You are right Jean did deny it but later that part the Phoenix took (or borrowed) of Jean’s actual consciousness was returned and to me that makes all the difference. So part of her was always there during the Phoenix years. Of course some writers understood this and others did not so sometimes she acted like she was Phoenix and other times not depending on the writer. Oh well. It is one of those things with this character.
I think that it was mostly just Claremont trying to make his Jean count as much as he could with an editorial that was deeply against it. It essentially goes:
- He writes Jean as Phoenix.
- They retcon it as not being Jean by saying it was a copy and the real was on a coccoon.
- He writes that Classic X-Men story of their meeting where Phoenix-Jean is framed as being Jean as much the one in the coccoon.
- He writes Jean absorbing the part of her with the Phoenix, and makes it so that was meant to go to Jean before she woke up in the coccoon but Jean felt the destruction she caused and instinctively rejected it(which I think it's a really interesting part of the whole thing that people don't mention enough).
- Simonson makes it more of a temporary double/triple personality plot point, that ends with her losing the Phoenix spark(or whatever it was supposed to be) and saying she doesn't feel attached to the memories anymore.
- When Claremont is on X-Factor he makes it so Jean goes to the moon and has a vivid memory of DPS("I feel it with every fiber of my being, this is where I died!", a line that I love lol).
Last edited by Wiccan; 01-17-2020 at 12:39 PM.
Well yeah you are right about Claremont for sure but it hasn’t only been him. The issue Jean proposes to Scott there is acknowledgment that it was Jean’s consciousness that willed The Phoenix to kill itself on the moon, etc. In Morrison’s run there were references to Jean going Dark Phoenix. But you are absolutely correct Claremont watered down the retcon with the classic backstories and with conclusion of Inferno.
I think that the simplest way to think about it is that Phoenix/Jean was Phoenix and only Phoenix.
But when the Phoenix brought Jean back to life, she gave her own memories of her time as Jean to the newly Risen one. This way, Jean wouldn't have any problems to adjust with her life and her colleagues…
“Strength is the lot of but a few privileged men; but austere perseverance, harsh and continuous, may be employed by the smallest of us and rarely fails of its purpose, for its silent power grows irresistibly greater with time.” Goethe
Well, that part on the proposal was kind of nonsensical though cause Scott talks like Jean influenced the Phoenix from inside the coccoon when that's not really how it went lol. It was just the Jean-personality in that body gaining control over the Phoenix's.
I think a lot of the confusion and messiness of it comes from the fact that the Phoenix Force as a character, especially as a character that goes around using hosts, wasn't quite established yet. The person on DPS and what came before it isn't just "The Phoenix", it's a Jean clone(cloned body at least) that the Phoenix created and used as a host, just like she would have used the original Jean's body or any other. But it was like writers at that point just didn't quite get that concept and thought of it more like it was the Phoenix shape-shifting or something.
Didn't Mortison retcon Jean's tk cocoon to a phoenix egg? In HCM there's even another one on the moon where she died as Dark Phoenix. Implying is a sort of life cycle Jean goes through.
It's been revealed that the new Children of the Atom book is about Gen Z/sidekick versions of the X-Men that looked up to them as children. So it appears Jean has at least one superfan in the Marvel universe.