Illyana Rasputina: Magik Appreciation 2020

[sunofdarkchild]

Squeee!

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[Siddhartha]

Couldn't you put the video on YouTube?

[c-lei]

Not the most self-consistent portrayal, but there were good parts too.

Really ?

[sunofdarkchild]

Boone interview from today https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-new-muta...s-a-1844806878

Her backstory is so convoluted in the comic book and there are so many layers to it that connect to other magical aspects of the Marvel universe. We really tried to use a somewhat similar backstory for her and simplify it and ground it psychologically as much as possible. This is another thing we sort of smuggled into the movie—a plot that deals with child trafficking. For Illyana, we gave her a childhood reminiscent of Stephen King’s book Lisey’s Story. This fictional realm that Illyana’s imagined and she’s so powerful, that it’s almost become this real kind of thing. Lockheed we approached in the same way because while there’s so much that I love about her dynamic with him, if I were to get into his proper backstory in the comics, then you get into space and it gets too messy.

I think we’ve honored all the characters mythologies while at the same time making sure that they felt really psychologically valid and felt very you know, it felt real and authentic in a way that it didn’t feel so much like a superhero movie.

I'm kind of disappointed in this. The right way to go about it was not to change her origin so that limbo isn't a 'real' place, but to leave much of what happened there a mystery and up to the audience's imagination. This also means that Belasco almost certainly doesn't exist and that any demons in the hypothetical Inferno movie would just be created by Illyana's mind.

[Odd Rödney]

I'm kind of disappointed in this. The right way to go about it was not to change her origin so that limbo isn't a 'real' place, but to leave much of what happened there a mystery and up to the audience's imagination. This also means that Belasco almost certainly doesn't exist and that any demons in the hypothetical Inferno movie would just be created by Illyana's mind.

I don't disagree with you but I wasn't really expecting them to get it right. This is the last Fox X-Men film so at least there's that.

[sunofdarkchild]

If anything it makes her make less sense. Where do her magic powers come from if Belasco and Limbo are not real? Has her mutant power been changed to reality warping, and that's how she makes the sword and lockheed? Are her stepping disks just and extension of that? The original Limbo origin works for a reason. It explains where all of her powers come from and what her personal conflict is. Taking that away undermines her character.

This has been one of my biggest worries about the film for a long time. One of the many problems I think Captain Marvel had as a movie is that it presented a late-2010s Carol Danvers without most of the development she's had over the decades. Viewers saw her final form and not everything she'd gone through over the years that made her interesting in the first place when she was Ms. Marvel, was attacked by Rogue, or as Binary. I've been worried that New Mutants would essentially present Illyana in her 'final form' as she is depicted in the comics currently and skip all the character development she had in the 80s and even in the first few years since her return. It looks like that is what they're doing. Illyana was never in Limbo for 7 years, so she has no problems understanding how to interact with other people like she did when she first joined the New Mutants and has no concern that she could become just like Belasco, because who's Belasco? Being a sorceress means she had to learn and grow to become as powerful as she is and have respect for her own power. Being a mutant reality warper who makes one-liners means she's a totally different character.

My hope when Boone first implied this was that the others would think she made it all up but it would later be revealed to be real. That looks a lot less likely with the latest interview.

[244]

Boone interview from today https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-new-muta...s-a-1844806878



I'm kind of disappointed in this. The right way to go about it was not to change her origin so that limbo isn't a 'real' place, but to leave much of what happened there a mystery and up to the audience's imagination. This also means that Belasco almost certainly doesn't exist and that any demons in the hypothetical Inferno movie would just be created by Illyana's mind.

I’m fine with it. At the very least, it feels self-contained: Also the fact that there are more characters too besides Magik that are worth exploring.

[Havok83]

I’m fine with it. At the very least, it feels self-contained: Also the fact that there are more characters too besides Magik that are worth exploring.

Im with you. Illyana's origins are far too complicated to get into in an ensemble film that is introducing a bunch of new characters. I think what he is doing is for the best given this particular story.

[sunofdarkchild]

We're going to have to strongly disagree. I will maintain that keeping the origin intact without delving too deeply into it was how it should have been handled, and that literally taking the 'magic' out of Magik is a terrible decision. They've made her a reality warper like Legion or Franklin Richards instead of a demon sorceress. Instead of going for 'less is more' to make room the other characters they're just changing things and creating new questions and problems and this will require more time and backstory than keeping her past in Limbo mysterious would have done. It even makes the rest of the cast even more useless. The mystery and magic are both gone and replaced by 'she's just nuts' and infinite power that just further exacerbates the 'superman is too powerful problem.' What is the point of any of the other characters when Illyana can make literal life and entire alternate dimensions with her mind? That was always going to be an issue, but now it's reached absurd proportions.

