New Mutants - TV Tropes

• Badass Teacher: As a group, they decided to take the reins of teaching and guiding the youth of Krakoa as there hadn’t been a school since it’s inception.
• True Companions: Unlike most of the main adult X-Men roster, they notably lack their older counterpart's Dysfunction Junction in their interactions with each other and their Family of Choice relationship is considerably stronger and much more visible than most X-Teams, with them at their prickliest with each other still being relatively friendly Vitriolic Best Buds. While individually they might have strained relationships with their fellow X Men members from time to time, the New Mutants as a whole are always portrayed as being "ride or die" and a lot more relaxed with each other. The fact that they are notably a much better Morality Chain for Illyana Rasputin than both her older brother and former best friend just shows how powerful their friendship is.

Danielle "Dani" Moonstar / Mirage

Nationality: Cheyenne Native-American

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: Marvel Graphic Novel #4 (November, 1982)

• Action Girl: Due to her training at Xavier's and her time as a Valkyrie in Asgard, and her natural athleticism growing up in the Rocky Mountains, Dani is physically fit and an excellent hand-to-hand combatant. In addition, she is experienced in the use of several primitive weapons, especially the bow and arrow, spear, knife and sword, which she carried as a Valkyrie. She is a skilled equestrian and swimmer, a good marksman with a rifle, and an excellent archer.
• The Aloner: When first introduced, Dani is living alone on a mountainside with only her grandfather for human contact, thanks to her powers being out of her control.
• Ambiguously Evil: Despite being a member of the MLF the worst crime she commits is knocking out Sunspot with a psionic arrow. Outside of her reveal most scenes that feature her, have her as a background character.
• Badass Normal: Ever since she was depowered, she could still kick ass using regular hand-to-hand combatant or her marksman skills.
• Bad Powers, Good People: Her initial mutant power was to create illusions based on people's fears, but she was depicted as a hero. Later, this expanded into a wider variety of Psychic Powers included illusions based on wishes and desires as well as fears.
• Blessed with Suck: Side-effect of being a Valkyrie is she can see when people are about to die.
• Braids, Beads and Buckskins: In the early days of her appearances, she tended to wear "traditional" Native American clothing. She mostly grew out of this over time, but still wears her hair in braids quite often in modern comics.
• Brought Down to Badass: Even without her powers, she's a Badass Normal.
• Captain Ersatz: During her initial depictions she's essentially a younger, female version of Thunderbird I; both are Jerkass Native American mutants with an anti-White streak, a vengeful attitude, and an inflated sense of themselves. Unlike the doomed John Proudstar, though, she grew out of her bigger character flaws, and their different sets of powers help obscure the similarities.
• Character Development: Early depictions show her as vehemently prejudiced against white men and vengeful in general. Over time she slowly grew more mature and responsible, proving herself to be a natural leader for the team after Karma's disappearance and pointing out that they needed to learn to work as a unit rather that constantly attacking enemies one at a time.
• Cool Horse: Specifically, the winged steed of an Asgardian Valkyrie. His name is Brightwind and they bonded when she found him caught in a snare and released him. She didn't realize this also came with one or two other things as well.
• De-power: Moonstar is one of the many mutants who lost their powers at the end of House of M. These were restored after she contracted and then was cured of the transmode virus.
• Deal with the Devil: With Hela during "Utopia", granting her Valkyrie powers. Later she arrives for the final battle with her powers as a Valkyrie fully restored and she takes on Ares, defeating him after a brutal battle.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?:
  • In a straight fight, Selene would annihilate her, and she knows that as well as Selene does. Nonetheless, she managed to trigger Selene into having a panic attack that completely took her out of commission by preying on her deep-seated fear of eventually losing her ability to stave off aging and projecting an image of her as a withered old hag.
  • Shortly after becoming a Valkyrie, she drives Death away when she comes for a sort-of friend of Dani's who'd been in a car accident, but she returns shortly thereafter and tells Dani much as she might try, she can't save her friend. All Death is doing is allowing him to pass with a minimum of fuss.
• The Dreaded: To inhabitants of Asgard, who can recognize her as a Valkyrie on sight.
• Face–Heel Turn: Twice, first when she's possessed by Hela and second for much of the X-Force series Dani is a member of the MLF (averted as she was undercover for S.H.I.E.L.D.)
• Hide Your Gays: Zigzagged. Under Claremont, she and Rahne were all but outright confirmed as in love with one another, regularly referring to one another as "soul mates" and one instance of an Aborted Declaration of Love. Once Claremont was gone, Dani and Rahne's feelings for one another "magically" disappeared. But, on the other hand, even under Claremont, both girls were shown as very attracted to the opposite sex as well. Dani in particular was quite the boy-chaser, being very aggressive in flaunting herself to guys and getting offended at their lack of interest.
• The Leader: Became the leader of the team after Karma went missing. She worked to get the team to actually behave like a team and fight for a cause greater than themselves. This led to a lot of stress.
• Magical Native American: Played with. On the one hand, yes, she's a Native American who can use magic. On the other hand, it's Norse magic that comes from being stuck on Asgard and joining the Valkyries.
• Master of Illusion: By using her illusion power in conjunction with her basic telepathy, she can cast images based on someone's greatest fears or desires.
• The Mentor: During her time as a member of the Xavier Institute's faculty she mentored the New Mutants Squad, which included Elixir, Icarus, Wallflower, Surge, Wind Dancer, and Prodigy. She was also initially Wither's mentor, but their relationship quickly fell apart and he sought the guidance of Emma Frost instead.
• Morality Pet: To her ex-boyfriend, Nate Grey, who is somewhat poorly socialised, Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life, and a Reality Warper with Psychic Powers of such a magnitude that he doesn't always have much of a perspective on... reality. She grounded him. She doesn't necessarily even have to be present, as such, the memory of her is enough (further complicating matters is his history of subconsciously creating flawless independent psychic constructs). In this case, a memory of her convinced him that his central thesis regarding connections to others in Age of X-Man was flawed, that he was Not So Above It All, and persuaded him to let go.
• Odd Friendship: With Hela, the Asgardian Goddess of Death, treating each other as a Friendly Enemy who work together more often than against each other. Hela trusts Dani enough to send her soul to her for safeguarding and granted her Valkyrie powers back in exchange for a boon at a later date, which compared to most other deals she offers to mortals was both fair and without strings attached.
• Older Than They Look: In her first appearances she was drawn as a pre-teen despite being sixteen. When Bill Sienkiewicz took over her appearance was brought up to date.
• Power Incontinence: In the beginning, she had no control over her powers, which would sometimes go off on their own and show people their worst fears, sometimes showing everyone else in the vicinity as well.
• Put on a Bus: After M-Day, she was unceremoniously kicked out of the mansion by Emma Frost, who claimed it was for Dani's own good as it was too dangerous to remain without powers, but everyone knew it was because she hated Dani.
• Psychic Link: When communicating with Wolfsbane in her wolf form.
• Shipper on Deck: Tried to set Karma up with coffee shop barista Luna DePaula. While the two were friendly, Luna was much more interested in Dani while Karma was pissed that Dani thought they'd hook up simply because they're both lesbians.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Apart from (originally) manifesting people's worst fears holographically, she could communicate psychically with animals. This comes in handy being on a team with Rahne, a mutant who can shapeshift into a wolf, so when Rahne transforms, they can communicate over long distances.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: During New X-Men: Academy X, she and Emma Frost make no attempt to hide their hatred for one another.
• Terror Hero: Sometimes. This isn't necessarily her favorite tactic, but it is reasonably common and often very effective. She certainly has proven to be good enough at it to reduce Selene to a barely-composed wreck, which is definitely not a feat to be taken lightly given Selene's extreme arrogance and narcissism.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: She's the Tomboy to Rahne's and Karma's Girly Girl, being an assertive, aggressive, sexually-forward girl with traditionally "masculine" skills, such as hunting and fighting.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: In the second New Mutants Series, Dani becomes Elixir's guardian and acts maternal towards him. At the end of this series this is dropped and never mentioned again.
• Younger Than They Look: In the second New Mutants series Dani becomes a teacher and is drawn and acts like she is in her late twenties despite the book stating she is twenty-one.
• Your Heart's Desire: Rare heroic example: she could create a mental illusion of your worst fear, or your heart's desire. She could choose which one, but even she couldn't know what her victim would see until it showed up.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: The earliest days always implied this was an aspect of Dani's powers she'd just never tapped. For a while, she could conjure solid objects with her illusion powers, depending on how strongly she or her target wanted or feared said object.

Samuel "Sam" Zachary Guthrie / Cannonball

Nationality: American

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: Marvel Graphic Novel #4 (November, 1982)

• 10-Minute Retirement: During the Time Skip in Avengers, Sam gets Izzy and their child to leave Earth and takes their child to live in the Shi'ar Empire before Sunspot comes around to bring him back in the "Time Runs Out" arc.
• Ascended Fanboy: Likes science fiction, ends up living on Chandilar with his wife, a senior member of the Shi'ar Imperial Guard. Also applies to him joining The Avengers.
• Barrier Warrior: The energy Sam creates can manifest as an impenetrable and virtually indestructible "blast field." He can use this blast field to function as a personal shield for himself, extend it to encompass others, shape it around another person to imprison them, or absorb outside kinetic impact into his own energy supply and then re-channel it to increase the bludgeoning power of his blows or create explosive shock waves upon impact. Sam is also capable of generating the blast field without actually having to blast off, though it takes him extreme concentration to prevent himself from propelling into the air.
• Berserk Button: Do not EVER insult his heritage or imply he's a dumb hick. Not only is the second bit not true in the slightest, but both REALLY piss him off.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Sam is normally one of the nicest, sweetest people you could ever meet. But as Serafine of the Children of the Vault learned, pissing off someone who's nigh-invulnerable when he's blasting is a bad move.
• Big Brother Instinct: When Cypher is killed during The Fall of the Mutants, Sam blames himself as he's the oldest of the team and knew that Doug's powers were of no use in combat. He feels he should have looked out for Doug the way he used to keep an eye on his siblings back home.
• Bumbling Dad: After the Time Skip in Time Runs Out.
• Canon Discontinuity: The whole "External" thing is near-entirely in the discontinuity bin, though there has been the odd nod to it here and there, such as during Stryker's attack on the mansion during New X-Men. Sam is shot up, but it's noted he's somehow able to heal (though the concept of him being immortal is immediately dismissed).
• The Cape: He stands out as one of the sincerely nicest and most heroic members of the New Mutants.
• Character Catchphrase: "Ah'm nigh-invulnerable when ah'm blastin'", and any possible linguistic variation thereupon.
• Commuting on a Bus: Due to living with Izzy and his son Josiah on Chandilar, Sam tends to only appear in X-Men stories that involve space.
• Country Mouse: The fact that he comes from a rural background and is now living in a more urban environment is often played up.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • With Gladiator. Sam was not on the receiving end.
  • With X-Man. Unfortunately, Sam was on the receiving end.
• Dating What Daddy Hates: Played with several ways to Sunday when he began dating Lila Cheney, and was terrified about what Mama Guthrie would think of her, not just because she was a Mutant, and a punker rocker but also because she was English. Actually, Sam's mother was far more chill about the whole thing than Sam.
• Deadpan Snarker: Leaning more to the deadpan side of this Trope, having friends like Roberto and Dani have transformed him into a full-fledged snarker of epic proportions.
• Deceased Parents Are the Best: Mr. Guthrie was a coal miner who died of black lung.
• Depending on the Writer: How pronounced his accent is depends on the writer.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: He managed to beat Gladiator in a fight. Yes, that Gladiator, the Marvel equivalent of Superman. And he did it with very little effort.
• Flying Brick: He's nigh-invulnerable and can pack a serious punch, but only when flying. Which is just as well, since he steers like a brick, too. He can't hover at all and has very little control over his speed or direction.
• Funetik Aksent: Occasionally dipped into it during the Claremont days, though mercifully never too far.
• Genius Bruiser: He is far more cunning and intelligent than he looks and he is constantly using the application of momentum and physics in his powers to maximum effect. Not only that, but he is actually quite skilled at the use of both Xanatos Speed Chess and he has shown the ability to actually pinpoint The Plan of others.
• Goggles Do Nothing: He frequently wears goggles, though whether he actually keeps them over his eyes in flight varies.
• Good Ol' Boy: He comes from rural Kentucky, so he acts a lot like this.
• Having a Blast: Sam can release thermo-chemical energy from his skin. He mainly uses it for flight but can release it from any part of his body.
• Happily Married: During Jonathan Hickman's Avengers, he married fellow teammate Smasher, even having a son with her.
• Hot-Blooded: Though he mellows with age and becomes much more level-headed, in earlier issues Sam is ruled almost entirely by emotion and instinct, acting before thinking almost as often as Roberto. This led to several Nice Job Breaking It, Hero! moments, such as when he flew into a rage and attacked Illyana, thinking she had killed Amara, when she was actually freeing her from the Demon Bear's spell. This distraction allowed the Bear to regroup and nearly cost the team their lives.
  • Also, in X-Men: Disassembled, he attacks Nate Grey head on. This quickly turns out to be a very bad idea.
• I Believe I Can Fly: Among all the many, many methods through which flight is possible in the Marvel Universe, igniting chemical blasts around your lower body and propelling yourself forward with an invincible force field is still pretty unique.
• Interspecies Romance: During the time that the New Mutants were in Asgard, he fell in love with the dwarf princess Kindra after he was injured saving her and she tended to him whilst he was wounded. They were separated when the New Mutants were forced to leave Asgard as part of Loki's terms, though in What If? (Marvel Comics) vol.2 #12 an alternate universe where he stayed in Asgard depicted him wedding her, fathering at least one child, and becoming the new King of the Dwarves.
• The Lancer: Headstrong and brash compared to Dani's levelheaded and tactical Hero. After they grow up and particularly after Dani loses her powers and becomes desperate to prove herself, the dynamic is reversed.
• Large and in Charge: Downplayed. He was co-leader for a time, and emphasizing his original gawky teenager look, Sam was drawn to be considerably taller than the rest of the New Mutants, who were all quite diminutive to begin with. Used as a gag for a Team Shot photograph of the original gang that shows up several times, where Sam is so tall that the top half of his head is cropped out of the picture and "Sorry, Sam!" has been written on top of it.
• Lightning Bruiser: Can fly at astounding speeds, and his secondary powers allow him to both hit like a truck and be immensely difficult to harm.
• Likes Older Women: His first relationship was with Lila Cheney, a rock star in her 20s while he was still a teenager. Later, he develops feelings for Rogue (who originally wasn't that much older than the New Mutants, but Vague Age and all that).
• Massive Numbered Siblings: Sam has 11 siblings, all of whom are mutants. After M-Day, however, only he, Paige (Husk) and Jay (Icarus) avoid being de-powered by Wanda.
• Megaton Punch: Sometimes he’s shown to channel his blast field into his fists.
• Messianic Archetype: He was destined to lead the Mutant race by combining Magneto, Xavier and Cable's dreams into something better. It didn't take once the "External/High Lord" thing ran its course and got tired during a change in the creative team.
• Morality Chain: He's one of the few people who function as one for Cable, not that Nathan would ever admit it.
• Mr. Exposition: Early on, not a single issue can pass by without him reminding the reader that "I'm nigh-invulnerable while I'm blastin'!", either out loud or in his thought bubbles. He became infamous for it.
• Mr. Fanservice: Spent rather a lot of his downtime at the mansion not wearing a shirt, and several issues made it quite clear that Sam preferred to sleep only in his underwear. In his younger days, his tendency to leap into action without thinking led to many instances of him flying off after bad guys without stopping to get properly dressed and on one occasion he went blasting off wearing nothing but a Modesty Towel that, inevitably, blew away, to the delight of female onlookers below.
• Nice Guy: Above all things, Sam is a kind, chivalrous and warm-hearted man who just wants to do the right thing.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: When he's blasting, he's enveloped in a protective force field, which he uses for both defense and offense (hence his moniker). It's also one of the most powerful force fields seen in the entire MU; strong enough to completely No-Sell Gladiator's blows and redirect them back at him. Gladiator, whose power levels depend on his confidence level, was so thoroughly shocked that he was almost completely depowered and was subsequently beaten with virtually no effort on Sam's part. Unfortunately, this has its limits, as X-Man demonstrated with a brutal Offhand Backhand in X-Men: Disassembled.
• Old Hero, New Pals: When the team officially became X-Force, Sam was the only original New Mutant left for readers to hang onto, going off into new adventures with several new teammates like Shatterstar and Feral and being led by Cable.
• Only Sane Man: Among the X-Men as a whole he is one of the most down to earth and often the most pragmatic of the group, especially as a member of the New Mutants or X–Force.
• Progressively Prettier: During his New Mutants days, Sam was pretty lanky (and had very prominent ears, so much so Spider-Man could recognize him from them alone at a moment's glance in the middle of a pitched fight). Since then, he's filled out an awful lot, and become more ruggedly good-looking.
• Required Secondary Powers: An aversion, in one instance. He could direct the blasts out of his arms instead of his legs, but the recoil would just send him flying, unless there was someone around with super-strength to help hold him down (as U.S.Avengers reveals).
• Southern-Fried Genius: Contrary to what his background would have you think, he's very, very smart, highly intuitive, and incredibly clever and creative when it comes to using his abilities.
• Token Flyer: Sam was the only flyer on the team before Sunspot's powerset was enhanced to include flight.
• Took a Level in Dumbass: When he joined the X-Men after Age of Apocalypse he started being written as a wide-eyed rookie, and only got his brains back once he eventually rejoined X-Force. Later, his depiction in The Avengers (Jonathan Hickman) had him portrayed as essentially a frat boy, utterly at odds with his previous decades of behavior.
• Tragic Dropout: He started out a promising student who abandoned his scholastic dreams to work the coal mines after his father died of black lung in order to provide for his numerous siblings. Then a cave-in happened on his first day and his powers kicked in.
• Undying Loyalty: To Cable, whom he views as his most significant mentor during his time on the original X-Force. The two did often clash on when to use lethal force, but Sam is always ready to jump at any call for assistance that Cable puts out.
• Unskilled, but Strong: For the first few years of New Mutants, Sam struggled with controlling his power, which gave him a huge amount of speed and forward momentum but very little ability to maneuver while blasting, forcing him to fly in a straight line until he crashed into something, as landing was also difficult. Quite a lot of Claremont-written angst was wrung out of Sam's frustration with being one of the oldest on the team but also the slowest to master his power. As time went by he became much more adept and is now a highly-skilled flier.

