On Tanya Trask
When I first started playing around with the idea of a sequel to House of Cards, there wasn't a lot I had in mind, but Tanya Trask seemed to loom fairly large from the get-go. I don't really know why. I was never a huge fan of hers in the comics, and to be honest she is not a very attractive character. But she just started forcing her way in there and who was I to deny her?
In the X-Men comics, Tanya is the older daughter of Bolivar Trask, the inventor of the Sentinels, whose brother, Larry, is a mutant (I jettisoned Larry as a mutant in HoC, largely because it was a complication I didn't need). Tanya is also a mutant who has the power to enter the Timestream, or to chronoskim. Whilst experimenting with her powers she gets stranded in the Timestream and loses her mind. Rachel Summers, travelling through the Timestream after abandoning the Days of Future Past timeline, finds Tanya and saves her life by repairing her mind and 'anchoring' her in another timeline; this turns out to be the Askani timeline. Here Tanya becomes Madame Sanctity, the slightly unhinged second-in-command of Mother Askani, Rachel's future self, and protector of the Askani'Son (who is actually Nathan Summers, Cable, the son of Scott Summers and Madelyne Pryor, who was sent to the future in order to protect him from the techno-virus).
Confused yet?
Madame Sanctity continues her trips through time in an insane bid to control the past and thus control the future. One of her ideas is to go back into her own past and stop her father from creating the Sentinels and making things difficult for mutantkind. Rachel only just manages to prevent her from creating a fatal paradox in time by wiping Bolivar's mind of the memory of his daughter's future self, whereupon both Rachel and Tanya return to the Askani timeline.
Now in the midst of all this convoluted backstory, there was something about Tanya that just stuck out to me. Maybe it was the self-serving insanity; or maybe it was the fact that her powers exactly mirror Rachel Summers' (check out their powers and abilities on the
Marvel Database). I had this idea that Rachel was still important in the HoC universe, but she needed a something to drive her, and I sensed that something (without knowing what it was) in Tanya Trask.
Meanwhile, I was playing around writing little scenes from a projected HoC sequel, and somehow Tanya started popping up in a lot of them. The only thing I could do was to grudgingly give in and accept that Tanya was a part of this world and wasn't going to go away. At first Rogue starts going flaky with Destiny's psyche; Gambit goes back to Essex to figure out his relationship to him; Essex, having lost Rachel, wants Tanya instead; Gambit is sent undercover to 'collect' her and ends up having an affair with her.
Those were the initial seeds of Twist of Fate, bits and pieces of which I kept in the final storyline. Almost as soon as I started writing her in ToF, her history began to reveal itself.
Tanya Sarah Trask is intelligent, resourceful, creative, closer in personality type to her father than her mother or her brother. (She is also, for some reason I cannot quite pinpoint, curly-haired in my mind). Bolivar is proud of his daughter's accomplishments, but one thing comes first for him - his research. He is disinterested in raising a family and his bigotry towards mutants fuels his desire to create the Sentinels and unleash them on the world. At about the age of fourteen, Tanya first started manifesting her telepathic powers, which she hid from her family. Later, when her ability to travel the Timestream kicked in, she was unable to hide the fact that she was a mutant any longer. Unable to control her powers, and more than that, suspicious and afraid of them, Tanya was unable to leave the Timestream and spent a long, traumatic time lost in it. This trauma affected her grip on reality, and when she was finally able to control her powers enough to leave her prison, her mental stability had been severely affected.
Growing up in a bigoted household, Tanya had never felt fully loved or appreciated by her father, and this was compounded by the fact that Bolivar was horrified by his daughter's 'abnormality' and sought to hide it. He funded research into nanomachine technology, a technology that would be able to mask the X-gene from any scan. The process was long and painful, both physically and mentally, but eventually it worked, and Bolivar was satisfied that his daughter would now pass as 'normal'. But Tanya was deeply hurt and damaged by her father's actions, and whilst she loved him deeply she could no longer trust him. Caught between a vengeful hatred of her father and a craving for his approval, she excelled in school yet infuriated her father by continuing to use her powers and risk exposure. Throughout this rebellion, Tanya's intelligence and exuberance masked her inner tendency towards depression, self-loathing, and inadequacy. Her mental health further deteriorated when her parents divorced and Tanya was left in New York with her father whilst her mother moved to Chicago. Tanya grew even more unmanageable, and Trask was eventually forced to enrol her in the University of Chicago in the hope that the change of scene and the move to her mother's would help improve her increasingly erratic behaviour.
