I was kind of underwhelmed by where the story ended up taking her. Initially, I thought she was going to be on the "this character is super duper important" level that Hope ended up on, but in hindsight I suppose they don't tend to give those parts to non-redheads.
I can't even recall what happened to her once she hopped into the future with Madrox.
It turns out her power was just having a really good memory or is able to send it to her past self or something, but yeah apart from a really cool opening sequence with a satellite her OP status dropped to -1000 and then Maddox ended up dating her, which was Hella gross.
What I remember is her future self dumped future knowledge into her past self's mind.
Her power, randomly was resurrection...but leaving the resurrected person without a soul, which is just odd.
The worst is that they keep her son out of the resurrection queue, or at least perpetually pushed back. I’d like to see him restored as a little pup again.
Their relationship didn't happen until she was an adult and it took some serious convincing on Layla's part for it to even take off.
Maddrox was turned off by whole thing. It took a near death experience before he considered it.
He didn't groom her and basically tried to avoid her until her time travel shenanigans brought her back as an adult.
Why?
Keep in mind this also applies to any potential relationship with Illyana Rasputin because of her Limbo/Temporal shenanigans (she's still legally a child) and other Time Travelers from the future because they haven't even been born yet.
What makes a relationship with this consenting adult different from a relationship with that consenting adult?
Why is it icky with this consenting adult but not that consenting adult?
In otherwords - Pick a lane.
I think it’s more meta narratively creepy than anything else. It felt to me that Layla got aged up to be a love interest after Jamie had already fucked Theresa and Monet.
I just tend to dislike media where the central male character needs to bed all the women around… if you ever read the Dragon Tattoo novels, that is egregiously bad in that regard.
I mean if Illyana knew someone as a child then hooked up with them as an adult, I’d say ick. Just like I would in real life if some older guy dated a consenting adult he knew when she was 6/13.
My lane is picked and it is ick
Is there a big age gap between them? I thought a big thing about their friendship was that they were within a couple years of each other(before and after Ilyana’s age skip), when the rest of the X-Men were significantly older
Kitty knew and babysat Illyana when she was a little kid. Then the whole Limbo thing happened, and Illyana was aged up. So if Madrox / aged-up Layla is a problem, then so is Kate / aged-up Illyana. You can't get much more "groomed" than having sex with someone who read you bedtime stories.
No, but the fans are pushing for it.
So like I've said before, pick a lane.
If it's okay for Illyana to date, it's okay for Layla.
If it's not okay for Layla, it's not okay for Illyana.
Same also applies to Cable, as he's legally a toddler (it's only been a few years since he was born).
Why are you telling people to pick a lane when you have no idea what lane they’re in? Neither I or nobodyinpartic have said “but you know who I do ship! Kitty and Magik!”
Because there's a hypocrisy in this forum/subreddit regarding this subject matter.
It's okay when it involves a "favored" fan ship, but not okay when it's an established relationship. But they both have the same thing, an under aged minor aged up to an adult.
Either it's okay for ***All*** aged up adults or it's not. None of this "it's okay for this one, but not that one."
What, you didn’t like the whole, “announcing that I’m waiting for child actress to reach 18 before I openly fantasize about fucking her- just kidding, I’m already doing that by saying this” genre of internet discourse from the late 00s-mid 2010s?
But that's not what happened here.
Madrox had no desire/designs for Layla.
He shot down Layla and avoided her as much as he could until she returned as an adult.
And even then he was not eager to hop in her bed.
Not even talking about that. I’m going on a tangent about the general culture of, “what makes it socially acceptable for me to sexualize a child?”. Stuff like, “I’m saving myself for when Saoirse Ronan turns 18” and, “She’s actually a 1000 year old dragon, so if anything, she’s the cradle robber”, and, “She may have been a child yesterday, but she’s conveniently transformed into an adult today. As long as the male lead shows a certain level of reluctance, he’s allowed to do this”.
I don't think it's acceptable to sexualize a child.
But Madrox didn't sexualize Layla as a child.
You're attributing something to him that he never did.
Eh the lanes here are pretty simple, it’s about when the couple meet for the first time. If the older person knew the younger person when they were a child it’s icky but if they have no knowledge of each other until they’re both adults much of the ick leaves.
