#all bc i said hey can we like…not whitewash a character thanks

[sevikasenby]

y’all…and the comments are terrifying.

[nexusbeingmoved]

hey, i hope it's okay to ask but i know ur super passionate about the maximoffs so !! i felt like u'd be the person ask. i'm friends w/ this guy who's argued with me that whitewashing the twins in x/mcu isn't a big deal bc he says their jewish and romani roots aren't a crucial part of their characters. obviously, this is not true so as someone who knows their characters v well, do u know any sources from canon i can refer him to? thank u so much for your portrayal of wanda btw !!

WARPED. yes of course this is okay!!! in response to your friend, i’d argue that their jewish and roma roots are The single more crucial part of their characters. i’ll start just with their origin story: wanda and pietro watched their mother get burned to death by angry rioters who literally murdered her because she was roma. her death was a hate crime. the first time wanda used her powers in canon was to defend herself from being r*ped by a White Man —- then a mob of, again, angry racist white villagers tried to burn her alive as well, just like marya. 

erik and magda are survivors of the holocaust. from a perspective of that, how could their roots NOT be crucial. holocaust survivor’s children are the best example of survival. it is, quite literally, a miracle that they were even born —– the shadow of genocide is just barely behind them. to say that it’s not crucial would be an offense to everyone who’s family survived, from the ghettos to the camps and to the healing beyond them. (i won’t get into magda being whitewashed rn since you only asked about the twins but they literally erased the fact that she survived AUSCHWITZ despite that being one of the only details about her that we even know from the comics. it is astounding lmao what the fuck can they be more transparently racist without just holding a sign that says ‘fuck all roma and jewish people’)

now just pointing the obvious nods to them being roma in the comics (i’m focusing mostly on wanda here because i’m obviously the most familiar with her appearances): basically the entirety of avengers vol. 3 was focused on wanda being unabashedly roma. i mean, her outfit was pretty trope-y and kind of a racist stereotype……………………..but, it was an attempt to make her so obviously roma that you couldn’t ignore it. it was literally a belly dancing outfit. that she fought villains in. and when she was asked about it, she said something about wanting to be more in touch with her roma identity lol i mean it was clearly written by white people and i’m Tired but still she was Not White At All.

the axis retcon took away the twin’s jewish heritage (which is unforgivable on a massive scale). BUT, even erasing erik and magda as their parents: they are still roma. the replacement was natalya maximoff as their mother, who was proudly romani. their origin at it’s core never changes. being roma is the center of her identity. 

her solo series alone cemented the fact that above all else, her connection to her people give her power. she is a PROUD roma woman. without that, she isn’t even Her. which is exactly what the m.cu did. they put her name on a character that literally shares no qualities with her apart from having ‘red powers’. to actively seek justification for that is super fucking racist. and the mcu didn’t just simply erase her jewishness: they christianized her. it was subtle but undeniable, by hanging cross iconography in her room in ca:cw, they firmly and swiftly stripped her of the last piece of her heritage. to do that to a character who, as i’ve said, is alive as a direct result of her family SURVIVING GENOCIDE, is pretty damn awful.

at the end of the day, frankly, the twins have suffered much more persecution and hatred for being romani/jewish than for being mutants.

below the cut is some examples of wanda’s ethnicity being reference from her solo. she is even speaking romanes in one.