Amazing Spider-Man #31

[lordultimus]

Comments

[tcampbell1000]

Sometimes I think shipping has more to do with comic nerds' sense of order--"a place for everything and everything in its place"--than an honest interest in relationships and how they work.

As I've said before, I'm not particularly an MJ partisan or anti-partisan. And I don't think there was any problem, at the pitch level, with characters like Mockingbird, Carlie Cooper, and Anna Maria Marconi. ("Absolute worst love interests?" I don't see Lucy Lane ANYWHERE in that roster!)

[windleopard2]

Sometimes I think shipping has more to do with comic nerds' sense of order--"a place for everything and everything in its place"--than an honest interest in relationships and how they work.

I certainly wouldn't say the writing of relationships in this run was motivated by an honest interest in relationships and how they work.

And I don't think there was any problem, at the pitch level, with characters like Mockingbird, Carlie Cooper, and Anna Maria Marconi. ("Absolute worst love interests?" I don't see Lucy Lane ANYWHERE in that roster!)

Well, the execution of how those characters were written in those relationships left much to be desired. Especially Carlie.

[tcampbell1000]

Oh, sure. I mean, fan-logic is a problem on both sides of the pipeline after a while: most of the people writing superheroes now were at least fans of them once.

[zachbeacon]

Mockingbird - I mean, I guess she makes more sense than Captain Marvel. It's telling when the writer that introduced the relationship decides it's a bad idea, though (see also: Silk)

Carlie Cooper - Is just another Gwen clone. Like Jill. Or the actual Gwen Clone.

Anna Maria Marconi - Anna wasn't really Peter's love interest. Solid character though.

Norah - She seemed like she might be fun right up until the implied racism.

Michelle -ACAB

Lucy Lane - is just generally at bad person. But I'm not aware of her crossing paths with Peter in any DC/Marvel crossovers and I'd like to think he'd have the sense to run in the other direction of his Spider-Sense is functioning correctly.

Who am I missing?

[windleopard2]

Norah - She seemed like she might be fun right up until the implied racism.

What implied racism?

Michelle -ACAB

.... Michelle wasn't a cop. Are you sure you weren't thinking of (Ultimate) Jean DeWolff.

[zachbeacon]

Michelle's brother was a dirty cop and she was a lawyer representing him. She counts.

Norah is a rare case of this community ruining a character for me. I admit didn't notice it at the time but it has been pointed out that some of her comments towards Michelle and Randy are not great.

(As an aside...Betty, Liz, Norah...wow, a lot of Peter's potential love interests end up with Goblins)

[cyberghostface]

Do Miles and Gwen fall under ACAB then?

[zachbeacon]

Did they retcon some horrible skeletons in their father's closets that I don't know about?* I'm pretty sure their dads meant to represent what law enforcement should be.

I probably shouldn't muddy the waters by bringing other media into this but George and Gwen were the actual heroes of the Amazing Spider-Man movie.

*The SHIELD retcon doesn't count. If I had a nickel for every time a Spider-Man's dad was revealed to be a secret agent then I'd have two nickels.

[cyberghostface]

Doesn’t ACAB refer to all cops?

[zachbeacon]

As explained on another response here, it's not a stance I take across the board but it does apply to Michelle.

In hindsight I should have gone with my first instinct and typed "ACABEC"

("Except Columbo", obviously)

[windleopard2]

I'm surprised Felicia hasn't been paired with a Goblin herself.

[zachbeacon]

Well, IIRC Flash was a Hobgoblin suspect for a while.

And Lily's whole "Queen Cat" phase tells me she might be a fan.

[blues32]

She does NOT count. Michelle represented her brother in court properly, as a good attorney should. He had turned snitch on the others and needed a good lawyer to make sure he wasn't put with those who might take offense and kill him in jail. She failed at that, however, and he became a member of the Goblin Nation, but that's all on him. Harry tased and pummeled him, so it's all good.

[cyberghostface]

She made a taco joke to Michelle and then said “I’m not racist I’m obnoxious to all races”.