[Havok83]

We're going to have to strongly disagree. I will maintain that keeping the origin intact without delving too deeply into it was how it should have been handled, and that literally taking the 'magic' out of Magik is a terrible decision. They've made her a reality warper like Legion or Franklin Richards instead of a demon sorceress. Instead of going for 'less is more' to make room the other characters they're just changing things and creating new questions and problems and this will require more time and backstory than keeping her past in Limbo mysterious would have done. It even makes the rest of the cast even more useless The mystery and magic are both gone and replaced by infinite power that just further exacerbates the 'superman is too powerful problem.' What is the point of any of the other characters when Illyana can make literal life and entire alternate dimensions with her mind? That was always going to be an issue, but now it's reached absurd proportions.

I actually think Limbo and Illyana's origin is deserving of its own movie but if that were to happen, then she wouldnt be a part of this one. Film 1 would be to introduce the NM and Film 2 would be about Illyana and their quest to save her. Boone has an actual character arc in mind for her which was to culminate with Inferno in the 3rd film, which I think would have worked out better. I think the sorcery is something that could have come in film 2 with the demon and Limbo stuff in film 3. It would be changing things but you have to do this stuff when adapting comics to another medium.

[sunofdarkchild]

I actually think Limbo and Illyana's origin is deserving of its own movie but if that were to happen, then she wouldnt be a part of this one. Film 1 would be to introduce the NM and Film 2 would be about Illyana and their quest to save her. Boone has an actual character arc in mind for her which was to culminate with Inferno in the 3rd film, which I think would have worked out better. I think the sorcery is something that could have come in film 2 with the demon and Limbo stuff in film 3. It would be changing things but you have to do this stuff when adapting comics to another medium.

You can't introduce Limbo in movie 3 if it's already introduced in movie 1 as something completely different. You can't suddenly make her a sorceress in movie 2 if she's not a sorceress in movie 1 and has no magical training. What is she going to do? Start training in spellcraft in movie 2 even though she already has unlimited power? With who? That would again take more time than just having her be a sorceress from the start. Would they have just retconned Limbo into being real in movie 3? Then what's the point of making it just in her mind in the first place?

As I keep saying, the solution is to keep the origin as it was and show as little as possible. That's adapting to the film medium, not changing the character so that her very name no longer makes sense. There's no need for everything to be the same. For instance, there's no need for alternate timeline versions of characters like Old Storm and Cat. What's needed is that she spent her childhood in Limbo learning dark magic from Belasco and eventually escaped. The details are unnecessary. What happened during that period is extraneous information. Even Belasco's name may be more than is needed in the first movie. Play up the mystery and don't reveal any more than is absolutely necessary. That's what should have been done. What they are actually doing is more complicated, more convoluted, and will require more screentime to explain than just doing her origin right would have been. There's simplification, and then there's just butchering, and they chose the latter when it would have been easy and even simpler to do the former.

What's missing?

The soul sword is no longer the ultimate expression of her magical might created in a moment of self-realization about who she is. It's something she created with her mutant reality-warping powers because she thinks it looks cool.

Her fears about becoming the person who kidnapped and abused her and repeating what he did? Gone. She was still abused, but the character struggles which arose from it don't exist. And without that Inferno cannot work. That is why Belasco is absolutely necessary and she can't exist without him. Removing this is like removing the fact that Bruce Wayne's parents were murdered or that Kal El came from a planet that exploded. It changes the character so much that they become someone completely different.

Her status as an outsider among outsiders. So she has no social problems since she didn't spend 7 years in another dimension with barely any human company. So she's not a sorceress who scares other mutants the way they scare regular humans. She's scary, but only because she's so much more powerful than everyone else.

Everything that defines her as a character is stripped away by this change, and what's left are the superficial things like one-liners and visuals. She's more Wanda Maximoff than Illyana Rasputin at this point. A reality warping mutant with severe mental problems who could destroy the world because she's just that crazy.

I hope I'm wrong, but for that to be the case she still has to be a real sorceress trained by a dark sorcerer. This 'I can create dimensions and dragons because I'm just such a powerful mutant' thing cannot be the real explanation for her powers because if it is then she's not Magik, both in the literal sense and in the sense that she's not the same character at all.

