Should Wanda go on trial for for her actions? Or should Doom go on trial for his actions?

[Majin_O.A.W.]

She would be found guilty and everyone knows it. Because obviously they don't want a character they're actively using to be sitting on a jail cell. So the only reason to put her on trial would be to give her more of a pass than she already has and that by itself just doesn't seem worth the effort.

Not putting her on trial is more compelling. Because it shows how the Avengers coddle and protect their own... yet Magneto went on trial; Matt Murdock was on trial; The Human Torch was on trial - but never Wanda. She decimated a people, and before that she literally destroyed the Avengers - heck in the 80s she destroyed the West Coast Avengers. Wanda is the perfect one above fault. Not giving her due process... that's the more compelling narrative that I want to see openly addressed.

YES, Wanda should stand trial. Let's put this story to bed once and for all, and have her on trial, have a writer do a balanced, even presentation (not one sided); make it complex, make it bold. She should be on trial, it's absurd she's allowed to just wander (snicker) around free and praised by Avengers, but we're supposed to believe those same Avengers think Scott or Emma or Namor are "fair game" for jail??? WTF? As for the trial results? Sometimes getting the verdict people don't want can be a powerful thing; and produce some amazing story points. I don't know which writer I'd pick; possibly Soule (his She-Hulk vs. Daredevil in court was EPIC!).

I can go along with this.

[Marvell2100]

Not putting her on trial is more compelling. Because it shows how the Avengers coddle and protect their own... yet Magneto went on trial; Matt Murdock was on trial; The Human Torch was on trial - but never Wanda. She decimated a people, and before that she literally destroyed the Avengers - heck in the 80s she destroyed the West Coast Avengers. Wanda is the perfect one above fault. Not giving her due process... that's the more compelling narrative that I want to see openly addressed.

Hank Pym went on trial.

[Marvell2100]

She would be found guilty and everyone knows it. Because obviously they don't want a character they're actively using to be sitting on a jail cell. So the only reason to put her on trial would be to give her more of a pass than she already has and that by itself just doesn't seem worth the effort.

You mean not guilty?

[ROSA13]

Harkness confronts Wanda to tell her that the reason her children have been disappearing lately is due to the simple fact that during moments of distress when Wanda isn’t thinking about the children, they cease to exist. Wanda takes the news with a lot of denial and disbelief,ups to consider their next course of action, she doesn’t take kindly to their inability to react quickly. When Janet suggests that maybe the twins weren’t kidnapped, but rather they simply disappeared like before, she slaps her down

[gurkle]

Not putting her on trial is more compelling. Because it shows how the Avengers coddle and protect their own... yet Magneto went on trial; Matt Murdock was on trial; The Human Torch was on trial - but never Wanda. She decimated a people, and before that she literally destroyed the Avengers - heck in the 80s she destroyed the West Coast Avengers. Wanda is the perfect one above fault. Not giving her due process... that's the more compelling narrative that I want to see openly addressed.

Most characters don't get due process, for reasons Reed Richards explained in the panel I posted earlier. The characters you mention are the exception to the general rule that super heroes never stand trial for the massive amounts of harm they cause, because "possession" is a get-out-of-jail-free card. (The reason everyone points to the weirdness of characters yelling at Scott Summers is precisely that it's such an unusual situation: 9 times out of 10, a hero who does something bad while possessed, Avenger or X-Man or whatever, never has to face any consequences for it.)

Besides, in Bendis's telling, the Avengers abandon one of their best friends and longtime members and give up on her as a hopeless nutcase; most of them never look for her and the only one who does, Hawkeye, just sleeps with her while she doesn't remember who she is. Billy and Simon in The Children's Crusade are the first characters to bring up the possibility that she might be innocent or at least wronged, 6+ years after Avengers Disassembled. That is - the way Bendis and the other writers characterize them - the exact opposite of coddling their own; that's the Avengers treating Wanda far worse than any X-Men have ever been treated by their own, including Scott.

Here's the thing though, and here's why I keep trying to understand the thinking of "Wanda Iz The Worst" fans: I don't hate the Avengers for the way they treated my favorite character. It's just a story by a writer, strung through some other stories by other writers. I know that because Cap would not stand up for Wanda in this story does not mean he is officially a man who does not stand up for his friends; I don't think Dr. Strange's "Wanda is crazy and has been crazy all along" speech characterizes his attitude toward her. I dislike them in the context of that story. Not in other stories where they're acting normal.

I don't get the idea that you can't separate a character from a story, and I don't understand why, if I don't hate characters for what they did to a character I like, some people are obsessed with the idea of this character being punished for stuff one writer made her do.

[Majin_O.A.W.]

Hank Pym went on trial.

Did Cap go to jail for his drug use?

[PlanetaryDevastation]

Hank Pym went on trial.

And Starfox in a storyline that might not have been a good idea.

[Ravin' Ray]

Harkness confronts Wanda to tell her that the reason her children have been disappearing lately is due to the simple fact that during moments of distress when Wanda isn’t thinking about the children, they cease to exist. Wanda takes the news with a lot of denial and disbelief,ups to consider their next course of action, she doesn’t take kindly to their inability to react quickly. When Janet suggests that maybe the twins weren’t kidnapped, but rather they simply disappeared like before, she slaps her down

While not excusing Wanda's treatment of Janet, she already had to face the rebooting of her husband's memory that effectively erased any emotions he had towards her. This doesn't absolve her completely of her actions, but it does mitigate them to some extent.

[Majin_O.A.W.]

