Illyana Rasputina: Magik Appreciation 2020

[G0RM]

*shrugs* you people can complain about it all you want, idgaf.
I don't mind too much if she sometimes has a big ass anime sword and others she doesn't, I mostly care about how it looks. And the savage avengers one is ugly as ****.

Coincidentally, I would like for Sapna to be reborn on krakoa (:

The trouble with that is that Sapna was possessed by The World Eater at the time of her death.

Attempts to resurrect Sapna might create a renewed link to World Eater Central, and HoX doesn't need yet another HellWar right now, since there are at least three already in motion, given the Kulan Gath, Mephisto, and Saturnyne situations.

[G0RM]

To all my fellow shut-ins:

The New Mutants on Ultra High Def Video Streaming Tonight!

[G0RM]

Does anyone else think Magik is throwing her games in X of Swords?

Mild Spoilers:

The spelling contest was absurd; we know she knows the difference between Hel and Hell, and would know the difference between Magic and Magik, plus navigation using scrying isn't too hard. (And yet again, we know she can enhance her strength and use stepping disks which move boulders after a fashion.)

Illyana clearly isn't taking this seriously, especially from her expressions and comedic demeanor vs 'I am Become Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds' mode were all know she can take.

Are they trying to match Magik up to the racist trouble-maker of the movie?

Plus I was thinking about the 'unbeatable' Arrako champion from before:

Could they challenge her to lose, as in "the first to lose five rounds in a row wins the game"?

If nothing else, she'd at least lose something.

[sunofdarkchild]

I think it's pretty clear she threw the first fight with Pogg since she didn't even use her armored arm, let alone her stronger form. Bascially she was not trying in protest against how stupid the contest was.

With the navigational challenge, she and Cable were going up against Isca, whose power is to never lose, so there was no way to win that one.

As for mispelling 'magic,' I'd imagine she doesn't have much reason to have to spell or write out the word normally and has just gotten used to her unique way of doing it. It's not the same as Hel and Hell which are distinctive realms with different rulers she has to keep up with as a fellow hell lord.

They have been treating her as strangely young and not too bright in the latter half of X of Swords, which is a complete departure from how she was written in the first half. In the first half she was very serious in how she trained Doug, was working on plans with Scott, and agreed to look after Cable. In the first dinner issue she was scoping out the competition with Gorgon and earned Isca's respect. But that all changed the very next issue which had her fangirling over Isca and some of the Arrako mutants saying she grew up in a nice place. Her rematch with Pogg showed off her intelligence, as does winning the puzzle contest with Gorgon, but then in Cable her reaction to Gorgon's death is the same as Cable and Doug's and she's one of the 'children' Apocalypse has to describe death to, which doesn't fit a character who has seen many people die and even killed several loved ones herself.

[WallStreeter]

Does anyone else think Magik is throwing her games in X of Swords?

Mild Spoilers:

The spelling contest was absurd; we know she knows the difference between Hel and Hell, and would know the difference between Magic and Magik, plus navigation using scrying isn't too hard. (And yet again, we know she can enhance her strength and use stepping disks which move boulders after a fashion.)

Illyana clearly isn't taking this seriously, especially from her expressions and comedic demeanor vs 'I am Become Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds' mode were all know she can take.

Are they trying to match Magik up to the racist trouble-maker of the movie?

Plus I was thinking about the 'unbeatable' Arrako champion from before:

Could they challenge her to lose, as in "the first to lose five rounds in a row wins the game"?

If nothing else, she'd at least lose something.

She winked her eye after misspelling magic. It was deliberate. As a child she read Belasco’s spell books. She’s literate.

[sunofdarkchild]

She winked her eye after misspelling magic. It was deliberate. As a child she read Belasco’s spell books. She’s literate.

That was more like a wince than a wink.

[244]

For me, continuity is the beginning and end of the art-form: Backstory

In "Understanding Comics", the thesis is that the entirety of the medium is what happens in the 'gutters', the space between panels: the readers themselves create all action, purpose, and meaning of those static images in the space between their ears, given the prompts of the sequential art.

I started writing a post a month ago about a 'paranoid' theory I had a while ago, which I now feel is too, too possible the more I think about it, but it would turn the entire X-Men line into a horror series, like how 'The Green' and 'The One Below All' have turned Immortal Hulk into a horror series.

I won't go into that yet, but this recent 'Sword of X' series leaves me doubling down on Backstory.

I have a deep belief that one of Illyana's primary tactics is to "Throw Fights" to win Empyres.

I started writing this post because I went back to my idea of Illyana swapping places with Saturnyne, given that the problem here isn't winning a swordfight, but rather that the wrong ass is sitting on the throne, but we also know that Illyana refuses to Reign in Hell.

