Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes "X-Force" Legionnaires

Now we all know the Legion has a NO KILLING rule, but there have also been grey areas in the past. If the Legion were to ever have a black ops team a la the current X-Force, which Legionnaires (pick from any incarnation) do you think would be the most likely to join such a team if it were deemed necessary? (aside from the Khund Legionnaires cuz that's probably a given and who cares about them anyway? )

Violet, in several of her interpretations, has been pretty hardcore. The Threeboot version is particularly ruthless, being a gun-toting chica who is willing to expand within someone's body to blow a limb off and then shoot them to cauterize the wound! But even classic Vi, after her capture by the Imskian resistance, was pretty fiesty.

Action / Lo3W Mysa is getting there, although I'm not liking the 'Dark Willow' vibe she's giving off at all. (And Blok, former Super-Assassin, is the last Legionnaire ever who would become a killer, IMO, which would make it all the more powerful if he's the one who ends up having to 'put down' Dark Mysa before she takes over the mantle of Mordru...) The version of Mysa I consider true to the character would never go for it, but Johns version is apparently the new improved model I'm gonna have to live with.

Shady has a practical 'warrior princess' side that could easily be tweaked into a more cold-blooded sword-and-blaster survival of the fittest persona.

Dawnstar is also pretty no-nonsense, and, from a more tribal perspective, the hunt *should* end with a kill, not an all-expenses trip to the fabulous TiG (Takron-Galtos).

Brainiac Five, particularly in his engineering of the death of the Time Trapper (and Jason Rugard, in the process), has shown the same sort of cold-blooded practicality, and Mon-El and Luornu going along with that plan ended up being very surprising, since neither of them struck me as the sort initially. (After 1000 years in the zone, I could see Mon-El developing a somewhat detached perspective on mortality, however, and the thought of someone with his powers being jaded to human life, and death, is chilling to the bone... Luornu is a harder sell, but the girl has already felt *herself* die, more than once, so perhaps she's a bit grittier and darker on the inside than most people realize.)

Some members who might seem like good fits, but, IMO, would very much *not* be good fits;

The Projectra who snapped Nemesis Kid's neck, and went on to become Sensor, at first blush, might seem a shoe-in, but her execution of Nemesis Kid was an exception, not a rule, and it would be a pretty radical departure from her characterization (and a cheapening of the significance of that moment) for her to start snappin' necks left and right.

Similarly, Timber Wolf most fits the 'X-Force' vibe, with shades of Wolverine and Rahne, but despite his occasional bursts of temper, Brin has never been a bloodthirsty sort, nor a killer, as far as I can recall, making him a particularly ill-fit for this group.

Legionniares I'd discount right off the bat from an X-Force style team.

Element Lad. Sun Boy. Colossal Boy. Chameleon Boy. Phantom Girl. Ayla (whatever code name she's using this week). Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl and Cosmic Boy. I could craft a story in my head where one of these characters 'went dark' for organic story reasons**, but they would all be *strong* departures from 'classic' characterizations, just as it was a strong departure for Cosmic Boy to go after his parent's killers with lethal force (and even then, he pulled back from that path at the end).

** Some more than others. Colossal Boy, post a 'death of Yera' storyline, could be Imaged-up into a grittier person. But it's hard to conceive of a plausible and true-to-character scenario that would turn Element Lad or Phantom Girl or Chameleon Boy into a willful killer. (The Progenitor crap was a failed attempt at doing so, IMO. Classic Jan's pretty darn close to the last Legionnaire who would go dark.)

Even 'hot-heads' like Wildfire and Ultra Boy would, IMO, be very unlikely X-Forcers, as Wildfire is strongly rules-oriented (as befits someone whose physical form has no definition, and who has to find structure in things the rest of us consider intangible, to compensate for how the rest of his form is free-flowing and uncontrolled) and Ultra Boy *fled* from the whole lawless thing as a teen to become a super-hero, and joining a black ops team, IMO, would ruin the entire Legion experience for him, turning him back into the sort of thug he was before he escaped that life. Even the existence of such a team, or being invited to it, would hurt Jo, IMO, as it would cast a pall on his dreams of heroism, of 'getting away from that life' only to see it corrupt his new life.

Others, I'm not so sure about. Could Dream Girl become so jaded by seeing everyone's deaths (or so willing to prevent *more* deaths that she's willing to engineer a much smaller number of them before their time?)? Could Star Boy, 'Champion of Xanthu,' use his powers to lethal ends under the direction of his planetary leadership, and become a 'good soldier?' How freaking scary would a killer Chemical King be, able to shut down the chemical reactions in your brain and kill you instantly, and tracelessly, from across the room, without looking up from his drink?

