Race change body swap fuckery
Marvel fuckery
Combining the two
I think they should have just left it alone since the character has been that way for 30 years and her backstory just gets more and more complicated.-
She started out as Captain Britain's sister (with psi-powers)
She gets to be Captain Britain for a bit (at some point here, an evil version of her brother from another world tries to rape her. Uh...)
She gets blinded by Slaymaster, who gouged her eyes out
She refuses implants, but Mojo kidnaps her, gives her cybernetic eyes (with cameras), and brainwashes her
The X-Men rescue her and she joins the X-Men, but sucks in combat and just kind of sits around until Wolverine (?) starts training her
Now here's where it gets even dumber:
Psylocke gets a premonition that The Reavers are going to kill all the X-Men
She sends them through the Siege Perilous, which is a fancy term for "throw the X-Men into a magical-cosmic portal and spit them out in new locations with character changes"
Psylocke is spit out of the portal as an amnesiac right near a Hand fortress. They decide that she is perfect to use in an attempt to resurrect Kwannon, who was the Hand leader's lover and top assassin, and brain-dead at the time.
Somehow Mojo and Spiral contact the Hand and the two use psychic Hand conditioning and Mojo...stuff ("the Body Shoppe". Sure!) to swap Psylocke's mind into Kwannon's body, with her psychic powers intact, and use her as an assassin.
We now have super-ninja Psylocke who's bad ass and shows lots of ass because Jim Lee wanted to draw some more half-nekkid women (bless you, Jim)
Kwannon then comes back a few years later, somehow inhabiting Psylocke's original body. There's also a mess of memories and both are sort of the same person (and also used to explain why Asian Psylocke is kind of a sexpot who flirted with Cyclops and likes to run around half-naked- that's the Kwannon personality coming out). This is sorted but then Kwannon dies because the original body got the legacy virus.
Psylocke gets fucked up somehow and another mystical thing called the Crimson Dawn restores her, giving her that dumb red tattoo over her eye and some different shadow-like powers. I wasn't reading X-Men at this point so I have no idea how she got the psychic powers back (maybe she didn't?). A few years later, Psylocke gets killed by Vargas.
Psylocke is mysteriously resurrected again a few more years later (I think this was supposed to be her crazy other brother Jamie Braddock's doing?), does X-Men stuff, then is transported to wherever the Exiles are and is in that series for a while.
An evil group of female mutants led by Madelyne Pryor resurrects her original body and makes Psylocke's mind go back into it. I didn't read this story (Greg Land art
) but I think the gist was that she was brainwashed, given her old powers back, and then the X-men win and she goes back to the Asian body.
Nice and easy to follow.