Xuân/Xi'an/Shan Coy Manh / Karma

Nationality: Vietnamese

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: Marvel Team-Up #100 (December, 1980)

A Vietnamese refugee forced to raise her twin siblings after her parents were killed in the war. Joined Xavier's school to provide for her siblings. She's also a French-speaking Catholic. Her Mutant ability is the power to take control of other people's bodies and manipulate them at will.

• All Love Is Unrequited: According to Xuân, she had tried to speak to Kitty Pride about her feelings, but desisted when she felt that Kitty could not reciprocate her feelings.
• The Artifact: Her backstory is heavily tied into the Vietnam War, yet she still appears to be in her early 30s in stories written more than four decades later.
• Artificial Limbs: Lost most of her left leg to an attack by Cameron Hodge. Soon after, she had it replaced with a mechanical prosthetic.
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign: Xi'an isn't a real Vietnamese name and doesn't work grammatically in Vietnamese. Karma's 2023 arc in the Love Unlimited Infinity Comic states that she's actually Xuân (pronounced 'Swun'), but long ago stopped correcting people. Galura gently calls her out on this.
• The Assimilator: Only once, in her first appearance, when she had to kill her evil brother by overloading his mind and absorbing his life-force into her own. Whether she was able to do this specifically because they had the same powers or not is never explained and she never attempts to do anything like this ever again.
• Badass Bookworm: Was made the school's head librarian during the New X-Men era.
• Cain and Abel: Her evil twin brother. Later on her evil estranged sister.
• Dark and Troubled Past: She was orphaned during the Vietnam war, raped by pirates and subsequently had to bring up her little siblings by herself in a foreign country. Her siblings are later kidnapped by her criminal uncle and twin brother in an attempt to blackmail her into using her powers to help their criminal enterprise.
• Demonic Possession: She gets a nasty taste of what possession feels like when the Shadow King takes over her body and uses her to run his criminal empire for some months.
• Driven to Suicide: Seriously considered just letting herself die after spending months under the Shadow King's control.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first time she appears she uses her power to absorb her brother's body and soul and her dialogue makes it seem like she knew she was capable of doing so, she just didn't want to unless it were absolutely necessary. It's possible she could only do it because she and her brother shared the same power and she turned it back on him, but this is never confirmed and this ability is never displayed again.
• Formerly Fit: When she's possessed by the Shadow King, during the time she was initially thought dead, he engaged in his favorite physical pastime—eating—and becomes morbidly obese as a result. Xuân is not happy when she gets her body back.
• Good Is Not Soft: Xuân once used her powers to massacre an entire room full of The Right's goons.
• Grand Theft Me: Anyone Shan successfully possesses has their mind dominated by hers. Early on, Professor Xavier notes that her targets' higher brain functions completely flatline for as long as Karma has control, effectively making that person cease to exist for as long as she is in their minds.
• Hoist by Her Own Petard: Her power is to possess others, and she herself ended up possessed by the Shadow King, an older and more experienced possessor who would go on to become one of the X-Men's deadliest recurring villains.
• Keeping the Handicap: After joining Krakoa, Shan decides to undergo the Crucible in order to separate from her brother and give him a new start. This involves getting killed in ritual combat and being resurrected by the Five. Theoretically this would mean she would be revived with two legs. She however decides to keep her amputation and own and embrace her role as a member of the disabled community.
• The Leader: At the first, officially Xuân was the leader, being the oldest and most sensible of the team. So bad luck for them that she went missing a few issues in.
• Let's You and Him Fight: When she is first introduced, Shan takes over Spider-Man's body to use him to rescue her siblings. She uses him to fight the Fantastic Four when they get in the way, and Thing continues to beat him up even when she stops possessing him.
• Lipstick Lesbian: Other than a brief moment in X-Force, tends to prefer a quiet and conventionally-feminine mode of dress, before and after she came out.
• Meaningful Name: Whereas most superhero codenames are a reflection of their powers or abilities, Shan chose the name Karma - the sum of all good and bad deeds - after she absorbed her evil brother's life force, to both honour their relationship and to remind herself that all actions have consequences.
• Morality Pet: Serves as a brief one to Loki after he sent various X-Men and New Mutants to Asgard as part of his latest plan, which led to Shan losing the excess weight she'd gained while under the Shadow King's control. While Loki's defeat led to him sending the mutants back to Earth without the powers and gifts they'd gained from their time in Asgard, he explicitly stated that he wouldn't be so cruel as to force Shan to return to her previous state, and she was allowed to remain fit and healthy.
• My God, What Have I Done?: In her first appearance, Shan believes Spider-Man to be a criminal thanks to her being too recent an immigrant to question all those "Spider-Man is a Menace!" headlines. She possesses his body to rescue her siblings from capture, reasoning that there is nothing wrong with using a criminal to fight another criminal. When she realizes Spider-Man is actually a hero, she is so horrified by her actions that she breaks down in tears and delivers her Tragic Backstory to Peter and the Fantastic Four.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: As a way of skirting around Xuân's potential Story-Breaker Power as detailed below, she is occasionally depicted as having more general telepathic powers instead, though this has never been portrayed consistently.
• Only in It for the Money: Initially. Karma had been working a full-time job to support herself and her siblings, and so agrees to work as Xavier's secretary to help him run the school in return for a generous salary.
• Out-of-Character Moment: After some time spent out of regular comics, the usually-demure and conservatively-dressed Shan popped back up in X-Force at a desert rave, having dyed her hair pink, acquired some body piercings and wearing a skimpy top and pants unbuttoned so much that her thong was visible. This was also the first time she had been strongly implied to be a lesbian. The next time Shan appeared she had gone back to her normal manner of hair and dress, but her homosexuality was explicitly confirmed and has remained that way ever since.
• People Puppets: She has the ability to take possession of the minds of other people or animals. She projects a psionic energy surge that overwhelms the consciousness of another; this renders the victim unconscious while placing her own mind in command. It allows her to alter the victim's perceptions and memories, command people to fall asleep or divulge information, and operate their bodies as if they were an extension of her own.
• Poirot Speak: Claremont has her occasionally pepper her phrases with French. Curiously, never any Vietnamese.
• Promotion to Parent: She is the legal guardian of her siblings from a young age.
• Put on a Bus: She was thought dead for a long time and after returning briefly she left again to look for her siblings. Out of the whole original team, Karma had the least amount of exposure in the book, as no creative team knew how to use her.
• Rags to Riches: When first introduced she was barely scraping by enough money to support herself and her young siblings. Now she is a billionare after inheriting her half-sister's company.
• Rape as Backstory: When her refugee boat was boarded by pirates, Xuân and her mother were raped and her mother died shortly thereafter.

  Xuân: I saw my father, and all the men aboard, slain. The fate of the women was... worse than death.

• Refusal of the Call: Ultimately, Xuân just isn’t that interested in being a superhero. She openly states that she finds her power too immoral to use most of the time and she’s only convinced to join so that she can support her family. Out of any teammate to get Put on a Bus, her motives to leave generally outweigh her motives to stay.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: With her brother, Tran, who is ruthless and sadistic where Xuân is compassionate and virtuous. It's played very literally in her first appearance, where the two of them are wearing tunics each bearing one half of the yin-yang symbol, which becomes whole on Shan's tunic once she absorbs her brother's body and power. Somehow. Why two siblings who had been apart for years would be wearing matching uniforms with magically transferring symbols on them is never explained.
• Story-Breaker Power: Her potential for this often leads to her being either conveniently absent when the bad guys attack or not even trying to take them over for no stated reason, until she was eventually written out because the writers just couldn't figure out how to make proper use of her. If there's a single villain, Karma would have to fail to take them over, because that ends the plot, but it makes her useless. The only thing she can be allowed to do is take over mooks, who would then be useless in attacking their own boss, because they're mooks.
• Telepathy: Karma had also begun developing other telepathic abilities that were either latent or triggered by her possession by the Shadow King. By possessing others remotely, she can mentally "see" through their eyes. She is also able to use her power to disrupt other psi-signatures, protecting her from all manner of psychic assault.
• Twofer Token Minority: Vietnamese and a lesbian. Later becomes a Threefer as an amputee.
• Voices Are Mental: Anyone Shan possesses speaks with her voice for as long as she controls their body.
• Weight Woe: Xuân spends months having her body possessed by the Shadow King, during which time he eats so much that her body becomes morbidly obese, and she feels horrified and ashamed once she is back in control, refusing to leave the house for some time. A teleportation accident and a months-long trek across a desert cause her to lose all the excess weight, though how she got rid of all the extra skin is a mystery. At the end of this, despite the Reset Button being pushed for everyone else, Xuân gets to keep the weight loss with no strings attached.
• White Sheep: For much of her extended family, who tend towards being criminal and psychotic.

Roberto "Bobby" da Costa / Sunspot

"I'm gonna do what I do best — spend money and save the universe."

^{Click here to see his non-powered form}

Nationality: Brazilian

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: Marvel Graphic Novel #4: The New Mutants (September 1982)

Roberto "Bobby" da Costa, better known as Sunspot, is a Marvel Comics character created by Chris Claremont and Bob McLeod.

A wealthy Brazilian mutant with the power of absorbing and channeling solar energy, Bobby is notable for being a founding member of the so-called "new mutants" from Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, primed to become the next generation of X-Men for their amazing abilities.

Bobby in particular became known for his impulsive personality, often acting first and thinking later, as well as his friendly demeanor. He grew especially close with fellow teammate Cannonball during their formative years, and they've since become one of the most popular pairs in all of superhero comics, rarely seen without the other. They even joined The Avengers together!

Though most commonly associated with the X-Men, he spent much of The New '10s as an Avenger, having joined the team (with Cannonball, as mentioned above) during Jonathan Hickman's time with the franchise.

During this time, he even bought out the villainous organization A.I.M., transforming them from Advanced Idea Mechanics to the international rescue squad Avengers Idea Mechanics; later, he again rebranded them as the US government-contracted American Intelligence Mechanics. As their leader, he also dropped his original codename and adopted the moniker of Citizen V, formerly held by super-villain Baron Zemo while masquerading as a heroic figure with the Thunderbolts. After the events of Avengers: No Surrender he resigns as leader of A.I.M. and changes his moniker to Citizen X, a reflection of his return to his mutant roots.

Outside of comics, Sunspot has appeared in live-action and animation. He's most notably appeared in the X-Men Film Series twice: as a minor character in 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past, portrayed there by Adan Canto, and a co-leading role in 2020's The New Mutants, as played by Henry Zaga. He also showed up as a recurring figure in the animated X-Men: Evolution, voiced by Mike Coleman. In addition, the character Marcos Diaz ("Eclipse") on FOX's The Gifted is essentially an expy of Sunspot, specifically based on a version of him from an alternate universe.

• 10-Minute Retirement:
  • A bit of roughhousing during a football game leads to Roberto giving his friend Sam a concussion. While moping about it he discovers that Xavier expects him to become evil like his father, which causes him to freak out and leave the New Mutants before he can hurt any more of them. This leads into the Fallen Angels mini-series, and seven issues later Roberto returns to the team.
  • After the New Mutants get a new leader in Cable and Mr. da Costa dies, Bobby leaves the team. He still shows up in the rebranded X-Force, and eventually rejoins about thirteen issues into the series.
• Aborted Arc:
  • At the end of X-Force, Roberto is forced to make a deal with Selene and join with the Hellfire Club. The next time he's seen is in X-Treme X-Men, working for Xavier's Corporation with no seeming ties to the Club. Then Shaw approaches him and he rejoins the club, then with Sage's help ousts Shaw as the Lord Imperial and takes his place. This also doesn't lead anywhere besides a single altercation with some of the X-Men, as Roberto rejoins Xavier's school right afterwards.
  • At the end of Avengers: No Surrender, he renames himself "Citizen X". This doesn't really go anywhere before Rosenberg's Uncanny X-Men run drops a bridge on him.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Of the good old fashion non-fantastic racism, being a mixed race kid growing up in Brazil.
• Artistic Age: Roberto was fourteen while with the New Mutants, but you really couldn't tell from the way some artists depicted him. It gets worse in X-Force, where he's roughly 18-20 but doesn't look much different from older teammates like Siryn or Warpath.
• Ascended Extra: At the start of Avengers he's one of Those Two Guys with Sam, and has little bearing on the overall plot. During Time Runs Out he upgrades to the leader of a third faction in the civil war between the superheroes, and then gets his own team to lead in New Avengers and its Sequel Series U.S.Avengers.
• Ascended Fanboy: Like most children in the Marvel Universe, Roberto idolized the Avengers. Then he grew up and was offered a spot on the team alongside his best friend Sam.
• Badass Boast: Two in succession to the Supreme Leader of A.I.M., after the Leader mistakenly believed he could take his company back from Roberto:

  Supreme Leader: Your ego gets the best of you, mutant. Did you really think you could simply buy me out?
  Roberto: I didn't "think" anything. I did buy you out. And I'm here to let my staff know that there are going to be some changes around here. I'm also going to kick your ass.
  [...]
  Roberto: Greetings, A.I.M. employees— I know it's not the best of circumstances, but allow me to introduce myself. My name is Roberto da Costa, and I'm a dashing, super-powered billionaire, an Avenger, and your awesome new boss. This guy right here? He's trespassing on my property.
  Supreme Leader: Adorable, Mr. da Costa. I suppose you think this is some kind of threat?
  Roberto: No. That was just me talking. This is a threat: Get the hell off my property before I make you.

• Badass in a Nice Suit: Roberto's wardrobe sometimes includes a fancy suit as part of his upper-class upbringing, but in New Avengers and U.S.Avengers he's constantly decked out in a suit and tie while leading the team and manipulating the field.
• Badass in Distress:
  • At the start of X-Force he and Gideon are held as political prisoners by Black Tom. It isn't until X-Force storm the building that they can make moves to free themselves.
  • In U.S.Avengers he's hit with an energy blast that makes his powers go haywire, leaving him helpless for Hydra to capture him. Toni has to make a headband to regulate his power before either of them can escape.
• Benched Hero: In New Avengers and U.S.Avengers, due to the M-pox messing with his powers, Roberto steps back from being an active team member and instead operates as their leader back at mission control.
• Beneath the Mask: On the surface Roberto is an arrogant, self-absorbed, charming playboy - a "cocktail sipping lounge-lizard" as Maria Hill once calls him. Underneath that he's a clever businessman with a bigger heart than people give him credit for, and a truly exceptional schemer capable of running rings around the very best. And under that are some deep-seated issues relating to his dead girlfriend and father, and his worries that he can't match up to the bravado that he presents to the world.
• Benevolent Boss: Roberto is a great boss to his A.I.M. employees, paying them handsomely and remembering them all by name despite them being Faceless Goons. His acquisition of A.I.M. works in part because the employees side with him over their previous boss, who was a jerk.

  Wiccan: [after Bobby gives him and Hulking a luxury apartment and a congratulatory cake] Fly, piece of cake. Fly to Roberto da Costa's mouth and tell him "He's the best"!

