Referring back to my earlier babbles about Good and Evil forces and the servants of evil seeking to upset the balance (or tip it far in favor of evil), this would make sense. I imagine when Mirage comes across standard “heroes” – diamonds in the rough, people with special destinies – she probably seeks to rub them out because they obviously tip the scales back toward good.
Mirage’s sudden need to teach Aladdin “fear.” I can see part of it but it wasn’t tied together very well. The villagers said Aladdin was very brave, and if he’d been given two seconds to be his USUAL SMUG SELF and brag a little before she showed up, this would have seemed more appropriate.
But he didn’t have that time and well before he had the opportunity to brag, Mirage seemed to think she needed to prove Aladdin was a coward.
This is sloppy organization, and it makes Mirage seem aimless, when she’s not supposed to be.
I really, really want to know how he came across this information. What kind of stuff did Jafar get into?
I’m a little confused. How does she know about Jasmine? How would she know she and Aladdin were a thing? Can she read minds? Because while it’s conceivable that she would know something about Agrabah given that she’s attacking the river valley that’s close by (or something), wouldn’t that mean she could have expected Aladdin to come along?
Because she wasn’t talking like that beforehand.
EXPLAIN, EPISODE. EXPLAIN.
Mirage spooks Genie a little and he decides they need to leave the village. In the middle of the night. Immediately.
The village that was a prime target for Mirage. (Because it provided food to the entire river valley apparently.) The people who don’t HAVE magic to protect them.
Genie wants to go home.
And apparently flying back is not an option. You have a damn magic carpet, people.
Of course this ends about how you’d expect. Everyone dozes off and:
Yeah. We never see or hear about this village again. Who wants to take bets on what happened to them?
I like that they give the Genie limitations but I wish I knew what their parameters were. Sometimes he either knows everything he needs to know because he’s a Genie and he was once all powerful, or he makes a book appear that knows everything when he doesn’t, but then on a rare occasion, he’s just completely stumped and his magic doesn’t give him any clues.
This is where Iago comes in. Iago, who worked with Jafar, and conceivably knows a lot of the stuff Jafar does. To a degree. Iago knows exactly who Mirage is, because he knows what Evil Incarnate is, and here’s where we get to some of the semi-religious stuff.
Evil Incarnate appears to simply exist to destroy goodness in the world. While the term is never used to my knowledge, this is a concept that compliments some tenets of Zoroastrianism quite nicely. With good and evil existing as distinct, living forces, there stood the belief that all living creatures took part in a cosmic battle between good and evil, the prize for which was all of creation. By living your life in the most good way that you can, you do your part to battle evil. For a figure like Mirage, as Evil Incarnate, it would make sense, then, that her function in life is to tip that balance in favor of evil. It is also why, in a world such as this, you can nod toward certain villains who play up to the notion of “being evil” for the sake of being evil as though that’s a thing. In this setting, it totally is.
Genie seems to remember a time when Evil Incarnate was someone else. “A hyper-intelligent wombat with a forked tongue,” to him. Things change, Iago informs him. This suggests that the mantle of Evil Incarnate is something that Mirage earned, establishing that she had a life before she took the role (which is further developed upon in “Eye of the Beholder,” hence why doing this episode and the last one was so important).
Once again, interesting questions raised. What was she like in her previous life? All to be discussed when the time comes.
Other things we know is that she’s not herself a goddess. There are other beings that appear in the series that she’s clearly subordinate to. She’s high on the totem pole when it comes to power (and would have to be considering that while she hates Genies she’s not the least bit afraid of them) but absolutely not the highest.
I can’t wait to see more.
My last question: Iago knows who she is. HOW does Iago know who she is? In what situation did Jafar come across her?
Is that where he got the snake staff from, maybe? (That could be interesting. But it was vaguely Egyptian in design.)
I really liked this encounter because the animators did some interesting things. Normally I’m actually not that fond of Mirage’s standard design (I prefer her redesign in “The Lost Ones,” by far. Usually I think her head is oversized.)
But this scene just looked really good.
Love how she just literally floats in to start shit. There’s little things that are done here that helps to give off more feline qualities without just giving her the literal features. The way she just sorta drifts past Aladdin reminds me of a cat casually invading a nervous person’s face so they can size them up.
Simple animation but it’s awesome how they play with the light here. Bravo.
One has to question why she didn’t just commence fucking with them without the introduction. We see time and again that she has the ability to move about unseen, so she could have gotten a look at Aladdin and the Genie without announcing herself. This is a warning shot. She wants her enemy to know she’s there; she wants them to know that it’s on.
This is very Sekhmet.
Perhaps this is because so far we’ve addressed largely comical villains, or in the case of Sadira, villains who are quite normal to begin with.
…No, I think that’s it pretty much. This is one of the first non-mortal villains we’ve come across, and she sounds it.
“I grow unsettled, here in Morbia. I await my pets’ return from a simple task. Are the peasants destroyed, I wonder? Surely, we have at least broken their spirit? But with my own eyes, I witness the unthinkable. You bowed down. You inflicted bruises. I ordered lacerations! But from the ashes of your humiliation, I will forge sweet victory."
This is so different from anything that’s come forward as a contender before.
Here’s a last bit, though, that left me with questions:
"If it were not for this defiant one, those farmers would be mine.”
What does she want the farmers for? Now we see her at other parts of the series clearly considering the creation of misery to be all in a day’s work for her, but this implies ownership of some sort. Why? In what way do they become hers? How does this system work?
I delayed a few days on this because I wanted to get all my thoughts in order before tackling her, because there’s a lot that’s interesting going on. We’ll discuss Mirage’s role as Evil Incarnate later when it’s actually brought up, but here let’s take a look at Morbia.
This place is never really explained at length, so we really only have to go on what is in front of our faces. A strange, celestial plane, and Mirage resides here. The temple vaguely resembles the Sphinx but I’ve heard more than one person reference Sekhmet specifically, others Bastet, but this was purely fandom talk. The reason why these sister goddesses would be interesting in this discussion because both are goddesses of warfare, one of great influence in Upper Egypt, the other in Lower Egypt as the two halves battled for supremacy. Oddly, they’re mostly positive figures beyond that, with Sekhmet a deity of healing and Bastet one of protection (and perfumes, oddly). Sekhmet, whom I have heard referenced more often by fans in relation to Mirage, was a lioness rather than simply a cat goddess, She was also said to have a powerful bloodlust and nearly wiped out all of humankind. She’s a better fit, here,
I don’t think the show in any way implies that Mirage IS Sekhmet but there’s some clear inspiration, and I think given the style behind her design, she is meant to be perceived as Egyptian in origin. It may be very well that she’s influenced by the deity, if nothing else.
Is this possible, you might wonder, given that the movie has several characters reference Allah? Well, we’ll get to the semi-religious aspects of this in another post. In short, this series acknowledges a number of things stemming from multiple religions (and with the Hercules crossover potentially establishes that different pantheons apparently coexist in this world)
Okay look, he was THERE when Iago announced he saw a village on fire. So I really want to know what happened between that and Genie deciding it was time to watch a Disney movie.
The DVD Fairy 