New Mutants will introduce viewers to the superhero Dani Moonstar, aka Mirage – and here’s everything you need to know about Dani in the comics. In the comics, Dani Moonstar is one of Marvel’s few Native American characters. As a result, when Fox cast actor Blu Hunt (The Originals, Another Life) it spawned some complicated debates about race. Although Hunt is of Native American heritage, the comic book iteration is a dark-skinned full Cheyenne. That kind of controversy could have proved fatal for any other movie – but New Mutants has been in Development Hell for so long that it’s mostly been forgotten.
One thing’s for sure; Hunt has signed up for a major role. New Mutants is at least partly inspired by the classic “Demon Bear” storyline by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz, and Mirage sits at the emotional center of that particular arc. That means this is one character who viewers really need to know well if they’re going to make sense of New Mutants.
So here’s everything you need to know about Dani Moonstar – from her first appearance in the pages of New Mutants to the present day.
Dani Moonstar – The New Mutant Who Lost Her Powers
![Who is Mirage? The NEW MUTANT’s Origin & Powers Explained](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/New-Mutants-Dani-Moonstar.jpg)
Dani Moonstar’s powers were originally fairly ambiguous and difficult to define; she’s a psionic, but the precise nature of her powers has never really been defined. Like her fellow X-Woman Psylocke, Dani’s powers first manifested in a series of precognitive visions; that’s a favorite trick of writer Chris Claremont, who seemed to be believe that most psionics should also have a degree of precognitive power. Dani’s visions began when she sensed the approach of the Demon Bear, a monstrous being that seemingly killed her parents.
Dani’s grandfather reached out to Charles Xavier, and she joined the New Mutants, where she began to hone her powers. Dani learned that she had the ability to telepathically “skim” a person’s mind, identifying their worst fear, and that she could then project it as an illusion. Over the years, Dani would learn how to give her illusions solid form, making her a truly terrifying foe to fight. She also learned how to create a so-called “ghost spear,” a quasi-mystical weapon that Dani used against her goes, possibly an analogue to Psylocke’s psychic knife. In addition to all these powers, Dani also had a limited ability to communicate with and control animals, which came in surprisingly useful.
Then came the darkest days in the history of the mutant race, when Scarlet Witch stripped the bulk of the world’s mutants of their powers. Dani, who had settled at a teacher at Xavier’s School, was one of the mutants to lose her powers. It’s actually unclear whether she’s ever regained them; the X-Men seem to have cracked the secret of reactivating the X-genes Wanda shut down, but there’s no indication they’ve done so for Dani.
Dani Moonstar Becomes A Valkyrie
![Dani Moonstar Valkyrie](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Dani-Moonstar-Valkyrie.jpg)
Chris Claremont’s New Mutants book was unlike anything else in the X-Men range, and he used the mutant teleporter Lila Chenney – a pop star who was also Cannonball’s girlfriend – to transport the X-Men to Asgard. There, Dani drew the attention of Hela, Goddess of the Dead, who recruited her as one of the Valkyries. Charged with ferrying the souls of the dead to Valhalla, she gained a winged horse, and learned to perceive death itself.
Unfortunately Dani’s relationship with Asgard proved to be a problematic one, because she was drawn into Hela’s latest scheme to take Odin’s throne. In order to accomplish this, Hela began driving her Valkyries insane in order to bend them to her will. Fortunately Doctor Strange was able to figure out the truth, and he transported the New Mutants back to Asgard in order to battle Hela. The victory came at a terrible price, with Dani losing her winged horse. She left the New Mutants, devastated.
More recently, Cyclops relocated the X-Men to San Francisco, and he asked Dani to return. He’d previously believed that ex-mutants were at risk if they stayed too close to the X-Men, but he considered Dani a strategic asset. This was during the so-called “Dark Reign” era, when Norman Osborn essentially took control of the United States, and Cyclops knew it was just a matter of time before Osborn clamped down on the X-Men. He was right, and Dani proved an invaluable resource against Osborn’s powerhouse Ares, a rogue Greek god. Cyclops had Dani strike a deal with Hela in order to become a Valkyrie once again, and she successfully took Ares down. Dani was the only member of the old Valkyries to survive the War of the Realms, although she seems to have stepped away from that role once again.
Dani Moonstar Became A Tutor To The Next Generation of X-Men
![Dani Moonstar Gun](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Dani-Moonstar-Gun.jpg)
Dani is both a natural leader and a natural teacher, and she enjoyed working as a tutor for the next generation of New Mutants at Xavier’s School. Even after the loss of her powers, Dani continued her teaching career, working at Avengers Academy. Unfortunately she found herself struggling with something of a conflict of interests there, because she correctly figured out that the US Government was training young superhumans as potential weapons.
The first wave of Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men relaunch includes the return of a New Mutants book, with Dani Moonstar one of the team members. Right now, though, it’s unclear what her powers really are anymore; the X-Men are currently cloning people, and it’s possible they’ve used this technique to create a duplicate Dani who has her old abilities back. If that is the case, Xavier could then have used Cerebro to transfer Dani’s consciousness into this new body. But if that has indeed been done, then it’s also unclear whether or not Dani still possesses mystical powers. Xavier’s technique doesn’t seem to acknowledge the existence of an immortal soul, and Dani’s abilities as a sorceress and indeed as a Valkyrie are bound to her spirit rather than her genes and her mind. There’s no reason to believe they would transfer into a duplicate.
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Key Release Dates
New Mutants
Release Date:2020-08-28