I'm sure you can fill a few college classrooms with how messed up characters with decades of history are forced to relive past abuses.
I'm sure you can fill a few college classrooms with how messed up characters with decades of history are forced to relive past abuses.
The challenge with Rachel is that her character arc was finished 25 years ago with the end of Alan Davis's writer run on Excalibur. I thought the ending Lobdell gave her of becoming Mother Askani, bringing Scott and Jean together with Nathan to defeat Apocalypse, and dying of old age was actually pretty good. Robert Weinberg didn't need to bring her back.
But, since he did...
What I'd do is send her home to her native timeline. Initially, the story picks up where Alan Davis's "Days of Future Yet to Come" left off with Rachel helping the survivors of Sentinel rule try to rebuild civilization. In the course of that, she remembers the original mission that caused her to end up on Earth-616 in the first place--prevent the Sentinel takeover from ever happening. Older, wiser, and more in control of her powers, Rachel decides to take another crack at it. Some of her peers try to talk her out of it; others encourage her. When she travels back in time--successfully, she finds various members of Marvel's cosmic pantheon getting in her way, ultimately sending her back. This then leads her on a quest to reclaim the Phoenix Force.
My endgame would be that she eventually succeeds, actually changes the timeline and prevents hers from happening, BUT she makes herself an anomaly in the process. Once Rachel changes her own past, she also changes the past events of Earth-616 causing a whole slough of paradoxes. The multiverse, to prevent those paradoxes, resolves things by splitting Rachel in two: Rachel as we've always known her ("1.0") and the Rachel of the revised timeline ("2.0"). Rachel 1.0 becomes a White Phoenix of the Crown, joins Marvel's cosmic pantheon, and leaves to roam the multiverse while Rachel 2.0 stays on Earth to enjoy her happy-ish ending. And grows up to succeed her parents as a leader of the X-Men...but that's a whole other set of stories.
Kill her off. They are going to need a backup next time Marvel decides to off Jean.
I don’t know why this Tnread made me emotional and frustrated at the same time. I wasn’t a big fan of Rachel .. so I never paid much attention to her characterisation and complexity but this thread just made me realise how messed the whole situation is.
The X-Men have a habit of ignoring mental illness signs. Literally, all of them r suffering one thing or another but they all ignore it ... I know it’s mostly writers not wanting to address it, but mentall illness is very prevalent in today’s society and since the X-Men is all about reflecting real life problems .. mental illness should be something they discuss.
Starting with Warren, Rachel and Scott.
Not even a huge Rachel fan but the OP spoke nothing but the truth and it actually sickens me how the writers and X-men have treated Rachel. Just wow.
Will Rachel get her own Ms. Marvel moment when she returns?
This needs to happen. She needs to slap and call her teammates out
X-Books are at an all time low.
I’m so sorry for Rachel and her fans. Loot at Rachel in Exterminaton/Gold/Red as well as Warren in UXM and you know how unable the current editorial is to handle characters with creative thinking or at least respect. Maybe they are not main characters but that doesn’t mean they should be treated so casually.
On the other hand, they can’t even portray their main characters well...
"He did it. Summers did it."
"I don't understand...What exactly did Cyclops do?"
"He kept his people alive."
Writers want to go from point A to B without really doing character work.
Rachel on Giggemheim was one of these examples and later on Extermination. The suggestion that Nightcrawler knew that something was wrong with Rachel and continued to have sex with her is really bad. Rachel lack of interest on him after mesmero seemed to confirm that she didn't had full consent.
Extermination is a story that will only really wrap on X-force, so characters couldn't go rescue Rachel from Ahab
Rachel deserves a moment like that. With Ahab Ahab canonically bearing sexual desire for her we are left wondering if he will act on it or not now that she cannot say No. For all we know he does act on it and we just never hear about it and we left to our imaginations that she's suffering in silence yet again.
So many characters deserve to get slapped and yelled at as they are her family and friends yet they failed her time and again. Then when she needed help the most her own mother just watched her be taken away to be with her Abuser.
They could have had someone (Jean or Kitty) vow to save Rachel. Just a simple line like that would have changed the entire context of the scene. Kitty oversees the X-men so she could have been the link to X-Force to give them a directive to find Rachel. Jean can do the same with Kid Cable. I hope X-Force opens up with this happening but I have my doubts
No one even called out Kurt over it too. Jean literally read his mind, not intentionally, and was mum about the fact that Kurt ignored his instincts because he wanted to have sex with Rachel.
I get it.
Rachel is gorgeous and they have a ton of history.
That still doesn't excuse him just rolling with it when he should known better as he knows her history and trauma because it is a rare chance to screw someone like Rachel.
And you're right.
Rachel being apathetic about it afterwards and just ending it heavily implies that it either wasn't consensual sex or she isn't even sure if it was or wasn't which reminds her of her being forced to screw Korvus in the past.
Last edited by Sardorim; 12-21-2018 at 10:12 AM.
Even if they did do something like this, and it's insane that they didn't, it wouldn't ring true because in Uncanny everyone's just chillin'. There's no way around this. You can't do something like this and expect people to buy that the characters who should be doing something are just twiddling their thumbs so they can resolve it in another book. And this is all to seed an X-Force plot that's been done two other times within the same year.