The training of the Red Room is some of the most intensive in the Marvel Universe. That intensity was showcased in a recent battle, where Black Widow proved immune to certain telepathic attacks.
Uncanny Avengers #4 by Gerry Duggan, Javier Garron, and Morry Hollowell pit the Unity Squad against the latest incarnation of the Mutant Liberation Front. Natasha Romanoff led the raid into the MLF’s hideout. She ambushed the mutant Wildside, but he was not surprised for long.
Wildside fought back with his mutant power, which forced others to hallucinate their worst experiences. Wildside’s ability seems to be telepathic in nature rather than a disruption of his target’s perceptions. In some cases, Wildside has made his target’s most intense delusions physically tangible, bringing their nightmares into reality. Unfortunately for Wildside, his power didn’t have the intended effect on Black Widow.
Black Widow is Resistant to Psychic Suffering
Rather than being paralyzed with fear or grief, Natasha laughed off Wildside’s visions of her past. She did not bother explaining how she did this. However, an examination of Black Widow’s background explains her apparent immunity to psychic manipulation.
Real-world soldiers and spies undergo special training to protect them from cracking under pressure if captured and tortured. It would make sense for Natasha to have undergone similar training. It would also follow, given the infamous brutality of the Red Room Academy, that her training would be much more intense. This would logically give Black Widow a similarly heightened resistance to trauma.
It is unclear if Natasha received special training against psychic attacks specifically. It is possible her experiences and training have merely hardened her to emotional trauma in general. In either case, Wildside’s attempts to attack her with her past proved ineffective.
Uncanny Avengers #4 is now available in comic shops everywhere.
