Did Chris Claremont hate cyclops?

[GallantGambler]

It's been thirty years since 'Maddie and the baby', five years since AvX, and hatred is on there.

I mean no one really hated on Cyclops in-universe for the whole Maddie thing. Not in any everlasting way. As for the fanbase...well that was a pretty crappy thing of him to do. As for everything post-AVX...yeah you're not wrong to feel so strongly about that I guess. It's Marvel's fault for continuously telling us they were trying to turn him into a bad guy but they never had the cajones to do let him do anything truly villainous. Instead they kept referring to him as Hitler in-and-out if universe but he never did anything to anyone...they just didn't have the courage to stick to their convictions I guess.

[stormphoenix]

Easy Answer:
Because he was a threat and was going to take over Claremont's Position, and we can't have that.........LOL

I honestly don't know.

[gurkle]

As others have said, Claremont was completely opposed to Cyclops leaving his wife and kid, but once it happened, he had to follow the logic of that story. This wasn't a minor point of characterization that different writers could disagree on or ignore. And it wasn't something that could just be retconned away, because the return of Jean meant that the Scott/Maddie marriage was doomed, no matter how Scott's behavior was explained.

Claremont bears some responsibility for this if only because his resolution to the original story was so unconvincing. The story was an obvious shout-out to the movie Vertigo where a man starts a relationship with a woman who looks exactly like his dead lover (whose name was Madeleine), only Claremont tried to make it out as if this was a perfectly healthy thing for Scott to do. He had already, in other words, derailed Scott's character a bit. But making Scott dump his wife and kid was not his idea.

[CuteClops]

I mean no one really hated on Cyclops in-universe for the whole Maddie thing. Not in any everlasting way. As for the fanbase...well that was a pretty crappy thing of him to do. As for everything post-AVX...yeah you're not wrong to feel so strongly about that I guess. It's Marvel's fault for continuously telling us they were trying to turn him into a bad guy but they never had the cajones to do let him do anything truly villainous. Instead they kept referring to him as Hitler in-and-out if universe but he never did anything to anyone...they just didn't have the courage to stick to their convictions I guess.

Yes, absolutely. But the problem here is that the same fanbase doesn't hate Tony Stark, Medusa, Black Bolt, Scarlet Witch, Captain America, Beast, Namor, Black Panther, Clint Barton, Reed Richards, Charles Xavier, Wolverine, Carol Danvers, Thor, Daredevil and so on... After all, cheat, telling lies, genocide, mass murder, manipulate people's mind and hypocrisy are not pretty ugly things? Well, yes, it looks that way, but only if it's Cyclops. Do you understand the difference?

[lurkerforyears]

Yes, absolutely. But the problem here is that the same fanbase doesn't hate Tony Stark, Medusa, Black Bolt, Scarlet Witch, Captain America, Beast, Namor, Black Panther, Clint Barton, Reed Richards, Charles Xavier, Wolverine, Carol Danvers, Thor, Daredevil and so on... After all, cheat, telling lies, genocide, mass murder, manipulate people's mind and hypocrisy are not pretty ugly things? Well, yes, it looks that way, but only if it's Cyclops. Do you understand the difference?

the phenomenon is normal.
Here in my country, a very high ranking politician was very hated because a bag with 50.000 dollars was found in her bathroom, and she couldnt explain the origin of that money.

Other politicians who have stolen far larger ammounts of money, in the millions or hundreds of millions rage, didnt get nowhere as much hate.
The reason for that is normal people can relate to 50.000 dollars, but they cant relate to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Scott (leaving wife and kid), or Emma (affair with a married man), are relatable sins. Commiting planetary genocide like Namor has done many times, isnt a relatable sin. The people who have commited relatable bad things get more hate than the ones whose evil is of a more fictional scale.

[spirit2011]

I read that back in the 80s after jean was resurrected in x-factor Scott left his wife and went back for Jean and because of that Chris hated Scott and wanted to make Jean and Wolverine a thing ever since just to **** on Cyclops.


