MCotP notes (Patreon)

I know this isn't where much room for plot in a fic where the premise is literally just "Scott Summers fucks a lot of different women," but I do at least try to adhere to a believable, canon characterization, so with Madelyne, I wanted to see about Scott legitimately trying for a 'second chance.' We might still get the infamous Goblyn Queen costume later--reason enough to hold off on the usual flowery description of Madelyne, fair enough?--but as with Emma, I wanted to explore the idea of Scott getting to BTTF his past, even if hardcore sex does ensue.

It's actually a little heartbreaking to research Madelyne Pryor, because it tends to turn up this quote by Claremont: 

"The original plotline was that Scott marries Madelyne, they have their child, they go off to Alaska, he goes to work for his grandparents, he retires from the X-Men. He's a reserve member. He's available for emergencies. He comes back on special occasions, for special fights, but he has a life. He has grown up. He has grown out of the monastery; he is in the real world now. He has a child. He has maybe more than one child. It's a metaphor for us all. We all grow up. We all move on.

Scott was going to move on. Jean was dead get on with your life. And it was close to a happy ending. They lived happily ever after, and it was to create the impression that maybe if you came back in ten years, other X-Men would have grown up and out, too. Would Kitty stay with the team forever? Would Nightcrawler? Would any of them? Because that way we could evolve them into new directions, we could bring in new characters. There would be an ongoing sense of renewal, and growth and change in a positive sense.

Then, unfortunately, Jean was resurrected, Scott dumps his wife and kid and goes back to the old girlfriend. So it not only destroys Scott's character as a hero and as a decent human being it creates an untenable structural situation: what do we do with Madelyne and the kid? ... So ultimately the resolution was: turn her into the Goblin Queen and kill her off."

And when you look at the X-titles... well, it's hard to naysay them when they've been so successful, perhaps being too successful, to the point of being impenetrable. But they do have this major problem with every decade or so, a 'young X-Men' team is created, they grow up, they complete their character arcs, learn to use their powers, become X-Men... and then vanish into the fucking ether, aside from maybe one or two breakout characters. Because any slot they can take on the team is being held by Colossus, who's still doing Colossus stuff for the fortieth year in a row.

And admittedly, people wanna read about Colossus doing Colossus stuff, but you look at some of the storytelling convolutions there have been and the ridiculous pile-ups of backstory characters have now, stuff like Bobby Drake having been gay all along and Magneto switching from good to evil like he's going for a Guiness World Record, and how much sleeker would the storytelling be if characters were retired to go off and do mutant stuff in the Congo or whatever? Instead of just perpetuating this endless X-cycle? The place is a school, right? The idea is that people will eventually graduate and then go off and follow their own path, not that Xavier is building a private army that's just continuously growing more and more powerful. 

I mean, time is a flat circle. This whole Madelyne Pryor thing happened because Marvel wanted to get the Original Five back together and put them in X-Factor, and now the exact same thing has happened with the O5. And as any sort of meaningful portrayal of the civil rights movement, it's really silly. In the real world, you have stuff like OscarsSoWhite being the kind of thing people are concerned with, and then in the Marvel universe they're still doing the equivalent of the KKK lynching people, because no one wants to write a take on race relations that doesn't involve Colossus and Wolverine pulling a Fastball Special on a Sentinel.