David Haller: Legion Appreciation 2021

[Superboy-Prime]

LEGION


The son of Professor X! A godlike Omega Level Mutant! A man with daddy issues!

David Charles Haller is and has been many things, including an X-Man (Literally). His power is the ability to generate any power, making him potentially the most gifted mutant of all.

One of the most compelling aspects of David is his ongoing troubles with his mental health, and the superpowered struggles that come along with them.

Though he's seemingly disappeared after the establishment of Krakoa, hopefully the strongest Mutant to grace the Marvel Universe returns!

(Seriously, if they continue to ignore him after all three seasons of FX's Legion it'll be criminal.)

Recommendation:

X-Men Legacy (2012) by Simon Spurrier

[Pav]

Spurrier's Legion story is one of the best comics I've ever read. I really hope that David plays an important role in the Krakoa era eventually, especially now that Si is on Way of X.

-Pav, who missed Blindfold...

[loke13]

He'll probably just end up in a role similar to molecule man

[Zelena]

David Haller has always been a maverick. He has never wanted to be included in the cattle… which is easier when you possess powerful powers and isn’t afraid of no one.

He is also critical towards his father. If there’s someone who is able to question Krakoa, it’s him…

[Rev9]

I’ve personally always wanted to streamline Legion as powerful mutant, the idea of a schizophrenic, chaotic mutant has an appeal but to me a better story would be that he was not initially that way but became that way(with MPD) as a means to an end. I want Marvel to get its own version of Dr Manhattan and I think retelling Legion’s backstory would go a long way to make him the powerhouse he is and was meant to be.I feel I have the nuts and bolts of the idea.

We start out with Legion as a child seeming almost god incarnate because anything he thought of came to pass immediately.This observation scared Xavier because he realized this was a nuclear level mutant, and the dangers of not curbing this power early on would be catastrophic, It is not that Legion was bad but his every whim manifested in reality meaning Xavier has to find a way to delineate David’s power, otherwise he would have another Matthew Malloy scenario on his hands. He and Moira studied how the mind works and decided to train David to fracture his mental landscape from just one omnipotent personality ‘Ex Nihilo’ into four that way a multiplicity of personalities with their own identity would never act in unison and would provide some sort of check and balance. What was important was to make Legion believe he had an active imagination and once the subconscious aspects of his godlike power were given conscious identity then it would set off a chain reaction.

To simplify and streamline the multitude of personalites ,I came up with 4 each reflecting a fundamental power or function in the universe.The other hundreds of personalities if Xmen books choose to keep them are just iterations of these four personalities. I call them collectively the Qaudrinity.The first is SOURCE CODE , its domain is the domain of information exchange at micro level or will, thought, soul if you will-the anima of any sentient being,or even machine at macro level, psionics, telepathy,mind control, techopathy are his domain. The second is MATRIX it controls all form in the universe, by form I mean matter, dark matter ,anti-matter and quantum particles. He is basically the master of all forms of matter constructs and matter manipulation in all forms and states. The third is FLUX it controls all forces and energies in the universe, heat,sound,electromagnetic, gravitational, entropy itself. So any form of energy manipulation, creation or changing is its domain.The fourth and final PRIME POINT it is the personality that controls space-time dimension, all powers of temporal or spatial control are its plaything.

In my rendition once the one powerhouse split into four, all David’s thoughts first materialized in a mental landscape as new ideas or constructs but not immediately occurred in the real world, they only do so through an iteration of a persona, but that is still a delay in time and scope of the ex-Nihilo and as the quadrinity individually or in concert gave birth to more personalities those personalities though powerful were again a step down from the original. In effect what Xavier and Moira did was to make a sum smaller than the parts by setting of a cascade of mental fracturing, that cost David his sanity but saved the world.

However in life 10 as we see Legion becomes more useful in Krakoa’s plans, since he is a failsafe and redundancy for mutantdom, something Xavier and Moira keep from even Magnus and the quiet council. We know that according to House of x 5 no experimentation has been made to mix a mind of one subject with the host of another but this failsafe exists with legion as every mind of a mutant is constantly downloaded to match an approximate powerbase on legions multiple personalities so that in case of any breakdown of Krakoan machinery Legion is the living breathing Legacy that Rogue was in Age of X and using his mind all mutant identities and powers can be accessed until husks can be recreated to animate them with Legion’s powers

[Superboy-Prime]

Here's David on the Reign of X poster (To the very left)!