The Pint-Sized Powerhouse — How Powerful is Hope Mikaelson Really?
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So far, I have not been completely happy with how Hope Mikaelson’s powers have been portrayed in Legacies. They have been massively underestimating the poor, innocent gal. And because I have the great and exlusive privilige to own a Medium publication, you all get to share in my displeasure.
To say Hope Mikaelson is the golden child would be an understatement. We’ve heard it over and over again: She’s oh so powerful, omfg she’s gonna end us all, oh no why did she set my dog on fire?! Typical Mikaelson hysteria. But what does any of this actually mean? How powerful is Hope Mikaelson really and how do we know? If that’s the sort of thing you spend your days wondering about, you’re a huge nerd just like me, but you also happen to be in luck. This article will aim to explain by looking at the lore in pedantically painstaking detail, presenting as much concrete evidence from TVD and TO as possible and making careful inferences not only exactly what gives Hope “witch-ender” Mikaelson her power but also lay out concretely what that means she is truly capable of. After all of that is complete, if your mind is still capable of function, we’ll take a quick look at what this means for the future of Legacies. So strap on your pointed hats, pull out your white oak stakes and let’s see what kind of a wallop this wolfpup packs.
First, let’s set the scene: Hope Mikaelson is established almost immediately as incredibly powerful in The Originals. From before the day of her birth, the witches were prophesizing how she might be the end of all witchdom. And on that day, her very birth acted as a nexus vorti that (along with several artefacts) was capable of bringing back an original vampire from the grasp of death itself. Quite right, cute wittle Hope’s first act in this world was sticking her middlefinger up to the Grim Reaper himself and slapping meaningful narrative consequence across the face. No mean feat either, as it took Bonnie Bennett (who herself is supposedly also part of a bloodline recognised in-universe as particularly powerful) a combination of expression, spirit magic, traditional magic, dark magic, lots of angry screaming and, yes, also this little thing called her own life to bring Jeremy back. Hope did this, unintentionally, as an infant. I’m sorry Bon Bon, but in our world the right heritage beats hard work and experience 9 out of 10 times. That was cute little baby hope, now nail your socks to the ground and let’s take a look at teenage Hope.
The Perks of Being First Out the Womb
Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, Hope Mikaelson is a firstborn of Esther and Dahlia’s line. This means, according to the font of witchy information and empty threats, Dahlia, that she has quote “devastating power.” As it is established in The Originals’ season 2 that every firstborn of this line has such power. Yet, what does this actually mean concretely? Devastating sounds all cool and apocalyptic, but it seems rather hard to quantify. In fact, no careful and thoughtful man would ever dare to embark on such a thing. And my mother always taught me to be careful and thoughtful. Fortunately I never listened to that bitch, so let’s try anyway. How do we do this? Let’s start by looking at her witchy predecessors. There are two other firstborn witches of this line we know of: the wicked bitch-witch of the West Dahlia and blonde viking goddess Freya.
Despite seeing her perform magic quite often and seeing some very impressive feats, which include things such as easily desiccating an original and almost killing three originals at once (I especially liked the part where she made Jackson suffer), it’s actually rather a bit tricky to get a read on Dahlia’s innate power. At least as it pertains to Hope. By the events of The Originals, at least in the present day, she had already tied herself to Freya through her very own brand of connective magicTM. This magic seemed to connect two witches together and through some magical gobbledigook make both of them exponentially more powerful. Or in Freya’s more erudite words from S2E16 it “…augmented my power even as it allowed her to draw from me.” Because why settle for the power to blow up towns, when you can blow up cities instead? This also means though that any magical feats she performs after this cannot be used lest I be considered a liar, a scoundrel, and worst of all a very bad boy, as Hope would not naturally have access to connective magic. At least not until the plot needed her to. And since she dies before being able to sever the connection with Freya, none of Dahlia’s feats in the present can be used to estimate Hope’s power. Well darnit.
