Sandbox / Marvel Comics: Rachel Summers

Rachel "Ray" Anne Summers/Grey / Phoenix II / Marvel Girl III / Prestige / Askani

Nationality: American (Earth-811)

Species: Human mutant

First Appearance: X-Men #141 (January, 1981)

"I'm not my mother. I'm not Phoenix. I'm my own woman... and before I'm done... they'll wish I were the Phoenix."

— Rachel Summers, Uncanny X-Men #468

Rachel Summers, or Rachel Grey, and also known by the aliases Phoenix, Marvel Girl, Prestige, and currently Askani is a Marvel Comics mutant superheroine who is associated with the X-Men. She debuted in X-Men #141 (January 1981), as part of the Days of Future Past storyline. Her first appearance in the main Marvel Universe would come three years later in New Mutants #18. She was created by Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and John Romita, Jr..

Rachel is the daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey from an alternate dystopian future timeline where Senator Robert Kelly was assassinated, and as a result, the Sentinels were allowed to take over the world. Rachel used her telepathy to send Katherine Pryde's mind to the past so she could save Senator Kelly. Katherine succeeded but their timeline remained unchanged, so Rachel used the Phoenix Force to go back in time and find out what had gone wrong. Rachel discovered she was stuck in an alternate timeline where her mother was dead and her father was married to Madelyne Pryor. She'd join the X-Men and later Excalibur.

Rachel remained with the team until her parents' wedding in X-Men #30. Then she travelled to another far-flung remote future where the Earth was a desert world ruled by Apocalypse. Rachel founded the Askani in order to oppose him, and brought Scott and Jean to the future to raise Cable.

However, the events of The Twelve changed the timeline, and Rachel was kidnapped by a cyborg soldier called Gaunt. She was rescued and brought back to the present by her brother Cable, and attempted to lead a normal life until circumstances forced her to join the X-Men again.

Rachel was Marvel's first (of many) "child from the future" characters, one of the best known, and one of the very few who stuck around. In addition to her mother's telepathy and telekinesis, Rachel can also send her astral form through time and across realities. She doesn't do this often though, since outside her stint with Excalibur - who were frequently involved in multiversal shenanigans - the rules of time travel make it largely ineffective.

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Rachel Summers provides examples of:

