Born To Be Bad: Why Emma Frost’s Fall Was Inevitable

The Bendis Run

When Brian Bendis took over writing duties on Uncanny X-Men in 2013, he had Emma Frost side with Cyclops once again. Disturbingly, Bendis didn’t seem to understand the dark implications of the “Avengers vs. X-Men” event; he uncritically wrote Emma Frost as blaming herself for the break-up. Still, at the very least, Bendis enjoyed developing the ‘teacher’ aspect of Emma Frost; in an amusing twist, he penned one excellent issue with Emma mentoring the time-lost young Jean Grey!

Return To Villainy

That brings us to Emma Frost’s most recent arc. In Death of X, we saw Emma shocked by the death of her beloved Scott Summers. Worse still, he died of Terrigen poisoning, and Emma could already see where this was heading; another potential extinction, an undoing of everything Cyclops had tried to accomplish during the years after “House of M.” This realization broke her.

Emma’s response was to launch a campaign to destroy the Terrigen, and she managed to destroy half – while using her telepathy to make it seem that Cyclops was responsible for this act. She manipulated events to lead to his apparent martyrdom, a more fitting end than simply dying of Terrigen, giving his death meaning.

As we’ve seen in Inhumans vs. X-Men, where her longer-term plans have finally been realized, this didn’t satisfy Emma. With the mutant race in danger of extinction, she manipulated Inhumans and mutants alike to prepare for a war between the Inhumans and the X-Men. While her purpose was supposedly to save the mutant race, though, the miniseries fundamentally presents it as an act of vengeance. The final issue shows her as a villain once again, donning a helmet that’s a clear stylistic cross between that of Magneto and Cyclops.