Tag: scott summers

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. 

image

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. 

Why is it a big deal that Cyclops is a deadbeat dad? Isn’t Mr. Vice Guy a trope similar to many real-life heroes who have feat of clay, who have affairs, and so on. It reminds me of the whole Spiderman can’t divorce his wife and that’s less heroic and more evil than getting an annulment from Satan?

It’s just not very well-set up in his previous characterization: from the beginning, Scott Summers has been one of those “emotionally repressed, …Type-A…personalities,” I talk about not working as well in the present, which is part of the reason why he has such a big hatedom.

Now, unlike Reed, Summers has historically been more of a follower than a leader – Xavier’s teacher’s pet and hall monitor, the eternal Leonardo to the Raphael/Michelangelo antics of Bobby and Hank (and Warren, sometimes) – but very much a rules-following, by-the-book guy. And the main thing that made him more than a total wet blanket was his Teen Romance-style angst about whether Jean could ever love a man who shot red eye-beams. So to sum up: Scott Summers = dutiful and into romance. 

Now, I think there was a way that Claremont could have leaned into the Mr. Vice Guy thing, but didn’t quite: namely, actually exploring Scott’s tendencies to have low-stakes, no-labels affairs the moment he thought Jean was dead/not around (thinking about Colleen Wing, Lee Forrester here) as a way to introduce the idea of Scott straining against his own repression and feelings of being trapped in his role as Designated X-Men Team Leader, and then build up from there to establish Scott Summers as one of these heroes with feet of clay (in his case, a tendency to default to following others’ expectations of him despite not really being fulfilled by the life that results in, and then a reactive tendency to try to wreck his own life in a search for independence and self-knowledge):

image

But there’s not really any follow-through. Scott and Jean never have a chance to talk through this tendency and how it reflects on his feelings about Jean (even though they’ve got one of those creepy psychic-link-true-love things going on which means she knows and he knows she knows) or what he wants from life beyond being her boyfriend and an X-Men. Nor does anyone really call him out on his hypocritcal jealousy around Jean Grey and other dudes (although one time it was Mastermind, so I guess you get a pass there), or really call him out about about dumping Madelyn (granted, a lot of that was the fault of Fall of the Mutants and Inferno, but still). 

Sidenote: I’ve never had a problem with Spiderman being married and, yes, him getting a divorce works so much better than diabolic annulment.