Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff)

Wanda's first moment in the MCU lasts a few seconds. In the mid-credits scene of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Baron Strucker shows off Loki's scepter at a Hydra base, and then we see the twins: Pietro darting back and forth in one cell and Wanda making blocks float in the other. Strucker calls them "the miracles."

In Avengers: Age of Ultron, the twins' story comes into focus. At ten years old, they lost their parents when a shell hit their family's building in Sokovia. A second bomb landed next to them and didn't go off. They spent two days trapped in the rubble, staring at the Stark name stamped on the casing. As adults, they volunteered for Hydra's experiments because they wanted a way to get at Tony Stark.

Early in the film, they team up with Ultron. Wanda plants fear visions in the Avengers' heads, and she's the one who unleashes the Hulk in Johannesburg. When she discovers, by reading the robot's mind, that his plan is to wipe out humanity, she and Pietro switch sides.

In the battle of Sokovia, Hawkeye convinces Wanda to really fight. Pietro dies protecting Clint and a child. Wanda feels her brother's death from a distance and, right after, rips the core out of one of Ultron's bodies with her bare hands. The film ends with her training at the new Avengers compound, alongside Vision, the android created with the Mind Stone.

In Captain America: Civil War, a mission in Lagos goes wrong. Rumlow sets off a bomb strapped to his body, Wanda tries to lift the blast away from the street, and it hits a building, killing several civilians, including volunteers from Wakanda. The incident weighs heavily in the creation of the Sokovia Accords.

After that she's practically confined to the compound, watched by Vision, with whom she already shares a romantic connection. Hawkeye comes to get her, she takes Vision down, and she joins Captain America's team at the Leipzig airport. She ends up locked in the Raft, the prison in the middle of the ocean, until Steve Rogers breaks the group out.

In Avengers: Infinity War, Wanda and Vision are hiding out in Edinburgh, in the middle of a romance, when Thanos's soldiers show up after the Mind Stone. In Wakanda, the only way out left is for Wanda to destroy the stone embedded in Vision's forehead. She does it while holding Thanos back with her other hand. It doesn't work: Thanos uses the Time Stone, undoes the destruction, rips out the stone, and Vision dies a second time in front of her. Wanda is among those who turn to dust in the snap.

In Avengers: Endgame, Wanda comes back with the other heroes for the final battle and goes straight for Thanos. She strips off his armor and nearly tears him apart, to the point that Thanos orders his own ship to bomb the battlefield, hitting his own soldiers, just to get rid of her. At the end, she's at Tony Stark's funeral.

WandaVision starts out as a black-and-white sitcom: Wanda and Vision as newlyweds in a small New Jersey town. With each episode the era changes, from '50s sitcoms to 2000s ones, and the details get stranger. Wanda gets pregnant and has twins, Billy and Tommy. On the outside, the S.W.O.R.D. agency and Monica Rambeau discover that the whole town is trapped inside an energy barrier and that the residents are acting as characters against their will.

Vision realizes something is wrong and, when he tries to leave town, starts coming apart. A "Pietro" with a different face shows up at the door. At the end of episode 7, the nosy neighbor Agnes reveals herself as Agatha Harkness, a witch who had been pulling strings nearby.

Episode 8, "Previously On", is the heart of the series. Agatha forces Wanda to relive her memories: her childhood in Sokovia watching American sitcoms with her family, the bomb, the Hydra lab, where the Mind Stone showed her the figure of a witch. Then comes the recent pain: Wanda went to S.W.O.R.D. to ask for Vision's body, saw it was being taken apart, went to a plot of land in Westview he had bought for the two of them and, in a burst of grief, created the town and a new Vision. Agatha concludes that Wanda is the Scarlet Witch, a figure of legend capable of creation magic.

In episode 9, "The Series Finale", Wanda beats Agatha using the witch's own runes and takes on the Scarlet Witch look. She understands that keeping Westview means holding hundreds of people captive, and she takes down the barrier, losing Vision and her sons. In the final scene, isolated in a cabin, she studies the Darkhold and hears the boys' voices.

In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the Darkhold has already taken hold of her. Wanda wants the power of America Chavez, a girl who jumps between universes, to reach a reality where Billy and Tommy exist. When Stephen Strange refuses to hand the girl over, she attacks Kamar-Taj, controls her counterpart from another universe from afar, and kills almost all of the Illuminati of Earth-838.

What stops her isn't a fight. It's seeing that reality's sons screaming in fear of her. Remorseful, Wanda lets America go, brings Mount Wundagore down on herself, and destroys every copy of the Darkhold. The film doesn't show a body.

Wanda debuted in 1964 in X-Men #4 as a reluctant member of the Brotherhood of Mutants, and before long she joined the Avengers along with Pietro. For decades she was presented as Magneto's daughter, a link later stories undid. She married Vision and had twins conceived through magic, and losing them leads to the House of M saga, in which she rewrites reality and, with a single sentence, wipes out the powers of almost every mutant.