Originally Posted by
Sutekh
Amara felt like she had a lot of story potential with the remains of Nova Roma, I feel, and a whole lotta nuthin' happened there.
At least some of the Nova Romans seemed to have been natives of the area who had been raised under Selene's spell ('coerced by her psychic powers' IIRC), utterly convinced that they were a splinter offshoot of Roman citizens, creating her faux Roman outpost. A bunch of folk, stripped of their language, their culture, their ties to the surrounding people, even their original skin color, to play dress-up for some batty immortal who got run out of Rome ages ago and wanted to recreate her glory days.
That's some pretty intense stuff, and Amara being one of them *could* have been amazing. Forced to embrace her mutant identity as she became aware that she's not and never was a 'Roman,' and that she literally can't go back to being whatever indigenous folk her bloodline was plucked from, since Selene didn't bother to keep track of the kidnapped native folk's tribal affiliations or cultural identities before she recast them as 'Nova Romans.' She be more 'mutant' than anything else, since everything she grew up knowing about herself would have been a lie.
The decision at her introduction to make her a blonde dressed as a native, and not a native glamered to appear as a blonde for Selene's fake Roman outpost, kind of stripped her of a potent story seed, IMO. And also made her kind of a dubious choice to go back and rejoin 'her people' in Nova Roma, since she was also suggested to be descended from Selene herself, the 'witch' that used her powers to enslave them, and not actually one of them. (Nova Roma itself was later retconned to be an actual Roman colony, and Selene to have just co-opted it, but that retcon seemed to subtract story possibilities, rather than add them, so was a strange choice, IMO.)
The waffling on her backstory, and the kind of scary nature of her powers (not a lot of non-lethal options for chucking 1300 - 2200 degree F molten rock at people...) did not do Amara any favors, combined with her kind of same-same generic blonde kid looks, on a team that already had Sam, Ilyanna and Doug in that role.