At the tail end of my last I Should Write The Legion, I promised that this one would feature the “biggest badass” in the Legion, and the guesses were predictable: Brainiac Five, of course, but also Superboy and Star Boy, plus a couple of emails betting it was Wildfire.
All of them are cool, mind you, but when you’re talking sheer badass that is off the charts, there’s only one nominee.
She’s a ridiculously powerful telepath. Her mental abilities have at times managed to hold off gods. She’s made entire groups of Legionnaires believe that missing comrades were alongside them for months at a time, lobotomized enemies, beaten other top-league telepaths like rented mules. In terms of sheer power, Imra Ardeen is near the top of any scale upon which the Legion can be judged.
(Aside: I remember someone once asked me to explain the appeal of the Legion. The conversation went like this. “Do you like Magneto?” “Yeah.” “Professor X?” “Yeah.” “Superman?” “Yeah.” “Wolverine?” “Yeah.” “Imagine all of them on the same team, together, plus Iceman and Firestar and Mr. Fantastic minus the stretching and a bunch of other equally powerful characters. That’s the Legion. They kick ass.”)
But what makes Saturn Girl the biggest badass in the Legion isn’t that she’s powerful. Lots of Legionnaires are powerful, after all. What makes her the biggest badass in the Legion is her inherent pragmatism – recently pointed out quite adeptly by Jim Shooter when she calmly mind-controlled Timber Wolf to stop him from killing somebody in a fit of rage, then mindwiped all the onlookers to make them forget that Timber Wolf snapped. Is this a violation of both T-Wolf and the assorted citizen’s mental dignity? Yes, that’s exactly what it was – and she did it anyway because it was necessary.
In his run initiating the current Legion, Mark Waid placed Cosmic Boy and Brainiac Five in opposition to one another. I always felt this missed the mark, because Cosmic Boy has the Captain America role in the Legion – he’s the guy the team rallies around, the purest and most natural leader, the one who is, by definition, going to be on the right side. Placing someone in opposition to Cosmic Boy is like, I dunno, putting Captain America on one side of a superhero-versus-superhero conflict and then asking readers not to think of the other side as the de facto “bad guys.” It made Brainiac Five seem almost villainous.
However, Brainy does need a counter in the Legion, because his intellectual and moral role within the team is so powerful, and Saturn Girl is exactly the person to take on the job. She’s tough and smart, and her steady pragmatism is the perfect foil for Brainy’s powerful idealism. The way I see it, there are things Brainiac Five just will not do as a matter of principle, even if they are necessary. (A great story in the initial-reboot Legion had him refuse to use the Metal Men’s responsometers to help the timelost Legion get home without their permission, once he realized they were sentient intelligences.)
Saturn Girl, on the other hand, is a lot more willing to bite the bullet. It’s just who she is. Which in turn means the two of them will be at odds with one another frequently. Not team-dividing warfare or anything; simply the collision of two equally valid yet ultimately opposed perspectives.
(Oh, and since I know people will ask: she’s with Lightning Lad because Garth is, in many ways, the Captain Carrot of the Legion – he’s not brilliant, but he’s moral and upright and just plain good, through and through. Do you really think a telepath could manage to be with anybody else?)
EDIT TO ADD: I didn’t want to elaborate too much on why Saturn Girl is pragmatic, but Brad pretty much explained it for me in comments below:
Saturn Girl isn’t pragmatic, because it’s an extention of her desire for control, or peace, or some kind of moral imperitive – she’s just been raised in a society that’s to some extent a psychic open-book. Much of our laws about freedom and rights (and justice) are because we can’t ever know what someone’s actual intent is behind their actions or what their capacity to act on those intents are. Titanians have no such limitations.
Exactly.
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This why I should write the legion thing makes me want to go out and start reading the title.
Then I realize that you aren’t writing it and I die a little inside.
I never really got the “Captain America” thing with regards to Cosmic Boy. Mind you, the only LSH run I’m familiar with is the Mark Waid run. I always thought that Saturn Girl was underused, though. She seemed interesting.
Would you recommend the current run, incidentally? I stopped reading LSH once Waid left.
What Rich said.
Oh boy do I wish you were writing the Legion. Yes. Saturn Girl is the Wesley Windham-Pryce of the Legion (or maybe Wesley was the Saturn Girl of Angel’s team…) and a bad ass to boot but she’s usually overlooked because of the girl factor.
I miss Waid. He actually did the impossible and made me stop hating Dream Girl.
I think the reason SG gets underused is because she IS so goddamn powerful. It’s certainly within her abilities to trick an enemy into punching themselves in the face repeatedly until they pass out, after all.
“Cortex Lock, Assholes!”
for the bad-ass quote win 🙂
Can we lose the overly-precious “Titanians don’t speak” thing?
My one question I have is, how do you make Saturn Girl distinct from all the other pragmatic telepaths using their power in questionable ways? No doubt this would be a fun path for the character, but what about her would make her stand-out from Emma Frost or Maxwell Lord? I have no doubt she would and does, but I’m just curious about how her other character traits would mesh with being a Machiavellian Mind-Walker.
The way I see it, there are things Brainiac Five just will not do as a matter of principle, even if they are necessary.
If Shooter writes him that way, I’ll soon end up liking him as much as you do. 🙂 (And I already think a lot of Brainy.)
