Elektra

Background

Classical Elektra myth

There are several version of the Elektra tragedy, but the Sophocles  one is the best-known (although neither Aeschylus or Euripides are minor authors by any stretch of the imagination).

The aftermath of the Trojan War held tragedies for the returning Greek heroes. Next to the travels of Odysseus, it is the fate of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, and his family that is the most dramatic. Having sacrificed his daughter Iphigeneia to secure good winds for the journey to Troy, Agamemnon is killed upon his return from Troy by his vengeful wife Klytaimnestra and her lover Aigisthos.

Their daughter Elektra succeeds in sending her brother Orestes to a safe place, but she and her sister Chrysothemis stay in the house to endure much suffering at the hands of their mother and her lover.

The Greek playwrights Aischylos, Sophokles and Euripides all treated the myth in tragedies, telling of the return of a grown-up Orestes with his cousin Pylades to his home town. First they came in disguise, pretending to bring the news of Orestes’s death – thus causing a complete breakdown of Elektra.

Orestes later revealed himself as Elektra long-lost brother and, edged on by his ever-resentful sister, exerting divine revenge by killing Klytaimnestra and Aigisthos. Pursued by the Furies, demons of revenge, Orestes fled to Delphi to seek atonement for his matricide, and through the intervention of Athena was finally granted peace.

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This story is part of the Atreides cycle – the house of Atreus  having been under a curse of murder and revenge ever since he killed the children of his brother, Thyestes, and served them to him as food.

The core of the Elektra myth might thus be considered to be the daughter of the great king driven to tragic murder and scary destructive insanity to avenge the death of her father. Another important part of the story is the incredibly poisonous and neurotic relationship between Elektra and her mother Klytaimnestra, but it has little relevance to Elektra the comic book character.

“Elektra’s complex” was also a terminology used by Freud and Jung to refer to theorized early female psychological sexual development. Although it at first incorporated Freud’s work on penis envy, this early take has lost most of its credibility for modern psychologists.

It is now more often used to refer to a female version of the Oedipus complex – a sexual attraction of young daughter toward her father, with an attendant desire to kill off the mother to free the way. In this theory, this primitive stage of attraction is normally then abandoned for more adult desires.

“Elektra” itself can be translated as “amber”. I have favoured this eye colour for her over the numerous eyes colours she’s had over the years.

Powers and Abilities

Elektra is arguably the deadliest assassin in the world. She has proven unstoppable by any conventional security, even highly advanced measures manned by superbly trained specialists. She has an arsenal of ninja skills giving her preternatural abilities at stealth and infiltration, and has proven to be extremely cunning.

Art by Phil Noto .

She is a world-class expert at reading security measures, and a nonpareil spy. She uses her skills to obtain extensive intelligence on her targets and case the sites. When she hits a target she knows everything – especially what was deemed impossible to know.

Elektra is also a world-class martial artist, especially when armed with knives or swords. She can shear through most opponents without breaking stride – although grandmasters such as Daredevil or Iron Fist will normally defeat her.

She knows an array of abilities to withstand pain, concentrate her strength, focus her chi , burn out disease and poison, etc. which are covered by her solid amount of Hero Points  and high Attributes and Skills.

A woman of remarkable beauty and allure with a perfect body, she finds it quite easy to make men lose their concentration. She has no qualm against using those assets for infiltration and intelligence work. As a gifted actress can play a very credible bimbo or young woman of negotiable friendliness.

Elektra’s “ninja magic” has varied from a significant array of mystical/psionic  abilities to nothing, depending on interpretations of the character. The main interpretation as of this writing usually lets her see in the dark and communicate silently with others, through a sort of low-key telepathy, but it will undoubtedly change.

The high water mark of her ninja telepathy (in Elektra : Assassin) allowed her to manipulate cognitive inputs, hopelessly confusing and manipulating untrained targets. She could substitute for their sensory input her own perceptions, their own fantasies, and imaginary elements, though the later took significant concentration.