A-H

• '80s Hair: Her (in)famous femullet.
• The Ace: Aside from Psychic Powers on par with her legendary mother, if not stronger (though thanks to her Hound conditioning, she's notably vulnerable to Mind Control), she's a time manipulator capable of leaving her brothers in the dust, and was so good at handling the power of the Phoenix despite her phenomenally Dark and Troubled Past (it's comparable to Magneto's) that the entity itself recognised this and granted her full control over its power, believing she would use it more wisely than it would. As she once points out with a smirk, after nicking some of the power of Korvus Rookshir's 'Phoenix Sword', "the Phoenix likes me."
• Adaptational Modesty: Her costume as Marvel Girl displayed her abs throughout much of the 2000s. Her subsequent uniforms tended to forget this and were full-body outfits.
• Alliance with an Abomination: This is usually the status of a Phoenix Host, so long as they've got a strong enough will to stay in control. The tension tends to derive from the fact that the Phoenix a) is volatile, b) is operating on Blue-and-Orange Morality, and c) usually has its own aims in mind. Given that it's a force of both creation and destruction, it can be an ally or an antagonist. Some hosts handle it better than others — Jean Grey actually does pretty well, most of the time, but it's her daughter, Rachel Summers, who takes the cake, with the Phoenix actually giving her full use of all of its power, deeming her judgement superior to its own.
• All-Loving Hero: At heart, under her spiky temper, enough that for a while, the Phoenix entrusts her with all of its power - and we mean all of it.
• Alternate Timeline: The universe she is from, Earth-811, was originally one of the possible Bad Futures of Earth-616, but was later retconned into being a completely Alternate Universe that paralleled Earth-616 (except for a few details revolving around Jean Grey's relationship to the Phoenix Force) up to Senator Kelly's assassination.
• Alternate Self: Averted; In an other-dimensional space where inhabitants' alternate selves can be manifested, Rachel can only summon aspects of her past, meaning she is apparently wholly unique in the multiverse. This saddens her, as this means her tragic life is the only one in which she could exist.
• Ambiguously Bi: Although her attraction to men was confirmed for a long time, Rachel is yet another Claremont character who was originally intended to be portrayed as queer, as often hinted at with her "special friendship" with Kitty. The ambiguity came from Claremont refusing to outright say it, and every other writer ignoring it in favour of having both dating guys exclusively. In the Krakoan Age her close relationship with Betsy Braddock received a lot of focus, culminating in the two kissing in Knights of X #4 and finally confirming Rachel's interest in women after decades of ambiguity.
• Animal-Themed Superbeing: Phoenix, when she was Phoenix Force Avatar.
• Anti-Hero: Of the Knight in Sour Armor variety, although she started as a Pragmatic Hero or Unscrupulous Hero.
• Anti-Hero Substitute: Zig-Zagged. At first glance, she's one to her mother, Jean Grey - she certainly has the style, as well as the whole 'younger and angrier' aspect. However, unlike her mother, she held the Phoenix Force for years without losing control, and proved to be an All-Loving Hero like her mother (if a more sarky version), on the grounds that Vengeance Feels Empty.
• Arch-Enemy: Rachel has the Beyonder, Ahab and Selene. Rachel made multiple attempts to kill the Beyonder because he was a threat to the multiverse, but the Beyonder made things personal when he gave Rachel a portion of his power, and proceeded to threaten the lives or her friends just to test her. Eventually, Rachel delved into He Who Fights Monsters territory and nearly destroyed the universe to free it from the Beyonder's influence. Ahab, on the other hand, was the man who turned her into a Hound, and after she escaped he fixated on getting her back. She's also gone up against Selene a few times and is a thematic Foil (Rachel's a young woman from the future and Selene's an ancient evil). Then there are the Shi’ar Death Commandoes. ‘Nuff said.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: During one of Excalibur's stops on the Cross-Time Caper, Rachel temporarily burns out her powers (causing the team to be temporarily stranded since her powers are what allowed them to jump between universes). In the meantime, she's able to fight instead by copying Kitty Pryde's ninja skills. Kitty never taught Rachel any of those skills, she was simply able to duplicate them by watching Kitty use them. Once.
