Okay everybody, welcome to a new installment of 'Achi Explains Why This Random WoG Is Actually Interesting'! Today's topic, my favorite dipshit, Morningstar!
Specifically the color used for his powers and how it changes, because I remembered I'd seen something and had to go recheck it.
According to Dwayne McDuffie, the reason his powers go all black is because is those instances they are absorbing all stray energy around them, including light. Which is wild just to start with because it means the boy is fueling himself with light which is just, so thematically appropriate. But it gets better, for a few reasons.
The most obvious is, since this shit is absorbing light, how clearly we see Mike when he's covered with that aura has to be for the audience's benefit. I mean, logically that's the case for him anyway even when he's normal or golden, that energy aura is probably bright enough to obscure him, but this is in the exact opposite direction. Under normal or overly-fed conditions he's probably difficult to see with the aura going on because the brightness obscures him to different levels. But when things go black, boy is probably shadowed as fuck, if not straight up void depending on just how much of the light is being eaten. Which is also thematically appropriate- the difference between encountering a mass of light in the shape of a teenager and encountering a mass of shadow in the shape of a teenager.
(Note: The light thing also applies to other characters who have periods of being surrounded by that glow effect, such as Gwen. From an in-universe pov they are probably a lot less obviously themselves aside from fucking colors, just a mass of light for however long.)
Building off of this, those energy beams would, themselves, in-universe likely come across more as beams of shadow or void depending. Which is probably a big part of why fuckers did not connect 'fucker showing up draining energy from people' to 'the other fucker we dealt with who went around draining energy from people' quicker.
But while this is interesting for me, a fanwriter who needs to know what fuckers are looking at in case I need to describe it, there's another angle that I find as much if not more interesting.
I don't know if the guy has control over this. Because the only times we see this effect when he's not withered are when he's just used said energy absorption to fix himself, at which point the next time he uses his powers they're back to being all golden light. Even in situations like his fight with Ben and Kevin in his premiere, where there should be no reason for him to not be going all out and for more. It's not like he's having to keep up the 'goodness and light' look, ya know, they've seen behind the curtain already. And if the beams and such themselves are absorbing energy, enough so to counteract the natural glow (which, by the way, the glow would itself be an expelling of energy, I've covered that before) then that would mean that they're probably more efficient for him, fuckers are at minimum feeding themselves. So, logically, he should be going for this version as much as he can so long as it's not damaging the persona he's putting out, especially in things like his fight with Ben in OV, he should be wanting to hold onto as much energy as he can after everything. He's not stupid, he'd notice that 'if I use my powers like this they're less energy expensive'.
If he can control that. But if he can't, and it's only something his body does automatically when he's in that rough, withered state...
Well there's a couple of reasons that becomes interesting.
Just as a start, the tying of his state to this altering of his powers. We already know he's, understandably, more than a little upset about his condition, and this right here only has to build on that. Suddenly his powers don't work quite the same, more efficiently yes, but, the change itself would be another on the pile of the transition from Morningstar to Darkstar.
Or if you consider him a mutant, looking at it from that angle it puts him of a kind with Cooper in a way- both with mostly control over their powers but not full control.
And then, alongside that, myself and others have already hit on how, between how he does things, how he describes he and Kevin's shared hunger, a part of Mike's whole deal is likely a desire for a sense of control. And oh how that ties back to reason one- how it must fucking burn for him to know that he can't control this. That he can't choose to be able to do this, despite these being his powers, a natural extension of himself.
But the most interesting side of all this, as someone who writes the bastard- the realization that this is the most efficient his powers get, their most effective at doing what he wants/needs from them, and it's only when he's at his lowest. He can be powerful, he can be beautiful, or his powers can work at their best. He can't have both. One has to be sacrificed for the other. And it's Mike, we know which one he goes for, it's the same one we'd all go for let's be honest, but even if at the end of the day he came out on top, and he was beautiful and powerful, you can just see how it would nag at him. Every time he used his powers to absorb from someone/thing and didn't get quite as much as he could once upon a time. Every time he reached his limit on how much he could use his powers before using too much energy and was reminded that for a while that limit was higher.
Just, that one fucking sentence from McDuffie, and we get a nice little bundle of options to twist into Morningstar to see what happens.