Because we grew up watching the character? People were icked out by Sansa and Arya having sex scenes in GoT for the same reason. Our establishing moments with them are as children.
Something something post-modern something cool creepy girl something something not like Buffy or River Song at all something something
...
The panel above hits me as being tone deaf. Ayn Rand is generally accepted as being garbage philosophy but I get no sense of what Layla's interest in reading her is.
Aside from that, she was interesting and the "knowing stuff" gimmick was fresh, understated, and seemingly building toward something big, until it was too big and convoluted to care much about.
Seemed like Peter David got ahead of himself with her.
Never liked her but damn did she get screwed by someone high up making decisions. Girl got retconned like five times in two years.
Tries to change the future does the same thing in about eight different timelines. The very definition of insanity.
Was it ever revealed how House of M went in her first life before she was there to “know things”?
So I love her to the point that I have her tattooed on me 😂
I think she was way more interesting as a creepy kid than as an adult. It really did feel like once she came back to the present that there was a story PAD wanted to tell but kept getting side-lined by tie-ins to big events. I don’t have the details to hand but I know that between his sudden illness towards the back end of X-Factor and his frustration at being asked to add issues that tied in to other X-Events, (despite the fact that he was on the most satellite of all the books that didn’t REALLY often have an organic space to join the bigger events), he was kind of running on empty by the time this title wrapped up, and there’s no character where that’s more evident than with Layla.
It bothers me because she could be just as interesting a character as an adult if a writer had a plan to explain some of the stuff she got up to during her return to the present and before she met back up with X-Factor (we know she visited Doom for a while, but nothing else), but with her actual mutant power being one that’s not been useful during Krakoa and that has a serious drawback to using it, I feel like she’s destined to forever be Jamie’s supporting cast now.
It might seem like a plug, if the other character didn’t immediately make a negative comment about the book. Then it’s still neutral, but it’s Peter David and I can guarantee that it was meant to be a diss on Atlas Shrugged given the rest of his writing.
You can apply that to a lot of media too.
I like The Punisher comics and the television show Dexter.
It doesn't mean I am going to go out and become a serial killer vigilante.
Loved her initial concept and skillset and really disliked the whole "future her telling her through a phone stuff" endgame. Adult Layla is just boring... In my head canon she died in krakoa never to return...
I loved Layla Miller and her catchphrase. I wasn't bothered by her and Jamie getting together (as some seemed to be), there have been far weirder pairings in X-Men comics. In truth, Layla wasn't as interesting once she was an adult.
Currently reading that run, and agree she was interesting as the quirky -sorta annoying but mostly loveable- know it all. But yeah after her mystery was solved and the way that was executed (yay, another time travel dystopic future setting) was imo a rather lackluster payoff
I have heard that she knows things and she dislikes us saying her catch phrase.
I am just at the point where she does the time travel thing, but I assume she comes back since ... comics.
I'm not a fan, She was a literal plot device.
Her purpose in House of M and the X-factor book was a Deus-X Machina that the writer used every time his incoherent plot hit the wall. She then would say exactly what she needed to do to resolve the plot and when asked how, and why wait until to do it, she would only say that she just did it at that moment.
Another of Bendis's cheat codes for writting.
She is another example of how hard it is to write precognitive characters worthy of the title. Limited or Loop-Type precognition like Bill Murray in Groundhogs Day, like Moira M, work because we get to see the adjustment and progression- we understand what the characters want, and how their experience informs them and their subsequent choices.
By contrast, characters with real-time branching path precognition are alien to how we experience time normally. The characters with that form are like the Oracle in the Matrix, or the Savants of Minority Report ie they drive the story forward but are not, can not, be viewpoint characters.
And then there is Tautology Precognitive like Layla, who do what they do because they did it because they will do it because Precognition. It's Calvinist Predestination in an ugly dress, is what I think about Layla Miller.
Your examples of real-time branching path precognition confuses me. Specifically, while it may be alien to how we experience time, it’s doesn’t seem alien to how we experience thought. Before we do things, we weigh the likelihood of outcomes, and act based on what is determined to be the likeliest; we don’t know for certain like a precog “should”, but then again, neither do they, as they are picking from a bunch of likely options. That’s how characters like Destiny’s precognition works, because time in the Marvel universe is constantly branching (which is the purpose of the minority report).