• Birds of a Feather: He and Boom-Boom are attracted to each other's spontaneity and fiery personality. Funnily enough, both Boom-Boom and Bobby's next girlfriend Magma have powers relating to fire or heat like Bobby does.
• Bratty Half-Pint: Back in his New Mutant days Roberto was an impulsive jerk who'd pick fights with his teammates and openly show derision towards adults like Xavier and Magneto (sometimes for good reason, sometimes just to be contrarian).
• Broken Pedestal:
  • Roberto used to be close with his father, to the point they were practically best friends, until it was revealed that Mr. da Costa was a greedy opportunist and member of the Hellfire Club.
  • He used to be a fan of the obscure stunt group Team America, particularly of Wolf, until he met them and discovered that Wolf was a Jerkass who cared little about endangering the life of Bobby's teammate.
• Brought Down to Badass: After Secret Wars, his Mutant powers were apparently removed by exposure to the Terrigen mists. This didn't mean Roberto had lost any of his athletic skills, or his intelligence. It later turns out Roberto still has his powers, but they come with a severe drawback.
• Cast from Lifespan: As a result of exposure to terrigenesis after Secret Wars, Berto's powers still work, but using them burns up his life.
• Catch Phrase: During New Mutants, especially in the early issues, he would often invoke the 'blessed saints' or 'blessed Madonna' when surprised. In X-Force he switches to droga.
• Character Development: He's introduced in New Mutants as a hot-headed Casanova who's terrified that he might become evil like his father. Over time he mellows out and starts putting his father's fortune to good use, and by the time he gets his own Avengers team he's a chessmaster par excellence who's married to the job and having fun with people's perception of him as a supervillain.
• The Charmer: He's a smooth talker even at the precocious age of fourteen. His dance instructor at Xavier's describes him as 'nearly irresistible', and later on in life he uses his charm to help infiltrate A.I.M. and keep the Avengers together when they split into two.
• The Chessmaster:
  • In one Astonishing Tales story, Mojo kidnaps Roberto and Sam and forces them to make movies for him. Roberto manages to manipulate the terms of the contract so that he'll have full rights to the movies, and then has fun stringing Mojo along until the reveal.
  • During the Time Runs Out arc of Avengers, Captain America and Iron Man split into two groups: Steve with the Avengers, aiming to take Tony down, and Tony with the The Illuminati, who are going to desperate lengths to prevent the world's destruction. Roberto's reaction is to gather intel on both sides via people he has on the inside (Spider-Woman and Black Widow on Steve's side, Beast on Tony's), gather a group of the most powerful Avengers to deal with the world-ending threat at its source, and then create his own faction to push the warring sides back together.
  • Come New Avengers (2015), he manages to outwit both SHIELD and The Maker (an evil alternate Reed Richards who even Thanos treats with grudging respect), and does so repeatedly. Any time it seems like he's being backed against a wall, it's either part of his plan or something he manages to manipulate his way out of.
  • In X-Men Red (2022), when Abigail Brand's plans start falling apart around her and it's clear that Roberto is behind it, the dejected villain wonders if it's worth saying anything, or whether to just start playing the Mission Impossible theme.
• Chick Magnet: He's a charmer with good looks, and knows how to use them. In one issue of New Mutants he wins a Bar Brawl and gets surrounded by an entire mob of appreciative women.
  • In the 2009 series, it was subverted to hilarious effect when all the New Mutants other than him successfully hooked up with someone at a party in Madripoor, including the deeply socially awkward Nate Grey and Warlock, despite being wing-manned by Doug Ramsey (with his ability to read body language). His response to this last - who picked up someone Bobby was going for - is to fall to his knees crying out, "THE SHAME!"
• Color Motif: All of his costumes feature red and/or yellow to some degree, which not only matches with his solar power, but also his fiery personality.
• Commonality Connection:
  • With Dani Moonstar, who realizes that she and Bobby have the same difficulty with swallowing their pride and admitting when they have problems.
  • He and Caliban become friends during X-Force since both of their powers (at the time) prevented them from passing as human like their teammates.
  • He forges one with Nate Grey, despite being a bit wary about initially finding him (having seen an enraged Nate at close quarters, at the height of his powers, one can see why), as his powers had been very hard to control at first, as were Nate's - though in this case, Nate had undergone a significant depower and was having trouble focusing what remained. The trick that Bobby taught him was one he would go on using until his powers returned in full.
• Complexity Addiction: By the time of Avengers he's coming up with crazy plans for every scenario. At the end of New Avengers he buys Wiccan and Teddy an apartment and then sends them to it under the guise of it being the headquarters of rogue A.I.M. agents.

  Wiccan: He can't even say goodbye without turning it into an intricate scheme.

• Conspiracy Redemption: Attempted with the Hellfire Club, didn't go too well. His stint as their leader was short-lived before he was made to return to Xavier's school.
• *Crack!* "Oh, My Back!": Mutant superstrength is no match for the sheer mass of Volstagg the Voluminous, even with the slight boost from Asgard's sun. Not helping matters was that Roberto succeeded, and Volstagg gives him a bearhug afterward.
• Crazy-Prepared: The amount of preparation he puts into his New Avengers is ridiculous. To wit: his champagne-providing robot doubles as a miniaturized EMP that can knock out any team member, he has a giant robot stashed away with a specially-made gamma power source (which turns out to be a perfect counter for the American Kaiju they fight), he has an entire second base hidden away in case his first one is compromised, every single member of A.I.M. is trained with psychic defences he learned from Xavier, he has a triple agent delivering him information on SHIELD, and he has the New Mutant Warlock hanging around his base just in case something goes wrong. And in the Krakoa era of New Mutants, he even had an alien lawyer on his payroll before the team went to space.
• Crimefighting with Cash: Zig-zagged, since he ducks in and out of having cash to work with. His father is a multi-billionaire, but Roberto couldn't access the funds after discovering his father was evil. Then his father passed away, leaving Roberto his fortune, but other complications rose to stop him abusing it in X-Force. By the time of the Avengers he has full access of his funds, and uses them to buy out A.I.M. and re-purpose them for the Avengers needs... and then he bankrupts himself during the end of U.S.Avengers in order to give a proverbial middle finger to a bigoted senator. No worries, though, he rebuilt his fortune.
• Deadly Upgrade: The M-Pox alters his solar absorption so that it's much more powerful than before, giving him strength comparable to the Hulk, but using it at that level burns out his body and causes him to age prematurely.
• Deal with the Devil: Makes one with the sorceress Selene and the son of Mephisto; they give his dead girlfriend another chance at life, and in return he serves them as the Black Rook of the Hellfire Club.
• Depending on the Artist:
  • Sunspot is of Afro-Brazilian descent (though his mother is white, his first appearance has a fellow Brazilian bullying him due to his African heritage) but a lot of artists seem to forget this and simply make him look like the stereotypical American depiction of a "Hispanic" person. His skin tone varies wildly, as do his facial features and hair texture.
  • Whether his hair is still visible when in his Sunspot form, or whether it merges with his Kirby Dots and becomes a trail off his otherwise bald-looking head. Also in Avengers World his Sunspot form is stylized so it appears that lightning is crackling off of him.
• Didn't See That Coming: He prepared for near every eventuality as head of A.I.M.... except for the notion that someone might turn on him for ideology, not because of simple brainwashing, allowing Larry (from Stores) to get the drop on him.
• Drama Queen: He sometimes reacts to situations with more drama than is necessary. This is especially true in Fallen Angels, where he constantly bemoans his 'evil' nature at every opportunity.

  "Warlock... I do not know what good act I have performed in this wasted life of mine... to deserve as true a friend as you. If Jamie Madrox does not consider himself sullied by the company of such pariahs as we... I shall consider myself honored."

• Dumbass No More: After spending his youth as a hothead who punched first and asked questions later, Bobby wised up during a Time Skip in Avengers and emerged a chessmaster who could give the Avengers, SHIELD, and alternate Reed Richards a run for their money. This has become his predominant characterisation since, to the point where he's expected to be scheming. Despite this, in X-Men: Red, he still manages to a) figure out exactly what Abigail Brand is up to, b) track down the two surviving Night Seats of the Arakkii Great Ring, the spymasters of Arakko, and is now among their number.
• Eccentric Millionaire: Roberto loves using his extravagant wealth to have fun and shower gifts upon his friends and employees. In one side story it's revealed that he bought his own film studio and produced his own action film, just because he could.
• Energy Absorption: Primarily he absorbs solar energy from the sun, but he's also been shown to absorb related energies, like radiation or laser light.
• Every Man Has His Price:
  • In Avengers he's able to convince A.I.M. employees to work as his double agents simply by buttering them up and offering them ludicrous amounts of cash.
  • During Time Runs Out he's able to access classified information on the world's incursions by bribing the right politicians.
• Evil Doppelgänger: He has an evil version of himself in Reignfire, who was a test subject infused with Bobby's DNA to give him Bobby's appearance and powers. During X-Force Reignfire sets out to ruin Bobby's life by freezing his funds, leaving destruction in his wake, and then tries to kill his friends.
• Existential Horror: After a run-in with The Beyonder, Roberto suffers an existential crisis, questioning what's the point of becoming a hero if someone as powerful as the Beyonder can erase his efforts at a moment's notice. He gets better after he and She-Hulk rescue a civilian from an accident.
• Faking the Dead: In New Avengers Ulysses has a vision of everyone at Roberto's funeral. It's later revealed that Roberto faked his death to lure rogue A.I.M. personnel to his funeral and get them arrested.
• False Friend: Gideon served as one to Bobby, presenting himself as a Childhood Friend while in reality he murdered Bobby's father and then kidnapped Bobby to experiment on his power.
• Fanboy: Of Magnum, P.I.. In his early days he would ask himself what Thomas Magnum would do in a troublesome situation, and he still has the Magnum PI theme as his ringtone.
• Flanderization: When written by Jonathan Hickman, he tends to be a narcissistic manchild who talks endlessly about how rich he is, and little else.
• Flying Brick: He possesses the ability to fly by propelling himself through the air and generating thermal updrafts.
• Flying Firepower: Gideon enhances his solar absorption so he can use the energy for flight and energy beams. Afterwards he alternates between offering fire support from the air and getting in close with his Super-Strength.
• Forgiven, but Not Forgotten: He encounters some hostility from the rest of X-Force after he's possessed by Reignfire and nearly kills them. They're willing to let him back on the team, but take a while to trust him again.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Downplayed when Magneto noted that Roberto's jerkass tendencies made him the least popular of the New Mutants. Sam, conversely, was one of the most popular, so when Bobby hurt him by accident the others were quick to turn on him. This has mellowed out now that they've all matured and grown into True Companions.
• Friendly Scheming: To cheer up Thor, who's been closing himself off, Roberto drops a line to his enemies and lures them to his base, prompting Thor to fight them off and regain his spirit.
• Future Me Scares Me: One future showed a Roberto that had helped create a caste society where humans were persecuted. The revelation disconcerted him, especially since he already had ongoing concerns about growing up to be evil.
• The Gadfly: Called one by the Maker. He realizes and enjoys that his audaciousness rubs some people the wrong way.
• Gadget Watches: He procures one by the time of U.S.Avengers, which can be used as a phone or to call up holographic images.
• Gallows Humor: In Avengers he ribs Sam about his relationship with Smasher, but only because an intense battle is coming up and it's easier to deal with when he's joking around.
• Ghost Memory: Cable reached into Roberto's memory to seal off the Reignfire personality, but in doing so he left some of his own memories behind. Most notably this taught Roberto how to speak Askani and with the associated psychic defences - which Nate Grey, Cable's half-brother/alternate counterpart, later copied from him.
• Glass Cannon: Early on he was super-strong but did not have a comparable level of invulnerability the way other heavyweights do. Eventually he gained that power.^note 
• Good Is Not Soft: Part of the reason everyone was so concerned about Berto potentially turning evil starts very early on in the New Mutant days when, during the gang's first run-in with Selene, Berto kicks her into a lava pit. Everyone else is horrified, but he simply points out A: she really deserved it, and B: she'll likely be back anyway. And he was right on the bean.
• Good Running Evil: He buys out A.I.M., weeds out all the villains, and re-purposes the remainder into the Avengers science division. Though this does result in multiple characters questioning whether he is good.
• Gratuitous Spanish: His speech is often peppered with random Spanish exclamations, especially in the early days. What makes it especially gratuitous is that he's from Brazil, and should be speaking Portuguese instead.
• Guilty Pleasures: Amara reveals to the other New Mutants that Roberto likes listening to Rihanna and Shakira, much to his embarrassment.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: While in charge of A.I.M.. Running a former terrorist organization does not do much wonders for your reputation, and both the U.S. military and SHIELD wait for him to do something so they can arrest him.

  Dum Dum Dugan: Kid— you're supreme leader of a secret cult of science crazies. You live on an artificial island in international waters with a private army and a fleet of super-weapons. You're damned right we're keepin' an eye on you.

• Heroic Build: Justified in that he was a star athlete before he discovered his mutant powers, so Roberto has good reason for his musculature beyond being a superhero.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In Avengers: No Surrender he uses his Cast from Lifespan power to help keep the Earth in place, which shaves years off his life and leaves him unsure how long he has left to live.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: With Sam Guthrie/Cannonball, his fellow New Mutant. The two grew close as the only guys on the original New Mutants team, and they've stuck together more than any of the other members. In the transition between New Mutants and Avengers, Roberto breaks up with his girlfriend off-screen and instead takes Sam on a Hawaiian vacation with him.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Calls out the Supreme Leader of A.I.M. for giving Roberto the energy he needs to win the battle.

  Roberto: You're really gonna try and kill the guy who can turn light energy into power with a laser?

• Honor Before Reason: At the end of U.S.Avengers he gives up his job and all of his fortune in order to spite a bigoted politician who was trying to take control of it all. It's not the smartest move, but it does make him feel good.
• Hot-Blooded: At first. By his Avengers days, he's mellowed out considerably.
• Hulking Out: Mildly. Early design notes for Roberto note he gains a few inches whenever he powers up. Not so much now he's not a teenager, and has therefore done all the filling out he's going to do.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: At the climax of New Avengers he finds himself alone with the Maker, with none of his super-powered teammates on hand. He reveals to the Maker that he has a particular secret he kept close to his chest up until that point: the M-Pox didn't take away his mutant powers. Cue him stomping the Maker into the ground.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Selene gets him to join the Hellfire Club by giving him the one thing he can't refuse: a chance for his girlfriend Juliana to be reincarnated as a new person. He meets with her once, and then decides it's better if he doesn't get involved with her new life.
• The Illegal: Roberto being part of the outlaw X-Force team comes back to bite him in his ass when I.N.S forcefully deports him from the country, as he no longer has the student visa that allowed him to stay at Xavier's school.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: When Wolverine calls Bobby and Sam while they're on vacation, Bobby vehemently orders Sam to turn down his offer... until Sam specifies that they're being offered a place on the Avengers, not the X-Men, and then Bobby instantly agrees to join.
• Immune to Mind Control: Xavier taught him some techniques to resist a psychic takeover. When Secret Empire kicked off he was able to resist the effects of Dr. Faustus' hypnotism and get a warning out to his team so they could do the same.
• In-Series Nickname: Most often called 'Bobby' or 'Berto' by friends.
• Incurable Cough of Death: Develops one during Ewing's New Avengers, thanks to Terrigenesis exposure. It's not ultimately fatal, but it doesn't help at all.
• Interclass Friendship: With all of the New Mutants, but it's especially notable with his best friend Cannonball. Sam is a modest Kentucky farmboy while Roberto is a multi-billionaire in charge of multiple companies, but the two of them are thick as thieves.
• Irony: Many characters speculated that Roberto was the New Mutant most likely to turn evil (though his stint with the Hellfire Club did not help in that regard). Despite this, he's proven to have an undying loyalty to Xavier's cause.
• I Should Have Been Better: Roberto blames himself for the disaster of the 2023 Hellfire Gala, figuring he should have been able to foresee it coming.
• It's All About Me: He can be egotistical at times. And not always in a way that he enjoys, as he blames himself for situations that he couldn't have had any influence on.

  Roberto: I'm totally self-absorbed. Honestly, I'm not even listening when most people are talking.
  Sam: Even me?
  Roberto: What?
  Sam: Really?