So my question is,was that stupid love triangle that polluted scott for years was because of claremont immaturity and being salty at scott?

Not everything is about shitting on Cyclops. I don't think Jean/logan was to **** on him, much the opposite

[BroHomo]

Ah, Claremont. Thinks that leaving his wife and son makes Scott a horrible person, but doesn't realize that quickly marrying a woman who just happened to look exactly like his dead girlfriend makes him look like an obsessive unhealthy man.

Soooo Cyclops is vilified for having a type? That's on par with leaving your wife and kid??!!!

I think the premise of Claremont was flawed right at the begining, in a world of Ghosts, aliens, mutants and Gods, the fact that you meet a girl looking and sounding exactly like your ex dead girlfriend, that she walked out of the plane crash the exact day that girlfriend died is far too much coincidence, and the reveal that madelyn was actually a clone of Jean made much more sense than to just explain she was the one in a million looking exactly like Jean!

I never took it as if Maddy looked EXACTLY like Jean Maybe cause I've mostly see Heard in the X-Men TAS and the few backissues I collected Jeans not in/dead or Maddy's full blown crazy eyes Goblin Queen but the X-Men live crazy lives. There were praying crapload of redheads who died/almost died the day Jean "died" Not a lotta Ginger babes in the X-Ranks Cyclops saw an opportunity and seized it

[Marvell2100]

Yes, absolutely. But the problem here is that the same fanbase doesn't hate Tony Stark, Medusa, Black Bolt, Scarlet Witch, Captain America, Beast, Namor, Black Panther, Clint Barton, Reed Richards, Charles Xavier, Wolverine, Carol Danvers, Thor, Daredevil and so on... After all, cheat, telling lies, genocide, mass murder, manipulate people's mind and hypocrisy are not pretty ugly things? Well, yes, it looks that way, but only if it's Cyclops. Do you understand the difference?

The fanbase doesn't hate Tony Stark or Wanda? Ha!

The level of hate they get is astronomical.

[spirit2011]

What if Emma and Jean get new boyfriends and resurrected Scott hooks up again with a redeemed Madelyne Pryor?
Although I guess Marvel wouldnt like having an heroic Jean clone around

there is already Jeen and Hope. We already get enough Jeans

[GallantGambler]

the phenomenon is normal.
Here in my country, a very high ranking politician was very hated because a bag with 50.000 dollars was found in her bathroom, and she couldnt explain the origin of that money.

Other politicians who have stolen far larger ammounts of money, in the millions or hundreds of millions rage, didnt get nowhere as much hate.
The reason for that is normal people can relate to 50.000 dollars, but they cant relate to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Scott (leaving wife and kid), or Emma (affair with a married man), are relatable sins. Commiting planetary genocide like Namor has done many times, isnt a relatable sin. The people who have commited relatable bad things get more hate than the ones whose evil is of a more fictional scale.

There it is. What Scott did is a very human, normal thing. It's way easier to hate someone for that because that's something that happens all the time. You can't emotionally equate that with Scarlet Witch wiping out a fictional race of people, or Xavier messing with one's memories. And besides, those characters get hate all the time. Wanda is despised by 90% of X fans, if not more, and Xavier's death in AVX was the end of him basically being a toilet the X-Men crapped on for all of his shady dealings in the mid-2000s.

Be angry about Cyke all you want, imagine being an IronMan fan in a post Civil War world. There's something that character will never, ever live down even though the 616 wants you to forget.

[CuteClops]

the phenomenon is normal.
Here in my country, a very high ranking politician was very hated because a bag with 50.000 dollars was found in her bathroom, and she couldnt explain the origin of that money.

