Originally Posted by
elgrey
Bendis is writing about a Scott who has been brought to his absolute lowest ebb. He killed the man who raised him. He's got a crazy kaleidoscope in his head of being and not being the phoenix and doing things he couldn't do - physically, quite apart from anything else, he's not Sunspot - never mind psychologically and yet which he half remembers doing and knows that he must have done. He's no longer uncrowned sovereign of a mutant kingdom. No one, including everyone he loves and whom he thought in the past loved him, have been willing to give him even a glimmer of the benefit of the doubt. The same people he has forgiven at once when they were mind-controlled or possessed in their time, all turned on him as one and acted as if they felt he was entirely to blame for his actions and secretly wanted to murder Charles Xavier. That would be an absolutely crushing blow just by itself, but that's his life now. The other X-Men have rejected him and lose no opportunity to verbalize how much they now hate him, when we know how much they have always mattered to him and what their love and trust means to him - something that he now appears to have lost forever despite not having been himself when he did the thing they now all hate him for.
People who used to be his sometime allies - S.H.I.E.L.D., the Avengers, are now intent on hunting him down like a wanted criminal and have shown themselves ready and willing to kill him themselves and to collaborate with shadowy government forces who will try to arrange his death. They had a choice between trusting that the man they knew would never have done the things that Scott did when possessed by the phoenix and helping him recover from that ordeal - as they did with Wanda - or allying themselves with people who would throw due process out the window and throw Scott into an iffy private prison and they chose to support the agenda of the people who wanted him shived in prison, and still are, even knowing that those shadowy forces are still in place. So he's not only had the shock of their hatred he also has every reason to be disillusioned with people he used to admire. He's still saying nice things about them in public, because - unlike them with him - he recognizes that they're still heroes despite the dodgy things they've been a part of, but there is absolutely no one he can really trust outside of the NXS.
And I think, crucially, Scott hates himself, which he didn't before, and his powers are broken - a really crushing blow to someone who has been all about control since the age of fifteen. He can't lead from the front as he likes to do when he doesn't know what his optic blasts are going to do next. And he's single, which Scott has never coped with very well, and for the first time in years doesn't have someone telepathically being kind to him on a regular basis. His life has been ripped out at the foundations and he's only still doing the things he does because mutants are going to die if he stops. He's got very little reason to get up in the mornings except for his overwhelming sense of duty. Looking forward, he can see more of this, with 99% of his old friends wiping their feet on him at every opportunity, a struggle in which he is more or less alone and where many of the people who would once have helped him to bring down sentinels hunting mutants now tut-tut at him when he tries it. And looking back to his recent past, instead of a sense of achievement, he's just got PTSD-inducing horror in his head. Possession, loss of control, and then killing someone he loved. For a guy whose worst fear from the day his beams kicked in was that he would lose control and kill someone he loved that is a crushing burden to have to bear.
I'd be really disappointed if Brian Michael Bendis was writing him the way Kieron Gillen wrote him because of the catastrophic and life-changing events that have occurred in between the two Uncanny books.
It's all YMMV of course but I think Bendis has actually done a great job of showing a guy who is still doing the right thing - even if some of what he's doing is, IMO, still proof of how much under Charles Xavier's influence he still is, and quite possibly how he's still trying to make him proud of him even though he's no longer around because that is just the way it is sometimes with fathers and sons - even though he is emotionally shattered and all the things he has relied upon for years - Emma's telepathy, a well-trained team with powers under their control, belief in his own abilities - have all been taken away from him.
I'm not sure it's still even possible for Scott to believe in himself as a hero when people one might have expected to give him some emotional support have all spat in his eye and acted as if he's the world's worst murderer - ironically in many cases while unquestioningly following the leadership of someone who actually is a multiple murderer. I think Scott is getting through the days by concentrating on the fact that the NXS are the only people helping mutants so if they stop helping, mutants die. He is committed to helping mutants so he is going to go through the things on his to do list that might make that situation better and that have worked in the past: find new mutants before mutant killers do, offer them a safe place to learn to gain control of their powers, make it clear to hostile parties that if they persecute mutants or the humans who support them, that their persecution won't go unchallenged.