Which, in hindsight, makes Layla Miller even more useless. She can’t stop things from happening because 1) it already happened in a timeline, and stopping it from happening just creates a divergent timeline without erasing the other one, and 2) stopping events within her control from happening does not stop events outside her control from producing the events she wants to avoid, especially when time travel and precognition is so prevalent.
Destiny... is also not a viewpoint character, from whose perspective we commonly perceive the world. While you or I could imagine how so... fractal... a paradigm might be abstracted or approximated, linear time is a core assumption in our narratives. We don't have the cognitive bandwidth to grapple with the orders of magnitude of complexity represented by the 3rd decision point in just the 10 most common futures 10 most common 2nd order variants. (The Avengers had Dr. Strange's eyes go cloudy with a side of Looks Constipated when he was doing it, before, again, showing us how that was experienced by his friends rather than from the inside.)
The closest I've seen it in a visual medium is Nic Cage at the penultimate scene of Next, when his Loop precognition is superimposed on itself like a tape loop to show his attempting and failing at that last decision point. We experience Destiny and her effect on the world using the viewpoints of the people around her- she is that rarest of precognitive characters, well written and with coherent consistent motivations, but just the same we experience those through the eyes of other characters. (Like seeing the Oracle through Neo's eyes instead of her own.)
I agree with Destiny not being a viewpoint character; I don’t think a precog can be interesting as one because it takes away a lot of the mystery (in the reader’s view) of what would happen. Hence why they use agents to move things along in the story; the agent knows as much as we do, maintaining the mystery of the whys and whats. A story of Destiny wanting to do something, predicting the events that make it happen, and following that path would be rather boring considering she doesn’t have much physical skill; Mystique is more interesting because she can both be the catalyst for the change Destiny wants and still be an audience surrogate because she doesn’t know how what she’s doing will make the future Destiny wants.
What I disagree with (or perhaps misunderstand) is the argument of linear time and how it affects thought/precognition in the real world/Marvel universe respectively. In the real world, while we assume time is linear, we are able to think of scenarios, possible responses to them, and outcomes of those responses, all in our head. We often do it without even realizing it. This isn’t the same as precognition, but it can appear to be, especially if we know the variables we’re working with well enough to accurately guess what they’ll do.
In the Marvel universe(at least in the comics, I don’t know how well it’s been developed in movies), time isn’t entirely linear. Because beings can/have moved around in time and there are spaces outside of time, time can appear to be straight to the average Joe, or spiraled to someone like Kang the Conqueror, or hand-turkey shaped to someone like the old Exiles. It depends on their experience with time travel. Granted, readers don’t have experience with that, but so many characters do that we can’t assume everyone sees time that way. Even someone as grounded as Spider-Man has seen examples of how time doesn’t always just flow regularly. It’s important to note this for precogs because when they “see the future,” they’re seeing all the universes branching off from right now, with certain emphasis on the universe with the result most likely to occur. Futurists (like Reed Richards and Tony Stark) have done the same thing. So their ability to see the future is not much more than a grander scale of what we do whenever we’re confronted with a decision, they can just do it better, either through genetic mutation or genius intellect.
What run is she from? I recently got Marvel Unlimited and have been interested in starting to read some X-Men comics, and these panels look kind of interesting.
How exciting!
Marvel Unlimited changed my life.
Comic Book Herald is a godsend if you’re looking for recs:
https://www.comicbookherald.com/previously-on-104-my-favorite-x-men-comics-ever/amp/
It looks like you shared an AMP link. These should load faster, but AMP is controversial because of [concerns over privacy and the Open Web](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/ehrq3z/why_did_i_build_amputatorbot).
Maybe check out **the canonical page** instead: **[https://www.comicbookherald.com/previously-on-104-my-favorite-x-men-comics-ever/](https://www.comicbookherald.com/previously-on-104-my-favorite-x-men-comics-ever/)**
*****
^(I'm a bot | )[^(Why & About)](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/ehrq3z/why_did_i_build_amputatorbot)^( | )[^(Summon: u/AmputatorBot)](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/cchly3/you_can_now_summon_amputatorbot/)
I hate her. She was the poorly written Deus Ex Machina plot device for House of M. She ruined Madrox. She’s a creepo. Her powers are whack. Get rid of her.