• Badass Longcoat: Her costume from Schism to ResurrXion sported a long red trenchcoat with many tails, resembling the tailfeathers of a bird.
• Bad Future: Rachel escaped from, pretty much, the ultimate Crapsack World. One of her driving motivations is preventing it from coming about, or at least preparing her students to face it.
• Betty and Veronica: In Excalibur she was the Veronica, Shadowcat was the Betty, and Alistaire Stuart was the Archie.
• Big Sister Instinct: For young Nathan Summers, before he became Cable. When Nathan was still young and had to be sent to an alternate future after he was infected by Apocalypse's Techno-Organic Virus, Rachel mentally took Scott and Jean to have a honeymoon to the future so that they could raise young Nathan properly.
• Birds of a Feather: Rachel and Korvus. Both wield the power of the Phoenix Force and both had their families murdered by the Shi'ar in a needlessly brutal fashion in order to wipe out potential Phoenix hosts.
• Bodyguarding a Badass: In House of M reality, she becomes bodyguard for Psylocke, who is an Action Girl herself.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: She has a tendency to get mind-controlled into being a Hound or turning against the X-Men. 2018 alone saw her brainwashed at least three times. ^note She's controlled by Mesmero in Gold, Cassandra Nova in Red, and Ahab in Extermination.
• Break the Cutie: Put simply, nearly every event in her life has served this purpose in some way or another.
• Brought Down to Badass: Just slightly before War of Kings, the fragments of Phoenix power she still had in her unceremoniously up and left mid-fight. This still left Rach with her Omega-level telekinetic powers.
• Bullet Dodges You: After thwarting a plot to murder Xavier after his secret is discovered by a group of anti-mutant bigots, one of the villains tries to shoot Rachel Summers, who uses her telekinesis to grab the bullet and redirect it at the shooter. Then the bullet freezes just in front of his head, having been caught by Magneto, who refuses to let Rachel become a murderer like himself. The bullet just hovers in front of the now-terrified assassin's face while they push against each other, until Magneto manages to talk Rachel down.
• Calling Parents by Their Name: She bounces back and force between calling her (sort-of) parents Mom and Dad or just by their names.
• Celibate Hero: Rachel had a relationship with a grown-up Franklin Richards in her own timeline, who was killed before her eyes. After that, she wasn't interested in romance for a long time.
• Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: She is able to change into multiple outfits within a matter of seconds as due to her Phoenix powers, she can alter the molecules of her costumes at a whim. She has also done this with multiple other people's clothes at the same time, when the X-Men need to become inconspicuous by changing into civilian clothes. However, she almost collapsed from the effort because at the time she didn't have Phoenix powers, just "ordinary" telekinesis.
• Chew Toy: Rachel is one of those characters who goes through a hell of a lot of misery with very little positive gain. Over and over and over again.
• Civvie Spandex: Danskins and leg warmers, before becoming Phoenix.
• Clothing Damage: Her green outfit from her X.S.E. days got shredded during her time in outer space, and without the necessary resources to rebuild, she was forced to improvise with what she had.
• Combo Platter Powers: Rachel Summers is a massively powerful telepath and telekinetic, and sometimes called 'the One True Phoenix'. Additionally, she's a Chronokinetic of awe-inspiring power, being the one behind Kate Pryde's mental time travel in Days of Future Past. She also later used this power to send Scott and Jean to the future on their honeymoon to raise baby Cable, and one future self became Mother Askani, matriarch of the Clan Askani, a bunch of weird, predominantly female psychics who pretty much wrote the book on psychic time travel, and even later used it as part of the famous 'Cross-time caper' story in Excalibur, which involved the titular team bouncing around a lot of alternate timelines.
• Comic Book Death: In the 90s, she got shunted off to Cable's future, where she lived out her life and died of old age. This got undone when that future stopped existing, and Rach managed to come back to her early 20s.