On a vulnerable target, it is thus possible for her to plunge them in a sort of virtual reality assembled as a bricolage  of actual and imagined elements.

Elektra’s rep is huge. So huge that most people think she’s only a legend, a bogeyman invented by incompetent security chiefs to cover for their failures. This plays in her favour, of course. Somebody who says they’re being hunted by Elektra Natchios is likely to be laughed off by people who have heard the legends – usually criminals of both the mob and white collar species.

Everyone has doubts, though. There are too many people who’ve seen things, too many people found dead, and while folks would rather pretend it is a legend, they all suspect it’s true that Elektra exists.

History

Elektra was born on the 11^th of August in tragic circumstances. Her parents were sailing in the Mediterranean when terrorists attempted to kill her father, a Greek politician. Her father was only lightly wounded, but her mother, then pregnant with Elektra and very nearly at term, was killed. Her death spasms gave birth to her baby daughter, who survived and was raised by her father.

Mr. Natchios was an alcoholic, perhaps as a result of the death of his wife. It is strongly hinted that he repeatedly committed incest with his young daughter, and Elektra also occasionally had flashbacks of her father hitting her. Her father’s friends refused to believe her when she complained, and she was considered hysterical and followed by doctors.

This compounded the psychological damage, and the damaged Elektra would maintain an incestuous fascination toward her father as a key part of her mangled mindscape.

She started to study martial arts in her early teens, and demonstrated astounding proficiency for one so young. The sensei of the girl turned out to be very well connected, and sent her to see a man only known as Stick.

The Chaste

Stick was the leader of a mystical order of martial artists with paranormal abilities, the Chaste. These deadly monks existed to oppose a vast, thoroughly corrupt organisation – a cult and assassins’s guild called the Hand.

Finding Stick high in the mountains, in the citadel of the Chaste, Elektra honed her martial and mystical skills. She even started to “talk” using the telepathy used by the Chaste. But her anger was too great. Recognising that her hatred was all-consuming, Stick cast her out into the world once again.

Determined to prove herself to her one-time mentor, Elektra found another person who had been turned down by the Chaste. She remade his life as that of a simple student under this new sensei. She studied hard under him, but would not be dissuaded from lengthy preparations to undertake a folly : infiltrating the enemy, the Hand.

It wasn’t clear, perhaps even to Elektra herself, whether she intended to infiltrate and destroy them or if she just wanted to join them.

Shortly after she was refused by the Chaste, her father’s job had him move to the USA, and it is in that country that Elektra continued her studies in political science. Two events marked her student years.

The first was a passionate, torrid relationship with a fellow student named Matt Murdock. That relationship was dangerous, however, as Matt was also a student under Stick – who refused that his protégé have any sort of relationship with the impure Elektra Natchios.

At that point Elektra was clearly descending into schizophrenia. She heard voices in her head and felt a urge to kill. Those issues were only nascent, and she never managed to really tell Matt what was wrong with her. She wanted to spend as much time with him before falling into the darkness.

It all ended when Elektra’s father was accidentally shot dead by the police during a hostage crisis. While Matt attempted to intervene, it was too late. The shattered Elektra ran away, and decided that she would make her attempt to join the Hand.

The Hand

Wise to her plot, the Hand’s leaders twisted her anger to suit their own ends. During her initiation she had to kill a man in darkness, who turned out to be the sensei who had trained her as a child. Her schizophrenia found a home in her shock over that murder – and that made her a perfect warrior for the Hand.

The ninja trained her and guided her in deceit and dishonour. As the Hand corrupted Elektra, her anger grew worse.

After being nearly raped by her jonin, Elektra rebelled against her handlers and fled Japan. She kept the sai with which she had killed her old sensei, as symbols of her fall and corruption. A warrior for hire, Elektra sold her talent and psychotic rage to anyone willing to buy it.

