Originally Posted by
sunofdarkchild
Naze was the mystic who trained Forge to be a sorcerer. He became possessed by The Adversary and the fight between Forge and his possessed mentor was the main conflict of the Uncanny part of Fall of the Mutants, where they defeated the Adversary.
A convergence of factors led to Inferno as it was written. Firstly, Magik's story was always building towards a big battle to prevent a demon invasion of earth, though it was set up specifically to have Belasco as the villain of that story. For Madelyne the buildup really started with Fall of the Mutants. first of all because that was when Mr. Sinister as a force acting behind the scenes was introduced, and that was also when the idea that there was a mystery to Maddie which needed to be resolved was introduced with her being attacked and murdered by the Marauders, coming back to life on her own, and being shown to have a connection to the Phoenix Force. Before that there was never meant to be any mystery or overarching plot for Madelyne, and they scrambled to come up with one in response to Jean being brought back and Scott running out on Maddie to start X-Factor to both get him off the hook for doing something so horrible and to get him back together with Jean. Fall of the Mutants also started the countdown to the demon invasion by having Magik lose control of Limbo., but these things did not have to happen in the same story.
Unfortunately Simonson wrote everything but the Uncanny parts of Inferno. Because she forgot Magik's origin she thought Illyana had killed Belasco and so Magik was written as someone who had no problems with killing and an entirely new villain was created to take the place in the story that should have been Belasco. This ruined the New Mutants part of the story and ensured Magik's storyarc could not be properly concluded in Inferno and I will nalways be angry at Simonson for what she did there. It didn't help that Bob Harris was the editor by then and he just wanted to get rid of the magical parts of the X-Men universe as soon as possible and didn't care enough to correct Simonson's gigantic blunder, which is probably why the Sinister/Maddie and Magik/Limbo stories were so awkwardly combined in Inferno. To be fair to Simonson, she didn't intend for Inferno to be the true end to Magik's arc and intended for Magik to be revealed to have stayed in Limbo to bring it under control while leaving an alternate child version of herself behind on earth, so the real conclusion to her arc in the form of a final battle with Belasco could have been had, but 1. that would never happen as long as Bob Harris was at Marvel, and 2. she had already wasted that 'Magik sacrifices herself to stop a demon invasion' card on lesser villains, meaning any attempt to do it again properly with Belasco would just be retreading old ground. Her return was the story her death in Inferno should have been if Simonson had not screwed up her continuity so badly.
In addition to ruining Magik's big sendoff, Simonson was on a completely different page from Claremont when it came to Maddie, because while he had an attachment to Maddie as her creator Simonson hated Maddie. So Claremont would focus on the tragic aspects of her fall and Simonson would focus on making her as evil as possible with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, with even her sacrifice to save the world during Fall of the Mutants being ignored in favor of making her inherently a villain from the start.
If I could go back in time as an editor I'd have separated the Limbo and Sinister stories, replaced N'Astirh with Belasco so that Magik would get a proper death and not have to be brought back to fix this story's mistakes. With the Sinister story I'd not have the Goblin Queen be a thing at all and have Scott ultimately show how much he's grown and matured by choosing to go back to Maddie and his son even after learning she was a clone, much like Spider-Mans growth and maturity was shown by his choosing to remain with Mary Jane in a story where it looked like Gwen Stacey had returned in the 70s. Jean coming back to life did not have to mean that she and Scott got back together.
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