A To Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! - W Is For Wanda, Wicked Witch of the West And Lily Weatherwax

 W is for Wanda, Wicked Witch of the West and Lily Weatherwax. Enjoy! 

This post is about the MCU Wanda, not the comics Wanda, as I have not read the comics she is in.

Wanda Maximoff, the Red Witch, is a strange character to write as a villain. She has a sad background as she and her twin brother Pietro were left orphaned during a war in the Eastern European country of Sokovia. She starts by working for villain organisation Hydra and for the evil Ultron, created by genius Tony Stark to protect the Earth, but not working quite as he intended. 

However, for some time, she is with the Avengers, the good guys. She falls in love with Vision, a sentient android whose body was created by Ultron for itself, but who ended up with the mind of Jarvis, Tony’s AI. 

She loses him during the war against Thanos, who rips the Mind Stone out of his forehead, killing him. This is when she starts to become a villain. Wanting a normal life, she re-creates him and settles in a small town called Westview. The only problem is that she takes over the entire town with her magic, turning it into a sitcom haven. As a child, she and her late brother used to love the TV sitcoms their father brought home, set in the decades starting in the 1950s. So this is the life she chooses - and forces the townsfolk to live it with her. 

She has two children, getting pregnant and giving birth in a day. The children, Billy and Tommy, shoot up soon after. 

She is forced to give up her hold on the town, after her magic duel with witch Agatha Harkness. To let the town go, she has to farewell her husband and children. In the last scene of WandaVision, we see her studying an evil book called the Darkhold.

The next time we see her is in the second Dr Strange film, Dr Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness. Steven Strange goes to her for help, assuming she is still a good guy. But, obsessed with finding her children in another universe, she is after his companion, teenager America Chavez, who has the ability to travel between universes, to kill the girl and help herself to America’s powers. 

This is a Wanda who is more powerful than Dr Strange. She arrives at the sorcerers’ settlement of Kamar-Taj, where America Chavez is being protected, and kills many of them. Her plans involve finding her children, killing her alternative version and replacing her. Oh, dear…

Then she wipes out an entire group of powerful people, the Illuminati. 

When she finds an r alternative universe with her children in it, the boys are horrified at what she is doing and run for their real mother.

It eventually occurs to her, after she has spilled a lot of blood, that this isn’t going to work. She destroys the Darkhold and disappears under a lot of rubble. This being the MCU, it’s entirely possible that she is not dead. 

While we might sympathise with her reasons, she has murdered a lot of people in her obsession.

W is also for the Wicked Witch of the West, from The Wizard Of Oz. A truly nasty character in the novel and the 1939 film, though I haven’t seen the musical Wicked! which tells it from her viewpoint. 

There are four witches in Oz. The witches of the North and South are good. The witches of the East and West are evil. Dorothy’s house falls on the Witch of the East, who has not been popular with her Munchkin subjects, so they celebrate her death.

The Witch of the West has enslaved her subjects, the Winkies. She has her Flying Monkeys attack Dorothy and her companions and enslaves Dorothy. She wants Dorothy’s magic shoes(silver in the novel, ruby in the film), but can’t get them off her feet, so she has to steal them. Dorothy, furious, splashes her with a bucket of bath water and it turns out that water dissolves her, so that’s the end of her. Nobody mourns her. 

W is also for Lily Weatherwax, the villain of Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad. She is the sister of Granny(Esmerelda) Weatherwax, one of Terry Pratchett’s beloved three witches. Esmerelda hates her sister because, when Lily became bad, she had to be the good one. When Lily takes over the town of Genua(basically the Discworld New Orleans), after killing its ruler, she decides to make it a literal fairytale town. On their way to Genua, the witches encounter some fairytale characters she has been messing with. In Genua, you can be arrested for being a cobbler who doesn’t tell stories to children or an innkeeper who isn’t fat and red faced. 

Lily has turned a frog into a prince and is planning to marry him to the girl whose father she murdered to take the throne, who has been forced to take the role of Cinderella. So the witches’ mission is to make sure Cinderella doesn’t marry the Prince…

See you tomorrow for the letter X!