My thoughts on Jean Grey’s personas

My thoughts on Jean Grey’s personas Jean Grey’s history gets complicated in a way that goes well beyond somebody changing their costume or taking a new name. You start with Jean, then you have Phoenix, then you find out Jean has been underwater while Phoenix was living her life. Add Madelyne Pryor and everything revealed during Inferno, and suddenly those stories are connected much more closely than they first appeared. I wanted to go back through that part specifically, because saying Jean came back from the dead barely explains what happened. The starting point is Jean as Marvel Girl, one of the original X-Men. She has her own relationships, her own experiences with the team, and her own place in Scott’s life before any of this happens. That matters when we get to the shuttle. Jean is the one who puts herself in danger trying to bring everyone home. The later explanation changes who emerges as Phoenix, but Jean’s decision to save her friends still belongs to Jean. When Phoenix comes out of the water, the story presents this as Jean surviving and returning with an incredible level of power. And that is how the people around her experience it. They are living alongside someone they believe is Jean, having conversations with her, trusting her, and building on relationships they already had. Phoenix goes through those experiences too. This is much more involved than a stranger wearing Jean’s face to fool everybody. There is the Phoenix who helps save creation through the M’Kraan Crystal, then the manipulation by Mastermind and the Hellfire Club, and eventually Dark Phoenix. The scale becomes horrifying when an inhabited world is destroyed. By the time the story reaches the Moon, everyone is facing the possibility that someone they love cannot safely be allowed to live. The sacrifice there ends that threat, but it leaves the people who knew her grieving Jean. Then the cocoon changes the explanation for all of it. The Jean who went down in the shuttle has been healing beneath Jamaica Bay. The Phoenix Force created a duplicate of her, drawing on her identity and a portion of her essence, while her own body remained protected underwater. The Avengers find the cocoon, the Fantastic Four become involved, and Jean finally comes out of it. Calling Phoenix “fake” gets across the shock of that reveal, but it can also make the whole thing sound like it never counted. It did. Those events happened. People died, people were saved, and the relationships were experienced by everyone involved. The revelation separates Jean’s body and actions from what Phoenix did. It doesn’t remove the history that happened in her absence. Jean returns to people who remember an entire stretch of her life that she did not physically live. Madelyne makes this even more complicated, and she is already part of the story before Jean comes out of the cocoon. Scott meets her after the apparent death of Jean, and her resemblance immediately raises questions. Mastermind even uses those fears against him. Eventually Scott accepts Madelyne as herself, marries her, and they have Nathan. By the time Jean returns, there is a wife and a child involved. That is a very different situation from Scott simply getting his girlfriend back. Madelyne also has experiences that belong to her. Her marriage, becoming a mother, her time with the X-Men, and the loss of the life she thought she had all happen to Madelyne. Learning later that she was created as a clone doesn’t make those experiences disappear. It makes what Sinister did to her more disturbing, because he designed a purpose for her without giving her any say in it. Inferno brings that purpose out into the open. Sinister created Madelyne from Jean’s genetic material and wanted a child with Scott’s and Jean’s combined potential. But the Phoenix connection is another piece of the explanation. After the death on the Moon, the portion of Jean’s essence associated with Phoenix tried to return to Jean in the cocoon. Jean rejected it when confronted with the terrible memories attached to it. It reached Madelyne instead and awakened her. That connects the three in a way that their shared appearance alone never could. Madelyne’s origin involves something taken from Jean, carried through Phoenix’s experiences, and then passed into her. She is living with a history she doesn’t fully understand, while Sinister has supplied an explanation for her past that serves his plans. Finding out where she came from means finding out that someone else has been arranging her life. By the confrontation in Inferno, Madelyne has become the Goblin Queen, and her anger turns into an attempt to destroy Jean along with herself. The psychic link forces Jean to experience Madelyne’s history. With Madelyne dying and Jean in danger of dying through that connection, the Phoenix fragment offers Jean a way to survive. This time Jean accepts it, taking in the memories and essence associated with both Phoenix and Madelyne. So when I talk about them coming together, I mean Jean is left carrying those experiences within herself. Madelyne’s body has not become Jean’s body, and this isn’t a simple return to the Phoenix who first came out of the water. Jean survives with memories and parts of lives that had continued separately from her own. The distinction between knowing what somebody went through and remembering it from inside their experience becomes a huge part of this. There is a particularly difficult consequence with Nathan. Madelyne is his mother. Jean now has access to Madelyne’s memories and feelings about him, alongside everything she already felt about Scott. She has inherited something deeply personal from the woman whose place in that family became so painful after her return. That is a lot to carry into an ordinary conversation, let alone trying to work alongside Scott and the rest of X-Factor. The early Jean, the Phoenix everyone knew, and Madelyne each reach this point through different experiences. Jean then has to continue living with the consequences of all three. She can understand things from perspectives she never originally had, including the perspective of somebody who wanted her dead. That is where this part of her history leaves her: back with her friends, still Jean, but carrying far more than the life she remembers having before the shuttle. Where I am in the story now, she is FINALLY coming to terms with who she is. All three of her psyches have merged, and she’s reconciled a lot of those memories, at least where I am now. She’s starting to fall even more deeply in love with Scott, even though marriage still isn’t on the table yet.