The Reason I've Been Spiraling
Rahne Sinclair, before becoming a mutant, had been taught to constantly feel shame for her existence.
She was born to a sex worker and a Reverend, her mother dying in childbirth. The Reverend raises her in the church, but doesn't tell her he's her biological father, too ashamed of himself. Instead, he pushes that guilt onto Rahne, telling her that not only her conception and mother was of "sin", that her mother dying was her fault as well. He told her that she had to make up for the "sins" of her mother for her entire life. It doesn't help that she was also in a small, highly religious town, and therefore unable to know of a different point of view. She lived in a God centered environment, and it was made very clear to her that God hated her existence.
It has been etched into her from a very young age to climb this never ending hill to make up for her being born, to preach and breathe what she's told as "the word of God", to accept the shame spewed out to her from her guardian as something that is just.
And when she became a mutant, became a werewolf, for her it just further proved that she was someone sinful. Especially because, when she becomes a wolf all her human made shames disappear, gaining the more wild and free mindset of being a wild animal. But then when she's back as a human, she feels the learned shame even harder because she was able to forget. She feels like her form is some demonic thing, that allowing herself a freedom is her straying so far from "morality" that she can't even see it.
And now here she is, thrown into a completely different environment from the suffocating one from back home, and unsure how to cope. She's given the freedom of choice and action, and of course she falls back on what she's always known, to speak the rhetoric she's always known. But when she's met with people who don't believe the same thing, to people who aren't the same as those she's been surrounded with her whole life, she doesn't know what to do.
A habit of Rahne's has been to lash out through her words, to douse others in shame, taking up the role of the Reverend without him around. She lashes out when she sees something "sinful" in others that she also sees in herself (the absolute picture of the cycle of abuse).
Then Illyana comes into the picture.
Illyana's life has centered around violence. As a very young child she was kidnapped into limbo and abused by a sorcerer, forcing her to fight demons that abuse her as well. He quite literally bound her soul. Then, when she thought she had a ray of hope, a chance to be saved, she was forced to kill them, to do what she was always forced to do; enact violence to avoid a worse violence.
She managed to kill the sorcerer, her abuser, the man who has been her caregiver for most of her life. And she inherits the very place that had been her place of torture, control over the demons that have done nothing but harmed her, her soul still forever bound. She knows she can never escape this place, that she's only taken further root. Then she comes home, only to see almost no time has passed, disorienting her from the world. Limbo seems closer to something of a home than the world.
From Illyana's perspective, she feels forever tangled up in the evil she's endured, making her now think herself evil too, an extension of limbo and the demons and the sorcerer (her abuser) she's now been forced to replace.
In response to this trauma, Illyana numbs herself into a sort of reluctant acceptance of thinking herself as something aligned with "evil". She distances herself from these thoughts but thinks of it as a truth all the same, feeling alienated from others because of this, even (and perhaps especially) other mutants. This trauma response of being able to emotionally shut down bleeds through into high pressure situations where decisions need to be made. Including when in battle, which can give others the impression that she's a colder person than she is, only helping in thinking herself alienated.
So we have these two teens, both thinking they're evil incarnate, likening themselves to demons for different reasons. While Rahne copes by lashing out, Illyana numbs herself to the idea. And when brought together, we have Rahne projecting her shame onto her, only to be met with minimal reaction from Illyana due to a mix of her coping mechanisms and what Rahne's saying is already what she thinks of herself (unstoppable force vs immovable object core). In each other they see what they think of themselves.
So there I was, fully invested in the story line surrounding these two, already envisioning it. To see how they'd hurt each other with their coping mechanisms, Rahne thinking Illyana is completely blocking her out when she lashes out, making her want to go even further. For Illyana to see Rahne as nothing more than her thoughts reflected back to her. To have that slowly morph and shift as time passes and their forced to see each other as full human beings. To get to a point where they understand each other, and in that understanding, breaking through the idea that they themselves are evil. OR, taking a darker route, their dynamic just further continues the cycle of self hatred in themselves, the toxicity only breeding more toxicity and leading them down darker paths as they feed into the other (I'd prefer the previous route but either way it'd be interesting).
I did quickly come to terms that it probably wouldn't happen in the 1983-1991 issues, since it kind of has the style of just jumping from plotline to plotline rather than deeply explore one plotline along with the characters' dynamics (it'll suddenly go deep into a character's psychology and I'm hooked and in the next issue we're just doing something completely different and we'll never address it again and I was slowly breaking down). And I thought surely, we'd see it in different runs.
I've been scouring, trying to find a crumb of their potential dynamic anywhere, only for the well to run dry. The plot for these characters I'd already crafted in my head went nowhere and I didn't know how to cope other than this.
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