#with her inarguably very traumatic childhood. i know she's a very relatable character for many so it can be positive to read into

[rookflower]

a lot of "why are we hating on fernsong he's a good boy :(" energy pops up whenever people start getting more critical or petty about ivyfern but it's like. no i truly get it. he is her personalityless nothingburger heteronormative husband she was unceremoniously slapped together with for next gen kids, and the fandom LOVES him because of one scene that implies the bare minimum of decent fatherhood (not even shown on screen. doesnt come to fruition) that suddenly means their offscreen relationship is queering up gender norms or whatever and the best leap for feminism in the series. if i was an ivypool stan id be bitter about that too wtf

[fiercestpurpose]

hi u talked about how jean often gets overlooked as a mother, would u be willing to talk more about it? its really curious to me how scott is often associated with the role of 'father' and his relationships with nathan and rachel, how he 'failed them etc, gets talked about to death but people dont talk about jeans as much. anyways would love to hear what u have to say!

Hi! I really have three main categories of thoughts about this: Jean’s relationship with Rachel, Jean’s relationship with Cable, and Jean’s relationship with the idea of family/her own motherhood.

Jean’s relationship with Rachel is… complicated. First of all, Jean is incredibly important in Rachel’s life, but it’s not always our (616) Jean. Rachel is obviously the biological daughter of another woman, 811 Jean, and that woman raised her and was her mother until she died when Rachel was about 8 (well before the rest of Rachel’s X-Men did). Losing a parent that young is frequently very traumatic and defining, and it certainly was for Rachel, so she develops this relationship that is not so much with Jean as it is with Jean’s death. She comes to the 616 and she learns that Jean is already dead, and she vows to reclaim the name Phoenix and honour her mother’s memory (even though 616 Jean is not really her mother). And then, at least twice during the Cross-Time Caper, Rachel has to watch different universe’s versions of Jean die, trying and failing to save her. So Rachel has this whole relationship with Jean as a concept, with Jean dying and leaving her, before she and 616 Jean ever develop a real relationship with each other.

And sometimes, people (fans and writers both) use Rachel’s preexisting relationship with Jean As A Conceptual Mother as evidence that 616 Jean doesn’t really count as Rachel’s mother. However, 616 Jean and Rachel do have a relationship. It starts with Jean rejecting Rachel, denouncing her because she doesn’t accept the future that Rachel represents and doesn’t want to consider her as her daughter. She later apologizes for this, saying that she shouldn’t have pushed her problems onto Rachel because they weren’t Rachel’s problems to deal with. And we see them hug and make up and it’s clear that they consider each other family.

That relationship, the daughter viewing her mother as a concept more than a person, the mother pushing her problems onto the daughter and trying not to accept the future that she thinks the daughter represents, reads to me as a very believable mother-daughter relationship. The circumstances are a little strange, but the emotions are familiar. Many children have a hard time adjusting to seeing their parents as their own people. Many parents have a hard time recognizing their grown children as being their own people and also their children. It’s a very complex relationship that’s certainly worth exploring, and referencing it only when they want to make a joke of it (as X-Men Gold and All-New X-Men both did) is a sign of writers who are not really invested in the emotional lives of those characters.

Onto Cable! In some ways, Jean’s relationship with him is a lot simpler because he is actually and inarguably her child. To be clear, she’s not his biological mother, and we’re going to put her blood relationship to his biological mother aside because it’s not actually that important. Jean is his mother because she raised him. In X-Factor vol 1, she becomes one of his primary caregivers once his mother is out of the picture, largely because she is dating his father at the time. (I’m not going to get into the whole Sinister-creating-Maddy-to-breed-with-Scott thing or the Maddy-living-in-Jean’s-head thing. It’s messy and it complicates things, but it doesn’t change the basic facts of Jean’s situation.) Jean in X-Factor is a co-parent with a day job, a woman who’s responsible for feeding the baby and changing his diapers and helping teach him how to walk and talk and keeping him safe from harm (that time she takes him into a fight excluded, of course). The first manifestation of baby Christopher’s psychic powers is that he and Jean share a special telepathic bond. It’s hard to tell how long this goes on for (comic timelines are, as always, vague and difficult to pin down), but it’s at least several months.

