Psylocke's blades

[Dante_G]

Can someone please explain how Psylocke’s Psi-blades work? I mean from what I can tell, they are not solid blades, correct? So do they actually cut you or stab, or do they just make you feel the pain of the attack? Or can she control how solid they actually are? Any examples would be cool, doesn’t have to be scans or pictures, just a description is fine.

[Chronos]

They’re telekinetic. They do actually cut and stab, and would work just fine against inanimate objects.

[Strassia]

Except for Sabertooth. When she stabbed him in the head it took away his violent urges for a while. Until Wolverine popped a claw through his skull. Then it stopped working

[tim314]

@Chronos

They’re telekinetic. They do actually cut and stab, and would work just fine against inanimate objects.

Originally they were telepathic, and would just overload the person’s brain/nervous system. Psylocke originally didn’t have any telekinetic powers. At some point she was changed to telekinetic, though.

I’m not sure what her powers are these days; it’s been a while since I’ve read any X-Men comics.

[magnusblitz]

Taken from a poster on an X-Men fan board who’s quite knowledgeable about this stuff:

After passing through the Siege Perilous, Betsy’s mind and body were warped and mingled with the assassin Kwannon, thanks to Spiral’s Body Shoppe. Her telepathic powers were reduced significantly, as the Kwannon-body kept a good portion of her mental ability, and Psylocke stopped displaying any of her other previous psychic powers at all. In their place, she had learned how to focus the sum totality of her telepathic power into a psychic knife, projected from the back of her hand. This blade would infuse any victim it struck with an enormous surge of telepathic energy, temporarily disabling any form of conscious thought or motion in a wave of pain and paralysis. The psi-blade was also useful as a focus for specific telepathic abilities, allowing Betsy to “cut through” interference, psychic barriers or blocks to probe or manipulate minds that were difficult to grasp normally. After Kwannon, aka Revanche, died of the Legacy Virus, Psylocke’s full telepathic power returned to her in a wave of energy. She began using her power to generate a full on psychic katana sword, instead of the smaller psychic knife.

After being critically wounded by Sabretooth, Archangel arranged for her to be saved by bonding a portion of her soul to the mystical energy source called the Crimson Dawn. The Dawn added a small boost to her physical and psychic abilities, while also giving her the power of shadow teleportation. Betsy was now capable of instantaneously traveling from one place to another by entering one shadow and exiting through another some distance away. She can travel alone, carry passengers with her, or even cause other nearby shadows to become passageways, swallowing up people or objects she is not in direct contact with. After the events of the Psi-War, Betsy was forced to turn off her telepathic powers permanently in order to prevent the Shadow King from escaping his prison in her mind. Behind the scenes during the Revolution’s six month gap, Psylocke and Phoenix were attempting…something and allegedly encountered the Shadow King on the astral plane. The end result was that Jean’s telekinetic power was transferred to Betsy while Psylocke’s telepathy was removed and added to boost Phoenix’s own TP. Betsy’s psychic katana was now a focused projection of teleKINETIC energy with two uses: it could upset neurological activity as it passed intangibly through a person’s body or act as a solid, mono-molecularly edged blade capable of slicing between atoms to cut through almost anything. Whether or not Betsy maintained her teleporting power after the switch remains unanswered.

Upon her return from the dead, Psylocke is still wielding a variation of her telekinetic powers. She has now demonstrated the additional abilities to bolster her fists with telekinetic force, dramatically amplifying the strength of her blows, and the projection of a tangible platform of telekinetic energy for transportation. She can also telekinetically bend light waves around her body to become functionally invisible. Betsy can also aid her own healing abilities by telekinetically holding her body together when she’s cut or bleeding. Furthermore, her brother Jamie tightly constricted the strings that made up her essence in reality, making her a unique individual unaffected by any outside forces of manipulation. She has become completely immune to telepathic attacks and virtually invisible to psychic detection, as well as immune to reality-altering powers of any kind.
After spending time with the Exiles and returning to the X-Men, Psylocke once again possesses telepathic abilities, as well as telekinetic ones.

My TL;DR summary: it used to be purely telepathic energy, then it became purely telekinetic, now it’s probably both/either depending on what the writer wants.

[tim314]

Originally she also wasn’t a ninja, and wasn’t Asian either… I think the psychic knife thing showed up after they did that whole transformation, but it was still just a “psychic knife” for many years. When she became telekinetic it became a “telekinetic katana” as I recall.

Ninja’d (;)) by magnusblitz. I was about to edit in something about the shadow teleportation power, too…

[TBG]

I get the feeling Jim Lee just felt like drawing her as a sexy ninja lady and they had to add a bunch of convoluted stuff to try to make sense of it later. Not that she wasn’t already convoluted, being Captain Britain’s sister and having her original body’s eyes replaced by cameras to entertain Mojo…