Though it was just as weird as "Teen" Angel and X-23 hooking up.
Angel and X-23 did give us Laura liking headpats though, so it wasn't entirely wasted. But yeah, after the initial arc or two, it really felt like they were struggling to give the O5 stuff to do. So, yeah, Teen Warren is banging Laura, Hank is studying magic and becoming half-demon, Warren loses his wings
again, but this time the replacements are made of cosmic fire or something, Jean's like a more personable Emma Frost with how she cheerfully manipulates people... When Scott 'He took the stick out of his ass and started beating people to death with it' Summers is the most normal and personable member of the team, something is
deeply wrong.
Kitty, there was some heavy teasing with Rogue just before AoA, he slept with Mystique, and, just to put an interesting spin on her outing him, he was also into Jean as a teen too. So that's interesting. But yeah, I think only Warren had more girlfriends than he did and he was a literal billionaire playboy.
If we ever do allow the MC to gayfuck people, Iceman's arc will be longer than one page and we're not giving the player the ability to out him.
There was some followup to it, with Teen Bobby confronting Adult Bobby about it and both of them basically going 'okay, yeah, we're gay now I guess' but it was so lazy and hamfisted, it was insulting. And I'm straight! I can't even imagine how it felt to be a teenager struggling with their sexuality and reading that!
I bring attention to "mostly." I didn't read the entire run because I stopped being a regular comic consumer for several years by that point but the way Jean behaved was always off to me. Less the preppy 15 year old wanting to be the smartest we saw in the original run in the 70s and more a bitchy 15 year old that acted like she was the smartest.
I'm 100% convinced that they came from another universe's past like Cable and Bishop come from another universe's future.
Yeah, I wasn't a big fan of the X-Men around the Utopia era myself. I was reading stuff like X-Force/Uncanny X-Force, which was fantastic, but other than that, Deadpool and Wolverine and the X-Men (I'm always a sucker for a light-hearted teen book), it just wasn't fun. From Decimation onwards, the franchise just seemed content to wallow in horribleness. I loved the darker New X-Men book that was out at that time (the one I've discussed before that had Laura as a main character), but the way they were content to murder characters left and right just felt cruel.
I think they did eventually decide that the everything involving the O5 wound up becoming a different timeline, so you're mostly right in that one. There was a cute followup to that story though, where Adult Scott told Kamala he remembered everything they'd done when he was a kid and that she was the best friend he'd ever had. That was just heartbreakingly sweet.
I mean, shit, the way he reacted it's almost like he didn't even know he was gay. Or like, she just assumed he was gay for some reason.
Exactly, it was just painfully done. Hell, the way I read it when I first saw it was her trying to take Bobby down a few pegs for being a show-off, which is
even worse! As I said, 'Jean decided to fuck around with people's brains for shits and giggles' makes more sense than 'I read your mind and you're gay' 'Wait, I'm what now? Huh, guess you're right!' It would've been a good way of showing how her being possessed by the Phoenix was always an inevitability as well, since she really does revel in showing off her power in the stories around this point and the whole Phoenix arc is her indulging in her new powers and being horrified at how much she likes it.