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Character Basics

Character Name: Raven Darkhölme / Mystique
Character Canon: X-Men (Films)
Canon Type: Movie

Character In-Depth

Tell us about your character's history:
[Given the film series’ lack of depth on Mystique’s back-story, I’m going to have to go pretty broadstrokes on her life before meeting Charles and pull on a few lines dropped throughout the entire series, as they are apparently all canon now]

Raven Darkhölme was born to a couple who were more than likely to have been X-gene carriers rather than mutants themselves, as their apparent horror and dismay over their daughter having been born a blue-skinned, yellow-eyed shapeshifter led them to attempt to kill her when she was still quite young, no more than ten years old. That was the night Raven ran away from home and never returned.

Scared and alone, it was all ten year old Raven could do to survive, using her shape-shifting ability to sneak into homes and stores in her search for something to eat, a warm place to sleep for the night, and more often than not having to imitate adults who belonged to those places in order to distract any unwanted attention away from who she really was and allow her to escape back into the night. Until, that was, she was caught raiding the fridge at the Xavier mansion and was discovered for who she was by the then twelve year old Charles Xavier.

He was the first person to have ever accepted who she was, to not be afraid of her in her blue natural state, and where Raven would have to admit she fell in love in a heartbeat, the love she felt for Charles then (as ever) was nothing but familial. While she watched in disbelief, he invited her to stay, promised her safety and acceptance where she had found neither while at school or at home, and she never forgot that fact. At her thereafter brother’s advice, she took the shape she is most comfortable using as camouflage, that of a blue-eyed, blonde girl. She wore clothes, she attended school, she socialized, but never did she feel as if she truly fit into the world Charles walked through so easily.

Despite the fact that there were only two years between them, being under Charles’ protection and her own discomfort with walking through the world under a mask (though she did not then see it as such) kept something of Raven childish and naive. Beside Charles’ brilliance, she often felt dull and unremarkable, but where he went, she could not but follow. He went off to Oxford to wow the academic world (and drink and sing and dance in bars), she came with and worked as a waitress to pay her part of the rent. He left to join Moira McTaggert’s work in convincing the CIA of the threat and capability of mutants like Shaw, she went and…demonstrated.

While Charles and his newly picked up companion, Erik Lensharr, collected fellow mutants to join their cause, Raven was caught up less in the thrill of a cause and an enemy than in being surrounded by mutants for the first time in her life. She had friends, people who thought her ability was amazing and who she laughed and drank and spoke with without the least bit of self-consciousness, although she rarely showed her true blue form around them, a lingering disquiet over who she really looked like never having left her. It felt as if they were immortal, that they stood on the cusp of some grand new future, down to tipsily choosing new names for themselves to match their new roles (Mystique chose her own, as well as that of Erik, though Charles’ was more or less a collective effort). Despite the fact that she knew that there was a mutant out in the world they were meant to be fighting against, Raven would have to have admitted that until he appeared at the CIA facility and killed Darwin, she had had no real idea of what that danger was.

Returning to the Xavier mansion brought back memories of both the life she had lived before Charles had taken her in, and the life she had lived by his side. While she threw herself into training for his and Erik’s cause, Raven was torn between their motto of ‘mutant and proud’ and her own dislike of her true form, hating even to look at her reflection in the mirror more often than not. Hank, sweet, friendly Hank, believed he could create a vaccine and make them both look ‘normal,’ the prospect too tempting to resist, for all that it ended in abject failure and Hank only heightened his beast-like appearance.

Her hopes crushed, and along with it the fragile might-have-been with Hank as they pulled away from each other in the wake of that experiment, Raven was taken entirely off-guard by Erik’s suggestion that her…blue-ness not be something she should be ashamed of. That it was something worthy of admiration, and when her first (and second, if you count her upping her age for a brief moment) attempt at seducing him in the shape of that blue-eyed, blonde girl failed her, and he instead slid into bed and became the first man to kiss her in the shape of who she really was, it felt as if the world had spun onto a new axis.

She saw then, as she never had before, that while Charles could not seem to accept her so easily blue (or, rather, that he thought she should learn to blend in as he did so easily), she did not need to feel the same hate and disgust for her blue form as her parents had. As so much of the world would not understand. Although she would have admitted easily to being infatuated by the handsome and charming mutant, it was the desire to strike out and be seen, as well as the first-hand knowledge of how humans reacted to mutants in their ignorance, that drove her to leave with him on that beach in Cuba.

The future, it seemed, looked bright.

