What’s your geek sacred cow?

Thanks to Alert Nerd for this Mega-Blog Crossover Event!

Simply put, when someone says “that’s my Scott and Jean,” it essentially means “that’s my geek sacred cow.” It’s the issue/coupling/whatever that you pretty much can’t discuss because you are too passionate about it and it makes you too crazy. You might hear perfectly reasonable arguments against said coupling/issue/whatever, but you cannot process them. It’s like That One Thing. It could be something like “Scott Summers and Jean Grey are supposed to be together and that is just how it is.” Or maybe “the new Battlestar Galactica does not exist for me because it is not the old Battlestar Galactica.” Or “The only correct portrayals of Batman are the ones that contain X, Y, and Z.” You get the idea. It’s your nerd mental block.

What’s my Scott & Jean? Well, it’s not Scott and Jean. In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite of Scott and Jean, at least when it comes to shipping the X-Men.

Mine is Logan & Jean.

Allow me to start off with a confession. I started reading the X-Men comics after the first movie came out in 2000. The only comics I read as a kid were Archie comics. I’m an only child and I didn’t have too many male friends when I was a kid, and the male friends I had as a teenager didn’t read comics, so I was never really exposed to them until I was 18 or 19. Before X-Men came out, I did read some Top Cow comics like Witchblade and The Darkness. But no Marvel for this fangirl until I saw the movie.

And then I was hooked.

I have another confession. I usually go for canon pairings. I love Han/Leia, Indy/Marion, Aragorn/Arwen, Lupin/Tonks, Jim/Pam… I think it comes from my desire to actually get a little action on screen instead of having to imagine it all (or write fanfic). So it would stand to reason that I’d go for Scott/Jean, seeing as they are (for the most part) a canon pairing, and they were the only pairing in the first movie.

But here’s where my usual shipping M.O. hits a snag.

I can’t stand boy scout characters. I don’t really like the good guys, the ones who know what’s right and what’s wrong, and by god, they’re on the side of right. I never liked Superman. I always went for Batman. I didn’t really care for Luke Skywalker, and instead went for Han Solo. I like my heroes to be conflicted and a little sketchy. Batman is awesome because he always treads the line between doing the right thing and doing the wrong thing in the name of vengeance. Han Solo shot first, damn it, and that’s part of who he is. He eventually comes around to doing the right thing, but he’s not ready to play heroes. He’s looking out for number one.

So, as I sat in the theatre, watching X-Men, I found myself strongly disliking Cyclops (with his velcro cardigan), and I also found myself with yet another grumpy anti-hero to add to my growing harem of favorite characters. Wolverine hit all of my buttons, and even hit some I didn’t even know I had (I never would have gone for a hairy guy before Wolvie, for example), and wham! I was crazy for this character.

Jean Grey, on the other hand, fascinated me in the movie, and even more so when I started devouring the comics. I love her constant struggle for balance between the kind-hearted woman and the power-hungry Phoenix. In fact, I love this character so much that I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on her, a feminist examination of the Dark Phoenix storyline in the comics and the movies.

I think it’s fascinating (and frustrating) how the comics creators bounce around when it comes to Jean, like they can’t figure out if they should just go out and make her the biggest badass in the Marvel ‘verse or punish her because she’s just so damn powerful.

But anyway, back to my pairing story. In the movie, I thought Hugh Jackman and Famke Janssen had smoldering chemistry as Logan and Jean, and since I was already a fanfic junkie at that point, [waves hello to The X-Files and Star Wars] it was an easy enough for me to slip right into writing Logan/Jean. I focused on the movieverse for a while, but once I started seriously reading the comics, I began writing and reading in that ‘verse almost exclusively. In the comics, there are just so many different universes and timelines to play with; I even got a little bit of Logan/Jean canon in the Ultimate and Age of Apocalpyse ‘verses. I even got a hilarious little bit in a What If…? comic, though that writer obviously didn’t share my conclusions as to what would happen if those two hooked up.

Logan/Jean is an iffy pairing when we’re talking canon. Ever since Wolverine’s introduction to the X-Men comics in the seventies, there’s been a… thing between them. Logan was hot in the pants for Jean right off the bat, and… well, I like to think that Jean reciprocated. But as the years rolled by (and Chris Claremont got his hands on them), that attraction bloomed into something more. Logan is obviously in love with Jean, and Jean again reciprocated, but she was always in a relationship with Scott and felt too strongly obligated to him to ever think of cheating, no matter how much she might have wanted Logan. So they’ve not exactly had a relationship in canon, though threads of it have always woven through the comics. It’s not unrequited love, just un-acted-upon. Well, unless you could those times that Logan planted a hot one on Jeannie, much to Cyclops’s irritation. ;)

Logan and Jean’s love for each other always seems to come out most strongly when one or the other is in danger. They just can’t hide it and pretend that everything is normal when they realize they might lose the other. In the Fatal Attractions storyline, for example, Jean fights to save not only Logan’s life after Magneto rips out his adamantium, but her teammates’ lives as well in a scene reminiscent of her first death. She uses her telekinesis to hold the jet together and force everyone to safety, but slips and is hanging onto the door by her fingernails. Logan, whom we all thought was on death’s door, saves her.

[blissful sigh]

And Jean’s next-to-last death in New X-Men #148… this one kills me. Er, no pun intended. Logan and Jean have been trapped on a space station that Magneto has flung toward the sun. They face certain death, and as he can’t watch Jean died a slow, horrible death, he stabs her to end it quickly. She dies in his arms, and utterly broken, he carries her toward the front of the spaceship, toward the looming sun, ready to face death with her.

I’m sorry, I need to take a brief break. I’m getting verklempt. [fans self]

For me, Logan and Jean always worked together better than any other pairing because of the way they complement each other. Both have to fight to keep the beast inside under control, but they do this in very different ways. Logan is prone to fits of berserker rage just as much as Jean is prone to supernova-inducing Phoenix outbursts. Logan deals with his beast by going all samurai, learning to meditate and channel his anger (for the most part). Jean deals with hers by repressing.

And the repression is what really lights my fire. In the glorious world of fanfic, Jean can let go of all of the nice-girl-repression she’s been building up for years and years, and Logan’s just the one to help her.

I’m trying to not leer right now, really. I’m in a computer lab full of my students, and it just wouldn’t be proper to leer. Heh.

Uh… I just realized that I talked a whole lot about a pairing that inspires so much passion it’s supposed to render me speechless. Or at least incoherent. My only defense is that I’m supposed to be working, and what better way to procrastinate than to wax poetic about my favorite ’ship? And share a big-ass gallery of my favorite Redshipper pics. :D

Now, tell me. What’s your Scott & Jean?