• Jerkass Ball: Early on, Kitty responded to being unceremoniously bumped down to the New Mutants by calling them "X-Babies" and spending several days ranting about it. Roberto was openly hostile toward her for a while after that.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: When he was younger Roberto could be temperamental and pig-headed towards his teammates. He steadily grew out of it and nowadays is much more amicable.
• Kirby Dots: When in his powered-up form, he appears as a flat black silhouette with motes of blackness drifting from his skin.
• The Lancer: When Sam and Dani were co-running the New Mutants, Roberto served as the headstrong, rash foil to their more collected leadership.
• Latin Lover: He's a Latino man and depicted as quite the handsome flirt.
• Latino Is Brown: Probably one of the most notable and contentious examples of this trope in comics, as discussed here. He's the child of an Afro-Brazilian father and a white Brazilian mother, and his very first appearance showed him facing racism from other children because of his black skin. Over time, however, his African facial features and curly hair were phased out, and his skin was often lightened as well, seemingly because the artists and colorists had a more stereotypical idea of what a Latino character looked like in their minds. This even carried over to his live-action portrayals, as neither X-Men: Days of Future Past nor The New Mutants cast an Afro-Latino actor to play him.
• The Leader: Of the New Avengers and U.S.Avengers. With his new leadership role came a more collected, tactical Roberto, who relied on his smarts and money instead of his strength.
• Leeroy Jenkins: One of his major flaws during his time with New Mutants and X-Force was his tendency to leap into situations instead of sticking with the plan, or giving his teammates time to make a plan. Cable eventually calls him out on it, and he strives to do better.
• Likes Older Women: During his time with the Avengers he goes through a phase of being attracted to older women, including Maria Hill and a future version of Jocasta.
• Lonely Rich Kid: Roberto's father goes down a dark path and consorts with villains, and his mother is never in the house due to her archaeological work, leaving Bobby disconnected with his family. It's also implied that he didn't have much friends before the New Mutants- besides his girlfriend, who died after he discovered his mutant power.
• Loophole Abuse: How he manages to 'beat' Isca the Unbeaten and see to it that Magneto wins a seat on Arakko's ruling council. Isca's power means that she always wins, so Roberto bets her that Magneto's opponent will win. Cue Magneto killing his opponent.
• Lots of Luggage: His idea of 'just enough to get by' is a full duffel bag and suitcase.
• Luckily, My Powers Will Protect Me: Take a drink every time it's mentioned that Sunspot is strong but not invulnerable while using his power. Lampshaded at one point when he starts describing his power, then cuts himself off because he doesn't need to explain it again.
• Meaningful Rename:
  • He switches codenames from Sunspot to Citizen V while acting as leader for the U.S.Avengers. The M-Pox affected the use of his Sunspot powers, and Citizen V better fit with the patriotic theme that the team had going for them.
  • Upon deciding to quit the Avengers and get back to his life as a mutant, Roberto switches from Citizen V to Citizen X.
• Moment of Weakness: In U.S.Avengers Roberto suffers a brief moment of panic due to the combination of Sam's apparent death and Captain America giving him a dressing-down. This renders him vulnerable to one of his employees betraying him, which in turn lets Hydra Steve move forward with his plan uninterrupted.
• Mr. Fanservice: Roberto is a handsome boy, and comics haven't shied away from showing it off. Particularly notable in Avengers: No Surrender, where he always strips his shirt before using his power even though it isn't necessary.
• Mr. Vice Guy: He's very prideful, and, at times, lecherous, but he never once strays from the side of good.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Fallen Angels kicks off with Roberto accidentally hurting Sam during a football match. He feels so regretful for what he's done that he leaves the team, declaring himself a villain who doesn't deserve friends.
• My Greatest Failure: The death of his first girlfriend, Juliana, which he blames himself for since she took a bullet that was meant for him. Any time afterwards that he fails to save someone, or otherwise suffers a great failure, Juliana is where his mind goes.
• Next Tier Power-Up: After Gideon infuses his body with more solar power than he should've been able to handle, Roberto finds that he has extra applications for his power, namely flight and energy beams.
• Noble Male, Roguish Male: With Sam, who's more upstanding and righteous compared to Roberto's devil-may-care recklessness. Best shown when they're asked why they couldn't tell someone was lying; Sam is non-judgemental and wanted to believe they were being honest, Roberto is self-centered and wasn't paying attention.
• Non-Idle Rich: At one point he's forced to return to Brazil and live an average rich boy lifestyle. He hates how vapid everyone is and how little there is to do, and quickly finds a way to get back to superheroics.
• Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: His dealings with A.I.M. and the Hellfire Club lead some to suspect that he's turned from the side of the angels. In both instances he was trying to reform them, and is still unambiguously a good person.
• Not Himself: Early in the New Mutants days, Roberto tended to be crochety a lot, so Doug was a little suspicious one day when he was much more chipper and agreeable. Rightly, since Roberto had been abducted by Mojo and replaced with a duplicate.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Make no mistake, the man is a genius. During New Avengers, he appears to be an overly-enthusiastic manager whose approach to everything is throw money around and see what happens. The truth is he's hiding a dangerously clever mind, capable of out-thinking damn near everyone, and preparing for almost every eventuality. Later on in X-Men Red (2022), Abigail Brand (among others) finds this out the hard way.
• Odd Friendship: Warlock is a naïve, sweet, and socially lacking alien, whereas Roberto is a hot-tempered, smooth-talking socialite. Despite this Roberto is Warlock's closest friend (besides his soulmate Doug), with the two going off on their own adventure in Fallen Angels and Warlock coming to Roberto's aid after a long absence in New Avengers.
• Offscreen Breakup: Roberto and Amara started dating in the third New Mutants volume. Next time Roberto is seen he's with the Avengers, with no mention of Amara, and his only relationship comment being that he's married to his job, implying they broke up at some point between books.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted with Robert Drake/Iceman over in the X-Men, who like Roberto commonly goes by the nickname Bobby.
• Out-Gambitted:
  • SHIELD makes a play to invade New Avengers HQ, but Roberto out-plans them and evacuates everyone to his second base. But then it's revealed that the Maker has the place bugged and knows Roberto's every move. But then it's revealed that Roberto not only knew about the bugs and was feeding the Maker false information, but had sent his own bug to the Maker's base.
  • He keeps tabs on Domino after selling her some weapons, so when an infiltration mission comes up he conscripts her into it in exchange for cancelling her debt. After the mission she reveals that she was the one who leaked intel on the mission in the hopes that he would hire her for it and allow her to cancel her debt.
• Parental Betrayal: He learns that his father is evil and working for the Hellfire Club after his dad puts out a hit on his mother. He then confronts his father about it, and essentially disowns himself.
• Phlebotinum Battery: Sunspot's powers are charged by sunlight, and he can 'store' a certain amount for when there's no sun available. Naturally, he often finds himself running low on power at night or in a cave.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Back when he was a New Mutant there was much attention drawn to the fact that Bobby was one of the smallest on the team, being only 5'4, but was their biggest bruiser due to his power giving him Super-Strength.
• Poly Glot: English, Portuguese, Spanish, classical Latin, Chinese, and Askani.
• Power Dyes Your Hair: He develops a skunk stripe during New Avengers, when he reveals he can use his powers, but that there are drawbacks.
• Power Limiter: To keep his M-Pox affected powers from killing him, Dr. Toni invented a snazzy headband for Roberto to wear that restrains his power to a manageable level.
• The Power of the Sun: His power comes from sunlight, and could be exhausted if he overuses it, especially at night or otherwise in darkness (he could gain slight power from stars or the moon, but not enough to make much of a difference).
• Power Palms: In U.S.Avengers he 'borrows' a schematic from Tony Stark: a watch that can transform into a palm-mounted laser blaster.
• Power Up Full Color Change: When using his powers Sunspot's body becomes pitch black. This is explained as him draining the 'ambient light' from his skin to charge up his solar power.
• Pride: One of his defining flaws. He's a naturally arrogant person who has great difficulty admitting when he has problems out of a fear of being seen as 'weak'.
• Psychic Link: In X-Force he has a telepathic link with Reignfire, who uses it to take control of Bobby and attack the rest of X-Force. Afterwards Cable uses his telepathy to try and sever it, but only manages to do so temporarily, allowing Reignfire to recover and use it to merge his body with Bobby's and take him over.
• Psycho Serum: He and teammate Rahne were forcibly injected with the same drug that gave Cloak and Dagger their powers. In Bobby's case he gained the power of the Darkshroud, able to teleport and trap people in his shroud of darkness, but it also turned him into a monster that fed on people's hope.
• Punch! Punch! Punch! Uh Oh...: In a Thunderbolts issue he attempts to punch out the Red Hulk. Hulk's response is to give him a Death Glare, and then send him hurtling through the air while he sputters out an apology.
• Pure Energy: He absorbs solar energy from the sun, which he can then dispel to fly around or in the form of an energy blast.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Gives a verbal beatdown to Gideon after the Eternal kidnapped his friends and tried to bargain them for Cannonball.

  "Funny, isn't it? You and your band of sad, old men claim to be immortals— well I've got news for you. We just feel you aren't worth our time."

• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The impulsive, hot-tempered Red Oni to Sam's more relaxed Blue Oni. Xavier specifically hoped that Sam would be a calming influence on Roberto when they became friends.
• Refuge in Audacity: His acquisition of A.I.M., a longtime villainous organisation, by simply buying them out is so off the cuff that the other Avengers have no idea how to respond.

  Captain America: Sunspot bought A.I.M.?
  Captain Marvel: Uh-huh.
  Captain America: He bought A.I.M..
  Invisible Woman: That's... That's... Well, kind of brilliant.

• Retcon: Reignfire was originally intended to be an older, more unstable Roberto after Locus teleported him through time. This was revised later so that Reignfire was instead a genetic clone of Bobby that was telepathically connected to him.
• Revisiting the Roots: At the end of Avengers: No Surrender, Bobby decides to step down from his Avenger role and get back to his mutant roots.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: In Avengers, Bobby manages to convert a few rank-and-file members of A.I.M. to double agents by getting them drunk and promising to pay them really well. Later, during the eight month time skip before Time Runs Out, he actually purchases all of A.I.M. and restructures it to be a helpful organization that supports his new, independent Avengers team.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: He has his team of New Avengers rescue Rick Jones from SHIELD custody, knowing full well that it'll get them branded as international terrorists, because 'a call for help is a call for help'.
• Secret Public Identity: At one point he changes codenames from Sunspot to Citizen V, but the latter is very rarely used in favour of his normal name (in part because Roberto isn't a fan of his new codename in comparison to his previous one).
• Secret Weapon: He reveals a succession of these when the Maker tries to invade his base; his chief scientist Toni has a Rescue armour suit, techno-organic alien Warlock has been hanging around the base in secret, and Roberto himself still has his mutant powers after everyone assumed his M-Pox got rid of them.
• Ship Tease: He had some with Dani in the early days of New Mutants. Their similar personalities meant they got along well, and Dani once expressed frustration that he didn't flirt with her like he did the other girls on the team. They've never been more than good friends, though.
• Shirtless Scene: Has received them constantly throughout the years, sometimes a result of his clothes getting wrecked during battle, sometimes just to show his muscles off.
• Sour Supporter: Early in the New Mutant days, Roberto could get pretty sulky over the idea of fighting to protect a world that hates and fears them (understandable, since he'd already spent his childhood being bullied by regular racists, never mind fantastical kinds), and often wondered about just bailing. The response of the older X-Men is basically "suck it up and stop whining."
• Speech Bubbles: After the Reignfire incident Roberto's power got a boost. This was reflected in his speech, which went from the typical white bubble with black text to red bubble with white text.
• Spotting the Thread: In X-Men: Red, he's one of the first to notice Abigail Brand is up to something seriously shifty, after about two minutes in a room with her. He immediately sets out planning something to do about that.
• Straight Man and Wise Guy: Played the Straight Man to Caliban's Wise Guy during X-Force. He even compared their relationship to Bugs and Daffy.

  Roberto: Why do you refer to yourself as "Caliban this" or "Caliban that"?
  Caliban: Because that is Caliban's name!
  Roberto: No. What you should say is "It is my name".
  Caliban: "Sunspot" is Sunspot's name! Maybe, Sunspot should not spend so much time upside-down!
  Roberto: Madre de dios...

• Super-Power Meltdown: In X-Force, Gideon forces Roberto through a series of tortuous experiments to amplify his solar absorption. He ends up absorbing too much and explodes, but not before Cannonball arrives to safely carry him away from civilisation.
• Super-Strength: Sunspot has ability to absorb solar energy and convert it for use as physical strength. The original limits of his strength was that of 2 tons. Since then however his strength has increased to 50 tons.
• Survivor Guilt: Reveals in the third New Mutants volume that he feels tremendous guilt for his girlfriend taking a bullet for him, and would often pray that God would somehow let him take her place.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: After hurting his best friend Sam, Roberto becomes convinced that he's meant for evil and so leaves the New Mutants. His first act of villainy is to break into a church, which immediately makes him feel terrible. By the end of Fallen Angels he's come to accept that he's not good at being evil, and so he returns to superheroics.
• There Are No Therapists: Xavier notes in his evaluation of Roberto that he's deeply troubled by the death of his girlfriend and the evil turn his father has taken, and may walk the same path as his father if he doesn't resolve his issues. It never seems to occur to Xavier to get the boy professional help instead of leaving him to deal with it himself.
• Those Two Guys: With Sam in the beginning of Avengers. They were practically attached at the hip, and most of their time was spent making witty banter and getting up to wacky antics.
• Throat Light: When using his solar powers, Roberto's skin turns pitch black and his eyes and mouth are replaced with an inner yellow glow.
• Took a Level in Dumbass: When written by Jonathan Hickman, he's a particularly ditzy manchild who seems to have the attention span of a hummingbird.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: His powers first manifested during a soccer game, when the racist opposition started to beat him up for being mixed-race and black.
• The Trickster: What makes Roberto's Obfuscating Stupidity so incredibly dangerous is the fact that he gleefully invokes it at all times because he gets genuine and obvious delight in watching people who underestimate his intellect crash and burn when he pulls the rug under them, so nobody (outside his True Companions) really knows when Roberto is being his genuine Jerk with a Heart of Gold Drama Queen self or when he's actively invoking this attitude in order to run intellectual circles around his enemies all the while amusing himself as his enemies fall into the same old Underestimating Badassery trap when interacting with him, again and again.
• Villainous Lineage: Roberto's father was a member of the Hellfire Club, leading some (including Xavier) to suspect that Roberto would follow down that path and become evil himself. While Bobby did eventually become a Hellfire Club member, it was part of his ploy to try and redeem the club, and ultimately he's defied the idea that he's 'destined' to become evil.
• What the Hell, Hero?: When he injures Sam during a football game, the New Mutants all call him out and tell him to get lost- except for Sam himself, who realizes he started it by injuring Bobby first, and Warlock, who's more forgiving and follows after Roberto instead.
• When You Coming Home, Dad?: Mrs. da Costa works as an archaeologist which, much to young Bobby's dismay, means she's away from home a lot.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: On top of his normal tactics and careful preparations, Roberto has shown an aptitude for rerouting his plans on the fly. When the Maker escapes his base, which he didn't expect, Bobby responds by having Hulkling disguise himself as Roberto and intercept SHIELD at the base, while Roberto disguised himself as the President and Warlock as Air Force One, allowing them to intercept the Maker before he kidnapped the real President.

Rahne Sinclair / Wolfsbane

Nationality: Scottish

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: Marvel Graphic Novel #4 (November, 1982)

The self-hating illegitimate daughter of a bigoted and abusive Presbyterian minister. Rahne was raised in a strict and abusive environment and mostly convinced she was damned to hell by the time she was 13. So she didn't exactly adapt very well when she found out she could turn into a wolf. Saved from a religious mob by Moira MacTaggart and taken to Xavier's where she became best friends with Mirage.

