Rachel Grey Character Timeline?

Yea, so i was trying to explain Rachel Grey to someone and i sort of thought myself cross-eyed.

My major issue starts from around the time Askani come to the past for baby Cable.

So Askani is a future older version of Rachel from after she leaves Excalibur an ends up in the Apocalypse ruled future. Right?

She eventually gives Scott and Jean the chance to raise Cable by bringing their minds to the future....Right?

She dies, and sends Scott and Jean back.

But Adult Cable eventually found the current Rachel (without the phoenix for the first time) and brings her back to our timeline....but younger then she was as Askani or Mother Askani...even being called and treated as a teenager by Cyclops and others.

Questions though....

So does our Rachel have the memories from her time forming the Askani tribe?

Is she the same as the Askani who died in the future, or is she from an earlier point and will one day have to go back to bring Scott and Jean to raise Cable and then die?

About how old is she?

Does anyone know what issue Cable found her and brought her back to our timeline in?

I hate time travel SOOOO much ... I have nearly stopped reading Marvel altogether because it feels like EVERY story leads back to some BS time travel explanation that just means they can do anything with any story then effectively retcon in the next issue because someone "changed the timeline"

@koays: you're right. I don't think she will ever cease to exist. She once said that she only dies to resurrect again. I think it is a privilege of being the daughter of the phoenix force itself. haha. Her memories of the Askani stint were erased, the only memories she have are those of her growing up in the days of the future past timeline which was erased by bryan singer because he didnt include her in the film. hahaha

Its a storyline in the Cable solo series, issues 46-48.

Every other statement you made was true. I don't know if you are aware of the site, but UncannyX-Men.net has very detailed and organized character histories. Perhaps it will help you straighten it out.

I personally hate the time traveling conundrums that have become synonymous with the X-Men. I mean I don't mind maybe one or two characters coming back in time, I like Bishop personally. Cable and Rachel Summers have just become obnoxiously confusing over time.

@cattlebattle: Gotcha, gotta track it down now.

Personally i like the Cable/Rachel connection....but the X-Men are on like their 5th averted future, and their just grabbing alternate future kids as souvenirs with everyone.....it takes away from what was something special and makes it another over used plot device.

@koays: agreed 100%

I had a moment of thinking the whole Mother Askani thing will get retconned to be Hope Summers' church...

:-|

lol about the souvenirs.....it's true.

I am probably the only X-fan in existence that doesn't care much for Rachel or Cable. I like Rachel when she first showed up and it seemed like she came from an unavoidable future, and how she was a hound....that stuff was interesting. But, not long after she joins the X-Men she finds out she comes from an alternate reality, which cheapens her existence a bit. Then all she does is complain repetitively about how all her friends in her reality are dead--which, is something completely justifiable to have complaints about, but here reminding us becomes too frequent. Before she departs to become a member of Excalibur Claremont wrote her as having this temper and mean streak, which also made her interesting but it feels like some writers forget that and she often feels like a Jean Grey stand in. I could do without her.

Cable on the other hand, as apparently intrinsic to the X-Men lore he became over the years....I could do without. His creation was an obvious sign of the times as he was a product of when Swarzenegger movies ruled the box office, so naturally, he was a huge muscle bound mercenary with big guns. Then the whole "X-Cutiners Song" debacle made it worse....it was something out of a bad soap opera...an evil clone from the future comes back in time to destroy you, blah blah. Then him being this soldier of the future sent back in time from where Apocalypse ruled just seemed like another huge sci fi cliche. Then his powers don't make much sense, he has powerful TK but uses it to keep his body together?? Sounds like a retcon as when he originally showed up he was just meant to be a cybernetic mercenary.

I have always liked Bishop, because not only was he a much needed black male character in the franchise but his power is pretty cool and his backstory was simple enough, he came back from a future similar to Days of Future Past and its now an alternate reality. End of story. There are other stories which feature his timeline but it isn't considered a big deal, and its not this overly complicated "my child of a clone whose clone has a clone and sent him to the future where he came back to an alternate past" I hate that stuff

I can get where your coming from.

