Dawnstar
2983 - Dawnstar is born on Starhaven, a home for offshoots of humanity taken from Earth in the 13th century.
2985 - 2-year-old Dawnstar is selected as the avatar of her peoples's goddess of the hunt.
2989 - 6-year-old Dawnstar develops her unerring tracking power.
2991 - 8-year-old Dawnstar discovers her ability to survive in a vacuum..
2995 - 12-year-old Dawnstar develops her ability to generate localized wormholes.
2999 - 16-year-old Dawnstar joins the Legion of Super Heroes to avoid persecution from the Science Police.
3000 - 17-year-old Dawnstar is picked up by the science police after the Legion of Super Heroes disbands. She escapes & becomes a fugitive.
3003 - 20-year-old Dawnstar achieves an accord with her goddess, allowing her to fufill her destiny.
3005 - 22-year-old Dawnstar joins the newly reformed Legion of Super Heroes.
Dawnstar is a later addition to the Legion that appears in only a few of their iterations. There's an inherently illusive quality to her characterization; she's clearly meant to somehow represent a Native American character but doesn't SAY so, and her powers are so borderline world-breaking that it's almost impossible to really make sense of her. Also... while there are a few re-imagined versions of her costume, she's generally presented as wearing one of the MOST sexualized costumes a person could dream up. even the fanart we're using here is tame by comparison.
So why use her at all? because even despite all that, there is something so elegant about the central notion of who she COULD be. Simply stating that her people are Native Americans who have created their own civilized planet feels vaguely ethnocentrist, but suggesting that her people were actually taken from their planet centuries ago and have since built their own civilization makes it feel lush and exciting. Making her an avatar of one of her people's gods allows her to slowly come into her unbelievable power... which we've fiddled with a little bit to make her able to open spatial wormholes in an effort to make them feel more actively sci-fi. In fact, we even went so far as to suggest that her powers are actually making her a target. Now there are layers of intrigue in her story, and she she can still be the soulful, genuine character she was always conceived to be... who just happens to dress like a winged, native american Starfire. |