| “ | Happiness is a lie. Life is horror. The light is always dying, all across the universe. The last star will flicker out someday. When it does, all that remains... shadow. And I will be its king. | „ |
| ~ The Shadow King. |
Amahl Farouk, best known as the Shadow King, is a powerful psionic entity and longtime enemy of the X-Men. He exists as a malevolent thought-form following his physical destruction, making him a formidable opponent even to powerful psychics such as Professor Xavier. He is the archenemy of X-Men members Storm and Psylocke.
What Makes Him Pure Evil?[]
- Manipulate Amahl Farouk that lose his father to the plague to be his host in promise that he will never be alone again.
- For starters, he worked with the genocidal Nazis back in World War II.
- In Cairo, Egypt, he was a petty crime lord who groomed street children into pickpockets to rob tourists. One of those children was Ororo Munroe (AKA Storm).
- Overall, it's because of this one crime alone that the Shadow King can be blamed for the X-Men forming in the first place. Because after Professor X seemingly killed him in a mental battle to save Cairo's children, he dedicated himself to protecting the world from such unrelenting evil as the Shadow King.
- After his original body died out thanks to Professor X, Shadow King went on to possess the body of Xuân Cao Mạnh (AKA Karma), a fellow psychic who can possess people's bodies, to amplify his own powers. For several months under his control, she was a knowing prisoner within her own mind; gained over 500 pounds in weight; hosted arena fights to the death; threatened mass suicides; possessed and enslaved her own friends; and made a woman spurn her own husband at a dance just to be cruel for the sake of it. Even worse, Shadow King was planning to just find another host and let Karma take the fall for his own crimes later anyway, to the point where she even outright cries while lamenting "better death than such a fate."
- On a more trivial note, Karma lost her parents and got raped by pirates as a child, so Shadow King's possession of her was simply placing even more trauma weights upon the shoulders of an already extremely troubled individual.
- The sheer scale of his crimes have gone to world-threatening levels multiple times:
- In the Muir Island Saga, Shadow King tries to leave the Astral Plane and make mankind enjoy hating itself into oblivion.
- In X-Men's "Psi-War" arc, Shadow King possesses Betsy Braddock (AKA Psylocke), another mutant psychic like himself, with plans to mind-rape everyone on Earth. If successful, all the psychics and telepaths would suffer debilitating feedback from the overload of energy, effectively crippling them with potentially permanent results. Everyone else would "just" experience symptoms ranging from mild déjà vu, nightmares, migraine headaches, and nosebleeds.
- In Astonishing X-Men's "Life of X" arc, while imprisoning psychics in a web within the Astral Plane, Shadow King possesses Psylocke once again to attack the city of London, slowly but surely turning its entire population into zombies who can only vainly beg to be set free while choking and rotting from the inside-out on their own despair, rapidly spreading the infection via touch. Even worse, had the X-Men not stopped Shadow King right then and there, the infection would've spread worldwide, to the point where the government was considering bombing the entire city just to save everyone else.
- Finally, in Uncanny X-Force's "Final Execution" arc, Shadow King (alongside Sabretooth and Daken) kidnaps Evan Sabahnur, subjecting him to constant physical and psychological abuse in an attempt to turn him into the second Apocalypse so he'll wreak genocidal havoc upon the world and thus kill billions.
- Despite the Shadow King allegedly being a "multiversal manifestation of the dark side of human consciousness spawned by the first nightmare", it's not preventing at all because that's really all it is: an allegation from one of the official handbooks. Therefore, it's an informed attribute that has no bearing and thus doesn't detract from his mental prowess in-universe.
- Furthermore, by Marvel standards, being Made of Evil doesn't automatically indicate moral agency issues; you're still capable of doing/understanding good. Case in point: fellow demon Mephisto has rumors of being that way too, and yet he's also shown in-universe enjoying himself while going on a date with Magma...at least until they break up. Shadow King is the exact same way, enticing his victims with false promises of their heart's desire (as shown with Karma).
- Being abstract entity in Marvel doesn't prevent you from lack moral agency for example Lady death once cure Ben Reily degenerative disease from being clone because she's impress in his selflessness and another time make a deal with Clea in exchange for ressurect Dr. Strange despite her being the embodiments of dead, is a prove that Marvel abstract entities have choice to be good or evil.
Trivia[]
- So far, alongside his Wolverine & the X-Men counterpart, are the only versions of the Shadow King to be considered Pure Evil.
External Links[]
- The Shadow King on the Villains Wiki
- The Shadow King on the Marvel Wiki