At least, that was, until Erik was accused of assassinating the president and was captured, leaving Mystique and the others who had chosen to follow him with no leader and no plan. Everything fell apart then, their group torn apart by their inability to work together without him. She attempted to keep track of each of them all the same, scrambling in her attempt to continue Erik’s plan and at a loss of how to proceed beyond her overwhelming desire to protect her fellow mutants from the evil that humans, in their ignorance and hatred, could wreak upon her kind. They lost so many - Angel, Azazeal, Banshee and Emma Frost - to ambushes and while she worked furiously to subvert humans like Trask, like Stryker, like her parents, she learned of their fates too late to do more than read the details of their autopsies in Bolivar Trask’s files.

Killing Trask seemed like the only way to keep him from his campaign to destroy all those like her. Finally, it seemed, she had a mission of her own. One of worth, that could have a lasting impact in protecting her fellow mutants. And then it all went sideways. Rather than her executing Trask for his crimes, she was interrupted and shot with Stryker’s taser, leaving her shaking and senseless on the conference table as Charles told her how he and Erik had come to save her. The moment Erik chose instead to become her would-be killer was one she was sure never to forget, her former lover now taking on the same role as her parents had so long ago. Once again she fled, terrified for her life and betrayed, only to be shot and dragged across the Parisian street in front of a crowd of onlookers, as if her nightmares had been lit and come to life.

That Hank was the one to save her while Charles stood idly by (no one having explained that he could not have given into her pleading and stopped Erik before he could kill her) and Erik insisted she had to die, is a fact Mystique is unlikely to ever forget. That timely save allowed her room enough to escape and make it to a hospital far enough out of the way to assure something of safety as she began to heal from the grievous damage the path of Erik’s bullet had carved through her leg.

If anything, Charles and Erik’s intervention assured her that she needed to be the one to kill Trask. That she needed to prove herself an active role in the war Erik had spoken of between man and mutant (”I know what I have to do. It’s us or them.”). Charles’ continued attempts to control her, to collar her and treat her as if she were still that little, half-starved girl he found in his kitchen chafed all the more for the importance of her mission. Erik’s speaking of why he had attacked her, and of his disinterest in continuing said plan, to her did nothing to undo the betrayal he’d already committed.

As intent as she was in her vengeance, Mystique still could not allow Erik to murder the president and all his men on live television. Perhaps there was something of revenge in slipping out under the guise of Nixon, only to shoot Erik in the throat and destroy his focus, but for all that she had followed him in the past, she knew that his way was not the way. Not any longer. Not for her.

Had Charles attempted to control her rather than finally allow her to make her own choice in the matter, Mystique is fairly certain she still would have killed Trask then and there. He had done too much to her, to those she cared for, and she firmly believed he had to be made to pay. Only knowing that she could make a stand and prove a mutant could do the right thing, with all the world watching, stayed her hand. It did not make the decision to lower her gun any easier. It likely would not allow her to sleep any more soundly. But it was what was right to do.

Tell us about your chosen exit point, why you chose it, and why you want to play the character at All Inclusive:

Mystique exits her canon immediately after the end of Days of Future Past, perhaps a day or two after where she’s been able to take a breath and at least begun to make her plans to get out of the city (likely staying at a cheap motel somewhere or ‘borrowing’ a hotel key for an unoccupied room in one of the ritzier places in the city while she figures out her next step). The fact that she was finally able to make a choice for herself without her hand being forced one way or another (although Charles right there, staring at her and insisting she shouldn’t shoot the president isn’t the kind of influence you can ignore in the situation) is integral to her character. She spent the entire movie shoved one way or another, told she had to choose between Erik and Charles’ ideals (”Are you Charles’ Raven or my Mystique?”), all the while just trying to protect her fellow mutants in what seemed like the only plan that would have an effect.

She’s lost absolutely everything - her brother, her one-time lover and leader, a clear understanding of how to protect those like her, her friends, her home - all but her mutant abilities. All Inclusive for her would be a safe haven that might allow her time and space enough to figure out her own philosophy, separate from Charles and Erik, investigate new connections to other people, roll her eyes at Erik and his dramatic speeches, sigh over Charles’ belief that he knows the way above all others, as well as give her sanctuary as she figures out her future plans.