After Simonson’s run on X-Factor, baby Christopher is removed from the picture by being sent off to the far-future — only to be raised by Slym and Redd, who are, of course, Scott and Jean. As a Scott fan, a Jean fan, and a Scott/Jean fan, I’m always surprised and frustrated by how little The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix gets referenced. This is years of their lives that they spend raising their son. Specifically, twelve years, which is quite a long time, and means that Cable is probably 13 by the time Slym and Redd have to leave. Redd is the mother that Cable remembers when he grows up. She’s the one who rocks him to sleep, who negotiates with his father about how to properly raise their son, who does everything in her power to protect him while continuing to participate in a secret rebel organization. And the telepathic connection he had to her resurfaces, so that they are able to fight together on the astral plane.

(If you ever want to cry about Scott/Jean or Cable’s childhood or the Summers family in general, I highly recommend The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix. I will forgive Lobdell any number of crimes because he gave us such an excellent miniseries.)

But she isn’t just there during his childhood. Jean has a relationship with her adult son as well. They work together as X-Men many times, before and after she realizes that he is her son. Of course, there are those incredibly cute panels you may have seen of Scott and Jean and Cable all getting together to celebrate Christmas. And after the defeat of Apocalypse, when Scott is believed to be dead, Jean and Cable become especially close. It is Jean that Cable confides in, sharing with her his feelings, his loss of purpose now that his war is over, how hard it is for him to be vulnerable again. And when Jean thinks Scott is still alive but no one else believes her, Cable is the one who comes with her and helps her bring him back. Unfortunately, post-Search for Cyclops, Morrison comes in, and Morrison has no interest in love or families and does have an interest in killing Jean off to further his ship.

Prime Cable is dead now, of course, so I cannot hope that writers will explore that relationship any further. (EDIT: Oh, yeah, he maybe sort of came back again in a comic last month. Clearly that shocking turn of events made a big impression on me.) I did enjoy getting to see Jean and Hope bond after his death over the love they shared for him, and I can wish that the writers will carry that relationship forward. As for Bable (baby Cable), he’s an angry teenager who experienced the events of The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix #4 about three or four years ago. He’s angry, he’s upset, he’s lashing out by killing his future self. There could be something really interesting there, in Jean’s relationship with Bable, if they chose to remember that he’s still the kid she raised. Her place as the mother of a rebellious teenager is complicated because he’s both the boy who brought her husband back to life and the boy who killed the adult son that she loved. If writers looked past the soap opera of it all to actually acknowledge the emotions involved, they’d see there was an interesting story there, one that is not just about the Scott/Cable relationship but necessarily involves Jean as well.

I’m sure there are things to be said about Stryfe and Nate Grey, but I honestly do not know or care enough about alternate versions of Cable to really have a coherent picture of Jean’s relationship with them, so I’m gonna skip that.

Next, I want to talk about Jean’s relationship with the concept of family. I would like to mention (as I always do), that Jean’s entire family — her parents, her siblings, and her siblings’ children — were murdered by aliens. How she feels about this is a mystery, as the comics have not addressed it at all, but she might feel guilty, because though it’s not her fault, they were killed because of her. She might also feel guilty because while family in the abstract is very important to her, her relationship with them was strained and she wasn’t as close to them as she’d like to be. She might also feel angry as hell that somebody decided to murder her family despite them doing absolutely nothing to provoke it. Any of those emotional responses would influence how she relates to her children and her granddaughter. Maybe she becomes a little more attached and attentive because she has no other family left. Maybe she distances herself from them out of grief. Maybe she rounds up her incredibly angry son and takes him into the stars to attack aliens so they can be angry together. I think any of those, done properly, could be interesting and in-character for her, and I just want some writer to acknowledge Jean as a character with her own history and her own relationships that shape her actions.

Finally, Jean’s relationship with the concept of her own motherhood. Jean is someone who wanted and expected to be a mother. I usually tend to read Jean as coming from a more traditional and conservative family, but I don’t think that’s an adequate explanation. I think Jean genuinely wants children. In X-Factor, she says, “I always thought we’d have a girl,” when talking to Scott, showing that she had thought about children being part of their future. When she talks to Rachel about her upcoming marriage to Scott, she mentions that she thinks it likely that another Rachel will be born. She wants kids, she’s seen them as part of her future for a long time, and then she got them! She got to be a mother, to Nathan Christopher and to Rachel, as explained above. I think a woman who wanted to be a mother and now is a mother should be allowed to have real relationships with her children. This isn’t like Emma, whose distance from the Cuckoos can be read as her viewing herself more as their teacher than their mother, since Emma always understands herself as a teacher. When Jean holds a baby in X-Men Red and winks at the mother and tells her that she’s implanted a psychic suggestion he not cry so much, that’s because Jean has been responsible for a baby before. Being a mother is part of who Jean is, just like it’s part of who Jubilee is or who Sue is, and I wish that writers and fans understood that.