In addition, by her appearance in the 21st century both Dahlia and Freya had been alternately sleeping and waking for about a millenium. Plenty of time to grow more beautiful, dream of dapper princes kissing you awake and, apparently, gain a +99 modifier to your magical power attribute. Because as Freya says in S2E16 about their little nap they slept with “…our magic acruing over time until we woke.” Even assuming they were wasteful little rascals and used up all their magic each time within the year they were awake, it does take quite a lot of power to rob so many goth clothing stores I’d imagine, Dahlia and Freya would still have had a century of magical power accumulated by the time we see them in the present day.
The same thing that makes it difficult to use Dahlia also makes using Freya as a benchmark difficult. We certainly cannot use any of Freya’s actions before Dahlia’s death, as they were still tied together in magical flagrante delicto through connective magic. And we never saw her power before that point, as they were already connected when Freya… was… still a child. I am now regretting that metaphor.
Even after Dahlia’s death our Aryan goddess still presumably had that century of magic in the tank. And while we’re not sure how much of a difference this would make, we know that in S3E9 Vincent brags about having been holding his power back for “…a long time…” after a show of force and that this statement intimidates Marcel. So while it’s hard to know exactly what his baseline was before he turned super saiyan, hard to know if the same rules apply to a regular witch not using connective magic, and we know he was a powerful witch before this point, this seems to at least imply that he gained a significant power boost from holding back his power. And this “long time” happens to have been a whopping 2 years of not using his magic (having quit in 2011 after his girlfriend went psycho and the scene with Marcel taking place in 2013 in-universe). Put that next to a full century of building up power and well… it’s rather like putting a bull up against an intergalactic space fleet.
In other words, Freya’s power as demonstrated after Dahlia’s death must be taken as being an upper limit for what it means to be a firstborn of the line. Even though it is likely that there is variation even between firstborns, with Dahlia likely having been naturally more powerful than Freya as Freya says in S2E16 while still tied to Dahlia that Dahlia was the most powerful witch she’d ever seen. And clearly she was unable to face Dahlia on her own, otherwise she likely never would’ve run to her family at all. I mean, would you try to cozy up to Klaus Mikaelson if you had the choice? The guy decorates his house with the heads of his enemies, he constantly sticks it in the siblings he supposedly loves without their permission and his paintings have a significant overuse of the colour red.
A lower limit is a little more difficult. We know that Freya and Dahlia are considered exceptionally powerful since firstborns of Esther’s bloodline are consistently referred to as some of the most powerful witches to ever exist. So, logically it follows that the vast majority of non-Esther’s line firstborn witches we come across are less powerful. Even the ones otherwise referred to as powerful are never spoken of as among the most powerful (save those of the Bennett bloodline). This implies that all of those witches are less powerful than Esther’s line firstborns like Freya or Dahlia. This allows us to estimate a lower limit for Freya’s power without her 100 years of slumber.
In this context some of the witches we’ve come across like that are Jonas Martin, Maddox and, most prominently, Vincent.
Jonas Martin was able to use pain infliction to disable an entire pack of werewolves at once without so much as breaking a sweat. Maddox was able to cast a spell on Klaus which protected him from Bonnie’s magic while she had the power of 100 witches (though, to be fair, we don’t know what aid he may have used). And Vincent… well, Vincent was able to inflict pain on the 1000-year-old Lucien. Quite impressive considering that the older a vampire gets the more power it takes to disable them like this, as illustrated by season 2 Bonnie when she failed to disable the 500-year-old Katherine this way. He has also been shown to be able to temporarily disable original hybrid Klaus Mikaelson and snap individual vampire’s necks left and right without much fuss. Although, to be fair, we don’t know to what extent ancestral magic might boost his power on a day-to-day basis. Still all of this acts as a nice (approximate) lower limit for the power of a firstborn Mikaelson.