But she learned that her tragic life was a confined one. The same players would come in and out no matter how far she ran, no matter how much she thought she knew. Old love would keep returning, and old debts left unpaid would keep haunting her.

Having executed on an assassination contract in New York City, she crossed paths with the blind adventurer known as Daredevil. She later learned to be Matt Murdock, her ex-flame and fellow Chaste-trained warrior. Daredevil vehemently disapproved of Elektra’s chosen profession, but the two cared deeply for one another still.

The Kingpin

Together, they fought the Hand — until the Kingpin, the most powerful figure in East Coast organized crime, hired Elektra as his chief assassin. In that role, Elektra clashed repeatedly with Daredevil. Finally, she was ordered to kill Murdock’s best friend and law partner, Franklin “Foggy” Nelson.

When Foggy recognized her as “Matt’s girl from the college”, Elektra realized she could not carry out the contract and left without shedding blood. That was her second failure in a short time as a ruthless killer, after sparing the life of Daily Bugle reporter Ben Urich.

In this general time frame Elektra expertly foiled a massive Hand conspiracy. The ninja cult nearly had one of their agents, Ken Wind, elected as the President of the USA. But Elektra thoroughly disrupted that plot with the unwitting help of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Agent Garrett.

Soon after that, the psychotic criminal called Bullseye determined that the only way to regain his status as the Kingpin’s number one killer would be to murder Elektra. The maniacal marksman impaled her on her own sai, and she died in Matt’s arms.

But even the final disappointment of a warrior’s passing brought Elektra no peace – the way of the Hand ninja is to know that life and death are nothing but energy pushed and pulled.

The next events are… hazy. It is possible that, at one point Elektra was resurrected, and started to be clad entirely in white to signify purity. She possibly prevented the Hand from enrolling Bullseye to turn him into their new perfect assassin, and died again while killing Bullseye.

Daredevil possibly complied with her last wish, and burned her body after she had managed to kill Bullseye for a time.

The resurrection

Unwilling to part with one of its most talented operatives, the Hand attempted to resurrect Elektra and place her fully under their thrall. The ninja ritual was stopped. Then Stone, a member of the Chaste, completed much of the resurrection process, bringing Elektra back to life after Daredevil had purified her spirit through sheer force of will.

Stone let Daredevil think that the process had failed, and secretly completed the resurrection after he left.

Elektra stayed at the Chaste’s retreat until the Hand attacked her again. Elektra left to confront the Hand, who wanted to fuse the killer instincts of Elektra’s soul with their warrior Erynys and create an even more perfect assassin. Although she defeated the Hand, Elektra was reintroduced to her evil side.

She moved back to New York City, meeting Daredevil again but refraining from resuming their relationship.

Elektra apparently reconciled with Stick for a time, and both were on hand to guide Wolverine through a spiritual and physical healing process. The loss of his adamantium-laced skeleton had triggered a dramatic regression to a bestial, aggressive state, and Wolverine sorely needed help to recover his humanity.

Art by Moebius

Ironically, Elektra, who in her lives and deaths never managed to stray too long from the path of the killer, proved to be a healer and a teacher of self-control and dignity. She achieved for Wolverine what she could never hope to do for herself.

Resuming her career as a freelance assassin, Elektra began a series of confrontations with the Snakeroot, a splinter organisation of the Hand (and the creators of Erynys). The Snakeroot hoped to re-energize a ceremonial sword with the blood of innocents, but Elektra recruited a group of martial artists to help defeat them.

Although her hired fighters were all killed, Elektra ultimately defeated the Snakeroot. Yet during that battle, a bit more of her assassin nature seemed to re-emerge, further weakening her tentative redemption.

Blindly thinking herself to be purged of the Hand’s corruption, Elektra was determined to find her own place in the world. She remained a ninja, a mystery, a shadow — until she chose to reveal herself.

Her life was one of seclusion, covert identities and a bewildering succession of disguises. But she reassured herself by repeatedly stating that having died herself she knew the true nature of killing, and would never gratuitously end a life thanks to her experiences.