NC, although I think telepathy is one of those powers that innately lends itself to a pragmatic attitude (being able to see the darkness within, et cetera), but there’s certainly a sliding scale. At one end there’s Emma Frost, and at the other end there’s J’onn J’onnz. Saturn Girl falls somewhere in between; like J’onn, she was raised in an environment that was wholly telepathic and so didn’t see the harsher side of unshared sentient thought until later in life – but she did see it earlier than J’onn did.
@NCallahan
One of the built-in advantages of the Legion is that while a shared Humanity is the uniting focus of the group they are all very much aliens. Often when the LSH is really cooking (and a lot of elements that Chris seizes on in his posts) is when you focus on the fact that the team members aren’t us-with-powers, they can have a completely different frame of reference… moral, philosophic, or experiential.
Most of the X-psych’s (and I guess, Max to some extent… although I have trouble reconciling “Crisis” Max with JLI-Max) are based around the “power corrupts” Marvel trope (powers just amplify who you are, if’ you’re a “good” person – you have to be better, and if you’re “bad” it’ll make you worse). But still earthlings.
Titanians (like Coluans are, and Tromians… would be… if they’d stop getting massacred) come from a completely different social paradigm that’s evolved to champion entirely different physiologies and philosophies. Since parts of the UP, like Star Trek, doesn’t have traditional wants and needs in a “survival” sense, they progress along an entirely different path, and therefore their Legionnaires bring entirely different moral viewpoints to the team.
If I have any major regrets about the last ten years of LSH cannon – it’s that writers seem to shy away from embracing that potential, and instead just making everyone share the same, limited perspective (Heck, the turned Jeckie into a giant snake… and then gave her arms, so we could read her body language better… why would a giant snake want robot arms? I don’t want a robot tail?* Jan isn’t somewhat spacy because he’s flaky… he’s somewhat spacy because he perceives matter differently, and has a hard time even remotely grasphing concepts of possession, or permanance, or death.
Saturn Girl isn’t pragmatic, because it’s an extention of her desire for control, or peace, or some kind of moral imperitive – she’s just been raised in a society that’s to some extent a psychic open-book. Much of our laws about freedom and rights (and justice) are because we can’t ever know what someone’s actual intent is behind their actions or what their capacity to act on those intents are. Titanians have no such limitations.
Put another way, wouldn’t a *better* gun control legislation be to just refuse to sell guns to anyone who is going to (or has the mental capability of) using them to commit a crime? If you can know intent – or capability – there’s a lot less need for freedom or law (which is essentially, a codified system for determining intent and capability retroactively).
(Incidentally this is why I don’t mind the “thought-bubble” that Greg alludes to above… it’s at least a physical reminder that all the Legionnaires aren’t just “humans with funny foreheads”).
Wow I typo-ed and mis-spelled the bejeebers out of that response. Score one for assuming my browsers spellcheck plugin was turned on.
And also, I now wish I had a robot tail a little bit.
But don’t we all, Brad? Isn’t that what makes us men?
once he realized they were sentient intelligences
Sapient, please. Sentient means “responds to sensory input” and includes common insects, for example.
The B5/SG conflict makes amazing sense, and would be a reason I would read your Legion.
Brainiac knows EXACTLY where pragmatism can lead.
Remember, Paul Levitz was way ahead of you in terms of badass Saturn Girl in The Universo Project. Universo has Mon-El and Ultra Boy as his bodyguards, Imra comes in, and a second or so later Universo’s reaction is something like “Two of the most powerful men in the universe, and you just looked at them and they fell down unconsious!?”
Hey, Tom – I’m not saying Saturn Girl as badass is new. I mean, Abnett and Lanning had her going toe-to-toe with the Progenitor, for crissake. I’m just emphasizing that I would carry on the tradition, which has at times been… overlooked.
I think the idea that a ten page slugfest will sell more issues than one or two panels where Saturn Girl goes “I’m going to fuck up your mind. We win now.” resolving every conflict sorta makes it that way. It’s like that old chestnut about Superman not needing the rest of the Justice League since he’s got powers enough to solve pretty much any problem the rest of the League could.
Boobs?
…Rightright, you mean the Terry Pratchett Captain Carrot. The one people will remember now.
*sigh*
(Heck, the turned Jeckie into a giant snake… and then gave her arms, so we could read her body language better… why would a giant snake want robot arms?
1. Because even in the 30th century, I’m not sure if everything is voice activated? As an example, her tail isn’t long enough to, say, operate what would be a eye-level touchpad for a human, without mashing her face into the ground.
2. Because while the rest of her race seems to get by having anthropomorhic racoon servants to do their lifting, Jeka was characterised as wanting a more independent lifestyle, and the arms are both a practical and symbolic step towards that?
Heck, I thought that Jeka-the-Snake was a nice way of diversifying the Legion, along with Gates. If they’re supposed to be a gathering of aliens from all over, it’s nice to see more than just minor variations on the standard humanoid bodyshape.
My thoughts:
1) I just read Volume Two of ‘Showcase Presents: Legion of Super-Heroes’, and I really have considered making a drinking game for the series in which you take a sip every time Saturn Girl is present and fails to use her telepathy when such a thing would be useful. But I don’t want people to die of alcohol poisoning.
2) Actually, I do want a robot tail. Tell me that wouldn’t be cool.
I like the way that Imra uses telepathy instead of spaking aloud – why would a race of telepaths need to use their vocal cords under anything like normal circumstances?
Although now that I’ve asked the question, it occurs to me that it would make a useful skill to develop if one wanted to exchange information with another Saturnian without fear of telepathic eavesdropping… Hmmm. Yeah, definitely start off with Imra never speaking, then teaching herself to do so for the times when pragmatism dictates that it’s needed.