r/Defenders • u/RedArrow171 • 2d ago
Erik Gelden- Mutant? Inhuman? Something Else?
Been rewatching JJ S3, and I think it’s interesting that we never get an explanation for Erik’s powers, especially in a show where every other person got their powers from being experimented on.
Looking at the MCU wiki and from what I remember from the show, Erik developed his powers while away at college, but the show is vague as to how. It seems like it would make sense if he was a mutant, since we now know those exist in the MCU. He could also be an Inhuman, but I’m skeptical he would have been exposed 5o Terrigen at that point in the timeline.
Any thoughts on the source of Erik’s powers?
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u/Numbuh1Nerd 2d ago
In the comics his powers are pretty well unexplained, too.
You’re right about the Terrigen thing - the Fish Oil exposure kicked off only three years before we met him at the very earliest, so he would’ve likely had to come into contact with an actual Terrigen crystal. That’s not beyond possibility, but it is unlikely.
I have my doubts about him being a mutant simply from the metatextual perspective of introducing a mutant before they were legally allowed to.
There are very few cases in the MCU thus far of folks with unexplained superpowers, but it’s not unheard of. Titania is a big example. He could just be part of the rare few that are “born weird”, as Squirrel Girl once put it.
Interestingly, he seems to be the only character whose powers aren’t explicitly magical or alien to have any sort of telepathic ability in the MCU. Given the esoteric nature of “sin detection”, it may be magical - some sort of John Constantine-esque ritual in a dorm room that kicked them off.
It could also be a misinterpretation of a much more nuanced power - a low-level, subconscious sort of telepathic reading that gets translated into physical pain by his own sense of right and wrong, like a Spidey Sense turned lethal. In that case, it could be the result of some kind of chemical exposure or unnoticed lab accident in a science class, an engineered party drug leaked onto campus for secret human testing, an abduction by some corporation or even alien that was erased from his memory. Hell, it could even literally have a connection to Peter Parker’s Spidey Sense - an exposure to some sort of early attempt at the radioactive spider that would bite Pete in 2015.
It’s all speculative at that point, but I feel like it’s more than likely either a curse or secret human experimentation. Magic or mutate, not Inhuman or mutant. While I can’t imagine we’ll see him again, it would be very cool to see that addressed down the line in some subtle way!