Tag: jean grey

So, if you’ve spoken about Jean and Scott, can you talk a little bit about Jean and her relationship with her kids? I think there’s a lot to unpack about Jean and Rachel and Jean and Cable. (Also, that wedding in July should be Kitty and Rachel, and everyone knows it.)

Good question (and you’re damn right about Kitty and Rachel)!

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Jean Grey’s relationship with “her” kids is incredibly weird, even by comic book standards. 

Because she comes from the future of Earth-811, Rachel’s relationship with her parents has been affected quite profoundly by the fact that she comes from an alternate future and thus hasn’t yet and might not be born in Earth-611. This was more of an issue with Scott to begin with, since Jean was dead and Scott had married Madelyn and had Nathan (who didn’t exist in Earth-811), giving Rachel something of an identity crisis, and making her relationship with Scott rather awkward. 

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When Jean finally met Rachel, Jean was dealing with having memories of her Phoenix self and Madelyn in her head, and thus was not quite ready to be a mother to a young woman she hadn’t given birth to (yet), especially given Rachel’s connection to the Phoenix Force through her mother, which brought up issues that the reborn Jean wasn’t ready to deal with either. So it took a while for them to gel.

Nathan Christopher Askani Dayspring Summers Cable is even weirder. He was born to Scott and Maddy originally, but then Jean subsumed Maddy’s memories, so Jean is in this weird

Schrödingerian situation where she both did and didn’t give birth to him at the same time that she remembers Scott abandoning the kid and other-her to be with her. But in the course of the original run on X-Factor, Jean dealt with her issues for Cable’s sake…only to have to give up the child in order to save him from the technovirus. And then the baby came back to her as a man who was older than she was, which is pretty damn awkward even if he hadn’t been a hard-bitten soldier from the future. 

So overall, the thing about Jean Grey is that she’s never been allowed to get pregnant, have a kid, and then raise that kid. Which I think is a damn shame. There are a ton of examples of how to make interesting stories about superhero moms and kids: Hopeless’ run on Spider-Woman and Slott’s “Renew Your Vows” (to say nothing of the FF, Power Pack, Luke Cage and Jessica Jones, etc. etc.) 

Kind of a mammoth ask here, but what’s your opinion on the whole Scott Summers-Jean Grey “romance,” as well as how it relates to the Cyclops-Emma Frost and Wolverine-Jean Grey relationships(and the resulting love triangles)?

That is a big ask, but I’m game.

I’ve talked a bit about it here, here, and here. 

Scott and Jean are tricky, because so much of their early relationship was very grounded in a particular kind of 50s Romance Comic dynamic where Angst and Not Talking About Feelings reigned, and then they became the It Couple because Jean was the only female member of the 05. And then there was the Scott-Jean-Logan love triangle they tried for a while, and then we got the Phoenix Saga (which was all about Scott and Jean as Doomed Lovers), and then Jean was the Lost Love, and then she came back so they became Destined To Be Together, and there was the Evil Ex/Clone, the Time-Travelling Baby, and on and on…

What I’m getting at is that that’s a LOT of dramatic weight being thrown onto their relationship which is about their relationship, without giving them much time just to be a couple. Part of this has to do with the fact that Marvel writers seem to have a problem writing married couples – one of the reasons I’ve been enjoying Slott’s Renew Your Vows is that it’s a rare book which understands that marriage and kids are the springboard for story not the end of it – so they keep adding Relationship Drama as the plot of last resort. 

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Scott and Emma were, to be honest, one of the most interesting things that had been done with those characters in a long time, and their relationship had enough juice to run for ~20 years. Indeed, I think it could have gone on longer had Jean not been killed off AGAIN (another source of cheap drama in comics) and if they hadn’t gone down the same road with Scott and Emma that culminated with Scott dying and Emma going crazy/evil.

Jean and Logan has some interesting Romance Novel dynamics, and I would be interested in seeing someone take a “Renew Your Vows”-style (although interestingly Jean and Logan are together and have a kid in that AU) take at them having a relationship, although it’s limited by them being in a triangle where the authors see Scott and Jean as the OTP. 

However, I’ve said for a while on Twitter that the Scott-Jean-Logan triangle would be much more interesting (and funnier) if it was really about Jean coming into her sexuality (without having to be killed off) and wanting a poly relationship but being really bad at it.