Other politicians who have stolen far larger ammounts of money, in the millions or hundreds of millions rage, didnt get nowhere as much hate.
The reason for that is normal people can relate to 50.000 dollars, but they cant relate to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Scott (leaving wife and kid), or Emma (affair with a married man), are relatable sins. Commiting planetary genocide like Namor has done many times, isnt a relatable sin. The people who have commited relatable bad things get more hate than the ones whose evil is of a more fictional scale.

Makes sense, I guess. But Matt Murdock cheated on Karen Page with Typhoid Mary, and cheated on Milla Donovan (his wife) with Dakota North. Nobody hates him for that. Nobody cares.
Other characters have done considerably less than genocide (cheat, telling lies, hypocrisy, murder...), but they are not being hated.
It's a phenomenon know as "Cyclops haters".

[Grey]

I don’t know much about tbe history but Claremont comes off as someone who doesn’t like sharing.

I totally get why he felt the way he did and I’d feel the same way. But I also think he should temper his initial feelings with the fact that comic series generally don’t have a “forever happy ending.” It just seems his wish was a bit u realistic (again I woulda liked the ending he had in mind but character endings are generally not the norm in comics).

In sum, I think marvel should’ve consulted with him about their plans and gotten his insight, but I don’t think they were obligated too. It just would have been more polite.

Ugh forgive my typos. Got a new phone and the keyboard is different.

[spirit2011]

I don’t know much about tbe history but Claremont comes off as someone who doesn’t like sharing.

I totally get why he felt the way he did and I’d feel the same way. But I also think he should temper his initial feelings with the fact that comic series generally don’t have a “forever happy ending.” It just seems his wish was a bit u realistic (again I woulda liked the ending he had in mind but character endings are generally not the norm in comics).

In sum, I think marvel should’ve consulted with him about their plans and gotten his insight, but I don’t think they were obligated too. It just would have been more polite.

Ugh forgive my typos. Got a new phone and the keyboard is different.

I think Marvel screwed him up twice. First Tptb decided to kill Jean. allright, Claremont had Cyclops marry Maddie and have a kid with her then retire from X-men. Then Tptb made Jean come back and Cyclops leave his family to pursue Jean;
That screw up Claremont and the characters involved

[FUBAR007]

I never took it as if Maddy looked EXACTLY like Jean

She not only looked exactly like Jean, she sounded like her, too. There's a bit in one story where Rachel calls Scott, hears Madelyne talking in the background, and assumes it's Jean.

[FUBAR007]

If you wish to know more, here's a useful blogpost that collects the pertinent quotes by Claremont on the matter: http://secretsbehindthexmen.blogspot...-x-factor.html

The context: The editors wanted to bring Jean back so that the original 5 could form X-Factor. At that time, Scott was already married to Madelyn Pryor and had a newborn baby. The editors made this decision without Claremont's input, and he was furious.

Quote:

Chris Claremont’s reaction
“Oh, God! Barry Windsor-Smith and I were coming into the office to plot X-Men #198 (in 1985),” Claremont recalled in Comics Creators On X-Men. “It was a Friday night and (editor) Ann (Nocenti) took us out to dinner and didn’t tell us about X-Factor until it was, like, 6:30-7:00 at night and the office switchboard was already closed. I wanted to call Shooter, but I couldn’t remember his direct line. Ann knew his number, but she wouldn’t tell me. She told me to just sit down, have another drink and relax. I mean, she played me beautifully. Since it was Friday, I had the whole weekend to go berserk.”

“I spent the weekend coming up with a whole new set of characters that they could use for X-Factor. I came in Monday morning and pitched the idea of using Jean’s sister Sara and making her a living Cerebro. She not only senses mutants, but has the power to work out what they’ll become. Shooter sat there and said, “That’s a great concept. I think it’s wonderful. If you want to go with it, go with it, but we’re bringing back Jean Grey.””

