Jean Grey Headcannons
To preface, this is my interpretation of Jean Grey. Someone who within quite a few comics, as well as nearly all her animated and live action appearance has been boiled down to a non existent personality. This is how I envision her, and if you don’t agree that’s great. There is no wrong interpretation(unless she’s the ‘the one between’ Scogan or the useless wife of Scott)
Jean and her recklessness:
- Jean is reckless. She’s more reckless than Bobby, more reckless that Scott in near death scenarios, she is nearly on par to Logan with her recklessness. Except her recklessness is almost never at the expense of others, it mostly has to do with throwing herself into battle with no worry of the harm that will come to her. You need someone to block bullets, but she’s already holding a building up? Great she’ll use her body. Someone needs to shield two kids in a crumbling building? Great she’s in there and her back is withstanding the tumbling rocks. It’s borderline self sacrificial.
- Jean is really good at covering up the injuries that come with this recklessness. More often or not she walks out of battles with completely preventable injuries. She knows these are preventable injuries, she knows that most of the time she could have stopped those bullets, that she could have held that building up, but all the same she keeps putting herself out there. She has a hidden stash of Advil and Tylenol, along with medical supplies because she will not let Hank check her out and reveal how hurt she is. She uses her telepathy to appear without her limps or the pain on her face. She fools a lot of people.
- She fools Scott really well. She knows they’re something off with her if she keeps putting herself in danger, but she refuses to let him worry about her. She projects the hardest on him and he trusts her and believes her for the most part. He is getting suspicious, but it’s so easy to make him ‘believe’ her when he is so used to her in his head. She knows it’s wrong, but hates the idea of making him worry.
- Emma sees through the act the easiest. Maybe it’s because she’s a telepath, maybe she knows Jean Grey more than she cares to admit, maybe she cares more than she wants to admit. Nonetheless she loves tormenting Jean in private about what she knows, making sure Jean remembers that Emma can always just tell everyone. Jean hates it, but she has noticed her Advil is never low and her first aid kit is always replenished. She notices how on days when he own mental energy is to low to keep up the facade, no one seems to notice. And on days when Scott is to close to finding out, a beautiful blonde always walks in and escorts him away from the conversation.
- Logan is the other X-man that sees through Jean easily. At first he tried to talk to her, he wanted to reason with her on how she did not have a regeneration ability and that she wasn’t invincible, but just like the Jean Grey he knows, she fought back. Instead he took a step back and became a silent helper. If Jean was too tired to use her telekinesis to stitch up a cut on her back, he would come in and do it for her. If her shoulder was dislocated, he would fix it. If she was in pain and needed her room to herself, he’d distract the rest of the team to have fun on the other side of the mansion.
- Jean wonders if this self sacrifice stuff is related to the Phoenix. If maybe this is her twisted way of paying penance for all the people she has hurt and all the people she has killed. She just knows that in the heat of battle she feels no pain, high on adrenaline. But the pain afterwards feels like a payment to a debt she never knew she had.
Charles and Jean:
- Charles definitely sees Jean as a daughter, the closest thing he has to one at least. But Jean does not see him as father.
- The two have an interesting relationship. Jean definitely sees him as a mentor and someone she values, but she has also bared witness to his mistakes and failures. She trust him, but never too much, never blindly like Scott. But then again Scott was made blind, while Charles aloud her to see.
- Jean has different views that Charles when it comes to the future of mutant kind. She see’s use in his dream but see’s parts of it as illogical. She walks a fine line of realism and optimism, and wants to work to cultivate a realistic and attainable future.
Motherhood:
- When Jean was young she did want to be a mom. When she started at the institute she loved the idea of raising a mutant kid to feel love and respected within their community.
- The change to be against kids was gradual. It started by seeing the torment of mutant kids by the public. It grew with she realized she actually never wanted to stop being an X-man, that she thought her job was to important. It grew even more after the Phoenix, because how could someone be a loving mother if she had laughed as she dismantled an entire galaxy.
- When she came back to life, Scott had Nathan. She knew Nathan wasn’t hers, but for a while it was fun to have a baby in the house, it was nice to have a child running through the halls, one that called Scott Dad, and one who Scott wanted to raise with her. But Nathan wasn’t hers. He belonged to Madilyn. Even if Scott reassured her Madilyn was gone and he wanted to raise the baby with her, and that Nathan would be hers, Nathan did not belong to her. Jean did everything she could to be his step mom, but she always had a wall built up that she refused to pass. It felt wrong to her, to love this baby as her own, when she had watched the screaming wails of her clone? Her sister? Another her?
- When Nathan was taken by Sinister and the whole plot was revealed fully, Jean decided that she did not want kids. Not just with Scott, but in general. She didn’t want her child to have to carry her name attached to them, she did not want to bring a child into the world that would be ‘genetically perfect’ or for the human masses to torture.
- Yet Jean still yearned for the life she might have had if she wasn’t a mutant. She life that would include a child.
- When Rachel came into the picture, it through a wrench into everything. Rachel needed a mother, but Jean was so afraid of her self and the idea of another child that she would be responsible for that, she reacted harshly and crass. She was not Rachel’s mother, at least now she would never become Rachel’s mother. It was a defensive mechanism, but one that hurt her as well as Rachel.
- In later years the idea of a child has been brought up to Jean once again but her views haven’t changed. Maybe now she could explore the idea of raising a child, but after the events with Nathan and Rachel, she has promised herself she would not bring another Scott/Jean baby into the world. She has loved Scott but she can’t help but worry another child would just end in travesty.
- However Jean does have a kid of her own
- Hope Summers. A child that she has been very distant from, for many reasons. I think it’s in Hope that she sees herself the most, if Hope is anyone’s child she is Nathan’s and Jean’s. I would be nice to have them interact.
I like Jean. Is that obvious