So what can we say about firstborn power and what it means for Hope? What might Hope be able to do while solely tapping into this singular part of herself? Well, Freya is considered an extremely powerful witch by anyone who encounters her even after being unchained from Dahlia. Some of her greatest hits from this time period include: handily breaking Dahlia’s boundary spell so that Klaus could get his stab on, snapping the necks of nearly a dozen vampires from hundreds of miles away, easily disposing of 1000-year-old vampire Aurora and, most impressively, nearly killing Enhanced Original Lucien by literally telekinetically ripping his heart from his chest… like, omg that’s so cool please marry me and kindly don’t kill me, Freya. A feat, may I remind you, it took Bonnie engaging in a magical gangbang of 100 witches to even attempt with Klaus in season 2 of The Vampire Diaries. And not an unsignificant portion of that power either, as when Jeremy asks her in S2E17 how much of this power it’d take to kill an original Bonnie responds simply “All of it.” And Freya did not seem to have used up nearly all of her power when doing this as she did not exhibit any of the signs of this (a bloody nose, passing out, dying, etc.) afterwards.
Even at a significant lower limit someone like Jonas Martin (who is likely significantly below Freya’s level) was able to easily take out an entire pack of werewolves at once. And if Vincent and Maddox’s feats are reflective of their innate abilities then Hope should be quite capable of disabling originals and casting extremely powerful protective magic on herself using only her firstborn powers.
Finding Method in the Madness of Vampirism
So Hope, at a lower limit, can disable originals and entire packs of werewolves at once. And at an upper limit may have the power of 100 normal witches in the tank. All this just from being a firstborn witch like Freya. When Klaus asks Dahlia in S2E20 whether Hope will suffer the same fate as Freya, however, Dahlia responds in her usual sunny and delightful disposition forecasting that “Hope will suffer far more than Freya. Hope’s magic will be tainted with your vampire blood as well as the aggressive wolf temperament. Without the proper tutelage, that only I can provide, Hope’s power will grow unchecked. She will lash out at everyone. Including you. She’ll devastate the city that you love and then her terror will spread far beyond.” So, what the hell does the old dingbat mean with this? At least aside from conveniently making herself indispensible. You’ll be delighted to hear that for this we’ll need to first painstakingly lay out a bit of lore.
Anything which has a spell on it seems to possess some magical energy. We find evidence of this throughout all three series. Davina harvests energy from several dark objects (objects that have been enchanted with a spell) to bring back Mikael, siphoners like Josie and Kai can drain energy from objects like the window in The Armory’s cells and, most importantly for our purpose of assessing Hope’s power, both Papa Tunde (through sacrificial magic) and the Heretics (through siphoning) were able to drain power from vampires to fuel their magic.
This is not surprising, as at the end of the day vampirism is merely a spell Esther cast on some objects. Those objects just happen to be half a dozen, slighly homicidal, living-ish humans. A spell, might I add, that was quite powerful.
Despite transforming into a scared little girl when Dahlia’s around, Esther is recognised as one of the most powerful witches in history. Her spell drew from nature in the form of the sun and the white oak, and her spell drew from the thousands (or possibly millions) of witch spirits on the other side. Quite a bit of juice, and it shows. It turned those people into near unrivaled killing machines. Allowing them to rip people apart with little effort, control their minds and protecting them against everything from guns, to kenning spells, to broken necks, to powerful magic, to sick burns, to aging itself. Altogether making them nearly indestructible, it requiring the power of over a hundred witches to break the spell and kill them.
As might then be expected, channeling the power of this spell gives someone a significant boost. The first time we behold this spectacle is with Papa Tunde when he uses sacrificial magic to incapacitate Rebekah and then uses her as an infinite magical battery. Afterwards this piddly little witch, who easily got his eyes poked out before, can suddenly go toe-to-toe with Klaus Mikaelson. Even being completely immune to his neck being snapped. Later he even uses the power of several regular vampires that had been trapped in Marcel’s garden to create a weapon that can incapacitate any creature, even an original.
