The harsh reality of the nature of man.
Ultimately, there are a massive amount of tragic, saddening and outright depressing moments spread throughout this Comic Book Run, all chronicled on this page.
- Jean Grey's death at the end of The Dark Phoenix Saga, particularly after Uatu's poignant statement at the end: "Jean Grey could have lived to become a God. But it was more important that she die... a human."
- In an old issue of New Mutants, Danielle Moonstar uses her Valkyrie powers to stand between Death and a childhood friend who was in a car accident... until Death tells her that her friend has slipped into an irreversible coma; Danielle can keep him from dying, but he will never wake up. Grieving, Danielle stands aside, and from inside the hospital room, we hear the monitor flatline...
- Rachel Grey's entire damn life. Her mother died when she was a little girl, which would be bad enough, but then the government builds the Sentinels to hunt down mutants. The Xavier Institute is laid siege to by soldiers, and she witnesses Professor X getting shot to death. Then she spends most of her childhood being horribly experimented on and turned into a weapon designed to hunt down and capture or kill the last of her kind. Once they run out of Mutants, the government throws her into an internment camp with what's left of her friends and family. In a last-ditch attempt to prevent this timeline from existing the remainder of the X-Men assault the Sentinel stronghold, leaving only Rachel and Katherine Pryde alive. During this, Rachel feels her boyfriend's death, along with what he was feeling as it happened. And just to make things worse, while Katherine survives, their timeline doesn't change. So Katherine makes a deal with the Phoenix Force to send Rachel into the past, in the hope of giving her a better life. To the X-Men, in the nineteen eighties. Things got worse before they got better. Then they got worse again.
- A moment of Tear-Jerker in Hindsight is a scene from 1985 that calls-back to that classic Funny moment from 1983 where Kitty Pryde gave Lockheed the dragon to Madelyne Pryor to babysit. The scene 2 years later, which became the final story ever in which Pryor and Cyclops were shown as a happy couple, Kitty hands Lockheed again to Madelyne to babysit while Cyclops and the X-Men leave on that mission in Asgard. After they depart, Pryor expresses fears that became Tear-Jerkingly prophetic:Why all of a sudden am I so afraid I'll never see him... we'll never be happy together, ever again?!
- Just after becoming the Phoenix for the first time, Jean is hospitalized. The rest of the X-Men are tense and nervous, and then the doctors come along to announce she'll be fine. As Kurt goes to tell Cyclops the good news, he finds Scott's already by Jean's side, breaking down in tears.