• Abusive Parents: Her father, Reverend Craig, not only emotionally abused her from childhood, but led a mob to try and burn her at the stake when her mutant powers surfaced. He then became a villain involved in the Purifiers, an anti-mutant religious hate group. His Karmic Death was well-deserved, though unfortunately it screwed poor Rahne up even more.
• Accent Relapse: According to 2005's Madrox, Rahne's Funetik Aksent crops up whenever she's aggravated. That for the rest of the series and the following volume of X-Factor her accent is always present suggests Rahne's always tetchy (which, given what she goes through, isn't surprising).
• Animal-Themed Superbeing: She started off turning into a wolf before going full-fledged werewolf.
• Antiquated Linguistics: Sometimes uses the word "yon", and refers to Moira as "milady", even against Moira's explicit requests.
• The Baby of the Bunch: During the original run of the New Mutants, Rahne was the youngest member of the team, showing both in appearance (the tiniest) but in her reactions to the horrible things that happened to them.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: Subverted; Rahne may be a very religious woman, but neither her religious beliefs nor the self-inflicted grief they sometimes cause her are ever depicted as inherently wrong. The one time she does fall into something approaching this trope, her initial display of religiously motivated homophobia as a result of learning Rictor had come out of the closet, she ultimately gets called out on her attitude and admits that it's wrong before stopping it.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family:
  • Her own mother was a prostitute who died when she was young, and the corrupt priest who fathered her, Reverend Craig, took her in and abused her throughout her early years. She ended up eating him alive during a stint of being Brainwashed and Crazy. Her on-off lover, Hrimhari, is a son to the Fenris Wolf — which, by extension, makes her related to Loki (Fenris' father), Thor (Loki's half/adoptive brother) and Odin. Then there's her son, Tier...
  • And for added craziness, there's Vanora Sinclaire; a murderous godwolf/mutant hybrid from an alternate dimension in which, amongst other things, Rahne gave birth to Hrimhari's daughter instead of his son. She hates her mother in both universes and wants to kill her, although she vanished off the radar after her last appearance in X-Factor (2006) #242.
• Boyish Short Hair: Rahne is something of a tomboy and has the short hair to go with it. In the original run, it wasn't by choice - her hair just naturally stays short.
• Brainwashed and Crazy:
  • Her time in Genosha as a Mutate. It took several years for it to wear off.
  • In X-Force, to rip off Angel's wings. Which backfired when Reverend Craig - responsible for it in the first place - stood in front of said wings in a way that inadvertently triggered her programming and made her kill and eat him.
• Break the Cutie: Her life is basically just one horrific event after another.
• Butt-Monkey: And how. From what happened to her on Genosha to finding love and losing it to what Strong Guy did to her son, to the humiliating and degrading way Matt Rosenberg killed her off (she got better, but COME ON), few X-Men characters have been made into a Butt-Monkey as harshly as Rahne has.
• Christianity Is Catholic: Averted; she's a Presbyterian. Of course, a lot of readers see a religious character and assume she must be a Catholic. So do one or two of the writers. The writer of the New Mutants movie didn't bother to fact-check it either, and depicted the nightmare-version of her father as a Catholic Monsignor.
• Cure Your Gays: Briefly held this view, regarding Rictor. After he confronts her on it, she stops and admits that it was pretty stupid of her. Rahne, herself, might be an Armoured Closet Gay (or at least Bi), given all the implied attraction between her and Dani during the Claremont era.
• Depower: During the "Dream's End" storyline, Mystique zapped her with a depowering gun For the Evulz. A few years later, Elixir used his powers to restore her.
• Deus Angst Machina: She finally gets her head and life together, then she gets brainwashed into eating her estranged father... And then someone messes around with her head so she actually remembers doing so...
• Did Not Get the Girl: Gender-inverted, but none of Rahne's relationships have ever seemed to work out. Cypher? They just couldn't make it work. Havok? She had to come to terms with the fact that he would always love Polaris over her. Rictor? They broke up over personality issues, and then he came out as gay. Hrimhari? He was stuck in Asgard, where Rahne couldn't go, and after he was brought to Midgard, he ended up performing a Heroic Sacrifice to make a Deal with the Devil to Hela in order to save both Rahne and their unborn child, Tier.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Her death in Rosenberg's Uncanny X-Men has Rahne overpowered and killed by a bunch of ordinary humans she could easily out-muscle or drive off. Mercifully, it didn't last too long.
• Enfant Terrible: Subverted with her son, Tier Sinclaire, who just wants to be a normal kid once he matures to the equivalent of a 12-year-old. Played straight with Vanora Sinclair, her daughter from a parallel universe, who hates her and wants her dead.
• Express Delivery: Since she's a wolf-like mutant (and we've seen mutant biology affecting pregnancy before; see Angel and Beak), and the father is a divine wolf from Asgard, it's understandable that her pregnancy advances a lot faster than a human one. That she ends up giving birth to her son through her mouth is something that can only be attributed to his divine lineage.
• Fetus Terrible: Her son, Tier Sinclair, was one by accident. Being half Asgardian Wolf, he was so strong that his motions inside of her womb were tearing Rahne apart. Rahne had to get herself imbued with similar durability and strength to Asgardians in order to avoid being kicked open by her own unborn son. He also came into the world by inducing his mother to vomit him out of her mouth. Despite this inauspicious start, though, Tier wasn't a villain, but just an ordinary child... well, as much as that term can be applied here.
• Fiery Redhead: She's red-headed and has the typical Scottish temper.
• Fish out of Water: A little bit, in the early days, as comes of living under the roof of Reverend "fun is sinful" Craig on Muir Island. Rahne's actually taken aback by the cinema.
• The Fundamentalist: Averted. Having suffered at the hands of one in her childhood, although Rahne is a devout believer and so can struggle with accepting what the letter of the Bible says over what her morals say, she always chooses to embrace the ideals of tolerance and compassion. She has even been willing to concede the point when others have, in passing, pointed out that at least some of her emotional turmoil stems from her choice of religion and her faith, although she does not feel that means she should abandon her faith.
• Happily Adopted: By Moira MacTaggert, in all but name. She'd even call her "mom" when panicked.
• Hated Hometown: What with the association with Reverend Craig. When it looked like one of Legion's less pleasant personalities was going to blow the place sky high, Rahne — normally the most moral person around — had a reaction of "go ahead."
• Healing Factor: Right there from the early days, she could take wounds that for most people would be fatal, and be up and about in a week. Most writers tend to forget about it.
• Hide Your Gays: Zigzagged. Under Claremont, it was pretty clear she and Dani were in love with one another. And after Claremont was gone, every single relationship Rahne's ever been in has been with guys, with no mention made of Dani ever again. Mind you, Claremont himself frequently portrayed Rahne as attracted to men, and given her upbringing and her faith, it's doubtful that she ever would have acted on any attraction to Dani if she did feel that way.
• Hot for Student: With Elixir. To be fair, they were only three years apart and she was just a student teacher, but it still got her to quit from Xavier's (read: Put on a Bus so Peter David could have her).
• I'm a Humanitarian: In one particularly horrifying example, her father hypnotized her into attacking Archangel but accidentally triggered her programming himself. When the rest of her team found them, all that was left of her father was "some torn clothes and a lot of blood".
• Imperiled in Pregnancy: Having a demi-god baby who has a special destiny lures the attention of several mystical threats, including gods.
• In a Single Bound: In her transitional state, she can leap incredibly high.
• Interspecies Romance: Her longest-standing relationship has been an on-and-off affair with Hrimhari, an Asgardian entity who is a shapeshifting, magical, sapient wolf and one of the sons of Fenris himself. Eventually, she became pregnant by him and gave birth to his son, Tier Sinclair.
• Irony: On two levels; Rahne has always be been consistently depicted as terrified of her wolf-shifting powers, at least until Character Development helped her get over that, and a devout Christian. But her deepest love is a magical Asgardian wolf who can take on human form and who is related to Loki and Thor through his father Fenris — meaning her boyfriend/baby-daddy is both a creature she feared becoming for a long time and a being from pagan mythology.
  • For added irony, during a trip into Hel, when the New Mutants encountered the Hell Hound Grarm, Rahne even mentions that Grarm is basically a living embodiment of everything she fears her powers might turn her into.
• Jerkass Ball: Is initially pretty sour towards Magma for her Obfuscating Stupidity, since Rahne let slip a few personal details in her presence thinking Amara couldn't understand her.
• Love at First Sight: Crushed hard on Hrimhari the minute she laid eyes on him.
• Love Triangle: For a time, she was in love with Havok, who was in love with Polaris. It ultimately ended with her realizing she couldn't compete with Polaris and coming to terms with that. The two women even joke about it during their time together in X-Factor (2006).
• Made a Slave:
  • Momentarily, during the stay in Asgard. Thankfully Sam had a magic sword to hand.
  • During X-Tinction Agenda she's caught in Genosha and turned into a Mutate. That takes several years to break out of.
• The Mentor: During her brief stint as a member of the faculty at the Xavier Institute she was the mentor for the Paragons Squad, which consisted of Pixie, Trance, Match, DJ, Preview, and Wolf Cub. She was quite the effective mentor to them and they were all deeply upset when she was forced to resign and leave the school after her inappropriate relationship with Elixir.
• Me's a Crowd: She can now turn into a wolf pack of 5 thanks to the Mothervine.
• Morphic Resonance: Early on, there were still traces of her hairstyle in her wolf form, an artistic detail that isn't used so much anymore.
• My Instincts Are Showing: Side-effect of being a wolf is that when wolf-y she acts like... y'know, a wolf. A wolf with some human intelligence in the driver's seat, but a wolf nonetheless. When she and Hrimhari reunite, they scamper around like playful puppies (and little love hearts bubbling around them), much to Rahne's extreme mortification.
• Nice Girl: Usually, hang-ups related to her harsh upbringing aside, Rahne tends to be the least temperamental of the original team. She was the only one to object to watching a John Wayne movie, on the grounds that it had a racist depiction of Native Americans and that this was a horrible thing even if Dani wasn't right there.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Her power-set expands to include this after her augmentation to survive her pregnancy with Tier. It hasn't shown any sign of leaving her yet.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: She's a genetic mutant who can shapeshift from human to wolf. Eventually, she gained the ability to take on a variety of "transitional" half & half states, and during the 90s she spent some time unable to change fully back to humans. Eventually, she was retconned as having a Healing Factor, and after her pregnancy with Tier, she gained Nigh-Invulnerability and Super-Strength.
• Parental Title Characterization: Generally tended to address Moira as "Lady Moira". If startled or sufficiently emotional, she'd work up to "mom", if really concerned she'd go up to "mommy".
• Partial Transformation: She could change into a wolf or a transitional state between human and wolf. She once had to stay like this for a time, after being brainwashed in Genosha. She can and does also alter portions of her body, such as concealing 'transitional' legs under a long skirt for discreet mobility boosts or using a lupine head as a Game Face to run off harassers on a nighttime walk.
• Pregnant Badass: A variant; being pregnant actually resulted in her needing to get a powerboost so that she could survive the strain of being pregnant with her half-Asgardian son.
• Religious Bruiser: Rahne is a devout Presbyterian and doesn't look like much, but when she transforms into her werewolf form, she's very dangerous.
• Scotireland: She's canonically from Scotland, so, as a Marvel Universe character, this comes with the territory. On occasion, if she'd actually curse, she'd use the Irish curse "spaleen".
• Self-Made Orphan: Not voluntarily, but few shed any tears. Ironically, she took it hard when she found out he was dead, and harder still when she found out she was the one who killed him.
• Stripperiffic: Some of her outfits are little more than sleeveless bathing suits, surprisingly revealing outfits for such a conservative woman, though there is the justification that all-covering outfits and a body covered in thick fur aren't a good mix^note .
• Supernaturally Young Parent: She has a son by an Asgardian God and came to term in very short order.
• Super-Senses: She has some (not to, say, Wolverine's level, but she's got them).
• Super-Strength: Her power-set expands to include this after her augmentation to survive her pregnancy with Tier. It hasn't shown any sign of leaving her yet. Before that, her transitional states did boost her strength, but not to superhuman levels.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: When she kills and eats her father in X-Force.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: The Girly Girl to Dani's Tomboy.
• Took a Level in Badass: Although your mileage may vary, she did this over the years. Most notable was her power-up after becoming pregnant with Tier, where she was given Super-Strength and Super-Toughness to cope with Tier's own super-strong kicks.
• Troubled Sympathetic Bigot: Briefly, but after she found out that Rictor had realized he was gay and hooked up with Shatterstar, she displayed some distinctly homophobic attitudes. When she was called out over this, she admitted it was hard for her to understand, as her faith preaches homosexuality is wrong, but she was unwilling to condemn Rictor as evil for following his heart, and has since tried not to act in that manner.
• Wife-Basher Basher: She once killed a fatally-abusive husband during her time in the government X-Factor. Of course, being Rahne her reaction to doing this was an emotional breakdown.
• Wolf Man: Her basic form is usually some feminine variant of this.
• Wolverine Wannabe: Wolfsbane is a mutant with the power to shift into a werewolf form. However she possesses a transitional state which is half human half wolf, whereby she possesses Absurdly Sharp Claws and bestial strength.
• Woman Were-Woes: Wolfsbane's werewolf-like abilities are due to being a mutant rather than a supernatural gift/curse. As such, when she slept with a Norse wolf-god the resulting pregnancy seriously endangered her until she got a power upgrade because she did not have the supernatural constitution to handle it. Plus, having been raised a strict Scots-Presbyterian, she would normally have been repulsed by a pagan deity, but her female wolf instincts kicked in.
• You Don't Look Like You: For whatever reason in the Krakoa era she, and she alone, shrinks down to the height she was in the 80s, with no explanation.

Amara Juliana Olivians Aquilla / Magma

Nationality: Nova Roman

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: New Mutants #8 (October, 1983)

The daughter of a Roman senator of a lost city of Romans/Incans lost deep within the Amazon jungle. The New Mutants discovered the city while on an archaeological dig with Roberto's mother. Amara was targeted for sacrifice by the mutant witch Selene, but when she was tossed into a volcano her mutant powers manifested as the ability to control earth and fire and transform into a living volcano. Her father sent her to Westchester to learn how to control her volatile powers and she became a member of the New Mutants, replacing the recently vanished Karma.

• The Ace: In early issues. Despite only recently coming into her powers and being from a primitive society, Amara adjusts to modern life and using her mutant powers incredibly quickly, outperforming her classmates in several areas despite their experience, causing a bit of angst and jealousy, particularly for Rahne and Sam. This part of the character was eventually forgotten about.
• Action Girl: She is a skilled swordswoman.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: First she's in love with Empath, a Hellion (although she eventually accuses him of manipulating her into it, and given that it's Empath, she's almost certainly right.) Then she goes on a date with Mephisto—yes, that one—in exchange for him sending the team to the right Hel (one L makes all the difference), and genuinely enjoys herself.
• Brown Face: In her first appearance. To protect her from Selene's life-draining magic, Amara's father sent her to live with a tribe of local Incas, who put dark makeup and a black wig on her to disguise her appearance against onlookers. She and the New Mutants fall into a river soon after meeting and the disguise is washed away.
• Came Back Strong: Amara's powers as Magma don't manifest until Selene throws her into lava as a sacrifice. (Strangely enough this is never tied in to the Externals, even though it appears to be a textbook case, and would provide a decade-old precedent to justify the storyline.)
• Continuity Snarl: Her background has been subject to more than one Retcon trying to explain away the previous version as an increasingly complex plot. Nova Roman, British, New Yorker... whatever. Compounding this, because she spent most of the '90s and early 2000s drifting in and out of X-books every few years, her personality often changed drastically from writer to writer, including one instance of being an out-and-out villain that was never really explained or mentioned again.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Her combat form is made of magma. No matter how close they stand, her friends never get burned, and her attacks only burn what they hit.
• Convenient Replacement Character: The New Mutants meet her one issue after Karma's disappearance and she joins them soon after in order to keep the team as a Five-Man Band.
• Daddy's Girl: Partly on account of mom having been kind of eaten by Selene, but she adored her dad. Before the Continuity Snarl set in, they'd send letters to one another frequently.
• Despair Event Horizon: Due to the events of House of M and the mass depowering of mutants, Magma loses her boyfriend while the two are exploring the inside of a volcano at the exact moment that the depowering wave of the Scarlet Witch runs across Earth. His death temporarily drives her insane, causing her to make the volcano erupt and attack a nearby town.
• Dishing Out Dirt / Magma Man: Amara's geothermal powers grant her the ability to control the movement of earth and tectonic plates, even to the extent of causing seismic upheaval. She can also call forth molten rock from the Earth's core, producing projectiles composed of lava, or miniature volcanoes. Professor X once noted that training her is extremely difficult due to the inevitable property damage her powers cause. Although Magma has triggered small earth tremors without taking on her energized form, she has never been seen to use her power to control lava while in her ordinary human appearance.
• Drunk On Power: After her powers are activated by Selene tossing her into a volcano, the scared, fragile girl suddenly becomes a flaming Large Ham declaring her ultimate power over earth and lava. She calms down soon after, but it's still jarring.
• Elemental Shapeshifter: She can transform into a molten form with a corona of fire where her hair should be.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Due to being raised in a society modeled on the Roman Empire, Amara initially struggles to adjust to modern life after moving to Westchester. She is fearful of cars and wary of electricity, but eventually learns to adjust.
• Healing Factor: Amara possesses certain regenerative powers when in contact with the ground. Even when she was affected by Selene's life-draining touch, she recovered quickly enough to aid the New Mutants in battle.
• In Name Only: Magma's appearance in the X-Men Legends video game as essentially a Naïve Newcomer average girl from New York. She was intended to be a Relationship Sue for Bobby Drake and an expy of Kitty Pryde (who they couldn't work into the game because walking through walls would have been a Game-Breaker power in a dungeon crawler). Treated similarly, and more extensively, in X-Men: Evolution, where she is an ordinary Brazilian girl — who talks like she's from upstate New York.
• Most Common Super Power: As an adult, she’s now on par with the likes of Storm, Jean, and Rogue.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: The first time she met the others, she pretended not to speak a word of English. It soon turned out she could.
• Ojou: The daughter of a senator in an old-fashioned Roman society, she was brought up as a noblewoman, and in the beginning is very prim and unused to physical exertion and seldom seen wearing modern clothes like the rest of the team. She's completely mellowed out by adulthood, however.
• Oh, My Gods!: What with the "Ancient Rome" thing, pre-retcons Magma would swear by the many gods of Rome.
• Out of Focus: Despite early hints to her genius level intellect, her fish-out-of-water experience in the modern world, a friendship with fellow outcast Rachel Summers, a personal vendetta against Selene, and a possible attraction between her and Sam, Amara ended up being the member of the original New Mutants who was the least focused on and who received the least character development. Once Louise Simonson took over as writer of New Mutants Amara was quickly written off the team and spent the next decades drifting in and out of character limbo.
• Playing with Fire: Though she can't create fire outright, her lava abilities cover a lot of the same territory and she is occasionally drawn to be blasting fire from her hands.
• Power Incontinence: At first. Not a good thing when a girl can cause volcanoes to burst out of the ground when she's upset or scared, and definitely not when she gets heatstroke from the Brazilian sunshine.

Illyana Nikolievna Rasputina / Magik / Darkchylde

Nationality: Russian, Krakoan

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: Giant-Size X-Men #1 (May, 1975) ^note ; Magik (Storm and Illyana) #1 (December, 1983) ^note 

Illyana is the baby sister of Piotr Rasputin a.k.a. Colossus and Mikhail Rasputin, and just like her brothers, she is Russian. Illyana was an adorable little girl whose innocence drew the attention of the evil sorcerer Belasco. During a time when she was living with the X-Men, Belasco kidnapped her and made her his apprentice so that she might free his Eldritch Abomination patrons. She spent 7 years in a realm of Hell known as Limbo while only seconds passed on Earth, during which she learned sorcery and discovered her mutant teleportation power. She joined the New Mutants as Magik and served as a member for some time, though the nature of her abilities and Anti-Hero attitude unnerved her more religious teammates. Then, during Inferno (1988) she was de-aged back into a 7 year old and was later killed by the Legacy Virus. Then she later came back as a demon. It's very confusing.

