maximoff family lineage !! did you guys know that i am severely unwell about them okay yapping alert i am going to spend literally this entire post yapping about them i already posted a very extensive and decently well-researched ramble about the geography and history of sokovia in my profile comments so yeah but i'm gonna hit the highlights on the maximoff history because uh. for this to work it has to be pretty unique !! and i think it is oleksandr dobrzynski comes from a line of jewish poles in southern poland. his parents were victimized in the holocaust, and tbh methinks that their eldest child might've died in a camp at a very young age at the tail end of the nazi regime. after the war his family rebuilt and at some point moved to hungary. iryna stashenko (ирина сташенко) was raised in a ukrainian roma family. her parents were likewise victimized by the holocaust. i'm thinking that during that time, they were deported to hungary, where they just decided to stay. obviously olek and iryna met and blah blah blah. their relationship was HOTLY controversial among their families due to their respective engaging/marrying outside their culture, and both were more or less cut off. olek likely cut off contact with his family himself after they eloped to avoid the passive-aggressive remarks and blatant discrimination against his wife. iryna, though, was hardcore cut off from her family after announcing her intents to marry a jewish man. she was rejected from the family and wholly renounced of her very identity as a romni, it was a whole thing. to leave all that behind, they moved to sokovia and decided to change their last name to something of their own choosing, one that would signify their own family that they would make. they chose maksimov (максимов), either after someone they personally met or after aleksandr maksimov, i haven't decided yet. olek was worried when the twins were born, as they would never know their grandparents or other extended family. iryna insisted that that would be fine, because "we'll love them enough for six people." i love them your honor i just personally find it really significant how their story centers around love above all else, and think about how that would really influence wanda and pietro's characters. i just really love them your honor countries of origin are significant both in terms of their background but also for names. oleksandr and wanda are polish names. pietro is actually an italian name and tbh irked me a little bit in trying to figure all THAT out, BUT the cyrillic transliteration of it as "петро" is ukrainian, as is the name iryna. in that case, the proper pronunciation of pietro isn't "pi-E-tro", but rather "PYE-tro" as the cyrillic e has the y sound attached to the front. hungary isn't very specifically relevant other than a middle ground BUT ALSO in cw vision makes wanda paprikash as comfort food which is a hungarian dish. so there's that too the symbols are the star of david for judaism and the sixteen-spoke cartwheel for romani. i tried to make their ethnoreligions/ethnicities apparent in both parents and the twins because uh we do not uphold ethnic erasure in this household, no sir!! olek looks exactly the same (or at least as exactly the same as i can draw him, bald middle aged white men are HARD, MAN) but uh clearly everyone else is different. no way i was gonna whitewash iryna, nuh-uh. i also wanted wanda and pietro to be a nice mix of it. they could be seen as white-passing when with their father, or not when with their mother. in addition to just not whitewashing and christianizing out of basic decency and respect for marginalized and victimized communities, i think it especially to important this right now with everything going on. although i've rather considerably altered the backstory, their parents' histories of being directly impacted by the jewish holocaust (shoah) and romani holocaust (porajmos) is something really significant. additionally, wanda and pietro's identities as both jewish (widely and historically persecuted) and romani (described as "the most hated subgroup in europe") is something so central to their characters and i'm still very miffed that it was taken away in the mcu. random tiny facts for no reason: pietro was born with hazel eyes. they turned gray when the experiments awoke his x gene, and then returned to hazel when he died. also when he bleaches his hair it naturally turns a silvery gray without extra steps even though bleach usually makes a yellowish tint. just weird side effects of the x gene for him specifically ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (i mean cmon dude's name is quickSILVER) pietro has one piercing in his left earlobe (inspired by his actor atj). he usually leaves it empty, but will wear a silver hoop or silver ball stud for special occasions. he might get a diamond stud later on wanda's piercings are in the same places as her mother's. also probably 20% of her jewelry collection was originally iryna's song inside, out of roo