We see this repeated also with Finncent who does the same with Mikael. While he doesn’t use the power to simply copy-paste the originals’ abilities like Tunde, the lazy fuck, he uses it to fuel dozens of spells which trap armies of vampires and make them a slight bit ravenous. He traps his siblings in a chambre-de-chasse and easily incapacitates original vampire Elijah (though by this time he had added Esther’s new body to the mix).
Yes! She is Inwincible!
And what precious little snowflake, pray tell, happens to have the blood of an original handy at all times? That’s right, Hope “the fucking beast” Mikaelson. Because despite being a witch who has not yet died and become a vampire, her blood is already quite detectably delictably vampiric.
We can see this in the fact that, from when she was a little child, she’s been able to heal extremely rapidly (like a human with vampire blood in their system does). This rather implies that… well, she has vampire blood in her system. Her blood. Now you might think it’s just regular vampire/hybrid blood, but it clearly isn’t. Because in addition to rapid healing, despite technically seen not being a vampire-werewolf hybrid yet, her blood can turn werewolves into hybrids and cure werewolf bites. The only other blood that can do these things is Klaus’ original hybrid blood. And that only after he awakened his werewolf side in addition to his vampire side by breaking the curse. This implies that Hope already checks off both of the boxes of having vampire blood and werewolf blood. And also importantly that her blood is not the regular junk from those peasant hybrids but of royal original quality. Since regular hybrids do not seem to be able to make more hybrids (so far as we can tell) and their blood is likely not able to cure wolf bites (otherwise the Mystic Falls Gang likely would’ve called Tyler, not Klaus when deus ex machina blood was needed). In other words: she literally has extremely potent werevamp ORIGINAL blood coursing through her veins. Werewolf blood containing the magic from a curse by one of the most powerful beings in the setting (Inadu aka Hopesbane aka the Hollow) and vampirism containing the magic from a spell cast using the combined power of thousands or millions of witch spirits.
This means, from a mechanics point of view, there is an enormous amount of magical energy running through her blood highways ready to be harvested and turned to plot breaking purposes. The power Papa Tunde and Finncent channelled when they became nearly invincible? That stuff is inside innocent little Hope. You might as well imagine she has an infinite battery of magical power is strapped to her fucking back and a world-ending raygun in her hand.
But How Invincible?
Now how she would go about channeling it is a little more… difficult to say. Certainly she can’t do it like Papa Tunde and Finncent did. She’d have to incapacitate herself with sacrificial magic for that. And she doesn’t seem the “knock myself out” type of gal. She also can’t do it in the same way as the Heretics and Kai channel their vampirism, as she’s not a disgusting abomination. Well, at least not that type of disgusting abomination. But the power is there, and where there is a will there’s a convenient plot point to make it possible.
As alluded to earlier, this power may in fact rival the power of a hundred witches in itself, as it takes the power of a hunded witches to break it. Even if we take for granted that it takes more power to break a spell than to cast it (which there is some evidence for) it is still so powerful that no witch who wasn’t the equivalent of a hundred witches in power has ever even attempted to break it with brute force. Not even extremely poweful witch Esther, a woman who as its creator knows more about the spell than anyone, attempted this. She needed a reversal spell while channeling the entire Bennett line or a white oak stake to try to kill her children. It also happens to be the case that this spell seems to recharge over time and that there is no limit to how often it can do this, as Elijah points out that, while being channeled by Papa Tunde, Rebekah acts as an infinite battery due to the spell’s conferral of immortality.
Some examples of what other witches have been able to do with this power that adorable little Hope has just laying around include: making yourself immune to neck snaps and throwing around the invincible Klaus Mikaelson like a raggdoll as Papa Tunde did. Also shaking the very earth below the city, instantly creating boundary spells to hold originals or armies of vampires and werewolves, and easily subduing an original vampire like Elijah with gardening equipment as Finncent did while using Mikael as his own private gas station. Or even while siphoning nothing but regular vampire blood, like Kai was, casting invisiques like they’re going out of style, snapping vampire necks left and right and taking on big bad Bonnie one-on-one in a magical duel without even pulling out that complimentary phoenix feather wand you keep in your sock. Though it’s worth noting that he did also siphon werewolf magic for that last feat, which by sheer coinkydink Hope also happens to have.