• Daddy's Girl: She acts like this whenever she's with her father Cyclops, notably Scott tends to be quicker to accept Rachel as his daughter than her mother Jean does.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Her mother was killed by a nuke when she was a little girl. Shortly after that, the government laid siege to the X-Mansion and she saw them shoot Professor X dead right in front of her. She was then taken to a lab and spent her childhood and early teenaged years being tortured into a living weapon to hunt other Mutants down, after which she was thrown into a concentration camp.
• Dark Feminine Light Feminine: With Shadowcat, in terms of fashion sense (and perhaps backstory) if nothing else. Her personality, however, isn't especially dark.
• Deflector Shields: She commonly uses telekinetic force fields to protect herself and her teammates.
• Depending on the Artist: The size and shape of her Hound markings and her eyes, which, though usually green, are sometimes coloured blue - which would be just about the only feature she inherited from her father (whose eyes are blue behind the optic blasts).
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Galactus. Though technically, Rachel's own consciousness was in a coma while the Phoenix took him on. Just before that, however, she'd gone toe to toe with Necrom, the Anti-Phoenix, who hurled planets at her, reignited stars to try and destroy her, and was condensing the multiverse into a singularity to feed off and allow him to ascend to godhood. She won, albeit barely.
• Dirty Mind-Reading: She reacts to this in an issue of Excalibur, during the Cross-Time Caper story (where Excalibur was bounced around the multiverse), from a version of Nigel Frobisher - a creep in the 616 'verse who's obsessed with Rachel, and apparently a creep throughout the multiverse. This results in her very suddenly tarring & feathering him. We never find out what the exact thoughts were, but when Brian Braddock (Captain Britain) rebukes Rachel for her behaviour - they are, after all, guests - she shows them to him by way of explanation. Cue an expression of shock from Brian. Cut to the next panel where his temper slips as well and it takes his entire team to prevent him from turning alt!Frobisher into a greasy smear.
• Divine Parentage: According to her creator, Chris Claremont, Rachel's father isn't Scott Summers, but the Phoenix Force itself. This is quietly ignored by everyone else. That being said, there is a general acknowledgement that she has a somewhat special relationship with the entity in question.
• The Dreaded: Rachel's reputation is an extension of her mother's, for the most part, thanks to in-depth connection to the Phoenix. However, she also expands the reputation on her vengeful rampage in Shi'ar space after her family was massacred. Likewise, she also had one in her own time, when she was Brainwashed and Crazy, as one of the most powerful mutant Hounds.
• Dressed Like a Dominatrix: She frequently has had costumes that have this theme to one extent or another - her main costume while she was with Excalibur, for instance, was a spiked spandex bodysuit. Later costumes, barring her Marvel Girl one, were less obvious about this and tended towards a spiky component.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: To an extent as a teacher at the Jean Grey School during Wolverine and the X-Men to the point of being being noticeably grumpier than usual. Then again, if you had to teach Kid Gladiator and keep Omega class teenage rebel and generalised irritating little twit Quentin Quire in check, you'd wind up more than a little annoyed. When Logan asks her about this, she explains that she feels like the Bad Future that she came from is coming for them, and they have to be prepared.
• Evil Costume Switch: Subverted in Excalibur. She eventually ditches her original spiked red bodysuit (which was based on her Hound costume) and settles for the blood-red ensemble of Dark Phoenix. But she's not pulling a Face–Heel Turn; she just prefers these colours over "Light" Phoenix's costume. "[Dark Phoenix] might have been a threat to the universe... but she had great taste in clothes!"
• Extremely Protective Child:
  • While Jean Grey or Cyclops rarely needs rescuing, her younger children, Rachel Summers and Nate Grey are both more than happy to get violent in her name if need be.
  • Rachel flew off from a Excalibur mission when she felt an alternate Jean in danger (and avenged her death, with prejudice).
• Facial Markings:
  • When she was converted into a Hound, she was given facial tattoos (or scars, depending on the writer/artist). Her Hound marks are almost always tattoos but sometimes Depending on the Artist, their shape, number, and coverage vary from thin dark spider-web-like lines to six larger red marks (recently, they've usually been depicted as two reddish triangular tattoos pointing inward on her cheeks). Generally, she uses her telepathy to mask them from others... or writers simply forgot she had them, as she's a lot prettier without them/with fewer tats. She drops the illusion when she wants to be more intimidating. Or when she's too pissed off to concentrate on it.
  • For a while in the 2000s, during her Marvel Girl years, A Phoenix emblem flared up over her left eye when she used her powers, even when she didn't have the Phoenix Force fragment.
• Fanservice Pack: She started out in Uncanny X-Men as a skinny woman with a crew cut and a penchant for leotards and legwarmers (probably since it was the 80s). After a Wolverine-related injury, she was taken to Spiral's other dimensional "Body Shoppe" and subjected to a never-elaborated-upon process (the Body Shoppe usually specialized in cybernetics), so that when she reappeared in Excalibur she looked like a porn star and wore a spike-studded red leather catsuit (granted she had a mullet, but to be fair, it was the 90s). She also wore a similar catsuit in flashbacks (when she was a brainwashed slave of the anti-mutant Sentinels), though that was more a case of an Evil Costume Switch. Part of it might also be that Alan Davis (co-creator of Excalibur) is a better artist, and/or that he noticed various characters had mentioned Rachel looking a lot like her mother Jean Grey and decided he should make that actually be true.
• Fiery Redhead: Not only does she fit the personality trope, but she also happened to manifest her powers in the form of giant birds made of fire when she was Phoenix Force Avatar. She still displays a non-Phoenix fiery aura these days.
• Flaming Hair: While in Otherworld her hair is made of flames.
• Flight: She can fly by using psychokinesis, often at multi-mach speeds and in the depths of space.
• Flying Firepower: As someone who has spent ten years as the host of the Phoenix, it's safe to say that she does a lot of this, against the likes of Galactus and the Beyonder (though in the former case, it's the Phoenix possessing her).
• Game Face: She gets scary-looking lines on her face when she gets serious. They're actually scars that are always there, and she uses her telepathy to make others see an undamaged face. When she has to use her full power for butt-kicking, she can't spare any for the illusion and lets it drop. Or sometimes she's just too pissed off to concentrate on it.
• Generation Xerox: Rachel Summers is perhaps the prototype of this among the X-Men, being in many ways a carbon-copy of her mother in terms of appearance and power-set (with an additional temporal component), right down to claiming the name and powers of the Phoenix. This is occasionally lampshaded. However, their relationships with the Phoenix and their personalities are quite different... not entirely surprising, given that Rachel was trained as a mutant-hunting Hound and raised in a concentration camp.
• Genocide Survivor: She is a survivor of an anti-mutant genocide that happened in the timeline she came from.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: And glowing tattoos, come to that.
• Guardian Entity: The Phoenix Force has served as this to her, and is a bit more active about protecting her. The Phoenix protected her and helped convey her to the past in the first place, erasing the memories to protect her sanity, merged with her for a very long time, being genuinely protective of her, and then a fragment - a 'shadow' - merged with her when Korvus Rook'shir (then a Punch-Clock Villain) tried to use the Phoenix Blade that contained it to kill her and she responded with a Barehanded Blade Block. In the face of his utter bafflement, she smirked, with a glowing blue Phoenix symbol over one eye, and said, "The Phoenix knows me. It likes me."
• Hot Wings: Starting with taking on the Phoenix mantle, and in later comics depicted as blue flames instead of yellow.
• Hunter Of Her Own Kind: In the future world she came from, Rachel was forcibly brainwashed into becoming a Hound by Ahab after being captured and tortured by the government as a child. Ahab considered her the best of his Hounds thanks to her psionic abilities making her extremely talented at tracking other mutants. It left her both with long-lasting trauma, and tattoos/scars (it's never been entirely clear what they are) that she usually keeps concealed with her telepathy.