Unfortunately for Trask, the rather more liberal atmosphere at UC gave Tanya an outlet for her frustrations and a platform to stand on. She became active in the Mutant Rights Movement, which drew enough attention to her that people started to notice - including a certain mutant named Wolverine...
In the X-Men comics, Tanya is the older daughter of Bolivar Trask, the inventor of the Sentinels, whose brother, Larry, is a mutant (I jettisoned Larry as a mutant in HoC, largely because it was a complication I didn't need). Tanya is also a mutant who has the power to enter the Timestream, or to chronoskim. Whilst experimenting with her powers she gets stranded in the Timestream and loses her mind. Rachel Summers, travelling through the Timestream after abandoning the Days of Future Past timeline, finds Tanya and saves her life by repairing her mind and 'anchoring' her in another timeline; this turns out to be the Askani timeline. Here Tanya becomes Madame Sanctity, the slightly unhinged second-in-command of Mother Askani, Rachel's future self, and protector of the Askani'Son (who is actually Nathan Summers, Cable, the son of Scott Summers and Madelyne Pryor, who was sent to the future in order to protect him from the techno-virus).
Confused yet?
Madame Sanctity continues her trips through time in an insane bid to control the past and thus control the future. One of her ideas is to go back into her own past and stop her father from creating the Sentinels and making things difficult for mutantkind. Rachel only just manages to prevent her from creating a fatal paradox in time by wiping Bolivar's mind of the memory of his daughter's future self, whereupon both Rachel and Tanya return to the Askani timeline.
Now in the midst of all this convoluted backstory, there was something about Tanya that just stuck out to me. Maybe it was the self-serving insanity; or maybe it was the fact that her powers exactly mirror Rachel Summers' (check out their powers and abilities on the
Marvel Database). I had this idea that Rachel was still important in the HoC universe, but she needed a something to drive her, and I sensed that something (without knowing what it was) in Tanya Trask.
Meanwhile, I was playing around writing little scenes from a projected HoC sequel, and somehow Tanya started popping up in a lot of them. The only thing I could do was to grudgingly give in and accept that Tanya was a part of this world and wasn't going to go away. At first Rogue starts going flaky with Destiny's psyche; Gambit goes back to Essex to figure out his relationship to him; Essex, having lost Rachel, wants Tanya instead; Gambit is sent undercover to 'collect' her and ends up having an affair with her.
Those were the initial seeds of Twist of Fate, bits and pieces of which I kept in the final storyline. Almost as soon as I started writing her in ToF, her history began to reveal itself.
Tanya Sarah Trask is intelligent, resourceful, creative, closer in personality type to her father than her mother or her brother. (She is also, for some reason I cannot quite pinpoint, curly-haired in my mind). Bolivar is proud of his daughter's accomplishments, but one thing comes first for him - his research. He is disinterested in raising a family and his bigotry towards mutants fuels his desire to create the Sentinels and unleash them on the world. At about the age of fourteen, Tanya first started manifesting her telepathic powers, which she hid from her family. Later, when her ability to travel the Timestream kicked in, she was unable to hide the fact that she was a mutant any longer. Unable to control her powers, and more than that, suspicious and afraid of them, Tanya was unable to leave the Timestream and spent a long, traumatic time lost in it. This trauma affected her grip on reality, and when she was finally able to control her powers enough to leave her prison, her mental stability had been severely affected.
Growing up in a bigoted household, Tanya had never felt fully loved or appreciated by her father, and this was compounded by the fact that Bolivar was horrified by his daughter's 'abnormality' and sought to hide it. He funded research into nanomachine technology, a technology that would be able to mask the X-gene from any scan. The process was long and painful, both physically and mentally, but eventually it worked, and Bolivar was satisfied that his daughter would now pass as 'normal'. But Tanya was deeply hurt and damaged by her father's actions, and whilst she loved him deeply she could no longer trust him. Caught between a vengeful hatred of her father and a craving for his approval, she excelled in school yet infuriated her father by continuing to use her powers and risk exposure. Throughout this rebellion, Tanya's intelligence and exuberance masked her inner tendency towards depression, self-loathing, and inadequacy. Her mental health further deteriorated when her parents divorced and Tanya was left in New York with her father whilst her mother moved to Chicago. Tanya grew even more unmanageable, and Trask was eventually forced to enrol her in the University of Chicago in the hope that the change of scene and the move to her mother's would help improve her increasingly erratic behaviour.
Unfortunately for Trask, the rather more liberal atmosphere at UC gave Tanya an outlet for her frustrations and a platform to stand on. She became active in the Mutant Rights Movement, which drew enough attention to her that people started to notice - including a certain mutant named Wolverine...