As Maya Lopez leaves her criminal life in New York City behind and returns to her hometown to rediscover herself in the wake of the crumbling of her father’s empire, MCU fans eagerly await what will happen to the deaf hero. Maya’s character, also known as Echo, is an intelligent and strong-willed person who has kept viewers talking ever since she made her debut in hawk eye.
According to the brief flashbacks in the six-episode series, Maya grew up as the only child of her father, William Lopez, and formed a close bond with him. She studied martial arts as a child, with the support of her father, and supposedly lived as normal a life as possible for the daughter of a mobster. When William was murdered, Maya took charge of the tracksuit mafia and became the adoptive daughter of Wilson Fisk, to whom she was incredibly loyal until she discovered he was involved in her father’s death.
One of Echo’s most notable abilities is that she has the ability to mimic the fighting style of the one she’s fighting, a trait hawkeye show. Presumably she learned this as a child during her martial arts classes. However, much of her backstory is still unknown.
Maya’s memories begin with fond memories of her time with William as a child, then quickly leap into adulthood, where she witnesses her father’s murder. It later turns out that Fisk thinks of Maya as a daughter, because she turned to him while she was grieving. Fans assume that Fisk, aka Kingpin, has given Maya rigorous training to pick up her father’s tracksuit mafia mantle, but there’s still a big time frame in her life that remains empty. Perhaps this unknown time period is where Maya made contact with the widows and learned how to mirror the fighting style of her opponents.
What’s interesting about Maya’s special ability is that she’s not the only Phase 4 character MCU fans to have encountered this talent. Black Widow antagonist Taskmaster also reflects the fighting style of the one she studied in battle. Besides, when Yelena and Maya were fighting Clint Barton and Kate Bishop… hawk eye, the archers encountered a brief miscommunication, with Clint thinking he was fighting Maya on a rooftop, instead of Yelena. Clint has a lot of experience teaching widows how to fight, given his close relationship with Natahsa. The fact that he couldn’t distinguish between Maya and Yelena’s fighting styles implies that they have an incredibly similar way of fighting.
All of this begs the question: Does Maya also have ties to the deadly female hitmen? Controlling the tracksuit mafia probably required far more skills than she had learned from her father and martial arts classes as a child. Given her relentless desire for revenge, Maya’s goal was to build the tracksuits so that they are even stronger than before, so she wouldn’t have to suffer the pain of losing someone she loved. It’s fair to assume that Fisk taught her a few things to succeed as a leader, but he proved to be a pretty low threat in the MCU.
For all his bragging rights and power, Fisk was single-handedly stopped by Kate Bishop and later shot by Maya. His presence is much less threatening in hawkeye than it ever was in Netflix’s daredevil, so it’s unlikely he could train and produce a fighter as powerful as Maya. Her talents surpass the skills of the surrounding criminals in her life.
Given the loving relationship between Maya and her father, it’s unlikely that he willingly subjected her to the painstaking training the Red Room victims must undergo. As far as fans can see hawk eye, Maya’s upbringing was much more traditional than anything widows like Natasha Romanoff or Yelena Belova had to endure.
That said, given the major gaps in Maya’s backstory and her combative similarities to Taskmaster and Yelena, there could be a possibility Maya was unconventionally trained by another widow at some point in her life. The hawkeye show had huge ties to the Black Widow film, the story of Natasha Romanoff and the widows as a whole. While this part of the show was related to Clint’s journey, there’s always a chance the MCU will make connections between projects for their future projects. Marvel is also very intentional with their cinematography, and hawkeye viewers first encountered Maya bathed in a room filled with bright red light. Maybe it was just done for aesthetic purposes, or maybe it was meant to call back the Red Room of the Widow.
Anyway, the coming Echo series will hopefully shed some more light on Maya’s complicated past. Maybe she was a widow, or maybe her skills come from another source entirely.
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