The Black Mountain

For a time she settled in New York and opened a dojo along with two other teachers. She lived with her lover Mac, a former heavyweight boxer, and her roommate, a young woman called Nina McCabe whose father had been killed during a fight between Elektra and Bullseye.

Still having a crisis of conscience over her relationship with death, killing and vengeance, Elektra tried to come back to artistic practices such as dancing, and attempted to find an equilibrium by acting as a vigilante, hoping to atone while still feeding her violence addiction.

However, the current reanimated giant ninja of the Hand, Kuroyama, managed to defeat her and ripped Nina’s heart out. Elektra renewed her quest for vengeance and scoured the world hunting the Hand’s operatives. In China, she met both the Kingpin and a resurrected Nina, who had become a Hand assassin.

She managed to defeat her and Kuroyama, and bought Nina to Stick so he could save her soul and give her redemption.

It was a trap – Nina stayed a Hand agent until the end. She communicated the location of the Chaste’s hideout to the Hand, allowing them to destroy everything and possibly kill everyone with an army of ninja warriors. At more or less the same time the Kingpin decided that Elektra was too much of a pain and framed her for putting Mac into a coma, as well as placing a huge bounty on her head.

Natchios had to flee, swearing she would rebuild the Chaste and clear her name. But her heart wasn’t in it anymore. The Hand, by shattering her dream and corrupting Nina, ended this lengthy attempt at redemption. Distraught, she gave up on the moral code she had upheld for the past few years and walked the path of the assassin again.

The assassin

This took her to many, many places – including a complex adventure in Iraq, where she stole the Scorpio Key for S.H.I.E.L.D..  Yet she chose not to give Fury the key. She left it for safekeeping to the LAPD sniper who, years ago, had mistakenly shot her father. As they shared a bond of death, Elektra knew he wouldn’t betray her.

She also captured American men who had raped a Greek woman many years ago – the woman was now quite rich, and paid a large sum. Elektra refused to help with torturing those men for revenge, though.

Meanwhile, a coalition of 4 very rich people who had greatly suffered from Elektra’s depredations was working to bring her down. They succeeded in getting out the word that she was compromised, and after a while nobody would give her contracts.

The complete lack of fighting and killing reduced Elektra to a pathetic, unkempt, broken, needy wreck within two months, at which point it was easy for Locke, the conspiracy’s mastermind, to capture her.

Locke didn’t intend to kill her and become a murderer himself. What he wanted was for her to confront the fact she was a monster. By keeping her drugged and exposing her to movies from her past (especially movies featuring her father), Locke forced Elektra to confront her own nature, and left her deep in the Mojave desert.

While officially the plan was to have her commit suicide over her own deep corruption, Locke was secretly rooting for her to survive, as he had fallen on love with her.

Elektra would have taken her own life by having a poisonous snake bite her. But Locke’s accomplices, furious that he hadn’t killed her outright, went in and tried to terminate her. She killed their men and burned the poison from her system, their actions ironically forcing her to survive her ordeal.

The sensei

Elektra came back for Locke, but didn’t kill him. He convinced her to try and change her ways. His bodyguard took her to a South Central LA local sensei named Drake. Drake was a former pupil of the Chaste and Hand, with a past much like Elektra’s.

She proved to be better than the young Greek woman in the martial arts, and to have the means to help her renounce her ways.

Over the next few weeks, Drake helped Elektra turn the page over her past. However, that redemption would only last a few days as the Hand attacked, attempting to force Elektra to come back to her old ways. They were successful. Elektra chose to take the life of Locke, whom the Hand was using as a living shield, in order to dispatch the last of the three Hand masters who had come for her.

Her white costume covered in blood, she went back to being a top-flight hired killer. She demolished a corrupt African regime, then turned back on her clients as they had lied to her – and took them out.

