Imagine being so petty that you decide to sabotage your sister’s wedding by issuing an ultimatum to her would-be husband in the form of making him choose between his memories of his home planet, or his symbolic loyalty to the empire he’s marrying into.
Those, dear readers, are the depths that the malicious Deathbird, the latest villain to role up in X-Men ’97, was willing to stoop to in order to prevent Charles Xavier from marrying Lilandra, playing upon the former’s nearly limitless love for his dear X-Men (who have found themselves in the direst straits yet)—a love that’s all but ready to bring him back to Earth as tensions boil to an all-time high.
And we have a sneaking suspicion that this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Deathbird, so what can we expect going forward?
Who is Deathbird?
Deathbird is the sister of Lilandra, the current Empress of the Shi’ar Empire. In case her name isn’t enough of a clue, she’s not a friendly face to the X-Men and their allies, and there’s a good-to-fair chance that Deathbird is going to do as she tends to do in the comics and seek to usurp the Shi’ar throne from Lilandra.
We saw Deathbird in the original animated series before, where she unwillingly served as one of Apocalypse’s four Horsemen. This also happens in the comics, and from that, we know that her Horsemen title is War.
Read that again: Deathbird, a villain who once had a title that was literally War, has shown up in X-Men ’97 and is not-so-subtly aiming to take control of the Shi’ar Empire, all on what appears to be the eve of a mutant-human war back on Earth. If that isn’t foreshadowing for Shi’ar’s involvement in the X-Men’s most severe conflict yet, then we certainly know what the overarching plot of season two is going to be.
(featured image: Disney+)
