mirage – The DVD Fairy

And now I’m going to gush about this redesign because wow. This is gorgeous. Like one of the main complaints I have about Mirage’s original design (that is used in all episodes besides this one) is that her proportions were sometimes really off, largely because the shape of her head lent itself very often to the animators drawing it too big for her body.

This one seems to borrow more closely from the bone structure of the Abyssinian, which makes sense for her as most tales of the breed’s origin are tied to Egypt. It’s also just by and large capable of being more expressive than her original design.

This whole scene is just a marvel to watch because like the rest of the episode, everything is fluid and consistent and very well defined and oh my God why didn’t they keep this design?

Conclusion: Fasir throws the main characters a bone

Fasir decides that he’s going to use magic we weren’t even certain he had to heal the tree and give Aladdin and Jasmine their cure.

But the part of this episode that always stuck with me was the end as he looked on at the heroes celebrating their victory.

“You once left me, Mirage, to pursue your malevolent path, but one day, love will triumph over your evil heart and bring you back to me."

I always wished they’d develop on this more in the series but it never happened. It made me wonder what kind of power Fasir had – its limitations and where it comes from, and like I discussed in our last episode: what kind of life did Mirage lead before she became Evil Incarnate?

People have wondered if Fasir is her polar opposite – if she is Evil Incarnate, perhaps he is Good Incarnate.

I don’t think he is, because as I discussed in "The Prophet Motive,” I’m pretty sure that entire adventure was orchestrated so that Aladdin would kill his brother.

But now let’s look back at Mirage’s motivations throughout this episode.

She wanted to prove that love is weakness. More specifically, she wanted to make Aladdin stop loving Jasmine, and I said this was telling about her own past, most likely.

Her tactic for getting Aladdin to stop loving Jasmine involved turning Jasmine into a monster and thereby making it impossible for them to be together. She wanted Jasmine to lose hope that she could be anything but a monster, and she wanted Aladdin to stop loving her once she was no longer the woman he fell in love with.

This leads me to think that she thinks she’s become a monster, and has no idea why Fasir hasn’t stopped loving her. In some ways I’m not sure she believes he still loves her, because of this.

And that’s pretty damn profound for a Disney series.

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I want to preface this by saying these two characters have never been seen onscreen together before.

But here we have Fasir and Mirage bickering. Fasir wants to know why Mirage insists on tormenting mortals and she wants to know what the Hell he’s doing on her lawn.

We don’t see people talking to villains like this very often. Here we get implied familiarity, which is interesting, and it’s not just an old rivalry. If Mirage wanted to attack him, she absolutely would. She doesn’t.

“You’re so pathetic with your hopeless causes."

She’s not talking about humanity, there. Never in the show does she give off the impression that she views humanity as anything other than a pawn in the game, an integral part, but one to be tested and manipulated.

Given Fasir’s insistence on Mirage’s goodness, the "hopeless cause” she’s referring to in this scene may very well be Mirage, herself. We know the two were previously involved, and it’s Fasir’s entreaties about love being the “strength of good” that gets the ball rolling in this episode.

He’s trying to get her to admit that she still has feelings for him.

And naturally, she protests too much.

Seriously, I love the range of expressions in this scene. Let’s be clear. This isn’t a case of someone whose advances were always unwanted. When Mirage gets to talking about how love is just a feeling and nothing more she’s clearly talking about feelings she’s had that she wants to make very clear she gives no weight now. So what if she was in love at one point in time. That’s weakness. LOOK AT HOW OVER YOU I AM GOD.

The fact that Fasir shows her Aladdin and Jasmine as an example of true love offends her – which we’d consider natural. She hates them. But more importantly I don’t think she appreciated having herself compared to them.

So she believes she can prove to Fasir that she can make them stop loving each other. More specifically, she can make Aladdin stop loving Jasmine.

Hold onto that because that’s going to be really important to bear in mind as we go through this, because it has WAY more to say about how Mirage sees herself than how Aladdin and Jasmine see each other.

Conclusion: So they all decide not to be scared and…that’s it?

No seriously. Mirage could have left them floating in Morbia, unable to find a way out. She could have done that. She didn’t.

There are no reasons given for why she just sends them back, because it’s pretty obvious that no one in Aladdin’s group is responsible for that.

I don’t know if this is an issue of writing or the nature of her power. It is quite possible that once she’s set a test before someone and they pass, she is bound to let them walk free.

OR there are other powers at work in her dimension that decided she’d had her fun.

These are pretty much the only explanations I have for this. We’ll see if they hold true later. However, it need be acknowledged that she is shown time and again to be held to certain rules like that, spoken or unspoken.

In many cases there is not much else stopping her from just outright killing these people when one of her plans doesn’t go the way she wants it to. That suggests to be that she’s following a code in some shape or form.

I’m really sorry that the conclusion of this episode was delayed so much, but when you get busy, you get busy!

Next I’ll be covering “Eye of the Beholder,” as requested, and remember: if there are any characters you’d like to see covered or specific episodes you want to see discussed, feel free to shoot me an ask!

Iago fills in the blanks when Genie displays he can sometimes be quite ignorant.

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.)

Mirage’s opening dialogue is really interesting.

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?

Now to the good bits. Introducing: Mirage

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)