She was also hired by the government of a Philippines analogue to take down a rebellious armed death cult that was ready to walk on the capital. She succeeded into having that army simply disintegrate and go home after destroying the credibility of their leader.

Description

The red costume usually symbolizes murder and her psychotic nature. Occasionally she has worn a white costume, indicating redemption, or rather an attempt at redemption and purity. Elektra’s perfect body has two huge scars. One triple penetration wound over the solar plexus, where Bullseye impaled her with her own sai (twice) ; and a double impact wound at the back of her neck which I couldn’t identify.

When Elektra is aroused (usually due to twisted associations having to do with her father, or the shedding of blood in particularly intense circumstances), she tends to bite her lower lip with a psychotic, feverish, ecstatic gaze that makes it clear something very bad is going to happen. She didn’t display this particular tic during her relationship with Matt Murdock, though.

Personality

Elektra is complex. Both because Miller’s original vision is intricate, and because the character has often since been handled in a way that had little to do with Miller’s original take (I’m tempted to call those “Miller lite”, but probably can’t get away with it).

In many appearances, Elektra is just a kewl ninja bad girl with strong kung fu killing lots of people. She’s mostly a tough, independent, ultra-competent anti-heroine walking a line between good person and ruthless assassin. There’s some background angst due to the fact she’s died and has been back. That’s about it.

The more complex version of the character is the intersection of several factors :

• Her original mistreatments and probable sexual abuse at the hands of her father, to whom she is totally devoted and deeply loves. She associates love and abuse in a tangled, ugly, neurotic mess. She has only ever been in love with one man, Matt Murdock, and it ended very poorly. Elektra’s relationship with love and caring is a psychiatric Verdun .
• Her trauma over the death of her father. While her relationship with her father was a morbidly co-dependent, incestuous, neurotic cesspool, his death destroyed her world. With her father gone she could no longer define herself as a good, obedient girl pleasing her daddy. Feeling herself empty she compensated by burying herself in the martial arts and, later, murder.
• She continues to some extend to have a conflict between “good parent” (her father, though she knows, but denies, that he actually wasn’t any good) and “bad parent” (the Beast, demonic leader of the Hand, whose “milk” she drank and who told her that her violence addiction was OK and that he loved her for it).
  If heavily drugged or otherwise mentally shocked, Elektra will easily regress to the personality of a severely schizophrenic little girl.
• She has a terrible, pathetic addiction to deadly violence, blood and fighting. If deprived of it, even for just 2 months, she will gradually collapse into a pathetic, homeless-looking wreck, begging people to fight her and triggering bar brawls for no reason so there can be blood and violence.
  This addiction’s reinforcing loop is the weight of her victims. The only way not to let the guilt of the innumerable corpses she left behind her catch up with her is to drive the guilt away by more fighting and more killing, effectively drowning the problem in adrenaline and blood in an ever-worsening forward rush.
• Her heart is actually that of a fanciful, creative, feline, beautiful young woman of great inner richness and sensibility. She excels at any artistic endeavour she learns, such as classical piano or jazz dancing, and is capable of great love.
  That she is hopelessly broken and insane is truly tragic, and she herself suppresses that fertile nature under the blade of the cold-blooded assassin with a hash, professional attitude.
• In her assassin mask/persona, she is cold, professional, highly intelligent, focused and very direct. She will accept or refuse multi-million contracts without apparent emotion, except perhaps for a wry, cold sense of black humor.
  She doesn’t like having anybody waste her time and moves very, very fast – planning, always planning and acquiring intelligence via means ranging from surveillance to subornation to social engineering, from seduction to brutal interrogation.
  Though she enjoys killing and the “game”, she will sometimes spare people, such as a guard who caught her attention for some reason. She tends not to kill women, but will not hesitate if her target is a woman or if eliminating one is necessary. She never kills children.
  Likewise she will not create unnecessary collateral damage. Security, guards, soldiers, etc. will mostly die, but she will normally not harm civilians who happen to be present, such as the staff of a restaurant where she conducts a hit.
• There’s a severe confusion in her mind over whether being the perfect assassin makes her pure or hopelessly corrupted. Sometimes she thinks being perfectly unstoppable and a stone-cold killer makes her a beautiful angel of death. Sometimes she sees how she’s just a commodity to be bought for doing dirty, impure carnal work.
  In this later mindset she quickly comes to consider herself as a dirty, bestial, soiled whore. She will occasionally behave weirdly when she starts considering herself as but a whore of death.
  Likewise, she cannot determine if acknowledging that she is a monster makes her feel powerful, or is so crushing that it can drive her to suicide. She mostly copes by not thinking about it and relishing in the sheer sensations of fighting and killing.
• Ever since Matt Murdock reached out and touched her with a strong message of Christian salvation, redemption is a major theme for Elektra. Redemption and, ultimately, failure. Twice, Daredevil allowed her to find redemption (once in resurrection, once as a nun).
  She also briefly found it when Drake reestablished her connection with humanity, allowing her to see the value of human life and not consider them as evil meat.
  Her terrible addiction and untreated severe schizophrenia mean, however, that she will always fall back into darkness and blood – although one period of redemption lasted for years.
• Elektra’s greatest, eternal foe is the Hand, which she fights ruthlessly wherever they appear. However, they are pretty much everywhere and all-manipulating, like in a paranoid dream, making it an harrowing, soul-numbing war that is on 24/7 and knows no sanctuary. Anything she has they will eventually destroy.
• Elektra is obsessed by death, and this has gotten worse since her own deaths. She accepts the Hand’s teaching that life and death are interchangeable, the same energy pushed or pulled. Of course, this teaching is solely intended to train killers and has little philosophical worth.
  Having been dead shocked her, and although she sometimes brandishes this fact to claim how tough and beyond good and evil she is, she is disturbed by the fact even death changed nothing in her. It brought neither peace nor definitive redemption – and she cannot remember what happened while she was dead.
  While she does not seem to fear death, she often mentions or implies that she is death, or a mistress over death itself. When confronted by hallucinations of a Vedic-like god of death, she defiantly wanted to prove she could best him and kill him. Part of her attitude comes from the fact she was born of a dead woman, then symbolically killed by the incest – and then again by the death of her father.
  One of the reasons she is addicted to death is trying to glimpse in the eyes of those she kills what happens in the afterlife, so she can remember “where” she was while she was dead. No answer has surfaced yet.