“The fact is, Ann did a smart thing. If I had actually gone in to see Shooter on Friday night, I would have quit. I was so pissed off. I couldn’t believe what they did to Cyclops (Scott Summers). He was supposed to be a hero and they had him walking out on his wife and newborn child and not even thinking twice about it.”

and

The fate of Cyclops’ wife
“The original Madelyne (Pryor) storyline was that – at its simplest level – she was that one-in-a-million that just happened to look like Jean (Grey),” Claremont told Seriejournalen.dk. “And the relationship (between her and Scott Summers) was summed up by the moment (in Uncanny X-Men #174, 1983) when Scott says, “Are you Jean?” and she punches him! Because her whole desire was to be loved for herself – not to be loved as the evocation of her boyfriend’s dead sweetheart. (…) But it all got invalidated by the resurrection of Jean Grey in X-Factor #1 (1986).”

“The original plotline was that Scott marries Madelyne - they have their child, they go off to Alaska. He goes to work for his grandparents. He retires from the X-Men. He’s a reserve member. He’s available for emergencies. He comes back on special occasions – for special fights, but he has a life. He has grown up. (…) Scott was going to move on. Jean was dead, “Get on with your life.” And it was close to being a happy ending. They lived happily ever after – and it was to create the impression that maybe if you come back in ten years other X-Men would have grown up, too. Would Kitty (Pryde) stay with the team forever? Would Nightcrawler? Would any of them? Because that way we could evolve them into new directions - we could bring in new characters. There would be an ongoing sense of renewal and growth and change – in a positive sense.”

“Then, unfortunately, Jean was resurrected, Scott dumps his wife and kid and goes back to the old girlfriend, so it not only destroys Scott’s character as a hero and as a decent human being – it creates an untenable structural situation: What do we do with Madelyne and the kid?”

“So ultimately the resolution was: Turn her into the Goblin Queen and kill her off.”

and

Back to Cyclops being a cad
“Jean is marrying Scott, so what’s Scott’s track record to date?” Claremont asked in the Internet interview. “Well, he had a wife. He got married in the mansion, everybody was there, he said, “Till death do you part,” they had a kid, and he walked out on them without a second thought and went to X-Factor. And then for various stupid – and I confess, I had my part in this as well as anyone else – plot reasons didn’t deal with it for a long time. The reason he didn’t deal with it was because he didn’t have a clue what to do with it. I mean, the guy was a cad and a bounder, no ifs, no ands, no buts.”

“In one fell swoop, he was destroyed as a character, as a heroic. He made a commitment to people and then walked out on them. And for various reasons, not Weezie (Louise Simonson), not me, we never dealt with that. We seem to take what seemed at the time to be the only sensible way out, which was we made Madelyne into the bad – you know, we set up a situation where rather than have Scott face the consequences of his actions, we’d just sort of like kill them all. And everyone forgave Scott, because Madelyne was a bitch anyway. And then they gave the kid away. “Don’t deal with the fact that you have a child, Scott, we’ll just send him away to the future” and - **** happens.”

“All of this should be an element in the mix. Mistakes or otherwise, this is Scott’s character, this is Jean’s character. (…) There must be a moment where the two of them sit down and address this. “Jean, marry me.” “Why?” “I love you.” “You loved Madelyne.” Pause. “Yeah, well…” “You walked out on her, Scott. You going to walk out on me? Suppose we discover in a year that Madelyne isn’t dead? Suppose I’m Madelyne. Suppose I’m Phoenix. How are you going to deal with that? How am I to trust you? You made a commitment. You did not fulfil it. You abandoned a child.””

“The onus is not on Jean to prove herself to Scott. She was dead. She got better. He made a commitment to someone. He had to prove that he could make a commitment to her. You can’t just say, “None of this existed, none of this happened, it all goes away.” You have to think, “How does this character deal with it? How does the story deal with it?” Because, by answering those questions, you might find the story going off in a totally different direction that may bring vitality and richness of concept that you never even dreamed of was coming in the door.”

Yep. And over 30 years later, he's still pissed about it.

All of this is also why Claremont is an intense Jean/Logan shipper.