| Posted: 30 September 2020 at 3:52pm | IP Logged | 7
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Rebecca Jansen wrote:
| If I wanted to turn a good character 'evil' I would probably have set up real bad things happening to them in their life... all Jean Grey supposedly had was this bad boy Mastermind guy whispering naughty things and giving her some weird trips... I never got the inherent 'darkness' Jean was supposed to have had in her all along. Now I don't have to even try to see any of that! Again... Yay! :^) |
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I don't know what the original intent of the creators were, but I assumed it was less about any inherent darkness about Jean, but about the general capacity of good and evil in people, and lots of Freudian pseudo-psychology.
The Phoenix Force was like a "high". Jean's compassion and self-discipline, among other virtues, kept that in check. But Mastermind's psychic manipulations greatly weakened those virtues, and Jean was overwhelmed by the "high" of the Phoenix Force which cause her to keep seeking out the sensation of using her vast powers.
I would liken it to a drug addict chasing that high and doing whatever she needed to get it. Combined with the occasional assertion of self-control that proved only temporary. Jean could sober up, but there was always the potential for relapse. Without the Phoenix Force present, Jean probably would have recovered from Mastermind just well.
That may not be how it was intended, but it was how I interpreted what happened to Jean during the Dark Phoenix Saga.
I do know that one of Claremont's many tropes was that his characters had dark sides waiting to be unleashed. He used that repeatedly in both X-Men and New Mutants in various guises in various degrees notably with Storm, the Shadow King's intrigues, Illyana Rasputin, and Sunspot. I'm sure I missed several. His version of Jean/Phoenix was probably just the first time he used this.
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