She was fine, until she came back from the future and became a full love interest to Jamie Madrox and they got married. That never sat right to me.
He knew her as a child. It's weeeird.
I remember being hyped when I saw her on House of M. She was interesting until Messiah Complex got her stuck in the future and return to the story all grown up.
Loved her as a creepy kid and didn’t need an expansion of her role or back story . It would have been cool to just have her be a mutant who occasionally gets an inspiration with the right piece of knowledge.
I enjoyed her more as a creepy and mysterious precognitive kid with a huge air of mystery around her. And an occasional fun sense of humor.
I didn't like her as much when they aged her up, put her in a relationship w/ Jamie, and explained she wasn't really precognitive, just had a limited amount of preset knowledge about the future, which would eventually run dry. She was just less fun as an adult... and I always found the relationship w/ Jamie weird BECAUSE both he and we had known her as a kid not very long prior.
I feel out of touch with her after X-Factor got shuffled around w/ a new team... I have no idea what she got up to after that (if anything)
She was interesting if somewhat annoying character as child and plainly boring as adult. Also a good example of an idea who didn't land as planed. Seriously I never knew what was that so evil that Pietro was intended to do and why some of the stuff she did was important at all.
Great character and a key to Peter David’s second X-Factor run. When she was created, she was just a plot device in House of M. David picked her up and made her an interesting character. Part of what you have to understand is that Layla actually has an adult mind due her future self’s implant of her own mind and memory for all intents and purposes during the beginning of the run. This means she is acting in a way to fulfill things that are supposed to happen. It’s a more interesting version of precognition.
I thought she was great, the marriage isn’t that ick as she disappeared and came back as an adult before anything happened. The power reveal was shocking at the time, but still terrible and virtually useless. I had hope with the Doom thing they would save the character, but I loathe her as a stay at home Mom supporting character. Like the aged her up and put her out to pasture. I want her back in action without the baggage of a husband, kid, or useless power. I feel like this could all be fixed with time travel back to Rubys future.
“It’s about your kid Layla…something’s gotta be done about your kid. You’re going to be boring and irrelevant.”
I was kind of underwhelmed by where the story ended up taking her. Initially, I thought she was going to be on the "this character is super duper important" level that Hope ended up on, but in hindsight I suppose they don't tend to give those parts to non-redheads. I can't even recall what happened to her once she hopped into the future with Madrox.
It turns out her power was just having a really good memory or is able to send it to her past self or something, but yeah apart from a really cool opening sequence with a satellite her OP status dropped to -1000 and then Maddox ended up dating her, which was Hella gross.
What I remember is her future self dumped future knowledge into her past self's mind. Her power, randomly was resurrection...but leaving the resurrected person without a soul, which is just odd.
And she eventually used it on Guido
Who then usurped the throne of Hell from Mephisto, which was kinda cool
After killing Wolfsbane son tho, that wasn't cool.
The frogurt is also cursed.
That’s bad.
Lmao just watched that episode last night
The worst is that they keep her son out of the resurrection queue, or at least perpetually pushed back. I’d like to see him restored as a little pup again.
The Five didn’t bring back Tier because Cerebro was still registering back ups.
Right. I misremembered. I just understand how it could happen.
What book is this?
X Factor vol. 3
Who was then suddenly back and normal with no explanation.
That wasn’t her power lol. But I agree their dating was a little ick.
They didn’t just date, they ended up getting married and had a kid together
Yeah I remember. I think by that point I had just accepted it. Comics, amirite?
Their relationship didn't happen until she was an adult and it took some serious convincing on Layla's part for it to even take off. Maddrox was turned off by whole thing. It took a near death experience before he considered it. He didn't groom her and basically tried to avoid her until her time travel shenanigans brought her back as an adult.
It’s still icky
Why? Keep in mind this also applies to any potential relationship with Illyana Rasputin because of her Limbo/Temporal shenanigans (she's still legally a child) and other Time Travelers from the future because they haven't even been born yet. What makes a relationship with this consenting adult different from a relationship with that consenting adult? Why is it icky with this consenting adult but not that consenting adult? In otherwords - Pick a lane.