Admittedly, there is also the fun that her preferred camouflage form might cause some hijinks with Katniss and her crew (harmless hijinks, I swear, but I do love a good mistaken identity mini plot)

Tell us about your character's personality:

Mystique is, at her core, conflicted. For so much of her life she was Charles Xavier’s adopted little sister, the one who listened and nodded as he went on his lengthy speeches about might not making right, of mutation and equality. She was the daughter who had been betrayed and attacked by the people who were supposed to have loved her unconditionally, not try to drown her in the bath. As much as she tried, she never fit in. Not in her hometown, not in Westchester, and not in Oxford. The instability of her shape-shifting, or at least her inability to remain long in one form without hints of her blue-skinned, golden-eyed one bleeding through, and the fear of what might happen if she were to be exposed as a mutant as had been left in the wake of her parents’ attack kept her from truly connecting with anyone around her outside of Charles.

The events of 1962 really began defining who she was, or at least who she might want to be, outside of her connection to Charles. For once she was able to walk around in her own blue skin and not feel the same urge to hide who and what she was. For once it felt as if she belonged to some larger, greater picture, and while she was then torn between Charles’ belief of a peaceful coexistence with humans and Erik’s of a need to dominate humanity with their greater power, there was suddenly choice beyond hiding in the shadows.

Had she not been shown how badly humans could react to mutant-kind by virtue of her own parents’ actions, or if she and Hank had been stronger in accepting what showed them as different from the rest of the world, there might have been something there beyond the simple realms of their friendship. Had Erik been a man anything other than what he was, she might have fallen entirely in love with him and (quite possibly) lost her independence before she had ever really caught hold of it. As it was, her infatuation hardly had time to become anything more before he was buried under endless concrete beneath the Pentagon and she was left on her own to remake herself again, this time in her own image.

Mystique’s loyalty has shifted from Charles (although he will always hold a piece of her heart, and he will always be her brother), to Erik, and finally to settle on the larger view of belonging to mutant-kind as a whole. She has dedicated herself to the belief that they should not have to fear humanity, that they should be able to walk openly without fear or shame, that they should be in the end ‘mutant and proud.’ Her loyalty belongs to her friends, and while she has allowed herself to become detached again from any close-knit group as she had once so dearly longed to be a part of, she enjoys her independences. As lonely as she can be at times, she does believe what she does is necessary and where she sees the world as a whole as being a hostile and dangerous place, she is not without hope that one day it can be better.

Outside of her role in the affairs of mutant-kind, Mystique remains irreverent, both willing and able to call those around her out on their arrogance and dramatics (Erik), ignorance of how it feels to stand in someone else’s shoes (Charles, no pun intended), and for the wrongs she believes need to be made right. She hopes for peace, but believes in action. Where Erik asked her in 1973 whether she was his Mystique or Charles Raven, she is neither and both. She is her own Mystique, her independence hard-won and as ferociously defended as her freedom. Time has made it difficult to trust those around her, every moment she had allowed someone to get close only having served to hurt her more at their leaving (whether it was voluntary or not).

Prose example post(s):

The bitter cold was made little better by the new layer of cloth she wove around herself at a thought, her sweater shaken out to become a thick and heavy coat, her light shoes made thick-soled boots. She shivered against the cold, cursing Erik and everyone else beneath her breath more out of habit than for her current predicament being the fault of anyone but herself, and continued her trudge through the deep snow toward the dim light in the distance.

The snow was never so obliging as to flutter lightly down around her as it did in the cheery (if faded) little Christmas cards she had seen at her last stop for the candy bars whose wrappers then lined her pockets and the coffee she had warmed her hands on before burning her tongue on its acrid taste. It fell instead in droves, nearly sheets of thick, white layers that obscured her vision and made each step feel as if it took more effort than the one before.

“This better be worth it,” she muttered, lifting her head again to mark the light as still ahead of her before she tucked her chin back in the lip of her coat. “Who in their right mind goes to Canada?” Another look at the glow ahead and she nearly groaned, it seeming to have not moved in the slightest for all her heading for it. “Abominable snow mutants?” She snorted at the thought, catching a hand at the strap of the pack at her shoulder and adjusted its weight across her pack. The rumor of a half-man, half-monster had leaked south along the trucking lines, passed from man to man in those late drawn out hours at the cafe where the coffee had grown stale and burnt at the bottom of the pot, the long hours carved in deep bruises beneath every drivers’ eyes as they contemplated their next bedding down in the back of their cab. Desperate as she had been for the suggestion of something to do and caught by the whispered suggestion of ‘mutant’, she had to wonder if she weren’t simply chasing ghosts.

“What kind of name is ‘Sabertooth’ anyway?” she grumbled, trudging on.