Tag Archives: Days of Future Past

Where do Mystique’s clothes go when she shape-shifts?

I just saw X-Men: Days of Future Past last night, and I can’t stop thinking about Mystique. Spoiler alert: there are no spoilers for the movie in this blog post. The spoiler alert was in regards to this actual blog post. In reading this paragraph, I’m basically giving it all away, what I’m about to talk about. Mystique.

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She’s the naked blue mutant that can shape-shift into whatever she wants. Cool, right? Yeah, but it gets even cooler. Because there’s one scene where she jumps out of a window, and everybody around is like, “Oh my God! A naked blue mutant!” and she needs to make discreet exit. So she kind of loses herself in the calamity and transforms into a regular looking woman wearing a really poofy fur coat.

But get this. She didn’t do a good job of disappearing into the crowd, because somebody finds her, again, I’m not going to reveal too much about the movie, because I don’t want to spoil anything. But what happens is, she takes off the big poofy fur coat, and she transforms back into her naked blue form.

And the coat is just lying on the ground, without any explanation as to how it exists independently of Mystique’s body. You know what I’m saying? Because she’s naked, and she does her crazy shape-shifting thing and she’s not naked anymore, she’s wearing clothes now. If she wants to change into an army guy, her army clothes appear from her body.

So how does she take off that coat? Isn’t that a part of her body? Do her powers include the ability to generate an infinite amount of disposable clothing? Or after a certain number of articles of clothing discarded onto the floor, does she get weak? Like does she need to eat a really big meal to replenish whatever it was that she lost when she just threw the coat on the floor? Or, even worse, is this how Mystique maybe goes to the bathroom? She just transforms all of her excretion into fashion?

That’s disgusting. But how are we to make sense of any of it? Let’s go back to her being naked. And then she transforms into a guy wearing a suit. Is that suit technically a layer of her skin? Or is it dead, like hair? Like, if someone walks up to her and says, “Wow, that’s a really nice jacket,” and starts feeling the fabric, maybe giving it an aggressive pinch to get a sense of how durable the material is, would she react? Would it hurt?

Or maybe her power is just truly super, even in comparison with her already super shape-shifting abilities. Maybe she can just come up with an infinite amount of clothing, and it doesn’t matter, take it off, whatever, she can just whip up some new threads instantly. In that case, wouldn’t it be cool to have Mystique as a friend? You could have her transform into you, but wearing some really nice clothes, and then she could take them off and give them to you. And you could have her do this every time you wanted to wear something brand new.

I just wish they thought it through a little further before cementing this scene in place. Because what, you didn’t think anybody would notice, right? Well I noticed. And if you read this, and you go see the movie, now you’ll notice it too. And it cannot be unseen. She just takes the jacket off and throws it on the ground.