CYCLOPS & EMMA FROST
This one has the best hope for reconciliation of any on this list, but the weird love between Scott Summers and Emma Frost has been through the wringer, thanks to the crazy-ass Phoenix Force and the mess of Avengers vs. X-Men.
Scott Summers was once the top student of Professor Charles Xavier’s School for the Gifted, the leader of the first team of X-Men and guy with a stick up his ass. Emma Frost was raised in a wealthy but cold Boston family, and she pranced her way into the Hellfire Club wearing lingerie as her supervillain outfit and abusing her telepathy for her own gain, and you’d likely have had to pay through the nose to put a stick up her ass. However, Emma had a soft spot for helping kids, and her propensity towards teaching eventually reformed her enough that she took a job at Xavier’s school.
At least he admits it’s weird.
Scott, as we all know, was married to his First-Classmate Jean Grey, who had a penchant for dying and being reborn. He was also married to her clone for a while, and then left her clone with child when Jean popped back to life the first time, so his track record with fidelity is spotty. Thanks to Psylocke, he discovered the possibility of ‘psychic cheating,’ wherein you have affairs with telepath babes that exist entirely on the mindscape – and that’s going to be discovered when you’re also married to a telepath. He had enough trouble resisting the thong-wearing Betsy Braddock – how do you think he’d manage to stave off someone like Emma Frost, who wields her sexuality like a weapon? What began as psychic therapy after a particularly traumatic experience wherein Scott merged with mutant-archvillain Apocalypse eventually became a full on mental affair between the two – which didn’t sit well with Jean. Luckily for Scott, Jean would soon Phoenix out again and shuffle off this mortal coil once more, leaving him free to fall in with Emma. Not that it sat too well with friends and family, but it was some kind of true love. Jean even approved of it before she left.
Eventually, the X-folks would learn to accept them together, and the two of them took over the Xavier school, as for all his failings as a husband, he rarely failed as a leader, and that boundless confidence in the field would make Emma, in her words, “positively throb.” When M-Day hit, reducing the number of mutants in the world to less than 200, things got real. Cyclops marshaled the mutants he could onto an island called Utopia and tried to make it a mutant stronghold, slowly growing more hardline about the preservation of the species – hardline enough that even Magneto joined their forces. Emma was behind him at every turn – even when they went to war with the Avengers over the return of the Phoenix Force. That is, until the Phoenix Force possessed them both, eventually leading Scott to betray her, forcibly TAKE her portion of the power and go full on Dark Phoenix on everybody and murder his father figure, Charles Xavier.
I’m not so sure if thats ALL she’s ever done…
We saw Emma had begun to completely resent Scott as she was reduced to ugly prison fatigues instead of her usual Tres Fabu white wardrobe, but moreso because he turned out to be a misguided idiot. Cyclops was in prison as well, looking to become a martyr. Everything looked kaput… until Magneto freed him, and they came for her, and now they’ve teamed up together in a sort of antihero X-Men way, capturing new mutants to train them together. True, Bendis’ first attempt at writing Emma was pretty godawful, with no sense of how she actually spoke, but eventually, he’ll either get the hang of it or force us to accept her with the typical Bendis voice… and we’ll see if they actually reunite fully while having completely fallen from grace together. If they do, it still won’t be the strangely appealing twisted love story it once was. It’ll be a much darker thing of desperation and frustration.
And Emma will be wearing black.
***
So there’s your tour down Misery Lane, folks! Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody! Enjoy what happiness you have, because comic book characters never will. They can’t. Because their adventures have to stretch out for 50 more years, at least. For those of us who get too invested in relationships like these and get a little heartsick when they end, Kitty Pryde perhaps summed it up best back in Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men. Let’s just take this advice to heart.
I’m trying to heed that advice myself… but I still can’t even talk about all the time Christos Gage of Avengers Academy put into developing the relationship between Hazmat, the prickly girl with the death touch, and Mettle, the skinless surfer dude, only to have it immediately destroyed in the first issue of Avengers Arena by having Arcade murder the shit out of the guy.
I admit it. I’m a sap. I can’t deal with it yet.