All these things Hope’s vampy-wolf blood alone could give her. A power to rival Papa Tunde, Esther and perhaps even a hundred witches. That is, may I remind you, on top of her powers as a firstborn. This may add (at most) yet another 100 witches worth of power. But boy, we are not all the way down this black hole of power yet. As there is a third puzzle piece we have yet to shove into its slot.
You Wouldn’t Like Her When She’s Angry… Or Sad… Or Worried…
As you may recall Dahlia also mentions Hope’s werewolf temperament. In context this could simply mean that this makes her uncontrollable. And, certainly, that is true. A werewolf temper pairs with great power as well as a fine wine with a pile of swine shit. But it could refer to something else as well.
Way back in the good old days of season 1 of The Vampire Diaries, before we measured power in terms of how many armies one could obliterate, we could find wise old witch Sheila (Bonnie’s grandmother for those who’ve drank the amnesia fluid) saying this in the middle of one of her famous speeches: “Many things can fuel a witch’s power. Worry, anger. After Stefan told me they had taken you, I had a lot of both.”
For those with poor reading abilities, you’d have to be to like my shit, that implies that anger can be a power source for a witch’s magic. Or at the very least, that it can enhance the potency of a witch’s powers. And werewolves… well, there’s this little characteristic they have, you might not have heard about it, where they can get just a little absolutely homicidally livid over someone putting their favourite sock in the wrong drawer. They will cut you.
It is nearly impossible to estimate exactly how much of a power boost this would give Hope. But I’m a rebel, so let’s try to guesstimate away. There are not many situations where we can unambiguously say a witch’s power was affected by their emotions, but after some thorough digging, by which I mean I sat around for five minutes playing Peggle while replaying scenes from TVD in the background, I’ve found that there are at least two.
We know that fear was enough to completely disable Bonnie’s power mid season 1. At this time however she was an inexperienced witch and this blockage may have been more psychological than magical. Her just being too afraid to use her magic after it lead to her ancestor using her body like a motel and her resulting experiences with Damon trying to omnomnom on her. This may mean it does not apply to Hope, who has never shown any fear to use her magic. She’s more of the smirk-and-snark-at-a-dragon type of gal.
Conversely we have Sheila. She is repeatedly shown as being a witch significantly passed her prime. In fact, she is hardly able to use a single pain infliction spell on the 170-year-old Damon. This is quite surprising as this is something which the, at that point still inexperienced, Bonnie does repeatedly in season 2. Without much of an ill-effect. After Bonnie is captured however, Sheila says she was “easily” able perform a basic locator spell. Though locator spells are consistently shown to be performed by witches of average power, a similar locator spell caused Bonnie to get a bloody nose later in season 2. Though admittedly this was after she had been performing other spells as well. This same season 2 Bonnie managed to use pain infliction on Damon quite easily and, to the delight of everyone, quite frequently without much of a bother. This suggests locator spells are still fairly draining for the average witch, at the very least on par with pain infliction spells. Sheila suddenly being able to not just cast one but to use one so easily, after being nearly drained by a single pain infliction spell earlier that same day, means she likely got a not unsignificant power boost from her anger and worry. Since she rose from significantly weaker than season 2 Bonnie, since she was drained after a single pain infliction spell, to stronger or on par with season 2 Bonnie, who only felt ill-effects after casting four pain infliction spells, a daylight ring spell and a locator spell in a few days. And Bonnie only passed out after also adding the messaging spell to that. If we assume all these spells require the same amount of power this may mean a boost of three or four times or perhaps even more. Definitely enough to make spells that earlier were draining suddenly easy.