Quotes

(Upon leaving young Matt Murdock) “I will go to Hell alone.”

“We’re close to the edge, Matt Murdock. One step from the end. This is where we belong. Always on the brink. The rest lead safe, numb lives, but you, when I saw you on the rooftops, I knew we’re two of a kind. Drawn to the edge and past it.”

“Ko Hung lived for hundreds of years. I, on the other hand, didn’t even make it to age 30.”

Customs man : “New York City. I don’t envy you. Too crowded for me there.”
Elektra : “Be less crowded when I’m done.”

Insurgent : “The General has treated our country, our people like a one dollar whore ! A one dollar whore ! I hear you’re ninja. What do you want to kill him ?”
Elektra (eyes weirdly glazed over): “Money. One dollar.”

“God of death, hey ? *I* will be judge of that.”

“Poppa…”

DC Universe History

She could replace Azrael II, for the most part. The League of Assassins probably replaces both the Order of St. Dumas and the Hand. During Knightfall, she stood in for Batman (making the armor important from the perspective of hiding her identity).

He had to take her down when she crossed the line, which story probably involved Talia fighting or shooting her, and now she works with him as a semi-attached agent.

By Sébastien Andrivet.

Source of Character: Marvel Universe.

Helper(s): Marvel.com , the fanzine Heroes, Peter Piispanen, Roy Cowan. As for the Elektra myth section, I took the second paragraph from the British Museum ’s summary. DCU history by John Colagioia.