Originally Posted by
Peanutsinspace
Claremont's idea was:
"And then we have a five-page sequence in which Jean essentially has her psionic abilities removed down to a molecular level, the reason being, Lilandra says, that they don’t want to destroy Jean, partly because they don’t know what releationship she has to the M’Krann crystal. They believe they can safely strip her power; they don’t know if they should kill her, so they won’t. And she doesn’t deserve to be killed. So her power is removed molecule by molecule. The galaxy’s greatest telepaths sit there and they literally take Jean apart molecule by molecule, take out all of the molecules that relate to her psionic ability and put her back together again, leaving her a normal human being.”
“What I wanted to do then was spend about the next eight issues or so having Jean come to terms with the fact that she can no longer move things by thought, that she is locked inside of her head for the first time in her adult life. At the same time she has the memory that she had godlike powers, and more importantly, what she did with them.”
“I had a rough idea of where I wanted to take it, which was over the next year having her deal with what happened, with what she did,” Claremont revealed in Phoenix: The Untold Story. “From my point of view, I saw it as coming to terms with the fact that she killed five billion people – that she committed a crime for which she can never atone, and yet she’s still alive. The easy way out would be just to jump off a cliff, but she can’t. She has to somehow put things right with herself, within herself.”
“The ultimate end of it, leading up to issue #150 (in 1981), would be that Magneto, having found out about this, would come in, kidnapping her, and offering her the power again on the false assumption that he could control her. And the X-Men would come to her rescue. They’d be battling Magneto on one section of the Asteroid M, and she’d be in a room all by herself with Phoenix, the effect, the power, coming back, forced to make the choice (of a lifetime).”
“She denies it,” Claremont answered in The X-Men Companion. “She says “No! Get thee from me, Phoenix!” And the idea is, it is better to be human than it is to be a wrathful goddess.”
“In X-Men #137 (1980) Jean is the victim. She is not a protagonist; she is acted upon; she does not act in her own behalf. In X-Men #150 (1981) she is the hero. She single-handedly all by herself, and no one knows it, saves the universe again. It’s the greatest sacrifice that has ever been made...Essentially all the stuff the Watcher said at the end of (the published version of) X-Men #137 would have been said at the end of X-Men #150 but not because she killed herself, but because she denied this infinite power.”