writer right there.

I would have loved to read that just for the implication that Wanda with her knowledge of magic did a better job than Jean Gray at bending it to her will.

classic benis

God, he's so shit.

>No Bendis wanted to shake things up and change the status quo
So he's an force for chaos using wanda agenst her will?

Honestly, no.
I don't believe he actively hated her, but I don't think he really wanted to write about her. I mean if he did, he kind of did a piss poor job of it.
The whole point of Disassembled seemed to be house cleaning to make room for his own hand-selected New Avengers several months later. It used a facet of the Scarlet Witch's continuity which hadn't been focused on in such a way, but it only used it to push her out of the limelight.
As for House of M, there was certainly an interesting story there, but it barely focused on Scarlet Witch. It was more about Magneto's lust for power and Quicksilver's desire for acceptance, and they both ended up using Wanda as a tool for that.
Which is kind of how Bendis used Wanda. He didn't bother to show her overcoming her problems, he just kinda used her freaking out to further the plot. I dunno, maybe he had bigger plans for her, but seeing how he handles "bigger plans" for characters, I don't relish seeing what those plans were.
I'm just glad Wanda is an MCU related character now so Bendis can't just push her out of the plot unceremoniously.

I wonder how Bendis will treat Wanda in Civil War II

Here's hoping she doesn't even show up. It's bad enough he's writing members from Ultimates and A-Force.

She'll get tired of everything, she'll think that a good way to stop a war is to get rid of both sides, start killing everyone, and it'll end with everyone teaming up to beat her.

Nope. Nope. Go to jail. Go to jail now!

Chthon would make the most sense.

So of course Marvel did'nt use him.

They both waifu her.

Whedon waifus her by showing her as a dangerous player that can solo a whole superteam, and has a bit of chaos to her, but showing her turn away from that side when faced with the world's annihilation, and is quickly forgiven and accepted by the team

The Russos and Markus and McFeely waifu her by making her a woobie good witch who dindu nuffin wrong, and was just trying to save Cap from the bomb, but everyone's mean to her :,( but having her get broken out in the end

Wanda's arc is very feminist, though.

> Girl who lacks self-belief.
> Struggles to master her powers.
> Battles against an Elder God who wants to possess her.
> Masters the most powerful magic in the universe.

At least they'll treat her well.

>if you're writing a character, you're spending a great deal of your brain power getting inside their head.
I think you might just be bad at it Bendis.

>Wanda who regreted her actions but still wanted to hurt people is less blameworthy than a guy who was literally tortured/mindcontrolled into doing all of the actual bad shit he did, who is actually described in the story as a good man by nature, and the worst thing he ever did otherwise was be a little jealous of his brother for getting the girl before quickly getting over it
I don't get it.

wait what did byrne do?

They're both interested in her trying to be a hero, and redeem herself. Bendis was interested in how curaaaazy she was.

Just look at this page. Study the level of analysis Strange gives. It comes down to "Well this isn't a surprise. That Wanda's just kooky (please ignore that she's literally possessed by an evil primordial god in one of these images). All those things that you like about her that made her your friend? Just forget all that and remember that she's loOoOooOpy!"

They don't have an instinctual need to protect Bucky's smile as much.

Is Strange forgetting the fact that VISION was the one who insisted on creating children thorugh magic instead of adopting like Wanda wanted? And that Dr Stange himself said it was OK?
Also, Wanda never had reality altering powers, Bendis made them up for this story and then had the gall to claim chaos magic didn't exist.

But that would presuppose he had something to say about her or that the endpoint of his aims were to bring her back stronger and more interesting.

Neither happened and it was solely the work of others that did anything to attempt to undo the character damage.

>had the gall to claim chaos magic didn't exist.
And they retconned that shit out of existence as quickly as they could.
Thank you based Slott.

Boom! He is a dick!
Long Live Wanda Maximoff!

>Is Strange forgetting the fact that VISION was the one who insisted on creating children thorugh magic instead of adopting like Wanda wanted?
The worst part is? No. Bendis is playing on an earlier story where Wanda's children were revealed to be pieces of demon, and Strange finds out pages before this to his dismay. They explain it as she "willed them into existence" because apparently she's just a reality manipulator? This is also where Strange said "there's no such thing as Chaos Magic" even though I'm pretty sure he's gone up against the master of chaos magic, and even mentioned it before. And then he ends up going into the spiel you see above where he criticizes Wanda for things he participated in.

Then it's settled. I decree we shall file all Bendis related Scarlet Witch writings as apocryphal and never mention them again.
Under penalty of Torture!

Seconding this motion.

It's pretty simple, Bucky did his bad things in their movie, while Wanda did her bad things in someone else's movie.

The Russos/Markus & McFeely inherited Wanda from Joss Whedon, and did surprisingly well by her, but they clearly do not care about the events of AoU. Even her powers are different and her brother is never mentioned.

John Byrne took over WEST COAST AVENGERS after Steve Englehart left, and Englehart had spent years turning Vision and Scarlet Witch into a happy domestic couple, complete with magically-conceived twin boys.

Byrne didn't like this so he did a story where Vision was disassembled and reassembled with a different personality, effectively ending the marriage, and then he revealed that the twins were pieces of the devil or something and wiped *them* from existence.

A lot of this story is recapped in the current issue of the Vision comic.

Bendis used this story as the basis for Avengers Disassembled, and it doesn't really fit with the continuity but that doesn't bother me much. Again, the problem is making the character toxic and unfixable, not making her crazy.

Poor Tigra, Wonderman, and Beast though.

Why does he need to shit on perfectly good characters so his favorites can look good? I don't even know who benefitted from any of those.

True, for all the shit we give Bendis, Byrne actively hates the Vision and wrote whole story arcs about how his humanity wasn't real and he was just a toaster.

fucking Falcon ever asking Spiderman why he's around. This piece of shit.

Which is why King turning Toaster into a term of endearment is so fucking good

Funny enough another 2/3 of West Coast Avengers!

Word.

that fucking Wonder Man story takes up two Annuals and reads like an incomplete first draft.

I'm so mad about that because the idea of Wonder Man and other classic Avengers getting mad at BendisAvengers is a great idea for a story but you can't have Bendis write it...