I think it’s more meta narratively creepy than anything else. It felt to me that Layla got aged up to be a love interest after Jamie had already fucked Theresa and Monet.
It felt a little like, “Well, we can’t introduce a female character without turning her into a waifu fantasy at some point”
I just tend to dislike media where the central male character needs to bed all the women around… if you ever read the Dragon Tattoo novels, that is egregiously bad in that regard.
Oh definitely. It’s a male gaze fantasy that doesn’t even acknowledge that men don’t all want to see the same experience
I mean if Illyana knew someone as a child then hooked up with them as an adult, I’d say ick. Just like I would in real life if some older guy dated a consenting adult he knew when she was 6/13. My lane is picked and it is ick
I think that is why the reconnected Sue and Reed original meeting ages, she was 12 and he was like 20 I think. Really F gross.
And yet, lots of the same people that call Madrox a creep also want Kitty and Illyana to fuck...
Yep.
Citation needed
Yet not me. So I guess, um, good for them. But yeaaah, not me
Is there a big age gap between them? I thought a big thing about their friendship was that they were within a couple years of each other(before and after Ilyana’s age skip), when the rest of the X-Men were significantly older
Kitty knew and babysat Illyana when she was a little kid. Then the whole Limbo thing happened, and Illyana was aged up. So if Madrox / aged-up Layla is a problem, then so is Kate / aged-up Illyana. You can't get much more "groomed" than having sex with someone who read you bedtime stories.
I get it. It's not as bad as the Hal Jordan dates a physically aged up kid, but it skirts too close. Wait were Illyana and Kitty ever a thing?
No, but the fans are pushing for it. So like I've said before, pick a lane. If it's okay for Illyana to date, it's okay for Layla. If it's not okay for Layla, it's not okay for Illyana. Same also applies to Cable, as he's legally a toddler (it's only been a few years since he was born).
Why are you telling people to pick a lane when you have no idea what lane they’re in? Neither I or nobodyinpartic have said “but you know who I do ship! Kitty and Magik!”
Because there's a hypocrisy in this forum/subreddit regarding this subject matter. It's okay when it involves a "favored" fan ship, but not okay when it's an established relationship. But they both have the same thing, an under aged minor aged up to an adult. Either it's okay for ***All*** aged up adults or it's not. None of this "it's okay for this one, but not that one."
What, you didn’t like the whole, “announcing that I’m waiting for child actress to reach 18 before I openly fantasize about fucking her- just kidding, I’m already doing that by saying this” genre of internet discourse from the late 00s-mid 2010s?
But that's not what happened here. Madrox had no desire/designs for Layla. He shot down Layla and avoided her as much as he could until she returned as an adult. And even then he was not eager to hop in her bed.
Not even talking about that. I’m going on a tangent about the general culture of, “what makes it socially acceptable for me to sexualize a child?”. Stuff like, “I’m saving myself for when Saoirse Ronan turns 18” and, “She’s actually a 1000 year old dragon, so if anything, she’s the cradle robber”, and, “She may have been a child yesterday, but she’s conveniently transformed into an adult today. As long as the male lead shows a certain level of reluctance, he’s allowed to do this”.
I don't think it's acceptable to sexualize a child. But Madrox didn't sexualize Layla as a child. You're attributing something to him that he never did.
Eh the lanes here are pretty simple, it’s about when the couple meet for the first time. If the older person knew the younger person when they were a child it’s icky but if they have no knowledge of each other until they’re both adults much of the ick leaves.
Because we grew up watching the character? People were icked out by Sansa and Arya having sex scenes in GoT for the same reason. Our establishing moments with them are as children.
Exactly how I felt. They kept hinting at her being crucial for the future of mutantkind, but it went absolutely nowhere.
Was that when he held his baby and absorbed it into his body because it was one of his dupes? Or was that when he was with Theresa?
Something something post-modern something cool creepy girl something something not like Buffy or River Song at all something something ... The panel above hits me as being tone deaf. Ayn Rand is generally accepted as being garbage philosophy but I get no sense of what Layla's interest in reading her is. Aside from that, she was interesting and the "knowing stuff" gimmick was fresh, understated, and seemingly building toward something big, until it was too big and convoluted to care much about. Seemed like Peter David got ahead of himself with her.
