So, I found yet another thing to hate about the whole Madelyne Pryor mess, and it’s that you could have had the “Maddy is Jean’s clone” story happen and still NOT shit all over Madelyne in the process. Because like…her being Jean’s clone makes more sense, let’s be honest. Claremont’s original plan for her to just be the, as he says, “one in a million shot” human woman who looks just like Jean isn’t just problematic and pointless, it’s also stupid. He says it goes back to lots of lore and media about doubles, such as Hitchcock’s flicks (uh, did you miss that those were horrors, dude?) and he wanted to basically fake the audience out by dropping lots of hints she was somehow connected to Jean or the Phoenix, and then pull the rug out from under ‘em like NAH, JUST KIDDING, SHE REALLY JUST A NORMAL LADY and like…that’s dumb, dude. I get that you want to go with the opposite of what the audience is going to expect, but in this case, the reason they expect it is because it’s the only thing that actually makes SENSE. So, I’m cool with her being Jean’s clone. I’m cool with Jean coming back, there’s nothing wrong with Jean. You can do these things without warping Madelyne’s character or killing her off. In fact, I think you could even write her spiral downwards into the Goblyn Queen the exact same way and have it be fine, right up until Inferno itself. Because Maddy’s descent is MASTERFULLY written. She did NOT turn into a villain overnight, she goes through REPEATED trauma, loss, and violation that strips her of her husband, her child, her very identity, and ultimately her agency, and even then she’s still too strong and too good, she has to be TRICKED by a demon and infected with demonic energy before she becomes evil. It’s not by her free will at all, which both fans and current writers forget. She’s the very definition of a victim here, as much as, say, Illyana Rasputin. It’s done really well, she is portrayed as a victim and as a three-dimensional character, and I am fine with it staying. Countless heroes go through horrible dehumanizing shit and/or become temporarily evil due to forces beyond their control, I don’t have a problem with that, any more than I do with Bucky Barnes or Laura Kinney. But unlike Illyana or Bucky or Laura, once Madelyne actually DOES become the Goblyn Queen, we’re meant to lose all sympathy for her. It’s like the writers felt that since they had done the required work to making her downfall believable—which to their credit they did, I really appreciate that they made it make sense and not be a sudden thing—then they could now just make her a straight-up wicked witch, complete with misogynistic tropes like her being suddenly super-sexualized, seducing Havok, and wanting to kill her own baby while Good Woman Jean contrasts her by being the mother that wants to save the baby, and the baby telepathically reaching out for her in preference over Madelyne. She’s no longer simply dehumanized by what’s happening around her in the story, she becomes dehumanized by the story itself. Like…to go back to Laura Kinney again, when Laura is dehumanized by other characters and circumstances in her story, it’s written in a way where we the reader are not supposed to agree with her dehumanization. We’re supposed to sympathize with her and be angry at her treatment. I would say that Madelyne is still treated with some sympathy towards the very end, mainly through Jean who sees her as the victim she is and says so, but ultimately this story was not Madelyne’s own story in the way that Illyana’s, Bucky’s, Laura’s stories are their own—-it was constructed for the purpose of killing her off, and making a way for Scott and Jean to be together without Scott being vilified for it. And that’s what’s shitty. The fix is pretty simple—just let everything happen as it did in canon, but take out the shitty sexist aspects of the Goblyn Queen persona, don’t make a Madonna/Whore dichotomy out of Jean and Madelyne, and let Madelyne survive and be treated as a victim and let her keep being a hero with the X-Men like she was before, just like many other X-Men have after being villains (especially since it wasn’t her fault or her choice) Basically, treat her the way any other character would be treated, instead of deciding to get rid of her by literally demonizing her, and let her just continue to be an interesting character like she was even before all this. It’s really not a hard fix. So yeah, pretty much everything could have happened the way it originally did WITHOUT it being terrible to Maddy in a meta sense (it would still be terrible in-universe, but that happens to all X-Men characters) but they still made it terrible because they wanted Jean and Scott back together and since a lady is nothing without her man, that made Maddy superfluous so she had to be evil and die the end.