Furthermore, if the boost a witch gets from their emotions is proportional to the strength of the emotion and dependent on their innate strength, this may mean Hope (with her werewolf levels of anger) may be able to get an even bigger boost when angry. Things that earlier might have been draining to her would suddenly become easy. And we don’t even know many things that are draining to her. As many things other witches have trouble doing, such as throwing originals around, are things Hope already does easily. In other words, with this boost she’s perhaps going from just below Dahlia’s army-obliterating strength to hopping all the way over it up to that delightful little place we call “world-ending power.” From being easily able to snap the neck of one original but perhaps being drained by snapping multiple at once, to snapping the necks of three or four at once with ease. But since this element of the lore is rarely brought up, and so far as I know it has never been specified when or to what extent anger has boosted a witch’s powers (or even that the writers haven’t forgotten about this long, long ago), it’s hard to be sure. Suffice it to say that whatever boost it might give Hope, you can count that on top of her firstborn status and her extra-potent miracle blood.
This Was Not Even 50% of Her True Power!
This is, of course, referring only to her raw innate power. Over the centuries witches have cleverly invented several methods to screw the rules of nature. With these they can boost or refine their power, allowing them to perform much greater feats than their innate power would otherwise allow. Things like channeling, to using spirit magic, to using the soul of your beloved dead grandpapa like a magical gas station, to using the power of geometry, to pretty much anything the writers make up when someone needs a Zenkai boost.
When we first see channeling, for example, it occurs between Luka and Bonnie. And it allows Bonnie, who had been struggling with overuse of magic at that point to perform even a simple locator spell, to nearly single-handedly take down the tomb’s boundary spell. Something draining enough that it lead to her grandmother’s death.
While Bonnie is only able to cast maybe a dozen spells in a few days at the beginning of season 2 of The Vampire Diaries and not even able to subdue the 500-year-old Katherine, when she starts using spirit magic to channel the power of 100 witch spirits later that season Bonnie is suddenly able to nearly kill original vampire Klaus.
While using another technique, expression, Bonnie is able to stonify Silas all by her lonesome despite him being a very powerful creature.
With spirit magic and a complex ritual Esther is even able to create vampirism, a spell which is so powerful that it takes the power a hundred witches to break (as demonstrated by Bonnie). Esther might be powerful as is, but as clearly illustrated by her not even attempting to kill her children through brute force (instead going with other methods) that her power without spirit magic is nowhere near the level of 100 witches.
Many of these things are things Hope could probably do already with her raw, innate power. As established earlier in this bloody article, firstborn witch Freya was able to take down boundary spells and nearly kill originals without seemingly channeling anything. Papa Tunde was able to essentially replicate the effects of the vampirism spell by channeling Rebekah’s original blood (which Hope has). So you can only imagine what she’d be able to do when the firstborn power and werepire blood power are further boosted by an outside source like spirit magic. Especially when she’s angry.
Without spirit magic Bonnie was unable to use pain inflication on even the 500-year-old Katherine, with it she could take down an original. Without any outside source Hope can snap the neck of a 1000-year-old original vampire with a flick of her wrist and likely even kill one, so with spirit magic… Let’s just say that if the boost is anything like what Bonnie was able to get, she could likely do that a dozen times over.
To put all of this into context, the nearly unstoppable villains for season 2 of The Vampire Diaries which our protagonists couldn’t beat… were TWO 1000-year-old originals. The powerful trinity which acted as the villains of season 3 of The Originals consisted of THREE non-original 1000-year-old vampires. With some additional source of power like spirit magic the originals, the trinity and the entirety of the Strix could probably have been Hope’s playthings. If she’d been an adult during season 3, Lucien likely would’ve been obliterated the first time his smug face said hello. In fact with this kind of power there is likely not a single being in the entirety of the lore, originals or Silas or whatever, that she could not utterly obliterate. As every previous creature that was defeated by magic, no matter how strong, was defeated by a demonstrably much weaker witch using one of the sources that Hope also has access to. Silas? First defeated by Bonnie using expression. Klaus? Nearly defeated in season 2 by Bonnie using spirit magic equivalent to only about 100 witches. Lucien? Used her firstborn power and a reversal spell. All things Hope could do without breaking a sweat.