[Havok83]

You can't introduce Limbo in movie 3 if it's already introduced in movie 1 as something completely different. You can't suddenly make her a sorceress in movie 2 if she's not a sorceress in movie 1 and has no magical training. What is she going to do? Start training in spellcraft in movie 2 even though she already has unlimited power? With who? That would again take more time than just having her be a sorceress from the start. Would they have just retconned Limbo into being real in movie 3? Then what's the point of making it just in her mind in the first place?

Yeah you can. I think you would need to be more open minded and not come into this looking at through the lens of a comic fan. Alot of the elements would have needed to be stripped down and made digestible for the general audience and I think it could have been done with what little we know of Boone's intended trajectory. We're all making wild assumptions based on quotes which we dont even have the proper context of how that plays out in the film

[sunofdarkchild]

Yeah you can. I think you would need to be more open minded and not come into this looking at through the lens of a comic fan. Alot of the elements would have needed to be stripped down and made digestible for the general audience and I think it could have been done with what little we know of Boone's intended trajectory. We're all making wild assumptions based on quotes which we dont even have the proper context of how that plays out in the film

Fine. How would you make Limbo real in a later movie when it is seen multiple times in the first movie and Illyana even fights the Demon Bear there ,while at the same time it's firmly established as something created entirely out of Illyana's mind each and every one of those times it is seen or someone travels there? Would you retcon it the way Exaclibur retconned the soul sword to not actually being created by Illyana?

This sort of retcon is what writers do when they run into a problem they didn't foresee or don't like the way something was handed before. It's what Rise of Skywalker did because they had no idea what they were doing or where to go. It's not how stories which are preplanned like this trilogy was are written.

Could they retcon her powers from being mutant in nature to being magical in nature in a later movie? That could actually work if she only teleported in movie 1, never said lines like 'so am I,' was never called Magik, and there were only vague hints that there was more to her than being more than just a mutant in movie 1. The 'so am I' line needs to be literal, or it is no longer badass but just another expression of her mental illness. Her powers being magical would either have to be a complete surprise to her or something she kept completely secret up until that point in the sequel for that sort of reveal to work. A reveal that she's magic and was right all along about that and that everyone else was wrong to doubt her on that is something that can only work if it's done in the first movie. It loses all impact if it's saved for the second movie and it just makes the other characters look bad.

The bottom line is her character still doesn't work if she's not MAGIK in this first movie.

The more I think about it the more I think it's impossible for them not to have her be a sorceress in the movie. We see her cast a spell, and in all the marketing she's called Magik. There's no way they'd make her just a mutant with all that. That still leaves the question of how she got these powers if she never was imprisoned in Limbo, which ironically is more complicated than just saying that she gained them in Limbo would be. It just shifts the problem from Limbo to earth and ends up requiring more explanation since it would require more of the nitty-gritty details than her Limbo origin would. Once Limbo is included at all I don't see the point of just having it be in Illyana's head. Even her using sorcery to create Limbo instead of her mutant power does more to shift the problem of her being too overpowered than to solve it, though at least it makes her a bit less like Dani whose power is also to make things with her mind.

My hope remains that at the very least what Boone said in these interviews is not the whole story on where her powers and Limbo come from. Because if this is all there is then they have indeed ruined her. If it does turn out to be 'what others assume about her' rather than the truth as we find out later in the movie then I take back pretty much everything.

And I have never argued that things should not be streamlined for the movie format. I have consistently agreed with that sentiment. I have also consistently stated how I think it should have been done. This in my opinion is very much not the way to do it. It strips out essential elements of the character and ends up making things more complicated and time-consuming instead of less. There was a better option that would accomplish the goal of streamlining the origin and having it take up the bare minimum of screentime much better than what they did while also staying truer to the character than what they did, and would also fit in with the film's mystery aspect much better.

[WallStreeter]

There was very obvious pedophilia in the Magik: Storm and Illyana series. When Storm enters Illyana the child’s mind, the Darkchilde says Belasco had his wicked way with her. Then he turned Cat into a literal cat that was completely submissive to him. Consider all the rape and pedophilia that happened in Hollywood it was probably way too much to put into a film. The film industry has to deal with the current political context, and with mass audiences and what their reactions would be, not aging male fans stuck on youthful memories.

It is what it is.

[sunofdarkchild]

How many times do I have to say that they should not include all or even most of her origin before people start to understand that that is what I am saying? How many times are people going to say 'they can't do X' when I've agreed and addressed that point a billion times? Where do people keep getting this idea that it either has to be 100% like the Magik mini or 0% like it and there's nothing in between?

As for the pedophilia thing, Boone says they are going with a child trafficking angle. That's as explicit as you can get when it comes to pedophilia and a million times more 'obvious' than anything in the mini.