X-Force #16: Into the Deep

[superboyprime]

Comments

[tinygaylaura]

I love her reaction to Beast here

"Please stop acting like you for a minute and go get the members of your team who aren't awful to stop this from hurting anyone"

[donnblake]

Now I'm imagining Wolverine and Kraven circa Squirrel Girl hanging out and fighting abyssal monsters.

[tinygaylaura]

I'm still sad Kraven's monster hunting life didn't stick as his new thing. That was such a fun idea

[silverhammerman]

This is a very minor note, but I've always found it so underwhelming that Quentin Quire's powers ended up getting sort of codified into "psychic guns" for the most part. I mean, I get it, "has gun" is a lot easier to write in an action story than like, high level telepathy, but it's so deeply boring.

[shakalooloo]

He built Martha's antigrav bubble thing, so he's also a tech genius. That never comes up.

[laughing_tree]

I feel the opposite. Telepathy and telekinesis are such ubiquitous, overdone powers -- I think Jean Grey's a cast member in this exact same book? -- that I appreciate how the Green Lantern-y twist makes Quentin's more distinctive.

[silverhammerman]

I think that in the specific context of X-Force pure telepathy could feel unique, since it's not traditionally action oriented and characters like Emma Frost and Professor X aren't usually in those kinds of scenarios. Even Jean Grey tends to lean on telekinesis during action scenes, at least in my encounters with the character. I just think of something like the psychic paintings from Jupiter's Legacy that shows that there's so much more to be done with a psychic character than mind bullets OR standard telekinesis.

[bruinsfan]

One thing I *really* liked about Whedon's Astonishing X-Men run was the story in which the entire Hellfire Club that beat that team of X-Men was revealed to be Emma Frost acting under Cassandra Nova's influence and fooling everyone into thinking they were fighting multiple opponents. (Including Sebastian Shaw winning a fight with Colossus—did Peter only think he was beaten up, or did he do it to himself in the grip of Emma's mental illusions?)

[icon_uk]

We get into a weird overlap between telepathy and illusion casting, if Emma could do all that with her telepathy, why did the Hellfire Club keep Mastermind around as their resident illusionist?

And I think, to Emma, making Colossus feel the pain of his illusory injuries would be the more straightforward approach (Which again, would make her pretty unstoppable in any situation, but that's a common issue with telepaths)

[scorntx]

Thought the Emma / Jason team-up was so they had a better chance of wearing down Not-Jean's mind than they would alone?

[icon_uk]

Maybe it's changed, but from what I recall, Emma designed and built the psi-amplifier which Wyngarde used to be able to influence Not-Jean's mind.

So it was all Wyngarde's powers with a bit of a nitro-engine-boost from Emma-designed hardware, rather than her powers.

[donnblake]

Emma has had years (how many? Hard to say. But certainly *some*) of practice with her powers between the Dark Phoenix storyline, including several stints working with other telepaths, either as partners or a teacher, so it's possible she's just picked up some new techniques by the Perfection story.

[tinygaylaura]

Kind of unfortunate as well given that Morrison's initial idea for the character was basically "What would a mutant version of a school shooter be?"

[icon_uk]

It's a bit more logical than Betsy Braddock moving from "I can blast your brain out your ears from the other side of the room" to "I am going to limit my psychic attacks to people who are at a point in space six inches in front of my hands" for no apparent gain.

Agreed though, it's a somwhat tedious exercise.

[tinygaylaura]

That psychic knife is the FOCUSED TOTALITY OF ALL HER PSYCHIC POWERS

Do not question its power!

[shadowpsykie]

Betsy also has pure control over it. it does mental damage but not physical damage, unless she wants it to.

[icon_uk]

To be honest, I don't remember it ever causing physical damage, which would seem to go against the fact it was telepathic power, not telekinetic.