literally any x-team can be improved by adding lorna dane. marvel has no excuses not to have her appear in literally everything
Marvel has even less excuse when considering that a) there’s a popular idea of her on TV, and b) this month, I mean this month we’re on right now, October 2018, is her 50th anniversary.
If Marvel can give Multiple Man, Longshot, Lockjaw, Shatterstar, all sorts of characters a solo, mini or oneshot despite there being nothing out there to “justify” it, then Marvel has no acceptable excuse for not doing anything with Lorna under current circumstances.
Further, Marvel doing nothing right now means that if circumstances change, Marvel still has no excuse. Marvel doesn’t get to completely ignore Lorna’s value at the height of her popularity and then use “she’s not popular enough” as an excuse if things take a downturn.
Pietro (age 12 and 3 minutes) – impatient, irritable, irritating, smart-aleck, fiercely protective of his “baby sisters,” highly suspicious of outsiders, constantly (and futilely) trying to please Dad, angry that he’s the oldest, but still shorter than his siblings.
Wanda (age 12) – reclusive, very sheltered up bringing, longs for the chance to know more about the world – and especially kids her own age, gets on better with teens/adults than her peers, misuses slang constantly, tries too hard to “be cool,” really into ballet
Lorna aka “Lori” (age 10 and three quarters) – the youngest, but tall as all heck, bubbly if a little shy, a major dork (note the Tamagotchi pet), tends to get and keep friends by letting them take advantage of her kindness and generosity, can change moods in a red-hot minute, has a raging crush on an older guy (she even makes her own t-shirts in his honor)
In recent years, physicists and neuroscientists have developed an armory
of tools that can sense certain kinds of thoughts and transmit
information about them into other brains. That has made brain-to-brain
communication a reality.
These tools include electroencephalograms (EEGs) that record
electrical activity in the brain and transcranial magnetic stimulation
(TMS), which can transmit information into the brain.
Lorna can affect the brain by electromagnetic stimulation. Here’s more detail.
TMS manipulates brain activity by inducing electrical activity in
specific brain areas. For example, a magnetic pulse focused onto the
occipital cortex triggers the sensation of seeing a flash of light,
known as a phosphene.
Got it? Good, cause here’s what that means.
Stocco and his colleagues have created a network that allows three
individuals to send and receive information directly to their brains.
They say the network is easily scalable and limited only by the availability of EEG and TMS devices.
And:
“A cloud-based brain-to-brain interface server could direct information
transmission between any set of devices on the brain-to-brain interface
network and make it globally operable through the Internet,
thereby allowing cloud-based interactions between brains on a global
scale,” Stocco and his colleagues say. “The pursuit of such
brain-to-brain interfaces has the potential to not only open new
frontiers in human communication and collaboration but also provide us
with a deeper understanding of the human brain.”
Past installments of this Tumblr post series included how Lorna’s powers could be used in a pseudo-psychic manner. I say “pseudo” because I always got the impression that mutant psychic powers were semi/pseudo-spiritual in nature, not biological. The difference is, when I talked about it in the past, it was about how Lorna could use her powers on individual people or with a small group.
This article reveals an important new detail: Lorna could connected to the whole world in a pseudo-psychic manner, regardless of distance, as long as the connections are there. She may not even need Cerebro to boost her powers at all. She may be her own Cerebro, guided by lines and signals already created anywhere with an internet connection.
Imagine how powerful that would make her.
Imagine a villain trying to control the world into doing its bidding, and Lorna fights with that villain via the internet.
Imagine an evil! Lorna, maybe an AU or her own M-Day/Dark Phoenix moment, where heroes need to find a safe haven without any kind of internet access OR ability for satellites to detect them.
There are so many stories that could be told with this application of powers.
I want to point out something exceedingly important.
Marvel’s attitude is that Polaris is just fine where she is. That she’s not important enough or deserving enough of use and good treatment to get either of those things unless she achieves absurd conditions that Shatterstar, Multiple Man and many others never need to fill. A version of her can be the breakout star of a TV show, it can be her 50th anniversary, and yet that’s still supposedly not enough.
Even when it was enough for Blink when they thought she would be the show’s breakout star. They had no problem with bringing back Exiles, and putting Blink on a team, when they thought the show would be her big moment. But when it turns out to be the big moment for Lorna, suddenly they can’t do anything.
So Marvel has this narrative. “Things are fine.”
They’re not, though. And there’s a blatantly obvious piece of evidence that supports this claim: everyone, everyone that talks about her level of use thinks she deserves better than she’s getting.
One of the personal experiences I commonly share is that when I first discovered Polaris, back in 2009, and said she needed to return from space, some guy said she should stay in space limbo to “keep her away from characters that matter.”
I never see that kind of badmouthing anymore.
What I see instead, all the time, is how she’s not getting the respect and use she deserves.
Nobody ever says Lorna’s been in too much, that she’s gotten more than she deserves, that she’s overhyped. That never happens. The message is always that she isn’t getting all the things that she should be getting. That she’s a much better character than Marvel ever gives her credit for.
If Marvel’s attitude about Lorna not being important or worthwhile enough was true, I’d be the only person saying any of these things. Instead, many, many other people think the exact same thing I do. If I died right now, the complaints would keep coming from all those other people.
hi!! first of all your english is great! and i LOVE this request i am so happy (i will post more of them separately later this week in case that’s what you really wanted)
salarta 