Most characters don't get due process, for reasons Reed Richards explained in the panel I posted earlier. The characters you mention are the exception to the general rule that super heroes never stand trial for the massive amounts of harm they cause, because "possession" is a get-out-of-jail-free card. (The reason everyone points to the weirdness of characters yelling at Scott Summers is precisely that it's such an unusual situation: 9 times out of 10, a hero who does something bad while possessed, Avenger or X-Man or whatever, never has to face any consequences for it.)

Besides, in Bendis's telling, the Avengers abandon one of their best friends and longtime members and give up on her as a hopeless nutcase; most of them never look for her and the only one who does, Hawkeye, just sleeps with her while she doesn't remember who she is. Billy and Simon in The Children's Crusade are the first characters to bring up the possibility that she might be innocent or at least wronged, 6+ years after Avengers Disassembled. That is - the way Bendis and the other writers characterize them - the exact opposite of coddling their own; that's the Avengers treating Wanda far worse than any X-Men have ever been treated by their own, including Scott.

Here's the thing though, and here's why I keep trying to understand the thinking of "Wanda Iz The Worst" fans: I don't hate the Avengers for the way they treated my favorite character. It's just a story by a writer, strung through some other stories by other writers. I know that because Cap would not stand up for Wanda in this story does not mean he is officially a man who does not stand up for his friends; I don't think Dr. Strange's "Wanda is crazy and has been crazy all along" speech characterizes his attitude toward her. I dislike them in the context of that story. Not in other stories where they're acting normal.

I don't get the idea that you can't separate a character from a story, and I don't understand why, if I don't hate characters for what they did to a character I like, some people are obsessed with the idea of this character being punished for stuff one writer made her do.

The character has had a history of corruption! Prior to Bendis. Read Darker than Scarlett.... SMH stop ignoring the corruption.

[Marvell2100]

Not putting her on trial is more compelling. Because it shows how the Avengers coddle and protect their own... yet Magneto went on trial; Matt Murdock was on trial; The Human Torch was on trial - but never Wanda. She decimated a people, and before that she literally destroyed the Avengers - heck in the 80s she destroyed the West Coast Avengers. Wanda is the perfect one above fault. Not giving her due process... that's the more compelling narrative that I want to see openly addressed.

Did Cap go to jail for his drug use?

I see no mention of Cap in your original post. You just said "Avengers". If you to make this into another "Cap used drugs" thing, then you probably need to make another thread.

[gurkle]

The character has had a history of corruption! Prior to Bendis. Read Darker than Scarlett.... SMH stop ignoring the corruption.

The character was the target of a plot by Immortus to drive her insane because something something nexus being. And when she was corrupted she became a crazed anti-mutant supremacist, so how Bendis got from there to "no more mutants" is beyond me. Even if you think the character had a history of corruption, she had no history of being a self-hating mutant.

More importantly, you know who has been corrupted or driven insane or possessed? Every single super hero ever. Darker Than Scarlet is almost literally the same story that the writer/artist John Byrne had done with the Invisible Woman a few years earlier, when she was corrupted and turned into the evil Malice. Again, people who have only read Avengers Disassembled/House of M often go back and read Darker Than Scarlet to find out what "led up" to those stories, so it's more famous of a story than it used to be. But Malice came back several times while Short-Haired Darker Than Scarlet Wanda never came back again, so why exactly is this character crazier than Sue?

[ROSA13]

Wanda is NOT pleased at this…

[Marvell2100]

The character was the target of a plot by Immortus to drive her insane because something something nexus being. And when she was corrupted she became a crazed anti-mutant supremacist, so how Bendis got from there to "no more mutants" is beyond me. Even if you think the character had a history of corruption, she had no history of being a self-hating mutant.

More importantly, you know who has been corrupted or driven insane or possessed? Every single super hero ever. Darker Than Scarlet is almost literally the same story that the writer/artist John Byrne had done with the Invisible Woman a few years earlier, when she was corrupted and turned into the evil Malice. Again, people who have only read Avengers Disassembled/House of M often go back and read Darker Than Scarlet to find out what "led up" to those stories, so it's more famous of a story than it used to be. But Malice came back several times while Short-Haired Darker Than Scarlet Wanda never came back again, so why exactly is this character crazier than Sue?

Let's not forget Dark Storm, She-Hulk going berserk after Red Zone and of course, Jean Grey

[Random4]

is Doom like behind every freaking major marvel crossover event or something

[gurkle]

Rosa, most of us have read the story, but what's your point? You're not going to convince anyone who likes the character to stop liking her, and that story has not only been retconned a lot, it was retconned within the story.

That is, it starts off saying that Wanda's kids are figments of her imagination, but then reveals that they were actually pieces of Mephisto's soul, and the reason the children disappeared when she wasn't thinking about them is that her pregnancy spell went wrong. The idea that the character was so baby-crazy she imagined she had children by a robot isn't even backed up within this story, let alone anyone else's.

Not that I blame John Byrne for wanting to get rid of Wanda and Vision's kids, by the way. There was always something creepy about the two of them having children through magic, and especially Steve Englehart's insistence that this "proved" Vision was human (when in fact the reason they had to resort to magic is that he's not, at least physically, human). And super hero couples probably shouldn't have kids anyway. Unfortunately people who don't read closely - let's call them Ryan Rendis - got the impression that this was the story of a baby-crazy witch-bitch who imagined she got pregnant by a robot, when that's not what happens in the story, it's not what happens in Englehart's story, it's not what happens in any story. A lot of weird stuff can happen when people write comics based on their vague memories of other comics...