I-Z

• Identical Grandson: Zizagged. She does look incredibly like Jean and is often drawn as such, to the point where the only differing features are her usually short hair, Hound markings (which are often concealed), and Depending on the Artist, blue eyes (like her father), though she's usually drawn with green eyes. However, she's also sometimes drawn looking utterly dissimilar.
• I Have Many Names: Rachel Grey, Marvel Girl, Phoenix, Mother Askani, R'chell, Revenant, Prestige.
• I Have No Son!: Inflicted on her by her own grandmother, just before the other woman was horribly killed by the Shi'ar Death Commandos.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty: A recurring theme with Claremont is that Rachel seems to run into a lot of women who want to take her captive and either do things to her or convince her to turn evil, in a way that is not at all suggestive.
• In-Series Nickname: Ray.
• Inconsistent Coloring: She is fairly notorious for this, sometimes having bright green eyes like her mother (often highlighting just how much she takes after mummy dearest), and sometimes having blue eyes like her father (when his powers aren't working).
• Instant Costume Change: When she became Phoenix she would instantly restructure the clothing she was wearing into her costumes by telekinetically rearranging the molecules.
• I Was Quite a Fashion Victim: While some of her costumes were dodgy, there have been worse. However, her buzzcut and her mullet are close competitors for the title of 'worst hairstyle in comics'. Thankfully, she has a much nicer bob cut these days.
• Kid from the Future: She is this trope played absolutely straight and is probably the Trope Codifier (predating Chibi-Usa and Future Trunks, other famous examples of the trope, by about a decade): she's the daughter of Scott Summers and Jean Grey in the "Days of Future Past" timeline's future, who goes back in time and joins various X-Teams.
• Knight in Sour Armor: She comes from a Bad Future where mutants were hunted down and killed or herded into concentration camps. She still fights to keep the dream of peaceful coexistence between humans and mutants alive.
• Lady-In-Waiting: In House of M reality, she becomes lady-in-waiting for Psylocke, princess of British Empire.
• Last of Her Kind: She's one of the last of the Grey family line after most of her family were brutally murdered by Shi'ar Death Commandos. The only currently extant other examples are Cable, Nate Grey, and Jean herself after her resurrection. Maddie Pryor is also around, but she is not considered part of the family line by the others.
• Legacy Character: She has taken on both of her mother's identities, Phoenix and Marvel Girl.
• Leg Focus: A lot of comments were made by other characters about her legs - which went on forever (thank/blame Alan Davis) - during her time with Excalibur, wherein she usually wore a skintight red leather costume.
• Leotard of Power: During her earliest days with the X-Men, she didn't have a proper costume, and was usually wearing a black leotard with some leg-warmers. When she got her first real costume, she commented about having been running around in her Danskins to that point.
• Made a Slave:
  • Her childhood and adolescence were spent as a Hound, a brainwashed and tortured slave of an oppressive government.
  • And again, after she came back from the dead, courtesy of Elias Bogan. Mind Rape was also involved. The X-Men at least managed to save her that time, though it did alter the look of Rachel's powers.
• Masculine–Feminine Gay Couple: Once she starts dating Betsy she adopts a more masculine image.
• Messiah Creep: Much like her mother, she underwent this - from concentration camp survivor to Phoenix host and saviour of the multiverse, being considered the One True Phoenix, starting a quasi-Jedi religion in the future, and organising the raising of mutantkind's chief Messianic Archetype, Cable.
• Mind over Matter: She has telekinesis. However, molecular manipulation is a signature trick of hers, as is time travel, across millennia and multiple alternate timelines.
• Mindlink Mates: Siblings example. She created a psi-bond with Cable shortly after his birth. It is unknown if that link still exists, however.
  • Of a sort with Korvus - she absorbed the power of his Phoenix Blade, and it led to a mental connection, and their dating, as well as influencing her personality for the darker. In the end, Rachel recognised this and broke up with him, presumably breaking the link too (though her mother taking back the Phoenix fragment she absorbed might also have been behind it), though they remained on good terms.
• Mind Rape: Unusually susceptible to this, especially considering her powers and their scale - though, in fairness, the perpetrators are usually enormously powerful beings like Selene, Elias Bogan, Maddie Pryor, and Emma Frost (who noted that the only reason she could do it was because Rachel was all raw power and no skill). Her background and conditioning as a Hound might have something to do with it. It has also diminished considerably as she got telepathic lessons from Emma Frost.
  • She's also more than capable of dishing this out, as Quentin Quire found out when he tried to taunt her by bringing up her memories of her horrific childhood. The result was Quire getting a Psychic Nosebleed and keeling over about two seconds later.
• Most Common Superpower: Originally averted: in her first appearances, Rachel was skinny, flat-chested, and rather unattractive, since she came from a concentration camp, being explicitly compared to a Holocaust victim by Wolverine (who, having served in WWII, would know). Of course, she filled out eventually (which, considering that her mother's vast power-set includes the Most Common Superpower, is not exactly surprising) - something helped by her visit to the Mojoverse's Body Shoppe.
• Ms. Fanservice: When she disappeared in Uncanny X-Men, Rachel was a stick-thin tomboy who usually wore gym clothes. When she reappeared in Excalibur, she had a much more developed "movie-star" figure (as she had spent time in the Mojo Universe) and wore a skintight, stiletto-heeled, spike-studded, red leather catsuit when on duty, and as little as possible off duty. This was followed by a skirt during her Marvel Girl days. She's toned it down since she came back from space, but she still looks like a younger (or older, around Teen Jean, who Rachel dubbed 'Baby Momma') version of her famously drop-dead gorgeous mother and still has a tendency towards tight clothing.
