Scarlet Witch

At last! Wanda Maximoff's abilities of telekinesis, energy manipulation, and neuroelectric interfacing allow her to read thoughts and give her targets waking nightmares. It's brought up in Wandavision that our girl Dubya doesn't have a codename yet. The MCU may not use supranyms in-story very often, but the characters do still have them: the general public will talk about Hulk or Iron Man (unless they're on a Netflix show, where they will bend over backwards to not call anyone or anything by name, only by tortured metaphor or euphamism), it's just the characters themselves who call each other by their normal boring names; and since they're the ones we follow, that's what we hear most often. But Wanda has always just been Wanda. Nobody named her anything, because the only thing the general public saw her do was blow up Crossbones in Civil War, so any name probably would have been negative. We've had two ML Scarlet Witches before, both with the same facial sculpt, but differing paint: one done by hand, one Photo Real. The likeness on this one is the best yet, definitely capturing the look of Elizabeth Olsen. There'd been earlier plans to give Wanda her traditional headgear tiara thing, but they never panned out - saving it for now worked out really well from a story standpoint. And saying it's part of a Sokovian fortune teller's traditional costume is more sense than the comics ever put into it. Prior to Wandavision, Ms. Maximoff (if you're nasty) just got by wearing fancy street clothes - jacket, pants, etc. Now she's finally got an actual costume, like the rest of the Avengers. Hers comprises full-arm fingerless gloves, a top that seems to turn into a dress as it passes under her little girdle thing, and dark pants with red stripes down the front of the legs. It's as complicated a design as any other MCU costume, especially the layers on the chest and the intricate collar. Her hair is blowing around her shoulders a bit, suggesting the power surging through her. Balljoints aplenty for the articulation! The hips, the chest, and even a barbell joint for the neck. Why has that so replaced the "hinged neck/balljointed head" combo that works so well? It's fine for a figure like Wanda, whose hair would render a hinge there mostly useless. She's got swivel/hinges all down the arms - shoulder, elbows, and wrists - then swivel thighs, double-hinged knees, and swivel/hinge ankles. The skirt/dress thing means her legs don't want to move backward, but how far backward can a leg move anyway? It's not a problem. The toy gets the same translucent pink energy effects as before, but she also gets alternate trans-pink hands to really up the power levels. There is at least one other accessory that would have made perfect sense to include, even if it was a minor spoiler: after all, this entire costume is a spoiler, so why not give her a copy of the Darkhold to browse through? This series' Build-A-Figure is Falcon('s wings), and Scarlet Witch gets the middle part of the left wing. As fun as Loki was, Wandavision is still the best of the Disney+ shows so far. It wasn't intended to kick off Phase 4 of the MCU, but, well, time makes fools of us all! Their design for Scarlet Witch Wanda is great, and the toy does it justice. -- 08/02/21

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