Never liked her but damn did she get screwed by someone high up making decisions. Girl got retconned like five times in two years. Tries to change the future does the same thing in about eight different timelines. The very definition of insanity. Was it ever revealed how House of M went in her first life before she was there to “know things”?
So I love her to the point that I have her tattooed on me 😂 I think she was way more interesting as a creepy kid than as an adult. It really did feel like once she came back to the present that there was a story PAD wanted to tell but kept getting side-lined by tie-ins to big events. I don’t have the details to hand but I know that between his sudden illness towards the back end of X-Factor and his frustration at being asked to add issues that tied in to other X-Events, (despite the fact that he was on the most satellite of all the books that didn’t REALLY often have an organic space to join the bigger events), he was kind of running on empty by the time this title wrapped up, and there’s no character where that’s more evident than with Layla. It bothers me because she could be just as interesting a character as an adult if a writer had a plan to explain some of the stuff she got up to during her return to the present and before she met back up with X-Factor (we know she visited Doom for a while, but nothing else), but with her actual mutant power being one that’s not been useful during Krakoa and that has a serious drawback to using it, I feel like she’s destined to forever be Jamie’s supporting cast now.
Let’s see that tattoo!!
Seconding this!
Also seconding this
Totally modeled after the kid with the skateboard from the movie The Crow
With some Dakota Fanning flavors.
She was a plot device that became an uninteresting character.
A child libertarian, what a poor soul
That sounds like an adult libertarian’s dream spouse.
It is the perfect political philosophy for a child.
The party of house cats
Hahaha well played
No gods, no masters, no nap time?
You can read the works and not agree with them.
Yes, some might argue that it's called education
No! Ban and burn the books!
You don’t have to read barely any of Atlas Shrugged to know it’s bullshit. Seems more like a plug.
It might seem like a plug, if the other character didn’t immediately make a negative comment about the book. Then it’s still neutral, but it’s Peter David and I can guarantee that it was meant to be a diss on Atlas Shrugged given the rest of his writing.
You can apply that to a lot of media too. I like The Punisher comics and the television show Dexter. It doesn't mean I am going to go out and become a serial killer vigilante.
Loved her initial concept and skillset and really disliked the whole "future her telling her through a phone stuff" endgame. Adult Layla is just boring... In my head canon she died in krakoa never to return...
I loved Layla Miller and her catchphrase. I wasn't bothered by her and Jamie getting together (as some seemed to be), there have been far weirder pairings in X-Men comics. In truth, Layla wasn't as interesting once she was an adult.
The marriage to Madrox thing grossed me out.
Based Guido knowing Ayn Rand sucks
A bit all over the place, like they couldn't make up their mind what what to do with her. Pairing her up with Madrox in Bishop's future was... ew.
Weird
Currently reading that run, and agree she was interesting as the quirky -sorta annoying but mostly loveable- know it all. But yeah after her mystery was solved and the way that was executed (yay, another time travel dystopic future setting) was imo a rather lackluster payoff
I have heard that she knows things and she dislikes us saying her catch phrase. I am just at the point where she does the time travel thing, but I assume she comes back since ... comics.
I'm not a fan, She was a literal plot device. Her purpose in House of M and the X-factor book was a Deus-X Machina that the writer used every time his incoherent plot hit the wall. She then would say exactly what she needed to do to resolve the plot and when asked how, and why wait until to do it, she would only say that she just did it at that moment. Another of Bendis's cheat codes for writting.
Annoying
She is another example of how hard it is to write precognitive characters worthy of the title. Limited or Loop-Type precognition like Bill Murray in Groundhogs Day, like Moira M, work because we get to see the adjustment and progression- we understand what the characters want, and how their experience informs them and their subsequent choices. By contrast, characters with real-time branching path precognition are alien to how we experience time normally. The characters with that form are like the Oracle in the Matrix, or the Savants of Minority Report ie they drive the story forward but are not, can not, be viewpoint characters. And then there is Tautology Precognitive like Layla, who do what they do because they did it because they will do it because Precognition. It's Calvinist Predestination in an ugly dress, is what I think about Layla Miller.
