Not cliche at all!

It’s really hard to choose a favorite moment. I don’t think I can do it. There’s multiple moments that mean so much to me, and most of them revolve around the Genoshan genocide.

There’s New X-Men #132, where you see Lorna being pulled from the wreckage of Genosha, containing the final moments of millions of Genoshans that were killed in the attack – culminating in Magneto’s powerful words. It’s such an emotional moment to consider all that horror and pain she had to live and relive, how it affected her personally.

There’s Uncanny X-Men #430-431. You see her as she finds out about her father, as people praise and look up to her… and then as the sentinels come and kill everyone, Lorna struggling just to survive even while everyone begs for her to save them. There’s so much pain in wanting to be more, but not managing to do it, and a sort of call to action for her that she needs to push herself harder to make sure that never happens again.

There’s Uncanny X-men #443 (I think), where she confronts Xavier about the need for force. In that precise moment, she’s perfectly encapsulating everything that X-Men franchise represents in the sense of how mutants should react to prejudice from humans. It goes right back to her introductory issues of having to figure out who she is, whether she should follow Xavier or Magneto, only here she’s her own middle ground stance.

I think you see a pattern here: the moments that get me most are the ones that actually acknowledge she’s experienced trauma, and explore that with empathy and humanity. Moments where she’s not a caricature, but a person who’s trying to become better despite the horrors she’s experienced. That’s peak Lorna for me. The comics tend to be too obsessed with action and “the pecking order” and don’t pay enough attention to raw emotion.

As far as power moments, though? Closest I can cite is her “bridezilla” bit in Uncanny X-men #425-426.

There are problems with it, and I wouldn’t want to see anything like it involving Havok written any time soon. But – it really feels like a powerful moment for her story-wise. It’s a moment where she’s fed up with being screwed with, and she shows she means business. Donning a Magneto-esque costume in it is to me an excellent move. Unlike so many cases out there, it wasn’t about saying Lorna’s moment is only thanks to Magneto being her dad. Instead, the Magneto-esque costume is symbolic of her becoming a hell of a lot more vicious and no-holds-barred, throwing out the nicer side of who she is. It’s not in service to saying how “great” Magneto is; it’s in service to demonstrating how dark Lorna is at that moment and how far she’s willing to go.

It was also generally a great moment of repudiating general attitude by people of “Lorna’s a worthless weakling compared to other characters.” Here she is, demanding the respect she’d been denied both in the real world and in the comics themselves for decades. It’s like a warning to have some actual compassion for her and what she’s been through. Almost like a fable or a mythological cautionary tale.

Not saying the surrounding story was necessarily a masterpiece or anything. Just that I feel Chuck Austen and Philip Tan did a great job of making her feel like a dangerous badass you do not want to mess with.

This is a ridiculously long post and I could probably go on forever and ever. Thanks for asking!