Jumping in the Artificial Weaksauce Ocean
Now will Legacies ever actually get into all of this? Well, probably not. Despite it being fascinating to big nerds like myself, you might have noticed these shows are not always so careful about their lore. So whether the writers remember all of the details I’ve laid out for you today… it’s a dubious proposition. Regardless, however fascinating it might be on a character level to see Hope finally able to channel her original blood and reconnect with her dearly deceased daddy, it probably wouldn’t happened anyway for one simple reason: the black hole of plot.
On the season 2 The Vampire Diaries commentary for the episode “Masquerade” Kevin Williamson talks about something he calls the “black hole of plot.” This is where magic in a story gets out of control and thereby makes the plot completely nonsensical. After all, it doesn’t make much sense to have a long arc where the heroes go find an ancient artefact in the Andes to finally destroy the evil mudkip while learning to love and hate and dance pretty folk dances along the way if you have a witch that can basically just blow the enemy to smithereens by rubbing her buttcheeks together. Or teleport the artefact to her. Or any number of abilities that will make the audience wonder “Why the hell didn’t she use that spell?! Or that other spell?! Or the seven artefacts of ultimate doom they already had laying around?!”
And currently Legacies already struggles with that enough. As is very plain to see by the fact that Hope often simply beats the shit out of her enemies, rather than using the vast magical powers she should already have simply being a firstborn. Not unless the plot calls for it anyway. Cough, cough, suddenly she knows a mirror spell, cough, cough.
Legacies is a monster-of-the-week show. They do not have the time to build up all the enemies Hope faces with season long arcs like Klaus or Dahlia were built up. And without that long build-up they cannot give them the gravitas or power it would take to stand against Hope on the level of raw power if she were as powerful as the lore suggests she should be.
The only way they could have concievably dealt with this was by introducing enemies like the Necromancer. Ones that play on Hope’s personality, inexperience and emotions. Ones that render her vast powers irrelevant through smart exploitation of her weaknesses. But great villains like the Necromancer cannot be mass produced. To come up with a new one to rival him and having him exploit Hope’s weaknesses in a new and refreshing way might be a little too taxing for this show’s writers to manage in the time they have to break each episode.
So how powerful is Hope Mikaelson? She likely has an amount of magical power equivalent to about 100 regular witches inately. This may go up to about 200 regular witches if she manages to tap into the power of her original hybrid blood. Adding an emotion-based modifier on top of that may boost it even higher. Anywhere from 300–800 witches while emotional seems like a good, conservative estimate. That is if her werewolf levels of anger don’t boost it beyond that. Add on top of that some enhancing form of magic like spirit magic or channeling and we could be talking her having power equivalent to that of literal thousands of witches all by her lonesome.
The power of ONE HUNDRED witches was enough to kill an original.
This means with even a conservative estimate she is powerful enough to quite easily kill originals through brute force alone, make herself borderline indestructible, snap the necks of armies of vampires with a flick of her wrist, create boundary spells at will, nearly instantly defeat every villain we’ve previously seen and utterly annihilate the plot. But sadly, despite the incredible dramatic potential inherent in doing so, we will probably never see these powers develop fully. Because if they did, then the show would be over. So it’s no surprise “Legacies” hit her with the nerf stick so hard the audience got a concussion.
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Note: This article was written in early season 2 of Legacies and does not take into account information after that point.
Copyright: The images used in this article are screenshots taken from the episodes of the show. We are allowed to use them under section 107 of the US Copyright Act of 1976. Legacies belongs to the CW and Alloy Entertainment.