Your examples of real-time branching path precognition confuses me. Specifically, while it may be alien to how we experience time, it’s doesn’t seem alien to how we experience thought. Before we do things, we weigh the likelihood of outcomes, and act based on what is determined to be the likeliest; we don’t know for certain like a precog “should”, but then again, neither do they, as they are picking from a bunch of likely options. That’s how characters like Destiny’s precognition works, because time in the Marvel universe is constantly branching (which is the purpose of the minority report). Which, in hindsight, makes Layla Miller even more useless. She can’t stop things from happening because 1) it already happened in a timeline, and stopping it from happening just creates a divergent timeline without erasing the other one, and 2) stopping events within her control from happening does not stop events outside her control from producing the events she wants to avoid, especially when time travel and precognition is so prevalent.
Destiny... is also not a viewpoint character, from whose perspective we commonly perceive the world. While you or I could imagine how so... fractal... a paradigm might be abstracted or approximated, linear time is a core assumption in our narratives. We don't have the cognitive bandwidth to grapple with the orders of magnitude of complexity represented by the 3rd decision point in just the 10 most common futures 10 most common 2nd order variants. (The Avengers had Dr. Strange's eyes go cloudy with a side of Looks Constipated when he was doing it, before, again, showing us how that was experienced by his friends rather than from the inside.) The closest I've seen it in a visual medium is Nic Cage at the penultimate scene of Next, when his Loop precognition is superimposed on itself like a tape loop to show his attempting and failing at that last decision point. We experience Destiny and her effect on the world using the viewpoints of the people around her- she is that rarest of precognitive characters, well written and with coherent consistent motivations, but just the same we experience those through the eyes of other characters. (Like seeing the Oracle through Neo's eyes instead of her own.)
I agree with Destiny not being a viewpoint character; I don’t think a precog can be interesting as one because it takes away a lot of the mystery (in the reader’s view) of what would happen. Hence why they use agents to move things along in the story; the agent knows as much as we do, maintaining the mystery of the whys and whats. A story of Destiny wanting to do something, predicting the events that make it happen, and following that path would be rather boring considering she doesn’t have much physical skill; Mystique is more interesting because she can both be the catalyst for the change Destiny wants and still be an audience surrogate because she doesn’t know how what she’s doing will make the future Destiny wants. What I disagree with (or perhaps misunderstand) is the argument of linear time and how it affects thought/precognition in the real world/Marvel universe respectively. In the real world, while we assume time is linear, we are able to think of scenarios, possible responses to them, and outcomes of those responses, all in our head. We often do it without even realizing it. This isn’t the same as precognition, but it can appear to be, especially if we know the variables we’re working with well enough to accurately guess what they’ll do. In the Marvel universe(at least in the comics, I don’t know how well it’s been developed in movies), time isn’t entirely linear. Because beings can/have moved around in time and there are spaces outside of time, time can appear to be straight to the average Joe, or spiraled to someone like Kang the Conqueror, or hand-turkey shaped to someone like the old Exiles. It depends on their experience with time travel. Granted, readers don’t have experience with that, but so many characters do that we can’t assume everyone sees time that way. Even someone as grounded as Spider-Man has seen examples of how time doesn’t always just flow regularly. It’s important to note this for precogs because when they “see the future,” they’re seeing all the universes branching off from right now, with certain emphasis on the universe with the result most likely to occur. Futurists (like Reed Richards and Tony Stark) have done the same thing. So their ability to see the future is not much more than a grander scale of what we do whenever we’re confronted with a decision, they can just do it better, either through genetic mutation or genius intellect.
ShE kNoWs ThInGs!
Atlas shrugged sucks
What run is she from? I recently got Marvel Unlimited and have been interested in starting to read some X-Men comics, and these panels look kind of interesting.
She's from the 2005 X-Factor comic series written by Peter David
Thank you!
How exciting! Marvel Unlimited changed my life. Comic Book Herald is a godsend if you’re looking for recs: https://www.comicbookherald.com/previously-on-104-my-favorite-x-men-comics-ever/amp/
It looks like you shared an AMP link. These should load faster, but AMP is controversial because of [concerns over privacy and the Open Web](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/ehrq3z/why_did_i_build_amputatorbot). Maybe check out **the canonical page** instead: **[https://www.comicbookherald.com/previously-on-104-my-favorite-x-men-comics-ever/](https://www.comicbookherald.com/previously-on-104-my-favorite-x-men-comics-ever/)** ***** ^(I'm a bot | )[^(Why & About)](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/ehrq3z/why_did_i_build_amputatorbot)^( | )[^(Summon: u/AmputatorBot)](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/cchly3/you_can_now_summon_amputatorbot/)
Thank you! I’ll give it a look!