  • Lampshaded at one point during Excalibur when she and Kitty go shopping, dissatisfied with the conservative suit and pumps Kitty picks out for her she uses her powers to re-arrange Kitty's outfit to resemble something Rachel normally wears. Kitty immediately thinks that she looks like a hooker.
  • Later, also during Excalibur, she ends up disguising herself as Rachel, right down to costume, and grumbles at how Rachel possibly fits into something so ludicrously tight.
• Nom de Mom: After Cyclops hooked up with Emma Frost after Jean's death, she started using her biological mother's last name to voice her disgust, and has kept it ever since.
• "Not So Different" Remark: The Phoenix, while possessing her comatose body, gets one of these from Galactus in Excalibur after she attacked him in a misguided attempt to protect a world since overextending her Phoenix powers shortens the lifespan of the universe. Unusually for this trope, it actually does give her a new perspective on Galactus.
  "Who is the greater evil, Starchilde? I, the devourer of life that has run its course... or you, who denies existence to future generations?"
• Noodle Incident: Her transformation into a reptile-humanoid thing is either treated as this or quietly ignored these days.
• Only One Me Allowed Right Now: When she traveled into the past, she ended up in the primary universe instead of the offshoot where she was born (where Jean Grey was depowered instead of killed). She didn't realize she wasn't in her own timeline until she saw Jean Grey (well, actually Madelyn Pryor, but close enough) and Scott Summers had a son... she never had a brother.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: She really tried to kill Selene in an early encounter. Wolverine stabbed her through the heart to stop her.
• The Phoenix: She kept the motif even after ditching the actual cosmic critter itself. Rachel's connection with the Phoenix isn't in a constant state of retcon like her mother's; she and the Phoenix were merged for years, then separated via a fairly complicated (though simple by Summers/Grey family standards) Time Travel storyline. She also never went Dark Phoenix like Jean, despite generally being more the hot-tempered of the two, but she came close to it a couple of times.
• Progressively Prettier: Originally, Rachel, in both actual art and in spoken dialogue concerning her is shown to be borderline emaciated, with a very unflattering buzz-cut. When she joined Excalibur she was given a very well-developed build and a skintight costume that didn't leave much to the imagination. Justified since her transformation happened while she was in Mojoworld, a place known (among other things) for reshaping people into attractive movie stars.
• Psychic Powers: Telepathy and telekinesis.
• Redhead In Green: She is a redhead and wears green, although she generally prefers to wear red.
• Scaled Up: An infamous heroic example; during a 2005 trip to the Savage Land, she was brainwashed by a telepathic member of a race of lizard people into believing herself to be one of them. Because of the strength and fine control of her telekinesis, her body started gradually morphing into a lizard woman. Once she snapped out of it, she reversed the change in the space of a single issue. Aside from occasional jokes, it has been quietly ignored ever since.
• Sensor Character: When she was a Hound, she was forced to use her psionic abilities to detect and hunt down mutants in a dystopic alternate future. She's regularly called on by other characters to employ those skills and eventually reconciles herself to using them for that.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: She came from a future where mutants were outlawed, hunted down by the military, or locked into concentration camps. She was drugged, brainwashed, and forced to use her telepathic abilities to track down mutants. Wolverine once compared her to Holocaust survivors.
• Ship Tease:
  • A metric ton's worth with Kitty Pryde. One issue has her being heartbroken over Kitty being... together with a just-back-from-the-dead Colossus. Chris Claremont, the creator of both characters, enthusiastically fanned the flames by saying that Rachel was actually the love of Kitty's life. It is possible that he meant this in a Platonic Life-Partners sense, but considering that this is the same man who codified the Mystique/Destiny relationship and tried to reveal Nightcrawler as their son, with Mystique having transformed into a man to impregnate Destiny, it seems unlikely.
  • One issue has a brief moment between her and Nightcrawler... which didn't get mentioned again or go anywhere for 12 years. Letters to the editor have noted that their romance seemed to come out of nowhere.
  • During the Krakoan Age, she gets a significant amount with Betsy, culminating in the two finally sharing a kiss in issue 4 of Knights of X. They became an official couple afterwards.
• Significant Green-Eyed Redhead: Like her mother, she has red hair and green eyes (though, Depending on the Artist, they can come out blue).
• Sins of Our Fathers: Rachel was almost killed because of the crimes her mother had committed as Dark Phoenix. Of the entire rest of her mother's family, however, she is the Sole Survivor.
• Sole Survivor: From a technical point of view, of the Grey family line, who were all murdered by the Shi'ar Death Commandos on the belief it would prevent the Phoenix from taking any of them as hosts. Jean Grey's subsequent resurrection changed this.
• So Proud of You: Rachel has been on the receiving end of several of these:
  • In the third issue of "Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix", after discovering Rachel is still mind-linked to Nathan, struggling to protect her brother despite being in a coma herself, Scott stays beside her bed and states he's proud of being her father:
    Scott: Sorry...I never treated you much like a daughter when I had the chance. I just wanted you to know...how very proud I am to have been your father.