I'm mostly avoiding threeboot and reboot characterizations here, because I feel like I 'know' the originals better. (Threeboot Element Lad, for instance, was willing to turn someone's teeth into phosphorus, at one point, despite all of his coffee shop pretentious philosophizing, and appeared willing to use lethal force against Brainy during a scuffle! He seems likely to argue vociferously against such a team on principle, but has no hesitation to abandon those lofty principles in the heat of the moment, being all hat and no cat.)

So,
Violet, Dawnstar, Shady, Brainiac Five, Mon-El. A combination of subtle powers, with a 'big gun' for the massive distractions (Mon takes on the battleships, while the others move in to wreak havoc on the command staff behind the war effort, for instance), while the ladies move in for the surgical work.

While I can see such a scenario in my head, I'd have to say I'm not a fan of it. It seems grittier and more 'reboot' than I like my Legion to be.

Contrariwise, you saying this actually makes me want to see such a team for the sake of Ultra Boy's development. It would be an interesting opportunity to define - or redefine - how he sees superheroics, and how he sees himself. There are several ways this could go, none easy on Jo - but why should they be? Give him some hard choices and see what he does.

To be contrary myself, I have always imagined that Ultra Boy's post-Legion career would consist of going back to Rimbor and seizing control of that worlds criminal organizations, and brute-force welding them into the planet's first official planetary government / police force. Somewhere between fighting fire with fire and doing bad to do good, with all the slippery slope that entails.

Any thoughts of your own on which Legionnaries would and wouldn't fit the tone, Drake?

I'm sure any character could be recast as a "cold-blooded killer" if the writers/editors/marketers decide that's how they wanna' roll.

Maybe it would even be well-written. Still probably not something I'd necessarily want to read.

Of course, I'm the person who just finally saw Batman II: Electric Boogaloo earlier this evening and really, really wishes that she could have those interminable two hours of her life back, so there you go.

Isn't the 'X-Force' Legion called Legion Espionage Squad?

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That seems a little harsh to me. Threeboot Element Lad knows that his transformation powers only affect their target for --what ?-- a minute. So changing the guy's teeth isn't any different than Ultra Boy punching the same character in the jaw. Yeah, it'll hurt for awhile, but then you'll get better. Also the target in question was a pirate about to shove a bunch of kids out of an airlock. So there's that.

Where did Element Lad threaten to use lethal force against Brainy ? Looked to me like Brainy was trying to strangle him, which is kind of an overreaction no matter how pretentious your teammate's philosophizing is.

Element Lad never claimed to be a pacifist, in any incarnation-- did he ? The quest to curb your worst instincts even in trying situations isn't de facto pacifism. Not any version I've ever heard of, anyway.

I wasn't terribly concerned with the transience of the effect. Having every one of your teeth turned into burning hot coals for a minute isn't about the damage to your teeth, it's about the damage to your mouth, gums, tongue and throat (and inhaling superheated gases would cause lung scarring and death, as a mild side-effect of the searing intense agony and grotesque amounts of physical damage).

Did the pirate deserve it? Quite probably, yeah, but the 'classic' Element Lad wouldn't have so flippantly rendered that judgement, and done something like turn the air around him into inertron, rendering him helpless. (Classic Jan seemed to be very much against using his powers on people, turning their guns into air, their clothes into bindings, the air around them into cages, etc. Progenitor Jan most definitely used his powers directly on living tissue, and it was part of what defined him as an insane threat, a corruption of the man he'd been.)

The threeboot Jan was very much not 'classic Jan' in temperament (Threeboot Jan talked philosophy, but didn't really live it when the chips were down. Classic Jan walked the walk, and didn't preach about it.), no more than the Progenitor Jan was.

When he tried to use his transmutation powers on Brainy. What exactly could a person be physically transformed into *and still be alive a minute later?* All physical biological processes would be interrupted and all energy states lost. The electrochemical signals in the brain would be wiped out completely. The contents of the mind would be lost, wiped like a hard-drive, as it the brain's biological state would have been altered, and it's ability to store information lost. Brainy's body could probably be physically revivable by CPR after being turned into a hunk of rock for 60 seconds, but he'd be a mindless slab of Coluan meat.

Being Brainy, he probably has his knowledge and stuff backed up in the lab, and it could be re-downloaded into his body, but it doesn't change the fact that he would have been rendered brain-dead by a teammate, and his personality might end up nothing at all like it was before his death, since he might be able to store raw data on backup files, but emotional associations might not transfer as well...

And that assumes that Jan was trying to turn Brainy into something *solid* at room temperature, like carbon or whatever. If he was trying to turn him into a liquid or gas, when Brainy's body turned back into 'meat' at the end of 60 seconds, it would be all over the room, dispersed into a fine coating of Coluan gore covering the floor and walls. It's likely that not a single cell, or even DNA sequence, would remain intact, after 60 seconds of puddling around on the floor and seeping into the carpet (and in gaseous state it would be even nastier, since Vi and El would have likely *inhaled* some of Brainy in that minute he was disembodied!)

