Originally Posted by
sunofdarkchild
With the Kulan Gath arc of Savage Avengers complete Illyana did indeed get the deciding blow that won the day for the good guys. Though what Kang and Conan do at the end might erase both the current and even the Claremont Kulan Gath stories from history. Not to mention the way the series handled her was odd. The zero issue being a reprint of the 80s story framed in a manner that emphasized her history with Gath made it look like she'd be very important, but she was only around for the fight with the dragon Saudurang and disappeared from the series after that. So her getting the kill shot, while making some sense thanks her teleportation power, comes somewhat out of nowhere since she'd been an after thought at most for the previous 10 issues. Plus, the fact that she wasn't even in on the plan and just thought 'everyone's making a big deal about this knife, better stab him with it' makes it not a moment that reflects or shows her character growth. Her being the one to defeat Gath in combat could have been used to show how she's grown since the 80s Gath story, but the way it was handled killed any chance of that.
On the language thing, the way Claremont handled it never made sense. Instead of downloading Russian into the heads of all the X-Men, the smarter move would have been to just download english into the child's head. That way if something happened and she got lost she'd at least be able to ask for help. Xavier did more work to achieve a less useful result. Instead of teaching an entire language to more than half a dozen people just so they could communicate with Illyana, he could have achieved the same result by just teaching one person english, Illyana, and achieved the further result of better acclimating her to life in America and better ensured her safety. That he was able to teach her english telepathically after she came back from Limbo was a plot hole even at the time, since even though Claremont hadn't decided what exactly happened to her in Limbo yet, her psyshields which Xavier couldn't breach no matter how hard he tried were established right away. When the Magik mini finally came out it specified whenever she spoke Russian and most of the time she just spoke English, so it seems Claremont changed his mind at retconned Xavier teaching her english to before Limbo, which should have been the case to begin with.
Illyana learned and became fluent in the languages required for spell-casting in Limbo. We also see in the Zell Wells run that she knows the language that's specific to the demons of Limbo. It's not much of a stretch to think that that is the language she spoke most in Limbo and the one that is most familiar to her.