[tcampbell1000]

Did the writer who introduced the relationship decide it was a bad idea, or did they just intend it to be a short-term storyline? I did complain elsewhere on this thread about abrupt get-togethers and breakups...but short-term stuff has different rules. Some relationship stories can be perfectly fine without having a long shelf life. If there's some online comments from writers that you're referring to, then I understand your point, but I still wouldn't really care...there are lots of good ideas mistakenly condemned by their authors.

I though the involvements with Captain Marvel and Mockingbird were handled pretty well and made a lot of sense: the former fling was brief, but it did lead to the utterly adorable first meeting between Peter and Ms. Marvel, who couldn't stop geeking out about the fact that he'd dated her idol. (That bit ended up saying a few worthwhile things about the idealization of dating versus the reality.)

Can't agree that Carlie's a Gwen clone. I can see a few similarities in how Peter handled things with her, but original-recipe Gwen was a real pre-women's-lib kind of girl. She spent most of her time either having innocent teen fun, mourning her dad, or measuring whether Peter had what it took to be her partner in adulthood...a consistently skewed assessment, since she never learned his secret. She didn't seem to have solid ambitions of her own--some story may've mentioned a lifeplan for her somewhere, but it sure wasn't prominent. Despite her father's influence, she wasn't too interested in pursuing the uncostumed kind of crimefighting, as Carlie did. (I will agree that Jill was largely forgettable, though, and that every Gwen clone was more a flash of nostalgia than a real prospect.)

I don't think a pure "ACAB" position really squares with an honest reading of the Spider-Man universe; it just has too many noble cops in it. Not to mention that Carlie ended up confronting police corruption. So I couldn't dismiss her or Michele, Yuri, or Jean DeWolff on that basis. The latter two never went very far with their interest, though (nor did Silver Sable). And Michele's tense relations with Peter were played for tsundere laughs. It was like a Fred-and-Ginger movie that never quite got to the second act.

The thing with Silk was straight-up hormonal, and it lasted exactly as long as it should have. If it'd persisted, it would have gotten awkward. Even though Cindy was physically of age, the difference in life experience would've made it feel too unequal not to be creepy. So I'm glad everyone was mature enough to walk away. But that image of Pete and Cindy making out on the walls while Anna Maria tries to douse them with a water bottle? If laughing at that is wrong, I don't want to be right. "No! BAD!"

It's true Anna Maria was never that interested in Pete, but it did seem like things might develop that way. I'd label her as a "love interest" in the most literal sense, a character that could intrigue the reader as a possible love connection. Peter prevented that one with his self-defeating behavior, constantly leaving fires for AM to put out (which gave her most of the problems of dating Pete and none of the benefits). And Otto's resurfacing really finished it. But the mature friendship between her and Pete was still refreshing.

If Anna Maria was a pick I'd argue for, Norah was one I'd argue against. I never saw her as a potential love for Pete. She didn't even seem to be sold that way. I guess she gives off a Lois Lane/Chloe Sullivan vibe and some related magic-pixie-dream-girl energy, and her floating morals could push Pete out of his comfort zone like Felicia's did. But most of the time she was close to Peter, she was linked to Robbie. And even if she hadn't been. there didn't seem to be any spark there, or the kind of friendship that could turn romantic.

Peter doesn't need a magic pixie dream girl to turn his ordinary life into a big adventure: his life is already a big adventure. And at least Felicia understands that when people are moral, it isn't just because they're too dumb to know better. Norah doesn't seem to get that. It's a kind of reverse naivete that mostly just gets on Peter's nerves, and not in a slap-slap-kiss way, more in a "what if the early J. Jonah Jameson were a younger woman" way. (Her racial attitudes seem more like a short-term misstep for later stories to correct, like Mary Jane's smoking addiction or "Sins Past.")

The only other figure worth mentioning in this roundup is Lian Tang, who was even more abruptly handled than Spidey's recent love life: she was revealed to be dating Peter, betrayed Spider-Man, and broke up with Pete all in one storyline. Still, points to Peter for how he handled that one; it highlighted some of his better qualities, whereas his other loves have often shown him at his worst.

