I'm Doing Just Fine

Concerning Jeanne-Marie's time teaching at Madame Dupont's I think the reason she chooses to become a teacher and specifically why she choose to teach there is because at that point in the story Jeanne-Marie doesn't realize she's been abused. She thinks Sister Anne and the rest of the nuns "helped" her, by doing "what was best for her", and that in spite of it all they "truly loved her".

None of those things are true.

However Jeanne-Marie sees it as her calling to help people and she wants to help people in the way she was helped.

Granted Jeanne-Marie doesn't seem to use the same methods as her tormentors, as shown in Alpha Flight #1 her students seem to really like her.

According to Aurora's bio in the back of one of the Alpha Flight paperbacks she is a history/geography teacher. We also see her teaching about Ancient Egypt in one of the X-Men annuals. I think she enjoys teaching those subjects (partly because I'm projecting and I like learning about those subjects).

I need Marvel toet her go back to her roots, ideally in a nicer school this time.

I didn't read too much about Northstar being a teacher mainly because that all happens in Chuck Austen's Uncanny X-Men and I only read four issues of that before deciding I hated it.

However I think Jean-Paul enjoys being a teacher not that he'd ever admit. It's always been core.tl his character that he cares about kids indulging Jeanne-Marie's students questions in issue one of Alpha Flight, vowing to help Snowbird recover her lost child, and of course adopting an orphaned baby with AIDs.

I'd think he'd have trouble dealing with teenagers at first, but based on his bond with Anole he seems to get the hang of it.

I think Jean-Paul approaches caring for children as giving them the safe space to be themselves that he was constantly denied during his childhood. However I also think based on his upbringing Northstar gives his charges a lot more freedom than they should have at that age. Such as in Amazing X-Men where he lets Victor go off into the city alone which results in the young mutant getting attacked by Lady Mastermind.

Other than that he's not the worst influence these kids have.

That being said I think he's a good teacher.

As for him teaching economics, if I'm remembering correctly he originally wanted to teach gym, but Xavier thought having a gay man teach such a class would reflect badly on the school. So Northstar settled for teaching them economics, having left a similar job to join the X-Men.

As of Amazing X-Men he was teaching class, but really he was off getting a massage and letting the kids mess around in the classroom.

I've advocated for some sort of Northstar villain arc, however I'm more hesitant towards an Aurora villain arc.

One of the few good things about Aurora's writing is that she isn't a villain character. Stories across all mediums are rife with villains who have Dissociative Identity Disorder, Marvel has Typhoid Mary (who has a lot of similarities to Aurora) and I think giving Aurora a similar arc would do more harm than good.

As for Northstar I think a good jumping off point for him being a villain would have been Marvel Fanfare #28 would have been a good jumping off point for a villain arc. After watching all his close friends get murdered in front of him, the reveal that Department H planted a tracking device in his brain, and Alpha Flight brushes it off and are all like "It's okay, we're your family."

I think a much more interesting option (instead of the AIDS turned elf disease storyline) would just be to have Northstar cut himself off from Alpha Flight and declare his vengeance on the.

However, this would also have its downsides. This whole arc happens in a completely different comic and would likely confuse Alpha Flight readers. Also much like Aurora, despite Northstar not having been explicitly gay in the eighties, one of the benefits to having Jean-Paul as queer representation was that he wasn't a villain like so many queer characters were written as.

Granted trying to kill him off wasn't a much better option.

Now the reason Jean-Paul and Jeanne-Marie were raised separately was because Jean-Paul was adopted by his mother's cousins the Martins. However they could only afford one child and adopted Jean-Paul (I think the reason for this was because Jean-Paul was a boy, marking this as Jeanne-Marie's fist experience with sexism). The Martins sent Jeanne-Marie to live at Madame DuPont's and the rest is history.

Jean-Paul lives with the Martins (who never tell him he's adopted or anything about his sister), until he is six when the Martins are also killed in a car crash and he's placed in foster care.

@northstarfan has a theory on the nature of Northstar relationship to his adopted parents and I'll link it here.

I do think as Aurora and Northstar already know how their parents died and why they were separated (courtesy of Mac) they would want to figure who their parents were. I pitched this concept of a Northstar Solo series where he ends up spiraling and comes to believe that both the Beaubiers and the Martins deaths weren't coincidences and becomes obsessed with solving them. Eventually Aurora joins him on this quest and she's satisfied with what she finds out about her parents (names, occupations, family trees etc.) However Northstar's still trying to uncover this "mystery" and Jeanne-Marie realizes how unhealthy this obsession is and tries to talk sense into him but it doesn't work.

The twins might have another relative floating around out there, a Wolverine villain named Jean-Pierre Beaubier | Mauvais, an immortal cannibal who has seven appearances to his name.