Billy? Maybe. Tommy? Probably not. He’s not a witch.
I don’t like this new idea about where the name Scarlet Witch came from because this was already explained. In the first issue Wanda ever appeared in. And that explanation stayed consistent for over fifty years.
The story goes like this: Wanda accidentally caused a fire. Superstitious villagers declared her a “scarlet witch” and tried to kill her. We weren’t told if that was a common phrase where she was staying or if it was something one of the villagers made up. What we do know is that she adopted it as her mutant name. You could argue that it might be a term from local folklore or something she was already referring to herself as around town, but she was never shown using it before that incident.
The easiest explanation, though, is the best one: She called herself Scarlet Witch because that’s what the people who tried to kill her called her. She took what was meant to be an insult and an accusation and turned it into a point of pride.
There are two things to keep in mind here: 1) This was one of the defining moments of her life. It makes sense that she would look to this memory for inspiration on how to move forward. 2) Magneto is exactly the kind of person who would encourage impressionable young mutants to take insults from humans and “wear it like armor and it can never be used to hurt you.” Wanda, having had her life saved by this seemingly all-powerful man, would have been likely to listen.
I don’t buy the idea that she was already calling herself Scarlet Witch and decided to tell the local superstitious pitchfork-carriers this. Why would she announce herself as a witch to strangers? That’s certainly not how it was treated in earlier issues. There were attempts to explain the scarlet in the name, either as being connected to her red clothes or to accusations of sexual impropriety (à la scarlet woman), but none of them involved Wanda coming up with the name herself. There was never any hint of that at all.
I like the idea of a female legacy like this in the abstract, but The Scarlet Witch being that kind of legacy? Not so much. It doesn’t feel like a name anyone, even anyone in a particular family, could have. It feels specific to Wanda’s situation.* It’s full of mystery and innuendo (again, scarlet woman is the obvious connection), but it also just doesn’t sound like a nice thing to call someone. Scarlet has very particular connotations and red is the color of extremes and witch… rhymes with bitch. It sounds like exactly the name a teenage girl, having been driven from her home and forced to live on the edge of society, would give herself when she’s reborn as a supervillain. It’s not just a name. It’s a challenge. It says, “I know what people say about me, and I dare them to say it to my face.”
All of that is more compelling when tied to the specific incident of her almost being murdered, instead of being a thing her mom also called herself.
I’m not sure what we gain by throwing out the original story, with all its fascinating implications, and replacing it with something else. The key to making a mythos for a long-running superhero is to build on what’s already there, not throw it all away and start anew. But in this Age of Unnecessary Retcons, that seems to be the plan with Wanda.
*Yeah, I know there was June Covington, but whatever.
Those Celestial Bodies 