But while Rachel clearly has had characterization issues and Cable is a true to the core 90's stereotype, they both have that connection to Scott & Jean which pretty much makes the entire family more interesting individually and as a whole.

I mean Cyclops/Maddie/Jean connection was interesting, even moreso when baby Cable is thrown in. But after that is resolved, they give Cyclops a devils deal where he has to choose his son living in the future or dying in the present, which is drilled in even more by the fact that Cable comes back and now Scott has a living embodiment of that choice. And all the while this is effecting both Rachel, who didn't have a brother in her time an now knows she may not exist; and Jean, who has a psychic and genetic connection to the kid without it being her kid, reminding her of another part of her life stolen by her death.

The fact that just Cable's existence effects so many people in very different ways sort of redeems a character that would've gotten old if he didn't have these connections. And better then that, idk if Cable's ever even mentioned the Maddie/Jean back story. It's just interesting that while each of them has a much larger story, little parts of there stories have major effects on one another. So i think with the Summers/Grey clan it worked just because of how much it contributed to each of the members.

I mean compare that to Kymera who doesn't have much of a story on her own, and has very little effect on Storm(they didn't speak for the first 7 months of her existence), or the Mystique kids who exist solely to shake things up despite doing harm to her character without sharing a panel. Even X-Man is sort of just there, and doesn't effect Scott or Jean or even the plot very much....his connection to them is just an after thought.

While Rachel and Cable are complicated it's a much better complication then "Wow that alternate future was cool, lets bring a character from that timeline here and forget about them"

I just read digital issues of end of greys and the issues after. Rachel said the events that she is experiencing now are much worst than the ones that happened in her reality. in her reality, her family were killed by the sentinels, in this timeline/reality her family died but on the hands of the shiar death commandos. I think even if people time travel, there is still a slim chance that they get to change the future or what is really destined to happen.

about Rachel's fear of the future and constant whining, I think that the writers forgot to take into consideration, that The Excalibur was able to fix the Days of the future past timeline. Rachel was able to reprogram the sentinels not to attack both the humans and mutants.

All good points. If you are a big fan of Summers' lore I could see why someone would like them

In fact, If the only characters in the entire comic series were Scott, Jean and their offspring I would want a television show made out of it. It would be neat to see all these characters criss-cross through space and time and run into each other and fight along with each other. But sadly, the X-Men is such a large franchise with lots of very interesting characters, I always can't keep help feel like that stuff is just excess. It just feels overly complicated and usually has to result in a lot of retcons because some concepts force contradictions to what was already established.

@cattlebattle: Yea i can respect that. Theres plenty other plot threads to latch onto if the Summers chain doesn't interest you. I was just saying how they at least did something with the alternate timeline shenanigans as appose to alot of the other ones.

@darthphoenix - Rachel is probably the X- character that gets over looked the most. She has these storylines (feud with Selene, angry with Scott and Emma, End of Greys,) That would all make her very interesting if they effected her character, but she seemingly moves on and forgets about them almost immediately after or she doesn't get attention for so long you forget what her character should be at this point. I mean honestly she should be a little angrier considering what her last few major storys have been.

@koays: overlooked and written badly, especially after her return to the x-men. There is so much inconsistencies in how she is written. There's just no justice most of the time.

1. She downloads all of xaviers telepathic know-how, trains with frost and still loses in a telepathic battle to xavier

2. She beats xavier jr in a telepathic battle when xavier jr is mind controlling the supposedly most powerful mind on earth-JEAN/XORN

3. She is paired with an alien(korvus) and a bacteria(john sublime)-who happens to be responsible for her mother's death. She haven't even met Franklyn Richards yet, who, by this time should be around 10-12 years old or in his earlty teens, since he was still a kid during onslaught.

4. She became a pain in the ass to STORM.

5. Her loyalty has always been a question-Is she really spying for scott or not?

6. She haven't really used her powers well after AVX.

I'll give Xavier his win because knowledge and application can be worlds apart.

But everything else is spot on, I mean during the Hellfire story arc in WatX-Men she scans the minds of everyone on the planet.....then she needs Cerebro to find Logan in Canada....It's wolverine, he's the most aggressive thing in that country by a margin.