Again, as with 'it's okay for Element Lad to set someone's face on fire, because he was a *bad man*', there is a difference between 'he didn't do anything wrong' and 'the jerk deserved it.'

Threeboot Element Lad made decisions that a Silver Age Legionnaire, from a team with a code against killing, and, while it was never overtly stated, we can assume a code against *torturing people,* would not have made so flippantly. Being the threeboot, even big goof Colossal Boy, who seemed genuinely nice, responded to watching Jan immolate that pirates mouth by standing there and watching, noting that, 'You are not a nice man.' It's the sort of thing that, in a previous incarnation of the team would have led to some sort of trial and likely expulsion from the team. In the threeboot, this brutal act was dismissed with a quip, just as Element Lad's attempted murder of Brainy was dismissed with Jan asking that Salu not tell the rest of the team that Brainy kicked his butt, *because it would be embarassing.* Can you picture a classic age Legionnaire failing to kill a teammate over a philosophical debate, and then begging for people not to tell, *because it would make him look like a wuss?*

It's hugely obvious that threeboot Projectra wasn't in any way the same person as classic Projectra (or reboot Snakejectra), but it seems just as important to note that 'doesn't like to sleep alone' threeboot Ayla has nothing to do with the fiercely independent classic Ayla and the manipulative threeboot Brainy who had Legionnaires brawling in the hallways in his machinations to undermine Cosmic Boy's authority was very different from classic Brainy and 'not a nice man' Jan is just as much *not* classic Jan.

As always, this is all my opinion, and I really believe that Mark Waid consciously chose to make many of his threeboot Legionnaires significantly different from previous incarnations, to 'make the team his own.'

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...it's about the damage to your mouth, gums, tongue and throat (and inhaling superheated gases would cause lung scarring and death, as a mild side-effect of the searing intense agony and grotesque amounts of physical damage...

See, I'm operating under the impression that the sum total effects of transformation would all disappear as soon as one minute was up. IOW, if EL creates a rosebush and then it disappears, so does the scent of roses;So does the hole in the ground. But I haven't read all of Threeboot, just a couple of the trades-- and out of order, at that. So if it was ever explained in a different way, I probably missed it.

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...Can you picture a classic age Legionnaire failing to kill a teammate over a philosophical debate, and then begging for people not to tell, *because it would make him look like a wuss?*...

No. But again, I didn't really go into Waid/Kitson expecting everything to be like it was before. Again, here's something I can't be sure was ever explicitly stated by Waid regarding his take, but I "filled in" on my own because it makes sense to me:

If the young people in this incarnation of the team are more callous, more unfeeling, less moral, than the young people we met before, maybe this is supposed to be a commentary on the difference in Waid's "utopia" and the earlier ones. IOW, I don't know that Waid was saying what EL was doing to the pirate was a good thing, but I can argue that it makes sense for the character himself to not regard another's pain as important-- because the U.P. in this take of the Legion doesn't champion anything beyond "order" and conformity for its own sake. So possibly to EL, anything that doesn't promote what he perceives as being the norm for "order" and conformity is going to be something he'll try-- particularly if he knows that there are no long-term consequences borne of doing it.

You could argue the same about Cosmic Boy, B5 and their rivalry. Frankly, I was seriously chilled by this version of Brainy. The earlier versions might have done awful things while insane, but this version was clearly not meant to be insane. Yet, when I stopped to think about it, his behavior makes sense-- in the context of what we see in the government/society around him.

Oh, and another thing: It's true that in this version of EL, he still proclaims a strong set of spiritual beliefs, but I don't find it all that surpising that he'd do the stuff you describe as "all hat, no cat." Because IRL, I see people all the time who proclaim a set of spiritual beliefs that directly fly in the face of what they do IRL. It's as common as breathing, really.

As for Ayla... well, I really liked what I saw of Waid's Ayla. (Except for the bared midriff Britney look, which I'd be very, very happy to not see again on anyone for the rest of my life. Ahem.) The "I-hate-to-sleep-alone" shtick was later on, when Shooter took over, yes ? There were things I liked about Shooter back in the day, but he had a strong misogynist-homophobic vein in his writing then-- and I gather from what I've heard of his last Legion stint that he never really moved on from that.

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...As always, this is all my opinion, and I really believe that Mark Waid consciously chose to make many of his threeboot Legionnaires significantly different from previous incarnations, to 'make the team his own.'...

Well, I can't really fault him for that. There are things I saw Waid do that I would definitely have done differently. But the dirty secret is: I felt that way about Levitz/Giffen, too. I've felt that way about beloved "auteur" books that were the sole product of one person who didn't have to answer to an editor. The only way to get the "perfect" Legion is to write and draw it myself. And anyway, I can already tell that you'd all hate it even if I could somehow make it magically appear before you tomorrow.

One day, I'd really just like to read the whole Threeboot from start to finish and render some final "fan decision" on it as others have, but for the time being that just isn't gonna' happen.