The part of Magik 'loosing' at arm wrestling bugged me due to continuity, given that all Magik needed to do was reach back in time, grab the Crimson Gem, say 'Cyttorak', shift to her silver armor over the resulting demonForm, and attempt not to tear off the other guy's arm while winning at the resulting game of 'pogs'.

Other possibilities would be Pog turning into ashes and bonechips when they first touched hands etc.

But then I remembered again that Illyana's primary ability is to fool The One Above All about who's actually in charge of the MU.

I kind of gave up on continuity because each writer has their own take on characters and mythos.

[TheLimboBabies]

Magik seemed like someone who would say anything to push someones buttons in the new mutants movie, i don't think she hated native americans?

[lunarmagik]

Magik seemed like someone who would say anything to push someones buttons in the new mutants movie, i don't think she hated native americans?

Even if she didn't hate them, it still comes off as racist. Like if someone said to a black person "you are a n****r" even if you KNEW they didnt HATE black people it would still be a racist action. I don't think we need to defend the actions of a bad representation of Illyana
Yea, she looks kinda cool, but sadly it was a totally missed opportunity. In a movie that has so many dumb deviations, I don't think I particularly care to defend any of it.

[TheLimboBabies]

Even if she didn't hate them, it still comes off as racist. Like if someone said to a black person "you are a n****r" even if you KNEW they didnt HATE black people it would still be a racist action. I don't think we need to defend the actions of a bad representation of Illyana
Yea, she looks kinda cool, but sadly it was a totally missed opportunity. In a movie that has so many dumb deviations, I don't think I particularly care to defend any of it.

Not defending her actions. She is a bully in the movie but i don't think she is racist, just poor behaviour, which i do not condone.

[G0RM]

Even if she didn't hate them, it still comes off as racist. Like if someone said to a black person "you are a n****r" even if you KNEW they didnt HATE black people it would still be a racist action. I don't think we need to defend the actions of a bad representation of Illyana
Yea, she looks kinda cool, but sadly it was a totally missed opportunity. In a movie that has so many dumb deviations, I don't think I particularly care to defend any of it.

Having read sunofdarkchilde's rewrite (thanks, sun), I get the feeling 'illyana' just looked for buttons to push, but didn't care which buttons they were.

The fact that Dani has killed a hundred innocent people vs. Sam's bodycount of a dozen Innocents, and Bobby one innocent & Rayne one self-defense, Illyana 19 guilty is never completely covered in the movie.

Dani is the only one in denial about killing, but Bobby, Sam, and Rahne killed those they had loved (at least at one time), whereas Illyana executed pedophile human traffickers who all but those opposed to the death penalty would agree deserved to die.

Dani's guilt is not covered in the way every other character's is.

Given that 'illyana knows stuff', treating Dani as being as vile as Sabertooth isn't necessarily unforgivable, 'sticks and stones' etc, calling Dani a bad name vs Dani killing a hundred people puts it in perspective.

It might actually have been psychologically healthy for Dani to externalize her anguish at 'the crazy white supremacist', given that it was turning inward so malignantly as to lead to attempted suicide.

Racial epithets, getting Dani to fight back and throw a punch, was probably better therapy than even making out with Rahne, which might be considered 'numbing' behavior, which is why sex with councilors, AA sponsors etc is generally strongly discouraged.

I generally think of 'magic' as the technology of using extra dimensional energies, and 'magik' as long cons so subtle that less than one percent of the readers pick up on it.

Illyana appearing racist, being cruel to be kind, rather than nice and ineffective, is par for the course.

Illyana is 'hated and feared by those she protects', thus Cyclops and everyone else putting her in a bomb jacket for saving the universe at the cost of her own soul.

Peter Parker fights crime despite JJJ's "Spider-Man: Threat or Menace" campaign, Doctor Doom trained and maintained Earth's superhumanity for decades while accumulating absolute power to defend the Omniverse from an infinite number of Beyonders.

Illyana could have arguably been a 'Mathew Malloy' hiding in plain sight, with Krakoa, the Mkraan Crystal, and the Phoenix Force just stalking horses and catspaws she used to assemble the all-new, all-different team to distract everyone from realizing the Marvel Universe are puppets she, Franklin Richards, Legion, Mad Jim Jaspers, Jamie Braddock, Mojo, Odin, Galactus, and the other Hell Lords and Reality Warpers are playing with, like 'runaway tractors'.

Ask yourself: why has Xavier never realized that "Teaching Illyana English" and impenetrable "Extraordinarily Sophisticated Psionic Shields" are intrinsically mutually exclusive?

How strong a psychic does she have to be to convince Charles to believe he read her mind, despite knowing he can't read her mind, and never notice it being logically inconsistent?

