Originally Posted by
sunofdarkchild
I'm not assuming anything. You're the one making assumptions about me and everyone else who has a problem with this. I didn't bring up the other instances of forgiveness not because I assumed you were only talking about Farouk, but because they are completely irrelevant to the problems with the way it's handled with Farouk. How well or not well Tran is handled has no bearing on the fact that Rahne's point, which got Gabby killed and was the result of external mental influence, is the point that is vindicated as correct in the end. It has no bearing on the fact that a moral event horizon was passed when Farouk murdered a child. And it has no bearing on the actual confrontation being presented as being about something completely different and switching themes halfway through the fight.
Something can be seeded in one issue and paid off much later. Something can't be made the center of the conflict in the final act and then dropped entirely halfway through the final confrontation. The thing the good guys and bad guys are arguing about isn't a minor matter. In most stories that is the main theme, and here it's a throwaway detail. If it wasn't going to carry through then it shouldn't have been brought up, because the result is that the theme changes mid-battle, and the first half of the fight was devoted to something unimportant. The argument is not going to be settled later, because beating the Shadow King, the source of the argument, wins the argument by default. The Farouk who did what he did is supposed to be a different person now.
The story would be more thematically consistent if instead of going to talk to Farouk, the New Mutants went to wreck him for what he did and only started to give him a chance when the kids came to the rescue and argued on his behalf. Instead we've got a story where the kids are telling the New Mutants to do what they just did in giving Farouk another chance, within seconds of him abusing the chance they just gave him to torture them, an entirely new and unnecessary theme is thrown in for no reason and then abandoned for no reason as well, and he's so not to blame that in the end the evil spirit is purged from him by a magic sword.