There's no need to drag other continuities into this, except to make one point: their existence should prove that Peter doesn't need Mary Jane (or Gwen, Felicia, or any of the others specifically) for his love life to be "complete." The fact that the movies call Michelle Jones-Watson "MJ" is more of a pun than anything else; she has even less in common with the original Mary Jane than the Ultimate-Universe Mary Jane did.

Lucy Lane's never interacted with Pete romantically, though if she did, she'd be a beautifully terrible prospect, awful for Pete to date but great for me to read. In her best-known incarnation, she tended to treat her boyfriend like dirt, and Pete's guilt complex would make him slow to realize that even on his worst day, he could do better than her. Not a bad story idea, now that I think of it, to pair Pete with someone like that...beautiful and independent, but a user and blamer, making him pay for his mysterious absences the way he deep-down feels like he deserves to. You'd have to handle the tone of it carefully so that the emotional abuse didn't get too traumatizing, but romance always needs some careful balancing of tone. It could be done funny for a bit, and then just serious enough.

I mentioned Lucy as a joke, to make another point. Of all the Spider-GFs mentioned above, I don't think any of them deserve to be considered "the worst-ever love interests"--except maybe Norah, if she were offered up as a serious prospect. Like, it's all still a better love story than Twilight. Or 50 Shades. Or Ross and Rachel.

Honestly, despite the way things sometimes got botched at a relationship's end--the Chameleon thing with Michele and the goblin thing with Carlie, for two--I liked Pete's free-floating days a lot better than whatever this is we've got now. Looking ahead, I figure we're probably heading to Pete and MJ finding a new normal as co-superheroes, which is not the worst idea, but boy, has it been a bumpy ride to get there. Think I would've preferred 31 issues with Michele or Mockingbird. Or Lucy Lane or Rachel Green.

[zachbeacon]

Mockingbird is a weird case because I think it works on paper (at the very least, it’s easy to see why Bobbie is interested in Peter) but then it falls apart because it only works on paper. In the context of the story I think Slott was trying to tell it seems much worse, though. When Peter is rich and famous he starts dating a hot superscientist, superspy, superhero. Then she dumps him when his life falls apart. Her reasoning makes sense but the timing is such that she feels like just another rich guy accessory Peter lost.

It may be my dislike of Captain Marvel talking but I just can’t wrap my head around why anyone thought that was a good idea. I mean, I guess it’s a good idea if you’re writing Captain Marvel.

(I’m aware Carol was Ms. Marvel at the time but don’t want to call her that in this situation for obvious reasons. STOP SLEEPING WITH KAMALA'S MASK, PETER!)

The thing about Gwen is that – if you get two fans who love her and two fans who hate her in a room – they will describe four different characters. That applies to any writers that may have based an OC on her.

(Speaking only for myself, every version of Gwen I like is VERY different from how I see 616 Gwen)

I think the whole “ACAB” thing is a bit of an oversimplification generally but it 100% applies to Michele. The hardline ACAB stance is that the “good” cops are passively enabling the bad cops by not speaking up. Again, that seems a little too black and white and this isn’t really the place for it. Michele, is providing legal aid to a dirty cop. That’s not passive support, that’s active support.

Yuri was such a missed opportunity. I have zero interest in her and Peter as a couple but I like the idea of Spider-Man having a partner and his dynamic with Wraith is bound to be different than his dynamic with 80s Felicia, 90s Ben, ect.

It seems like we’re basically in agreement on the Unbreakable Cindy Moon.

Lian Tang – Yeah, I forgot she existed (I think Cissy Ironwood might have more appearances). Look, if Peter is going to date a gearhead, then it should be Johnny Storm.

I feel like I reacted to the Lucy Lane joke in the same spirit. I did sort of think "the worst-ever love interests FOR SPIDER-MAN” was implied but you’re right; Peter Parker shouldn’t date Lady McBeth.

[windleopard2]

The thing with Silk was straight-up hormonal, and it lasted exactly as long as it should have.

If it were just their hormones, it wouldn't be nearly as offensive and racist in its presentation as what we got.