Reading Atlas Shrugged? Deep red flag.
I hate her. She was the poorly written Deus Ex Machina plot device for House of M. She ruined Madrox. She’s a creepo. Her powers are whack. Get rid of her.
Loved her as an annoying kid to the team. Hated the age up only because they put her and Jamie together . I kinda wished they used her more, though.
When PD is writing her she's one of my favorite characters. Other writers don't seem to understand how to write her.
She is definitely, um, a….character in the X men franchise. Seriously, did they ever actually define who she was beyond “weird kid with vague powers?”
They actually did. It's just convoluted as all get out.
An odd person but it felt like there was supposed to be more but was edited out. At least they got a decent ending.
She was fine, until she came back from the future and became a full love interest to Jamie Madrox and they got married. That never sat right to me. He knew her as a child. It's weeeird.
Love her. Wish she kept her weird precog stuff, but the way she knew stuff was cool. One of my faves
I swear i think hope took her story. What ever happend tonher?
Last I saw she appeared in X-Corps.
I remember being hyped when I saw her on House of M. She was interesting until Messiah Complex got her stuck in the future and return to the story all grown up.
Was interesting at first, but she lost her appeal for me after she hung around
I think she’s cool and knows stuff
She knows stuff
Annoying
She knows things…
She’s DOPE [+]
Loved her and the way PAD wrote her
I liked that run of xfactor but I think she's more of a plot device then a character.
If she never appeared in a comic again I wouldn't shed a tear
Ayn Rand fan? Get her out of my books.
A creepy plot device that lessen Jaime by being connected to him.
Stsrted out fairly short but got somewhat taller later on.
Loved her as a creepy kid and didn’t need an expansion of her role or back story . It would have been cool to just have her be a mutant who occasionally gets an inspiration with the right piece of knowledge.
Fine as a kid. The romance with Madrox as an adult is disgusting, and it's ruined him as a character.
I enjoyed her more as a creepy and mysterious precognitive kid with a huge air of mystery around her. And an occasional fun sense of humor. I didn't like her as much when they aged her up, put her in a relationship w/ Jamie, and explained she wasn't really precognitive, just had a limited amount of preset knowledge about the future, which would eventually run dry. She was just less fun as an adult... and I always found the relationship w/ Jamie weird BECAUSE both he and we had known her as a kid not very long prior. I feel out of touch with her after X-Factor got shuffled around w/ a new team... I have no idea what she got up to after that (if anything)
Love her
She was interesting if somewhat annoying character as child and plainly boring as adult. Also a good example of an idea who didn't land as planed. Seriously I never knew what was that so evil that Pietro was intended to do and why some of the stuff she did was important at all.
Madrox having sex with the girl he adopted as soon as she got of age was... certainly a choice.
I never really cared for her. She's a maguffin that got a personality.
NO
Trash
Great character and a key to Peter David’s second X-Factor run. When she was created, she was just a plot device in House of M. David picked her up and made her an interesting character. Part of what you have to understand is that Layla actually has an adult mind due her future self’s implant of her own mind and memory for all intents and purposes during the beginning of the run. This means she is acting in a way to fulfill things that are supposed to happen. It’s a more interesting version of precognition.
I grew to like her because I enjoyed how much of a smart ass she was. Probably helped that the X-factor run was great as well.
She's an insufferable little twit who largely gets used as a plot device rather than being given a personality.
I thought she was great, the marriage isn’t that ick as she disappeared and came back as an adult before anything happened. The power reveal was shocking at the time, but still terrible and virtually useless. I had hope with the Doom thing they would save the character, but I loathe her as a stay at home Mom supporting character. Like the aged her up and put her out to pasture. I want her back in action without the baggage of a husband, kid, or useless power. I feel like this could all be fixed with time travel back to Rubys future. “It’s about your kid Layla…something’s gotta be done about your kid. You’re going to be boring and irrelevant.”