As Maya Lopez abandons her life of crime in New York City and heads back to her hometown to rediscover herself in the aftermath of her father’s empire crumbling, MCU fans are anxiously waiting to see what happens for the deaf hero next. Maya’s character, also known as Echo, is an intelligent and strong-willed individual that’s kept viewers talking, ever since she made her debut in Hawkeye.
According to the brief flashbacks given in the six-episode series, Maya grew up as the only child of her father, William Lopez, and formed a tight-knit bond with him. She studied martial arts as a child, with the support of her father, and supposedly lived a life as normal as possible, for the daughter of a gangster. When William was killed, Maya took over as the leader of the Tracksuit Mafia and became the adoptive daughter of Wilson Fisk, to whom she was incredibly loyal, until discovering his involvement with the death of her father.
One of Echo’s most notable skills is that she possesses the ability to mimic the fighting style of whoever she’s in combat against, a trait that’s not talked about nearly enough in the Hawkeye show. Supposedly, she learned how to do this in her martial arts training classes as a kid. However, a lot of her backstory is still unaccounted for.
Maya's memories start with fond recollections of her time with William as a child, then quickly jump to adulthood, where she witnesses the murder of her father. It’s later shown that Fisk thinks of Maya as a daughter, because she turned to him while she was grieving. Fans are left to assume that Fisk, aka Kingpin, put Maya through rigorous training to pick up her father’s Tracksuit Mafia mantle, but there’s still a wide gap of time in her life that’s left blank. Perhaps this unknown stretch of time is where Maya connected with the Widows and learned how to mirror the fighting style of her opponents.
What’s interesting about Maya’s special skill is that she’s not the only Phase 4 character MCU fans have met with this talent. Black Widow antagonist Taskmaster also mirrors the fighting style of whoever she’s studied in combat. Additionally, when Yelena and Maya were fighting Clint Barton and Kate Bishop in Hawkeye, the archers experienced a brief miscommunication, where Clint thought he was fighting Maya on a rooftop, instead of Yelena. Clint has plenty of experience with learning how Widows fight, given his close relationship to Natahsa. The fact that he wasn’t able to distinguish between the fighting styles of Maya and Yelena implies they have an incredibly similar manner of fighting.
All of this begs the question: Does Maya also have ties to the deadly female assassins? Taking control of the Tracksuit Mafia likely required a lot more skills than she learned from her father and her martial arts classes as a child. Given her ruthless desire for revenge, Maya’s goal was to build up the Tracksuits to be even stronger than before, so that she wouldn’t have to suffer the pain of losing someone she loved ever again. It’s reasonable to assume that Fisk taught her some things to succeed as leader, but he’s turned out to be quite the low-level threat in the MCU.
For all his boasts of power and strength, Fisk was stopped single-handedly by Kate Bishop and then later shot by Maya. His presence is far 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 greatly supersede 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 tortuous training Red Room victims are forced to suffer through. As far as fans can tell from Hawkeye, Maya’s upbringing was far more traditional than anything Widows like Natasha Romanoff or Yelena Belova have had to endure.
With that being said, considering the wide gaps in Maya’s backstory and her combative similarities to Taskmaster and Yelena, there might be a possibility Maya was trained unconventionally by another Widow at some point in her life. The Hawkeye show had massive ties to the Black Widow movie, Natasha Romanoff’s story, and the Widows as a whole. Although this part of the show was tied to Clint’s journey, there’s always a chance the MCU is creating links between projects for their future projects. Marvel is also quite intentional with their cinematography, and Hawkeye viewers first met Maya bathed in a room filled with bright red light. Maybe it was simply done for aesthetic purposes, or maybe it was meant to offer a callback to the Widow’s Red Room.
Either way, the upcoming Echo series will hopefully shed some more light on Maya’s complicated past. Perhaps she was a Widow, or perhaps her skills come from another source entirely.