In Avengers vs. X-Men, Illyana is chosen as one of the "Phoenix Five", a group of X-Men granted additional powers by the Phoenix Force. After Ms. Marvel is defeated by Rogue, Magik appears and gags the Avenger before teleporting her into Limbo, trapping her and terrifying Rogue. Following the defeat of Cyclops, she and Emma Frost have gone on the run (other members of Phoenix Five, Colossus has rejoined Wolverine's team, and Namor has gone home to Atlantis). She joined Cyclops' team of X-Men at the New Xavier School. In their quest to recruit new mutants to their cause, Illyana continued to aid Magneto and Cyclops. As a result of the Phoenix Force being used in conjunction with the Scarlet Witch's powers to bring back the mutants, she began experiencing changes to her powers. Unlike the others, she gained more power than she had prior to the Phoenix force, and she was now able to conjure energies directly from Limbo. Eventually, she came to realize that her power was broken as well, as she inadvertently brought her teammates to Limbo where they were forced to fight the demon Dormammu. She defeated him, but realized she needed help with her powers and teleported back in time to find a past version of Doctor Strange to teach her a greater understanding of magic as her mutant powers were linked to magic.

Her former teammate Karma organized another New Mutants team, and placed her in charge of it. A new team has since been formed, of which she is a mainstay, and leads it depending on the situation.

Illyana appeared in 2020's The New Mutants, played there by Anya Taylor-Joy.

For tropes regarding Magik, see her page.

Douglas Aaron Ramsey / Cypher

^{Click here to see as Revelation}

Nationality: American

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: New Mutants #13 (March, 1984)

With the cerebral ability to understand all languages, Cypher was considered to be one of the weakest New Mutants. He was best friends with Warlock, but was killed while defending Wolfsbane in battle. He was eventually resurrected by Selene during Necrosha, but was freed from her control thanks to the New Mutants. With the foundation of the mutant nation of Krakoa, Cypher became a key member of the new nation by helping craft a new mutant language and serving as an unofficial member of the Quiet Council as Krakoa's translator.

• Ascended Fanboy: He and Sam got on well due to their shared love of science fiction. During the team's first encounter with Legion and a Journey to the Center of the Mind, Doug being able to recall a similar plot from an episode of Star Trek gave Professor X the "Eureka!" Moment he needed to get them out of there.
• And I Must Scream: So your power is language-related and you think you can beat Doug at his own game? Bad idea.
• Back from the Dead: After twenty years (possibly an X-Books record). He was forcibly resurrected during Necrosha, and soon returned to the X-Men as a powerful strategist.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Since coming back from the dead, he's convinced a futuristic mecha to kill its pilot, and used a literal spell-machine to remove an enemy's mouth so she couldn't use her hypnotic voice.
• Big Good: Shaping up to be this for Krakoa along with Warlock and the island itself. They've been spying on Xavier, Magneto and Moira from the start and know all their secrets, they've since shown such acts of undermining the Quiet Council as exiling a recently depowered Moira from the island after stopping Mystique and Destiny from killing her, giving the pit inmates their own simulated reality, and informing Legion about Moira's secret undetectable No-Space's.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Even after being brought back properly, it's pretty clear not all of Doug's social skills made the return trip.
• Chick Magnet: Sunspot likes to think he's a ladies' man, but Doug has had the most love interests of anyone on the team. He dated pre-bodyswap Psylocke as well as teammate Wolfsbane, but has also managed to earn himself quite the following of female villains, including one of Legion's female personalities, Cyndi.
  • In Peter David's All-New X-Factor, Doug had a wild night with Danger, and he acquitted himself well enough that everyone's favorite control-freak jail-bot offered him another go. Unfortunately, self/friend made the mistake of getting with the, er, girl his best friend Warlock was into. Warlock forgave him instantly but still knocked the taste out of his mouth.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • The 2019 one-shot "New Mutants: War Children", set during the heyday of the '80s team (written and drawn by Claremont and Sienkiewicz, even) puts a lot of focus on Doug, who is the only member of the team not to be infected by Warlock gone rogue. Special attention is given to his bravery despite knowing his powers aren't up to much and his relationships with Warlock and Rahne. Ultimately, he manages to save the day.
  • Even before, in the 1980s, he gets the focus of an annual: his teammates fall to Mojo's control, save for Magma; Captain Britain is deaged and weakened, and Mojo and Spyral have kidnapped Psylocke (back then, still a British woman before her bodyswap). It is up to Doug and Warlock to save the day: despite being afraid, he braves on, connects with Psylocke's mind, and releases his teammates, Captain Britain, and finally Psylocke herself. This allows for her to break Spyral's hold over her and return everyone to the real world.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: More like No Date Marriage, since Saturnyne arranges Doug and Bei's wedding within hours of knowing each other.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Blond-haired and he's a pretty nice guy with and a good friend.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: "Ability to understand any language" seems like a pretty lame super-power until you get into the very broad range of what exactly qualifies as language.
• Hollywood Hacking: Before he was revealed as a mutant, Doug was introduced as a highly tech-savvy boy whom Kitty Pryde turned to when she needed some hacking done she couldn't do on her own. His skill with computers was arguably more useful to the team than his actual mutant power most of the time and, since his resurrection in a time where computers are ubiquitous, Doug has learned to combine his hacking skills with his language abilities to become a serious threat to national security, if he so chooses.
• Likes Older Women: Dated a pre-bodyswap Psylocke for a while. The same with Bei the Blood Moon, who is at least over 50 while Doug looks to be in his twenties.
• Love at First Sight: Most doubts about marrying Bei the Blood Moon dissipate when he sees her without her helmet for the first time.
• Naïve Newcomer: Doug is thrilled to find out he's a mutant and is very pleased to get immediately swept up in a madcap scheme by the Hellfire Club. His first few stories have him constantly expressing his excitement and wonderment of the adventures the team get themselves into without noting any of the dangers. He mostly knocks it off once Dani finally has enough and tells him to can it.
• Non-Action Guy: Kitty met him in dance class. In the original stories, he only has the physical strength typical for a young man of his age, so he is not useful in a fight, most often keeping to the back of the fray or helping out with his computer expertise. After his resurrection and subsequent level up, this no longer applies.
• Obliviously Superpowered: Didn't realize that his linguistic skills were due to being a mutant until the New Mutants had to recruit him in the middle of the night so they could talk to an alien life form they'd encountered.
• Odd Friendship: His ability to understand literally anything capable of communicating makes him an odd friendship machine. Notably he's Heterosexual Life-Partners with Warlock and recently has developed a close bond with Krakoa, the Genius Loci that tried to psychically drain the original X-Men, oh so many years ago. Also the first sentient being he encountered that he couldn't communicate with, he married.
• Omniglot: Cypher is a hyper-linguist and has a superhuman facility for translating any languages, spoken or written, human or alien in origin. His superhuman skill also extends to his great facility in deciphering codes and computer languages as well as understanding hidden intentions and body language. Cypher's skills are such that he was once able to make great headway in translating the written language of an extraterrestrial race in a matter of minutes.
• Opposites Attract: The reason behind his attraction for Bei the Blood Moon. She's the very first person he can't understand since she communicates with something other than language. This causes an infatuation between both.
• Perfectly Arranged Marriage: He and Bei seem to be genuinely interested in making their surprise marriage work.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Not often shown, but Doug really can speak every language, including understanding animal communications. He is the only one who can understand what Rahne is saying in her wolf form (apart from Dani, who can read her thoughts).
• Taking the Bullet: Doug died doing this for Rahne (who didn't even realize what had happened until the fight was over).
• Teen Genius: Downplayed, but he does have remarkable intelligence. He was first introduced as a friend of Kitty Pryde (herself a teen genius) who could easily match her skill with computers.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: The few times his powers were truly useful came across as this, likely to try and justify Doug's being there in the first place. He saved the day in the first "New Mutants Annual" by being able to read an alien language and reprogram a supercomputer and when Legion first showed up, Doug was the only one who could understand one of David's multiple personalities, who spoke Arabic.
  • He ended up scoring two points for Krakoa during the X of Swords event. One for the marriage thing and the other through a dance competition.
• Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: He's at least a head shorter than his new wife Bei.
• Took a Level in Badass: Cypher underwent some severe level-up after coming Back from the Dead. Originally, his mutant power was "read and understand any language", meaning he was simply an Omniglot when he died in the 80s. Revived in the 2000s, we learn that "language" includes "body language", meaning he can predict his opponents' moves and actually held off all his old teammates single-handedly. It also includes computer language, making him an imminently skilled hacker and programmer, as well as letting him "read" the structure of a building and discover the easiest way to destroy it. Plus, he is capable of performing spells, too.
  • Again in the Krakoan Era, when he reveals himself to be a much better strategist than he previously showed any signs of, outwitting, among others, Moira, Mystique, Destiny and Charles.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: A major source of angst for Doug in the early days, since being able to instantly understand any language isn't as flashy as anyone else's. Eventually remedied somewhat in Excalibur, where he and Warlock were combined to form Douglock. Further remedied by Zeb Wells in the third series, extending his powers to cover all manner of communication — spanning the fields of linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, and art (to name a few). If there's a message or intention, he can potentially analyze and translate it. To say this has left him a bit....off is putting it lightly.

Warlock

Nationality: Technarch

Species: Technarch mutant

First Appearance: New Mutants #18 (August, 1984)

Warlock is a member of the Technarchy race of aliens. He is considered a mutant because he can experience emotions, something forbidden to his cold, ruthless species. See his series that takes place after Warlock's death and reanimation as Douglock (originally thought to be the combination of previously killed New Mutant Douglas Ramsey and Warlock) and after his departure from Excalibur.

• Abusive Alien Parents: Magus/siredam keeps trying to kill him.
• Beware the Nice Ones: A generally good-natured and friendly alien, with a truly horrific power. He once nearly killed Selene using his race's traits.
• Big Good: Shaping up to be this for Krakoa along with Cypher and the island itself. They've been spying on Xavier, Magneto and Moira from the start and know all there secrets, they've since shown such acts of undermining the Quiet Council as exiling a recently depowered Moira from the island after stopping Mystique and Destiny from killing her, giving the pit inmates there own simulated reality, and informing Legion about Moira's secret undetectable No-Space's.
• Heroic Sacrifice: He gave his life to help cure Richard Rider of his Phalanx infection. Fortunately, he got better a few pages later.
• Life Drain: An ability all Technarx have. Warlock's just too nice to use it on the scale most of his species do.
• Literal-Minded: Being from a species that outlaws emotions and has no time for sarcasm or figures of speech, Warlock can have some troubles reading between the lines with the things his friends say.

  Dani: Warlock! You, pal, are the proverbial sight for sore eyes!
  Warlock: Concern! Are Selfriend's primary ocular receptors dysfunctional?
  Dani: *sigh* Never mind, Locke. We're just real glad to see you.

• Living Ship: Often used to transform into helicopters to cart the New Mutants around.
• Offing the Offspring: Standard practice for his race is for a progenitor and its offspring to battle to the death shortly after birth.
• One-Steve Limit: He has no relationship to Adam Warlock, but they have met once. He is often just referred to as "Locke", possibly because of the other Warlock.
• Perpetually Protean: In the habit of changing his form quite frequently, warping his body to fit the occasion.
• Robot Buddy: He was technically a "techno-organic" alien, but his cable hair fits this trope in spirit. His own series saw his appearance change to a more humanoid form.
• Spanner in the Works: Twice in Uncanny X-Men Vol 1 191 - first, as the only being able to understand Spider-Man's language (other than Spidey and Kulan Gath, that is), he is able to translate what needs to be done to Ororo; and second, when Selene attempts to cast her spell to Take Over the World, he merges his dying body with Ororo^note  to enable her to defeat Selene.
• Tron Lines: As a Technarch, his body is mostly black, contrasted with bright lines. They're usually colored yellow, incidentally matching the yellow-and-black Superhero Team Uniform.
• Verbal Tic: Several; he prefaces every sentence with a descriptor like "Query:" or "Imperative:" and refers to all of his teammates as "Self-friend (name)".
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: A very literal example; his official "mutant power" is the ability to experience emotions, something denied to the rest of the Technarchy.

James Proudstar / Warpath

Notable Aliases: Pridewalker, Running Sun, Thunderbird

Nationality: American, Krakoan

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: New Mutants #16 (June, 1984)

James Proudstar, known as Warpath, is a mutant of Apache descent who has been affiliated with many X-Teams over the years starting with the Hellions.

• Anti-Hero: Type III-IV
• Anti-Villain: Way back when he was a Hellion, he was one of the nicer ones. Also, his reason for staying on the team after deciding not to avenge his brother by killing the X-Men was that he wanted to be there for his friends, rather than any villainous inclinations.
• Big Little Brother: When John is finally resurrected it is shown that James towers over him.
• Blood Knight
• Combat Pragmatist: His first two teachers were Emma Frost and Cable. Comes with the territory.
• Depending on the Writer: The powers he has, and how powerful each one is, vary wildly over time.
• Dual Wielding: From the Decimation-era, he had a pair of extremely big knives as weapons, given to him by Storm. Which are made of Vibranium.
• Genius Bruiser: Warpath is a very intelligent fighter. He once found out a way to incapacitate Wolverine, sneak by the rest of the X-Men, and could have killed Professor Xavier if he hadn't had a change of heart.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Also like his brother, he's very easily aggravated; They don't call him "Warpath" for nothing.
• The Heart: Unusual, given that he's also a Blood Knight with a Hair-Trigger Temper, but when he was a part of X-Force, he was described as a physical and emotional rock for the team. Indeed, during the periods where he's not out for revenge on someone, he's a Nice Guy.
• Legacy Character: Like his brother, the above-mentioned Thunderbird, he has the same powers and wears the identical-looking costume after him during his early appearances. He still wears a nearly identical outfit to this day.
• The Quiet One: One thing that makes Warpath so dangerous is that he doesn't always lead the charge in fights, despite being an ideal point man. Occasionally, he sneaks around, looking for a chance to ambush his targets.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Not, perhaps, in any individual case you find, but Warpath's motivation for joining every super-powered group he's joined has been revenge:
  • Hellions: His brother died fighting for the X-Men.
  • X-Force: Stryfe wiped out his entire tribe.
  • New X-Force: Some idiot killed Caliban.
  • The one exception is when he joined Xavier's X-Men to fly out into space. That time, it was sheer undiluted boredom that got him to go.
• Scarily Competent Tracker: It comes from his youth. Only got better once he picked up his Super-Senses.
• Superpower Lottery: Won it big:
  • Super-Strength: Once fought directly with Juggernaut, managing to stand up and not give ground for several minutes.
    • Super-Toughness
  • Super-Speed: Not at the "telescoping time" level, but Warpath can run down vehicles on the road, and has time to watch a dart fired from a rifle come toward him, smirk at the shooter, catch the dart, and return it.
  • Super-Senses: Implied to be above the level of most feral mutants, like Wolfsbane. Mimic, who has copied ferals before before, tried to copy Warpath's powers and was overwhelmed by sheer sensory input. May also extend to a sixth sense of sorts, as when he was on X-Force, Warpath had a tendency to wander off during fights he wasn't needed for and find things.
  • Super-Reflexes: Has been shown evading weapons fire.
  • Superhuman Flexibility and Agility: Despite being seven feet and 350 pounds, Warpath has been described as moving like an Olympic gymnast.
  • Healing Factor: Though not as strong as usual for this trope, it's there. Though during the events of Predator H he was stated to heal faster than Wolverine and Sabretooth.
  • Flight: Depending on the Writer, though the general consensus seems to be that he can, but does not prefer to, as he finds the motion unnatural–feeling (not unsurprising, considering his general athleticism).
  • Magical Native American: Ghost Rider unlocked shamanistic powers within Warpath so they could fight the Demon Bear and win. He used these powers to stop Selene in the Necrosis storyline. These powers seemed to be temporary, but alternate universe versions of Warpath have shown him having mystical powers as well, implying that his mutation has the potential for it.
• Talk to the Fist: After the Hellions rescued Empath from the New Mutants and promised to punish him for what he did, Empath immediately began planning his revenge for being captured. Jimmy then informed him that he intended to keep his word to the New Mutants, and immediately decked him before he could try to use his powers to get out of the situation.
• Token Good Teammate: Relatively. James joined the Hellions because he wanted revenge on the X-Men. He treated the New Mutants in a neutral-to-friendly manner, and otherwise did what he was asked without malicious intent or excessive force. It was enough that, as much as the New Mutants wanted vengeance on Empath, they trusted Thunderbird enough to let him deal with the problem.
• The Worf Effect: Feral and Shatterstar both got one over on Warpath in their introductions during the original X-Force series. Neither of these two are remotely in Warpath's league.

