Thursday, May 05, 2011

Who Determines The View Inside Rogue's Mind?

Originally typed Sunday, but posting today.

Rogue used to (and may still) have traces or imprints of all the people she's ever absorbed memories or abilities of. There have been at least a couple of stories where she's inside her own mind, trying to fight them off because they're just a little unhappy with the situation.

Here's what I was wondering. Do those imprints appearances change over time? If it's someone Rogue has frequent contact with over the years, and they change how they look or act in the real world, does that carry over to Rogue's mind? I was thinking of this in terms of how Rogue perceives them, whether her will determines is able to alter how they look, or whether they retain enough of their individual selves to maintain the look they choose.

I'm going to guess that even when Rogue's at her strongest, they look how they choose, which is how they remember themselves. Though it'd be interesting if that wasn't uniform, if only imprints of people with strong wills, did that. So, the bit of Captain America she picked up always looks like Cap, but Joe Schmoe, random Genoshan Magistrate will shift how he looks on the mindscape according to Rogue's thoughts. If she perceives him as a monster, he looks it. If she sees him as a weak, pathetic figure, that's how he appears.

I was initially thinking of this in terms of people Rogue knows and talks to (or fights with) over the years, but it could also apply to people Rogue's absorbed powers from more than once. If she drew from Wolverine once in the '80s, when he had the brown costume, then again during the Morrison leather uniform years, would the Logan in her mind change? Or would there be two, since the later Wolverine has new experiences and memories, and isn't the same as the earlier one.

It reminds me of Ultron Unlimited, when Ultron's captured some of the Avengers and is taking recording of their engrams. He notices Vision's new patterns are different than the older ones. The answer being Vision has grown and learned new things since then, so he's not the same, and a robot given those engrams presumably wouldn't behave the same as one uploaded with the earlier file.

1 comment:

Matthew said...

I would say that they, being basically 'snapshots' of a person's mind, would appear in whatever form that person perceived themselves (not necessarily how they did look) at the time of the contact.

As to what would happen on subsequent visits, surely using Wolverine as your example isn't fair because he's everywhere anyway! More seriously, I would say that in such a case it would be more likely to just 'overwrite' or update the previous impression unless that person's self-image had changed dramatically - for example, I would think that if Rogue sampled early Peter Parker and then again when he was doing his 'the Spider' shtick, there might well be two different entities as Peter had two very different mindsets at those times.