I posted this in the HOX issue thread, but the logic used in the latest issue really should have bearing on the whole "Jean wasn't Phoenix" retcon.
spoilers:end of spoilers
The issue establishes that if your mind and memories are copied into a cloned body and your soul transferred to it then you are still the same exact person. Not a clone or copy. The same person. So if the Jean who hatched from a gold ball pod is the same Jean who died when Sentinels attacked her escape pod (and this issue confirms she is) then the Jean who was Phoenix/Dark Phoenix and the Jean who hatched from the cocoon are also the same person. Not copies. The same person. Period. I dont' see how one could accept them being the same person in one instance and accept them as different people in the other. The same process happened in both instances.
Technically, Jean hasn't been on her original body since she was devored by a poison as a teen.
Yeah--Jean, Phoenix, Maddie, Teen Jean are all Jean. lol I think Jean was referencing this by saying she was the only Jean that has ever been.
The Phoenix/Dark Phoenix body was an exact duplicate/clone of Jean's original body. It has even been described as a "cosmic clone" (in the last issue of X-Men Blue for example). And it was never just the force impersonating Jean. Jean's mind/memories/soul were either copied or transferred or some degree of both or imbued upon or merged with the new Phoenix body (which was an exact copy of Jean's original body) depending on how the retcon was described in a particular issue. Moira ran tests on Jean's body in Uncanny 125, so Jean's Phoenix body must have been genetically the same as her original body.
In some versions of the retcon it is explained that the Phoenix force became Jean so perfectly that it didn't know that it had copied her. So it was never as simple as the force intentionally impersonating her. And the retcon has been effectively undone many times over at this point (Classic 8/43, Inferno, Morrison's run, Endsong, the logic in HOX, etc). These stories maintain the elements of the retcon story but make it possible to interpret the real Jean as having really been Phoenix/Dark Phoenix.
The Classic 8 backstory shows and states that the force created the new body as a shell for Jean's transition. Jean and the Force take each other's hands so these "two may become one". After merging, Jean realizes there is a spark of her soul left in her original body, so she puts it in a healing cocoon just in case she needs it later. When she rises out of the bay she doesn't remember exactly what happened on the shuttle. In Classic 43, Death talks to Jean as White Phoenix after she has died as Dark Phoenix. He explains the nature of Jean Grey and the Phoenix force. At the end she is sent back to life but she won't remember their talk because she has lessons to learn the hard way, Death states. We see her being split up between the original cocoon body and the Maddie body.
In Inferno, they all come back together.
Last edited by PhoenixStudies; 09-18-2019 at 07:33 AM.
Not too much of Jean, but she has a nice throwback moment with Storm that I loved. Cool to see everyone's theories on how to apply what we learned today to Jean's history.