Russell "Rusty" Collins / Firefist

Nationality: American

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: X-Factor #1 (February, 1986)

Russell "Rusty" Collins was a mutant who could create and manipulate heat and flame. He joined with many of the big mutant teams, however he didn't stay with any of them for too long. He shared a long-term relationship with fellow mutant Skids before his untimely death.

• Brainwashed and Crazy: When he was part of the MLF.
• The Cape: Originally Cyclops' protégé, and stated to have to potential to become a significant leader/figure for mutantkind. He went to prison as part of a protest over the treatment of mutants... and then he got put on the first of many buses.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door
• Playing with Fire: Rusty is a pyrokinetic. Rusty is able to ignite oxygen in the air and direct it as pyrotechnic blasts. He can also start fires anywhere in his line-of-sight up to 20 feet. Rusty can also erect shields completely of fire. The intensity of heat in the shield is strong enough to melt most physical attacks and disperse many energy attacks.
• Required Secondary Powers
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: Setting a person on fire will do that.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Poor Rusty was killed by the time-displaced Holocaust.

Sally Blevins / Skids

Nationality: American

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: X-Factor #7 (August, 1986)

Skids is a mutant who has the power to form force fields and has been romantically involved with the mutant Rusty Collins. She eventually ended up as an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. sometime after M-Day.

• Abusive Parents: This is the reason why her mutant powers had first activated. Her father had beaten her mother severely for letting Sally wear pearls and had turned his rage on Sally. It was at this time that she developed her ability to form a force field around herself, which protected her from her father and allowed her to scare him off.
• Barrier Warrior: Skids possesses the mutant superhuman ability to create force fields around herself and others, totaling an area of approximately 30 cubic feet (after a long training), with her being in the center. The field covers all of her body, so she never has any actual physical contact with anything touching any part of her body, as long as it is activated.
  • What makes Skids' force fields unique (and explains her name) is that her fields negate friction - when she has them up, it's impossible to hold on to her, and she can move by "skating" along the ground.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: When she was part of the MLF.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Originally with the Morlocks, she then joined became a member of X-Factor, X-terminators, and the New Mutants before being brainwashed into joining the Mutant Liberation Front. Magneto helped undo that brainwashing, so she joined his Acolytes, but after the destruction of Avalon she went to college and eventually joined X-Corporation. After M-Day she was briefly aligned with Apocalypse and then Masque's radical Morlock faction, but then turned out to be undercover as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, albeit with some loyalty leftover to Magneto.
• Slick and Stick: She can project a frictionless force field around herself that makes it impossible for anyone to hold on to her. It also allows her to "skate" across the ground.

Tabitha Smith / Boom-Boom

Nationality: American

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: Secret Wars II #5 (November, 1985)

"Hey, English girl, I used to do business with Cable and X-Force, you know what I'm saying? I've had to handle worse things than robots with big swords. Tick tick tick BOOM."

Tabitha is a mutant with the ability to create energy bombs of various sizes and intensity which explode upon impact. She ran away from home when her powers manifested and her abusive father tried to beat them out of her. Tabitha happened upon the Beyonder in his human form and bonded with him, and eventually wound up as a ward of X-Factor. She later joined the New Mutants and would go on to become a founding member of X-Force.

• Abusive Parents: Her father began to beat her soon after powers manifested, forcing her to run away from home.
• Action Girl: In Cable and X-Force. Even if she is in a situation where she can't use her powers, Tabitha is an expert martial artist who has been serving in mutant special forces units since she was a teenager and can easily handle most people in a fight.
• Badass Longcoat: She has taken to wearing a longcoat with many of her recent uniforms.
• Beware the Silly Ones: She may be irreverent and drunk most of the time, but Tabitha is amongst the X-Men who have the least issue with using lethal force thanks to her time with Cable and X-Force.
• Cool Shades: Recently she's been shown with sunglasses all the time, even at night.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: She may be lazy, inattentive, and usually at least a little buzzed, but Tabitha's power and skills can turn her into one of the hardest hitting X-Men very quickly.
• Ditzy Genius: Is consistently presented as not particularly book smart or attentive on missions, sometimes missing missions entirely. Nextwave pushes her into full-on Dumb Blonde territory. However, she is great at thinking on her feet, is incredibly street smart and she can get the hang of highly complicated, futuristic technology very quickly.
• Hard-Drinking Party Girl: When not on missions (and sometimes while on them), Tabitha will have at least one drink in hand and be partying. She really embraces the party atmosphere of Krakoa after its founding.
• Having a Blast: Tabitha can create energy bombs of varying size which explode after a time delay.
• I Have Many Names: Time Bomb, Boom Boom, Boomer and Meltdown. She's currently using Boom-Boom. This is even lampshaded by Sage, who mentions she changes codenames more often than she changes underwear. After they all get listed at one point, Tabitha is left trying to recall when she went by "Doctor Madame McSplode".
• Jerkass: In Nextwave, which may or may not be in continuity. At one point, she starts beating up a policeman for no reason other than that she hates cops. (Of course, everyone on that team except Monica was a jerkass.)
• Lower-Class Lout: Her family was white trash to the core, and while she isn't quite as bad as her parents, Tabitha herself is still a consistently rude, coarse, obnoxious, and generally trashy person. This subsided with the 2000s and she's instead now a valley girl more than anything — though this is when she's on her own.
• Ms. Fanservice: Her civilian outfits tend to show off her legs and cleavage. For instance see X-Terminators (2022) in which Jubilee compares her to a sex-addicted Barbie and a porn parody of Glinda the Good Witch.
• Progressively Prettier: Started out with a very unflattering hair cut and pretty daggy clothes, but over time artists had her look go from "white trash" to "valley girl", complete with prettier hair and clothes.
• Sticky Fingers: She is depicted as a kleptomaniac in Nextwave.
• Totally Radical: Writers love making her use lots of slang. This was most prevalent in the 90s when she was just... the embodiment of the 90s. In the 2010s, it's not so much her slang but her lifestyle which has turned her from "superhero but a 90s teenager" into "superhero but a lazy millennial", such as using ride-sharing to get to her superhero duties and sleeping in.
• Valley Girl: What she eventually becomes, complete with excessive slang, obsession with looks and lots of partying.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: She and Jubilee did NOT get along when they had to work together in X-Tinction Agenda, barely being able to put their animosity aside. This was partly due to their similar powersets causing them to try and one-up the other. This has mellowed considerably and with the two becoming this. They now hang out as friends but still mock each other even when they are out in danger and fighting vampires in X-Terminators.

Julio Esteban Richter / Rictor

Nationality: Mexican

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: X-Factor #17 (June, 1987)

• The Apprentice: He became Apoclaypse's student in studying magic after joining Excalibur and was given his mentor's grimoire after Apocalypse went to Amenth with his family.
• Badass Bookworm: Rictor has displayed an affinity for computers and can hack into various high-security systems.
• Badass Normal: Even though he has been depowered, he still earns his place as a member of X-Factor.
• Battle Couple: With Shatterstar after the two began seeing each other.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: The family business is selling weapons (and drugs) on the black market. He's less than proud of this and once worked to try to dismantle his family's business.
• Brought Down to Badass: Even when he was depowered, he still earned his place as a member of X-Factor.
• Coldblooded Torture: By the Right.
• Color Motifs: Green and brown, which represent his seismic-related powers.
• The Cracker: While not malicious, he does break into things like government servers to obtain information needed by X-Factor, which is definitely illegal.
• Deadpan Snarker: Par the course for anyone written by Peter David, but with Rictor it seems to have stuck.
• Dishing Out Dirt: He used to have seismic powers until he got depowered on M-day. In Avengers: Children's Crusade #6, he's the first mutant to have his powers restored by Wanda. He has since learned to remotely terraform the ground around him in a more tactile manner.
• Distressed Dude: He has a tendency to get kidnapped, tortured, and/or held hostage a lot. Mostly before he lost his powers. He actually isn't this as much after losing them.
• Druid: In Excalibur he began to explore more of his connection to the Earth beyond just geology and has discovered that he can manipulate plant life as well to a certain degree, utilizing vines to entangle his foes. A group of druids living near the Braddock Lighthouse identify him as one of them thanks to his connection to the Earth and even dub him their king when he calls upon them for aid. Rictor subsequently modified his uniform to look more druidic, including face paint.
• Electric Torture: One of the few details given about his torture by the Right.
• Family Business: The Richter family business? Selling weapons illegally, or "selling death", as he explains it.
• Foreign Cuss Word: Prone to this, especially during the 90s.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Again, guilty of this during the 90s.
• Green Thumb: After working with Apocalypse and gaining a power upgrade through the trials the External put him through Rictor has become able to control plants.
• Innocently Insensitive: When he becomes Apocalypse's apprentice, he becomes pretty sycophantic and admonishes other mutants for not believing in his vision. He's preaching this to people that Apocalypse had terrorized in the past, including brainwashing into being his Horsemen with still lingering consequences that the man himself justifies to them when called out, while also ''currently" manipulating them to his ends. Needless to say, Rictor's words fall on deaf ears at best.
• Interrupted Suicide: Three so far — in the original X-Factor (#22), and in X-Factor Vol 3 (#1 and #38).
• In the Hood: His uniform with Excalibur includes a green cloak with a hood that he wears up most of the time.
• Mirror Character: How Rictor became Apocalypse's apprentice is very much like Angel became his Horseman of Death. Both were suffering depression over their powers, were approached by Apocalypse and offered a way to salvation. Angel was brainwashed with a split personality that still haunts him to this day and resents an unapologetic Apocalypse for it. Rictor by contrast and showing off Apocalypse's Heel–Face Turn was instead merely mentored, and gives his loyalty of sound mind.
• Last-Name Basis: Nobody calls him Julio. Even his closest friends just call him Ric.
• Magma Man: After working with Apocalypse and gaining a power upgrade through the trials the External put him through Rictor has become able to control lava.
• Meaningful Name: His surname is Richter. He has once again earthquake powers. You do the math.
• Mundane Utility: At one point, he uses his powers to earn some scratch as a one-man demolition team.
• Person of Mass Destruction: His ability to control seismic waves and create earthquakes gives Rictor to the potential to wipe out entire cities if he loses control.
• Power Loss Depression: The very first issue of X-Factor Volume 3 opens with Rictor needing to be talked out of committing suicide after losing his powers. During a therapy session with Doc Samson, he admits that he still has his "bad days" where he feels depressed over loss of his powers.
• Power Loss Makes You Strong: After M-Day, he had to learn to put more emphasis on his regular skills and was actually quite successful.
• Relationship Upgrade: He and Shatterstar were Heterosexual Life-Partners; eventually he chucked the 'heterosexual' bit.
• Repower: After losing his powers on M-Day, he was repowered by Scarlet Witch in Avengers: Children's Crusade. In fact, due to a mix of circumstances, he was the only person she managed to repower.
• Sense Loss Sadness: Part of his depression over losing his powers was a previously unmentioned empathic connection with the Earth that's now gone.
• Straight Gay: It's been revealed that Rictor is not bi as previously assumed, but full-on gay, having found no fulfillment in his relationships with Rahne and Tabitha.
• Suicide by Cop: Attempted in X-Factor vol 3 #38, and later called on this trope by Guido.
• You Killed My Father: Held a grudge against Cable because of this, even after the truth (his father was killed by Cable's clone Stryfe) came out.

Nathaniel "Nate" Grey / X-Man

Nationality: American, Krakoan

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: X-Man #1 (March, 1995)

X-Man is an Omega-level mutant genetically created by Mr. Sinister from the Age of Apocalypse timeline. He is somewhat an alternate-reality counterpart to Cable, although Nate was made from the DNA of Jean Grey and Scott Summers whereas Cable was born naturally to Scott and Madelyne Pryor (Jean's clone). After returning from the dead and being captured by first HAMMER then Sugar Man after a run-in with Norman Osborn's X-Men, Nate joined the New Mutants and started a relationship with Dani Moonstar.

For tropes regarding X-Man, see his page.

Gabrielle Diwa

Nationality: Filipino, Krakoan

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: Marvel Voices: Pride (June, 2021)

A mutant woman who joined the New Mutants staff in educating the youth of Krakoa.

For tropes regarding Galura, see her entry on the X-Men: Krakoans page.

Erik Magnus Lehnsherr / Max Eisenhardt / Eric Magnus / Magneto

Notable Aliases: Magnus, Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, Master of Magnetism, Auschwitz I.D. #24005 (retcon from #214782), Michael Xavier, "The Creator", Erik the Red, "Red," Grey King, White Pilgrim, King Erik Magnus, Eric Lensher, Mr. Sullivan, White King, Miraculous Magneto, Phantom Saboteur, the Leader, Master (by Toad), Merciless Magneto

Nationality: German, Krakoan

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: X-Men #1 (September, 1963)

During his reformed period, Magneto started teaching the New Mutants and fought alongside the X-Men. This, at first was very difficult for many of the team-members, since they had done battle against Magneto more then once.

For tropes regarding Magneto, see his page.

Maxime and Manon

Nationality: French

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: Extermination #1 (October, 2018)

Mutant twins who have the power to manipulate people's emotions (Maxime) and rewrite their memories (Manon). They were sweet kids before they were kidnapped from the Xavier Institute in the future by Ahab. He turned them into sleeper agents for when he was on his quest to kill the time-displaced original X-Men, using them to quickly turn mutants into Hounds. After he is defeated, they remained in the present day, with the X-Men promising Cable that they would look after the two and help them unlearn what Ahab had taught them.

After the founding of Krakoa, the two joined Armor's makeshift New Mutants team.

• And I Must Scream: What Ahab used them for. Because making a Hound took years of torture, Ahab's workaround was to have Maxime and Manon manipulate emotions and memories, respectively, so that the victim felt like they had undergone years of torture, with the memories to boot.
• Enfant Terrible: They usually aren't malicious but their use of their powers is abusive at best. They had Beak forget how his parents were killed by terrorists to "help" him get past his grief, instead giving him the memory of them dying in their sleep peacefully.
• Manipulative Bitch: Both of them are keen on using their powers to solve any situation, rather than allowing people to naturally work through their emotions and painful experiences.
• More than Mind Control: Their power is usually used like some form of mind control, but they don't actually control people's minds. Maxime and Manon manipulate people's memories so that they will be more compliant with what the twins want them to do. For example, planting the memory of a man's wife having cheated on him with his terrorist friend and giving him increased anger, so that they can egg him into shooting his friend. Jean Grey mentions that it is very hard to undo, and she was only able to do so because they told her how to undo it.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: When Jean meets them from before they were turned to Ahab's side, they are helpful, friendly and all-around adorable. She herself, even after they'd turned against the X-Men, lamented what happened to them. Once Krakoa is founded, they do act more sweet and innocent... but are morally twisted despite this.

Robert Herman / Glob Herman

Nationality: American, Krakoan

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: New X-Men #117 (October, 2001)

Glob was a student at Xavier's mansion and a member of the Omega Gang under the leadership of Quentin Quire.

For tropes regarding Glob, see his entry on the X-Men: 2000s Members page.

Donald Pierce / White Bishop

Nationality: American

Species: Human cyborg

First Appearance: Uncanny X-Men #132 (January, 1980)

One of the X-Men's most loathsome foes, an evil racist cyborg who wants to exterminate all mutants - usually starting with the babies and children and working his way up. Totally repugnant and insane. Ironically, was a former member of the Hellfire Club until his political views drove him to become an all-out anti-mutant terrorist.

For tropes regarding Pierce, see his entry on the X-Men: Hellfire Club page.

Species: Demon

First Appearance: New Mutants #1

A demonic bear that has pursued Dani since her childhood, finally attacking her when she joins the New Mutants.

• Animalistic Abomination: It's a bear that is also a demon, or a demon that is also a bear. The narration at the end of the Demon Bear Saga implies it's pretty ancient.
• Bears Are Bad News: Giant, magic, evil demonic bear.
• The Corrupter: Can physically and mentally turn people into its servants, and its mere presence corrupts the mystical plane the New Mutants fight it on.
• The Corruptible: The closest thing to an explanation Claremont gives is Dani's dad saying it's a corruption of their clan's animal spirit.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: It drains the light out of places. Sunspot steps into its shadow and notes how utterly cold it is, nearly freezing to death in seconds.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Illyana defeats it by slicing it in half lengthways with her soulsword.
• Riddle for the Ages: What is it? Where did it come from? Why does it have such a particular mad-on for Dani? We don't know. The only one who might is Dani's father, and he doesn't share.

Magus

Nationality: Technarchy

Species: Technarch

First Appearance: New Mutants #18 (August, 1984)

Warlock's brutal father, who chased him across galaxies to battle his son to the death, as is their tradition. Magus is a cosmic-level threat capable of destroying stars and crushing planets in his rage. He also indirectly caused the events of Inferno by following the New Mutants to Limbo and turning the demons there into techno-organic beings like himself, allowing them to overthrow Magik.

• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The kids actually defeated him, albeit with Professor X's guidance.

David Charles Haller / Legion

Nationality: Israeli, British

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: New Mutants #26 (April, 1985)

The son of Charles Xavier and Gabrielle Haller, David Haller is the powerful Omega-level mutant known as Legion.