  • When they meet again after Grant Morrison's run, Cyclops reiterates she makes Jean and him proud◊.
    Scott: I'm glad you kept Jean's name. You make us both very proud.
• Spikes of Villainy: Originally, Rachel's Hound uniform was depicted as black with metal studs around the neck and wrists, down her front, and along the outside of her arms and legs. Her Excalibur catsuit was an adaptation of this: red with spikes instead of studs, and none on the legs. Alan Davis consistently drew the black studded uniform in flashbacks, but other artists instead put Rachel in the very same red. The outfit mix-up may have started with Days of the Future Present, where Rachel refers to her costume as her "Hound uniform" even though it's really a variation.
• Squishy Wizard: Rachel is an omega-level mutant with telekinesis and telepathy that are practically reality-warping and she's curb-stomped Galactus before, but in a pure melee she gets dropped fairly often including an absolutely vicious No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from her uncle Vulcan after he ambushed her.
• Story-Breaker Power: Rachel is conspicuously absent from most of mega-events. Since an Omega-level psychic with full control over the Phoenix Force would solve any conflict very, very quickly, the writers constantly come up with excuses for sidelining her.
• Strong Family Resemblance: She often looks almost exactly like her mother, usually right down to the red hair and green eyes - though sometimes the hair is a slightly different shade of red, and her eyes are sometimes blue like her fathers really are - with only styles and her Facial Markings (which she can hide) to seriously distinguish them. The resemblance is so uncanny that in an alternate reality, she successfully disguised herself as that world's version of Jean.
• Superpowerful Genetics: She inherits her mother's psychic powers.
• Superpower Lottery: Like her mother, Rachel has telekinesis and telepathy so powerful, it's almost limitless even when she's not Phoenix - for instance, she didn't need the Phoenix to master molecular manipulation, she's mastered Time Travel to the point of being able to travel across millennia, and she's effectively the only person to consistently and successfully control the Phoenix Force, to the point of being called 'the One True Phoenix'. Needless to say, she gets nerfed a lot, but she's still fairly impressive, flattening an entire Avengers squad in one shot during Avengers vs. X-Men.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: During periods when Jean Grey has been rendered temporarily dead or otherwise unusable, she has been substituted numerous times, most notably by Rachel.
• Tangled Family Tree: Obviously.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: With Emma, early on. Partly because Emma had still been a villain last time Rachel was around, partly because she was dating Ray's dad, and also because Emma just tends to enjoy pissing off everyone around her.
• Took a Level in Badass: She's taken a significant number over the years, particularly since the start of the 2000s - after a humiliating loss to Emma Frost, the latter brusquely started training her to make sure she was Strong and Skilled. After House of M, she can reach halfway across the universe from Shi'ar space while in a coma, by Avengers vs. X-Men she can go one on one with Thor with minimal trouble and hide the presence of a Phoenix host from Xavier, who explicitly warns Logan to treat her as he would Xavier himself, and she only gets stronger from there. By the Krakoa era, despite being telepathically sedated and mind-controlled for an extensive period, she was capable of comfortably overpowering a young Stryfe and leaving him begging for mercy.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Rachel was this when she first became Phoenix. As Spiral put it when Freedom Force (the former Brotherhood of Evil Mutants turned government agents) tried to arrest the X-Men, "So much power. So little skill." Later, Emma Frost beat her in a telepathic duel for this exact reason. Fortunately, Rachel was a quick study and is now one of the most skilled telepaths and telekinetics in the Marvel Universe, to the point where in one of the tie-ins to Avengers vs. X-Men Xavier explicitly warns Wolverine to treat her as if she's Xavier himself. This means that her powers are often understated or she'd be a complete Game-Breaker.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: A recurring theme with her, surprisingly.
  • During her return to the Days of Future Past reality, she spares Ahab, largely on these grounds, being content with the Sentinels having been reprogrammed to preserve life.
  • During War of Kings, she gets the chance to explode the head of the Shi'ar Death Commando who led the extermination of her family. She doesn't enjoy it, however, and promptly breaks down in tears.
  • During her time on the all-female X-Men, she saves the life of the Shi'ar official who suggested the 'exterminate the Grey family' plan in order to prevent another Phoenix host arising... though, granted, after being conflicted over the point. Instead, her ultimate response is to telepathically force him to feel how she feels, to make him understand, and leaves it at that.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Subverted, oddly enough, as Rachel, who already had ample reason to have gone insane (but didn't) before acquiring the Phoenix power, managed to wield it for years without going crazy. And then lost the power (despite the Phoenix itself insisting that it had permanently merged with her).
• The Worf Effect: Like all incredibly powerful psychics, whenever the plot needs it, Ray tends to be taken out of action. In fact, X-Men: Gold, X-Men: Red, and Extermination saw her get brainwashed no less than three times in the span of a few months (though, granted, in the latter two cases it was by a ridiculously powerful telepath - Cassandra Nova - and a man who dedicated a lifetime to brainwashing mutants, especially Rachel - Ahab).
• Your Mind Makes It Real: When she's brainwashed by anthropomorphic dinosaurs in the Savage Land into believing she's one of them she starts to telekinetically rewrite her own DNA and make it true.

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