The New Mutants movie might all be a long-con, a shadow game between her and Essex being played out across multiple timestreams, like HoX is.

She winked her eye after mispeling magyqk. It was deliberate. As a child she read Belasco’s spel books. She’s literate.

For a real future story to keep you up at night:

Reread Giant Sized X-Men #1

Only Thunderbird questioned Xavier how a guy in a wheelchair got out into the desert.

Ocaam's razor is that Illyana was in control of Krakoa (Limbo) much like Mathew Malloy's pocket dimension, or Bill Mumy's character in Twilight Zone's "It's a Good Life", and assembled the team by teleporting Charles back and forth across the Earth.

Thunderbird was the one to die.

(Thunderbird-Phoenix connection? Giant Sized X-Men #2 is rarely referenced, but actually the first issue with Phoenix, published before Jean officially getting the powers)

HoX & Sword of X could actually be a story, such that at the end of it, we discover the last few years of Marvel we were in Matthew Malloy's illusion, induced by an interplay of the Eye of Agamotto and interaction of Tempus & Illyana's Time Warp powers.

That's the sort of thing that gets the Living Tribunal to strip you of spacetime powers or imprison you outside of reality.

Kulan Gath eating Illyana would make for a nasty What If? ending in Illyana turning the tables and devouring Shuma Gorath.

[lunarmagik]

I mean that does sound very interesting, but I don't wanna give the director of that movie any credit, so I will just go for the simpler of the explanations.

And also, while it reads as a very cool idea, sadly, Magik hasn't really been written as too much of a big planner for a while :/
Also about her poor english skills, I could imagine that she barely pays any attention to written english and most of her knowledge in written form is about weird spells and magic stuff. Otherwise, it's just a dumb joke lmao

[sunofdarkchild]

I mean that does sound very interesting, but I don't wanna give the director of that movie any credit, so I will just go for the simpler of the explanations.

And also, while it reads as a very cool idea, sadly, Magik hasn't really been written as too much of a big planner for a while :/
Also about her poor english skills, I could imagine that she barely pays any attention to written english and most of her knowledge in written form is about weird spells and magic stuff. Otherwise, it's just a dumb joke lmao

When it comes to the movie Illyana is just a bully who learns not to be a bully towards the end because Dani is nice to her once. That's her entire story and arc. She doesn't know that Dani killed anyone and just thinks Dani is an easy target because Dani doesn't know what her powers are and so can't defend herself. The movie shows the exact moment Illyana figures out what Dani can do, so she didn't know before that. I'm not sure how my rewrite makes her some master planner who knows everything either. She knows Emma is looking to turn the mutants into weapons because she recognizes something of Belasco in how Emma talks, but she doesn't know who Emma is working for and spends the story trying and failing to get that information. She knows something's out there in the woods because she sense's its presence, but she doesn't know what it is. She doesn't know what Dani's powers are until she realizes that Lockheed's fear of losing her has been brought to life.

Depending on what you mean by 'big planner,' Illyana has been a planner during X of Swords, at least until the tournament actually started. When she wasn't training Doug she was making plans with Cyclops which will presumably come to fruition this week and she was also busy formulating plans with Gorgon about what to do with the individual Arrako opponents. That went out the window the moment the tournament turned into a farce, however. The taking down of the DOX website was also entirely her plan. If you mean some giant long-term manipulating everyone plan like Gorm like to propose, then, yeah, she hasn't done anything like that since Wells, with the closest thing being manipulating her brother to become the Juggernaut, but that was just her brother.

[G0RM]

I've been looking for online PDFs of working scripts of The New Mutants movie to do my own rewrite, and found this:

So after I made [The] Fault [in Our Stars], I ran back to Fox and said, “You’ve gotta let me develop New Mutants.” Knate and I made them a comic book, which was like a PDF where we’d gone and taken frames from all these comics we love and strung them into a vision for what the series was going to be. The characters we chose were always the characters – we had plans, obviously, to bring in new characters in the next movie – the character of Warlock was featured in all the early drafts of the script, but it was so expensive that we weren’t able to do it. Basically, cutting him out of the narrative allowed us to make the film. So our plan was always to have Warlock come back in the next one and try to tell his story then. They were all supposed to be kind of separate horror genre films: the first one’s like a rubber reality horror movie, the second one was supposed to be an alien invasion movie with Warlock, and then the third one was going to take all these elements from the X-Men crossover from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s called Inferno to be a kind of supernatural, apocalyptic horror movie. That was the plan.

[sunofdarkchild]

Illyana's 'biggest stepping disk ever' from Gugg's X-Men Gold run seems like an even bigger joke now.