After becoming the Sole Survivor of a terrorist attack, the intense trauma sustained by David ultimately led to the manifestation of his mutant abilities — namely, the ability to absorb and cycle between distinct personalities in his head, allowing him to spontaneously develop their own mutations for himself to use.

Though initially introduced as an antagonist in New Mutants, David is often portrayed as an anti-hero more than anything else, and his moral compass isn't as easily defined as his father's — though Xavier himself is also prone to doing some seriously shady stuff.

In 2017, Legion became the subject of an eponymous television series on FX, portrayed by Dan Stevens. The TV version of the character is somewhat different from his comic book counterpart because he was born in America as David Xavier, the legitimate son of Charles Xavier and his wife Gabrielle. ^note  David was given up for adoption while he was still a baby and was taken in by the Haller family. His struggle with mental illness is emphasized, and plays a major role in the series.

Not to be confused with L.E.G.I.O.N. (DC Comics), a modern day predecessor to the Legion of Super-Heroes.

• Acid Attack: His 762nd personality can breathe out a cloud of acidic green fog.
• Always Someone Better: Nate Grey a.k.a. X-Man is depicted as this to David in Uncanny X-Men (2018) - he's saner (albeit possibly Crazy Sane), a more skilled Telepath, a better planner, and ultimately, a more powerful Reality Warper. This leads to an absolutely brutal curbstomping when David finally gathers up the courage to confront him - he manages to trap the other mutant for five minutes real time in his head (in the other's worst nightmare, to boot), but the moment the illusion falls apart, an incandescently angry Nate delivers a cold Breaking Speech and effortlessly body-jacks him.
• Animal Motifs: In his solo, various superorganisms representing his mental state like bee colonies.
• Anime Hair: His iconic look gives him an Eraserhead-like tower of hair.
• Antagonistic Offspring: Towards Xavier at first. After Xavier's death, David decided he wants to realize his dream, but using his own methods.
• Anti-Hero: He eventually developed this role once he started controlling his personalities more and more, to the point in which he actually evolves from threat to Anti-Hero to a potential Hero.
• Anti-Villain: Has this role with his alters, often switching brands and also using schemes towards other heroes, although he also seems to be at odds with other villains.
• The Atoner: One of his personalities, telepath Jemail Karami, was actually the psychic ghost of one of the terrorists who tried to kill him to begin with. After a while in the kid's mind, Jemail decided he'd been wrong and dedicated his existence to restoring David's sanity.
• Badass Boast: In Uncanny X-Men (2018), he gives a rather good one to Nate Grey, who he'd trapped inside his head. Unfortunately, Nate being a monstrously powerful telepath (and arguably the strongest telepath in the Marvel Universe at the time), and utterly furious, it didn't quite work.

  I think you'll find that my mind is a little more complicated than what you're used to, big man. Do you really think you're the first super-powered child to throw a tantrum in here? I have ways of dealing with you. We all do... we are Legion.

• Bed Trick: During the Legion Quest story that'd lead to Age of Apocalypse, an amnesiac Legion used his powers to go back in time and pose as his own father and then sexually assault his own mother, Gabrielle Haller.
• Berserk Button: Extremely sensitive to even the barest implication that he's unreliable, or that his instability somehow waives all the good he's done and is trying to do.
• Big Ol' Eyebrows: A feature he's inherited from his dad is a pair of eyebrows that seem to go past his head.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: The Jack Wayne alter initially presents himself as being on David's side, protecting him from Jemail. It doesn't take long for the New Mutants to learn it's the other way around: Jemail is protecting David from Jack, who's determined to be the only one left.
• Blessed with Suck: Legion sure won the Superpower Lottery... Except that David, the core personality, can't use the powers that belong to his splinter personalities, and that several of the personalities are nasty customers indeed.
• Breaking Speech: Receives a brutal one from Nate Grey when the two finally square off in issue 8 of Uncanny X-Men (2018).

  Nate: Your father failed you. To soothe your broken mind he told you that there is a real you buried in there. He told you that the mind is the self. What you are. I know the mind is but a tool. And tools can be taken away. This is my mind now.

• Breath Weapon: His 762nd personality can breathe out a cloud of acidic green fog.
• The Bus Came Back: After being missing from the end of Age of Apocalypse, David eventually returned during the Utopia era.
• Catch Phrase: "Mine is the power of [insert personality/ power name he is currently using here]" in Legacy. His other one is "I rule me", which also serves as the Arc Words.
• Children Are Innocent: David's core personality is usually depicted like this.
• Combat Pragmatist: Sees no problem in cheating his way to victory, which is probably why he trapped Nate Grey in a Lotus-Eater Machine inside his head rather than taking on the more powerful mutant directly. Unfortunately, it just made him angry.
• Combo Platter Powers: In a way, this is his superpower; he can create any superhuman power he can think of, at the drawback of having to create a secondary personality to control it. When he learns to take control of multiple personas for his own use, naturally, he can combine his individual powers in whatever way he pleases. Some of those personalities play the trope straight themselves by having distinct combinations of powers; examples include Absence (can siphon off heat and love), Kirbax the Kraklar (flight and electricity generation), and K-Zek the Conduit (wireless energy transfer and electricity absorption).
• Curb-Stomp Battle: He doles these out to enemies like paper flyers simply by the multitude of powers he possesses and his ability to use them when focused.
  • He ends up on the receiving end of one of these when he tries trapping X-Man in a simulated version of the Age of Apocalypse inside his head, without his powers, pressing all of his Trauma Buttons in the process. All this ultimately results in is a very angry Nate, who - once he figures it out - crushes Legion in the five seconds it takes to deliver a brutal Breaking Speech and pulls a Grand Theft Me.
• Cursed with Awesome: Being mentally ill often helps him in his plans and enables him to concoct incredibly convoluted schemes.
• Deconstruction: His solo in X-Men: Legacy has a number of jabs at usual X-Men conventions. The fact that they only find mutants with "flashy" powers, filling their ranks with combat capable mutations, the fact that they're so ineffective the X-Men still need to be soldiers, and that none of them seem to work on human-mutant relationships anymore like how mutants can not only coexist but also aid society.
• Defeat Means Friendship:
  • After his defeat from the "New Mutants", Legion became their supporting character and unofficial member of the team.
  • Apparently, in Age of X-Man, with Nate Grey, with Legion finally getting some peace and quiet in the titular reality.
• Dirty Coward: Jack Wayne puts up a tough guy facade, but is a coward at heart and will run if stood up to.
• The Dreaded: Anyone who knows about a fraction of what he can do is terrified of him and the X-Men in general give him a wide berth whenever possible.
• Enemy Without: In the first volume of X-Men: Legacy he seeks help of his father, Rogue, Magneto, Frenzy and Gambit, after several of his personalities escape. In the second volume, an evil personality modeled after his old man escapes and tries to destroy the world
• Embarrassing Nickname: David hates being called Legion. He says it's incredibly insensitive and tantamount to calling an epileptic superhero, "Spasmo".
• Empty Shell: Spent several years effectively comatose after the terrorist attack that killed his stepdad. Then the Jack and Cyndi alters started acting out.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • In his solo series it's lack of trust. David is unable trust anybody but himself, so he manipulates people around him. As it turns out he is unable to trust even himself - this is why he personalized parts of his mind as alien beings and needs to fight to control them.
  • It recurs in the run up to Age of X-Man, leading to his convoluted plan to stop Nate Grey. Unfortunately, it has the exact opposite of the desired effect, and he's comfortably Out-Gambitted by Nate.
• A God I Am Not: In finale of Legacy, David merges with Weaver, becoming basically a god and starts fixing damage done by evil Xavier and himself. But then he realizes if he doesn't stop, he'll have to take control of the world and change it in his image. Which would go against all he believes in.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: Losing his final fight with Evil Xavier, David realizes his manipulative behavior alienated people from him so there is no one he can call for help now. Then it turns out he subconsciously sent his cries for forgiveness to all those people. And in response they came to help him.
• Gone Horribly Right: It's revealed in Hickman's X-Men run that David was purposefully conceived as part of Xavier and Moira's plan to breed a powerful mutant. They certainly got what they wanted.
• Grand Theft Me: On the receiving end from Nate Grey in Uncanny X-Men (2018) after he made the horrible mistake of a) trapping Nate, probably the most powerful telepath in the Marvel Universe, in his head, and b) subjecting him to his worst nightmare for what felt like months.
• Guile Hero: In X-Men: Legacy vol. 2, David picked a habit of manipulating people for the greater good. Sometimes, might take it straight into Magnificent Bastard territory. Later deconstructed - the series makes it clear the people he manipulates either see him as just a dangerous, unstable individual or an outright Manipulative Bastard, so while he gets the job done, he utterly fails at making any friends.
  • He tries this in Uncanny X-Men (2018) as part of trying to stop X-Man, but his desperation, lack of communication/lack of trust, and just being too late mean that he fails miserably. He then tries it on Nate himself, with a bit of telepathic trickery. It works for five minutes of real time, and only succeeds in absolutely enraging the more powerful and more skilled telepath.
• Helpless Good Side: In the early days, David's relative mental youth meant he wasn't much use, and could easily be shunted aside by Jack or Cyndi.
• Hollywood Autism: Begins life as a not very flattering depiction of Autism, with characters claiming the terrorist attack that caused his DID also "caused" him to become Autistic.
• Implied Rape: During Legion Quest (the prologue to Age of Apocalypse), an amnesiac Legion tried to use his own psychic powers to pull a Bed Trick on Gabrielle Haller (his own mother) and by the time Charles and Erik got to her, her clothes are ripped up and she's crying.
• Jerkass: Cyndi's rude and cynical, never mind the fondness for burning things (and/or people), but she's merely rough around the edges. Jack is worse.
• Manchild: David developed this after multiple traumatic incidents that happened in his childhood, which is somewhat justified. This could also be seen projected in two specific alters of him.
• Many Spirits Inside of One: He had multiple personalities with different superpowers. Then he went better, but as a whole was so powerful that he caused the Age of Apocalypse. He later came back, now having hundreds of personalities, each with its own unique power. Some of them are minds of dead people he drained, making him a combination of this trope and Mind Hive.
• Mental Affair: Has one with Ruth at the end of his solo series.
• Motormouth: In the early days, David tended to talk a mile a minute, sometimes coherently, sometimes not.
• Odd Couple: With Blindfold in Legacy.
• Papa Wolf: In Legacy David becomes protective of children and firmly believes the fact young mutants still have to learn to defend themselves proves X-Men failed to accomplish anything.
• Physical God: At his full potential, he becomes one of these and has been called a God and a God-Mutant when he has his full wits about him. Best summed up by his own mother when he awoke from his coma with a more collected mind.

  Danielle Haller: Even untrained, he's ten times the Psi his father is. He can do anything he puts his mind to. Anything. In short, X-Men, my son is a God.

• Playing with Fire: One of his earliest demonstrated powers was pyrokinesis. The alter in control of that was the short-tempered and cynical Cyndi.
• Plot-Relevant Age-Up: In his solo series his core personality grew to his actual age.
• Power Parasite: Played with. In his solo series he learned to have his core personality drain the powers of his other personalities, allowing him to use them himself without having to cede his body over to that personality, and to combine powers from different personalities.
• Precocious Crush: Early on, Jack taunts Rahne that David has a crush on her.
• Psychoactive Powers: However, how strength his core personality depends on his own confidence or determination - if he allows himself to be consumed by doubt, he barely can drain weakest personalities. When he really gets his head set on something, he can get the strongest ones. after David learns to merge with his personalities, high confidence allows him to do this with the strongest ones
• Punny Name: Cyndi (cinder), the pyrokinetic personality.
• Put on a Bus: He erased himself from existence, thus retconning any memory of it except for in Blindfold's mind. Then he's suddenly back for a second mini, then in Incoming! knowledge of him is back but according to Sinister no one knows where he is.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: As noted under "Bed Trick", it's implied during Legion Quest that an amnesiac David used his powers to pose as Charles and then sexually assault his own mother.
• Reality Warper: The most powerful of Legion's personalities, including the ones that are more or less cohesive amalgamations of his shattered psyche, have the ability to change reality itself in wide-sweeping ways, to the point of creating an entire alternate universe during Age of X storyline. Indeed, it turns out that he was conceived for this very reason. However, as he finds out to his cost, there's Always Someone Better - Nate Grey.
• Ret-Gone: In the end of Legacy he wiped himself from existence in the 616-world, the sole person remembering him being Blindfold.
• Sadist: Some of his alters show joy whenever a misfortune happens to an enemy or someone they despise, even going as far as to mess with their psyche for fun. It's possible that the core Legion personality has an element of this too, as when he trapped Nate Grey in his mind, he did so in an illusion of the Age of Apocalypse, without his powers, leaving him helpless in his worst nightmare. To say this backfired would be a severe understatement.
• Split Mind, Split Powers: All of his personalities have their own powers.
• Split Personality: Varying in number; originally it was just three plus Jemail, but things have gotten... complicated.
• Split-Personality Merge: It turned out Jemail had been doing this while he was inside David's head, helping to reintegrate all the personalities. Jack and Cyndi were the last two left, and putting up a Hell of a fight, since they (understandably) didn't want to be erased.
• Strong Family Resemblance: On first seeing him, Dani Moonstar quips that he looks a lot like Charles.
• Superpower Lottery: It’s his super power. No, really. His power designation in Hickman's X-Men run is Omega level Power Manifestation and according to Rogue new powers are being birthed with new personalities constantly. Some of the the big ones he’s manifested are telekinesis, telepathy, and the ability to create an entire universe.
• Superpowered Evil Side: Jack Wayne, among others (Jack was not the only malicious personality, but he did take over several of the others' powers at times, making him the most dangerous).
• Tomato in the Mirror: All his personalities are aware they're in his head, but most of them believe they're real (which given David's abilities, might be true). At the climax of his solo, his most powerful personality, the Great Weaver, reveals it has his face and its dialogue implies that David is the errant ego running around with his body.
  • This is exploited and developed by Nate Grey in his Breaking Speech when the two face off in a Battle in the Center of the Mind, coldly deconstructing the idea that there is an original David at all. Cue Grand Theft Me. Given Nate's track record, this could have just been psychological warfare (and if it was, it worked like a charm), but it has a disturbing plausibility.
• Unexplained Recovery: Was given a second series where he was inexplicably unerased from existence and desperately seeking the help of a psychotherapist to quell the uprising of a malevolent personality.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: During the 90s, Legion travelled back in time to kill Magneto, reasoning that his father would have a better life if Magneto hadn't been there. Unfortunately, Charles took the fatal blow for Erik, and the brawl itself woke up Apocalypse several decades early, creating the Age of Apocalypse.
  • This later drives his actions in the run up to Age of X-Man, as he blames himself for the titular reality's creation and, thereby, Nate Grey (who terrifies him - and with good reason, as it turns out).
• Usedto Be A Sweet Kid: Was relatively a normal and happy boy until He witnessed his step-father's death.
• Villains Act, Heroes React: In his solo series he becomes critical of this approach and tries to be more proactive kind of hero by removing enemies before they become more dangerous.
• Voices Are Mental: The New Mutants could tell who was fronting by their voices. Interesting, given Cyndi was a little girl...
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Jemail Karami seems to have vanished entirely.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Oh so very often in his solo series. Pretty much everyone from Blindfold to Pete Wisdom to Aarkus calls him out on his manipulative ways. Except for Pixie, Chamber and Frenzy, who skipped that part and just beat the living shit out of him.

Lila Cheney

Nationality: British

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: New Mutants Annual #1 (November, 1984)

Lila Cheney is an interstellar rock star mutant who can teleport between planets.

• Amicable Exes: With Cannonball.
• Blessed with Suck: She is a teleporter capable of traveling interstellar distance in an eyeblink. Where the suck comes in is that she can only travel interstellar distances. If she wants to zap herself from the east side of Cleveland to the west, she'd have to use Alpha Centauri as a halfway point.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Which she initially refuses to give, save piecemeal hints to Sam, but seem to include at least one instance of being enslaved.
• Idol Singer
• Most Common Super Power: Jubilee makes reference to it on panel.
• Secret Test of Character: Pulls a quick on on Sam when he tries introducing her to his mother, after they'd already had some nasty arguments. She shows up in a very revealing outfit, and when Sam is unresponsive teleports away only to reappear in a more conservative one, telling Sam that had been the test (if he'd made a fuss of it, she wouldn't have come back. Lila just doesn't learn Sam wasn't paying full attention in the moment).
• Sticky Fingers: On occasion, has had the tendency to take things without asking, which caused Sam no end of concern in their dating. Especially since the first time they met the "thing" she tried to take was the Earth.
• Teleportation: Lila has the ability to teleport across great interstellar distances. Her powers do not allow her to teleport any distances under a light year so she must use her Dyson Sphere as a midway point on shorter travels. It also only teleports her to places she feels home, as the New Mutants learn when a jaunt strands them in London with no money or passports.
• Too Fast to Stop: The reason she can only travel interstellar distances. When she teleports she generates a FTL field of tachyons that take her light-years before she can stop it, so technically she's only capable of overshooting shorter distances.