Truthfully Rachel just needs some character development, she's just been team psychic for so long it's painful, and everything she does that could be interesting (Betraying Logan for Cyclops, challenging Storms leadership, interacting with oldschool Jean Grey) is sort of just glossed over or forgotten about casually.

can anyone remember what issue it was that rachel "downloaded" professor X's experience with telepathy? I think it was vs vulcan

Somewhere around 478 of Uncanny X-Men i think....if not then it was toward the end of Deadly Genesis

I have to laugh at hearing others saying they hate the time-travel, because I found this thread after googling "x-men too much time travel" (seeing if anyone had voiced that already, somewhere on the internet). I wanted to read some X-Men (I'm mainly a DC reader, though I read about a fair amount Marvel - wiki summaries, etc - to get references when I do read Marvel, or to understand forum discussions) and I'm near the end of Claremont's modern Uncanny run (444-474) & had to think on this subject. Marvel (X-Men primarily, it seems) has SO much interaction between alternate universes/futures & the main/canon one. Often with characters staying in the 616 for an extended period. Add in that many times it's some child in the Grey/Summers family (but most aren't related, are from different universes, etc).... It's not the most difficult thing in the world, but it certainly doesn't help someone trying to build a bigger base of (clear) 1st-hand knowledge for Marvel (history, "current state of things", etc. Especially because there's always been so many different X-Men related books, teams splitting & re-forming, etc). I can't think of any comparable part of the DC-universe (pre or post new-52), even if you came in with little DC knowledge.

@lightsout: As a DC guy(my love of X-Men not withstanding), I think Donna Troy, Powergirl and Hawkman show that while Marvel (X-Men especially) tends to over complicate it's timetravel plots......they don't go through wishy/washy periods like DC does with characters of similar origin, "this one is from another universe, i mean she's superman's cousin, i mean aquaman's, i mean a goddess, i mean Supermans cousin definitely....OK she's from another universe".

You can even directly compare Powergirl and Rachel Grey's character arcs, with them both being from another world and having to accept the way things are now, though while Rachel eventually accepted her role in the universe as Scott and Jean's daughter and got closure (before going on to complicate many other backstories with Timetravel shenanigans) Powergirl kept reliving the "who am I?" dilemma everytime she decided she knew who she was and someone showed up and told her they were already that person. It's really just a pick your poison thing...i kinda like them both though.

@koays: That's true. In the pre-IC content with Powergirl (largely JSA) I guess I didn't see that come up much; and I've never read anything where Donna or Hawkman were more than ancillary characters (ie: their inner details weren't important -- Although now that you mention it, I think I remember a moment (reading WW) where I found that Donna's background wasn't always what I had thought it to be).

It may not be the strongest counter-point, but I think it's "not as bad" with those characters because they aren't main-characters. Not that Rachel a main/classic X-Men member, but Uncanny X-Men is a feature book & the team themselves is definitely a "main character" in Marvel (and she got a lot of narrating time in those books --- while in DC those 3 people at best get time in a team-book and even then it's not one that has over-arching impact on the rest of DC (as say, the Justice League would). ......and it just seems like there's SOOO many people with this issues in Marvel (aka X-Men) haha.

But yea, like I said earlier it's mainly just an "issue" when trying to jump into the world. (With DC I also grew up on the many cartoons they put out, so even when starting their comics I already knew a lot of basic info).

@lightsout: I think that a good point to make is that DC and Marvel have very different approaches to teams. The X-men while being a team, is alot more personal and character driven then most DC teams(and even their closest rivals in marvel) which are groups of heroes brought together to fight a common evil. DC hasn't had many teams that have personal issues as a equal driving point to the evil threat...the team books are just where ever ones world comes together.

The X-men is arguably the most incestuous franchise in comics because it's own continuity, characters and stories are just as important if not more then anything else. Rachel is a B+ X-men member, but there are 10 others that can claim that. In the grand scheme of Marvel she doesn't matter much but as far as the x-men are concerned she's had a huge impact.

Lol It's probably easier to compare X-men on its own to DC and Marvel. They've got more then enough continuity, books and characters.