Uncle Ben: No Way Home

[cyberghostface]

From Chip Zdarsky.

Comments

[beyondthefringe]

Uncle Ben's death is a whaddya call it, canon event. If he doesn't die, May does.

Which makes me wonder, has there ever been a Spider-Man timeline in which Peter is raised by his actual birth parents? AFAIK, no. Which would be interesting in its own right as a significant deviance from other depictions.

(Frankly making the two SHIELD agents/spies was a bad idea. Much better when Peter came from a perfectly normal family prior to his origin...)

[knight_moves]

My proposal would be to have Richard and Mary Parker be SHIELD employees, but not field agents. At the CIA, someone has to answer the phones and sort everyone's paperwork. They were doing that kind of thing, not shooting anyone.

[cainofdreaming]

And also babysitting androids, apparently.

[beyondthefringe]

Fun fact: my mother did exactly that back in the '70s. Secretarial work for the CIA.


At least that's what she CLAIMS...

[thanekos]

The Parkers having fancy backstories is just a fancy version of " guy realizes that his parents had lives before they were his parents. "

[beyondthefringe]

I just like the idea of Peter Parker being the quintessential everyman before he falls into a life of superheroism... and THEN everyone around him becomes a supervillain, superhero, or otherwise super-adjacent. Not that it makes a whole lot of difference in the long run since they weren't around to influence Peter's upbringing, and May and Ben, who were normal (AFAIK) were.

Which is why seeing a timeline where Peter was raised by his parents and who remained active in his life up to his origin might be an interesting take.

[full_metal_ox]

Uncle Ben's death is a whaddya call it, canon event. If he doesn't die, May does.

It’s what Doctor Who would call a fixed point.

(Frankly making the two SHIELD agents/spies was a bad idea. Much better when Peter came from a perfectly normal family prior to his origin...)

THANK YOU. It gets wearisome when heroism starts turning into a small interconnected dynasty of the Predestined Special—-particularly annoying in Peter Parker’s case because Ditko’s heroes were very much determined by choice—-the point of Doctor Strange’s as well as Spider-Man’s origin stories.

(Why, no. I never have forgiven The Return of Skywalker for having yanked the rug out from under Rey’s backstory reveal in The Last Jedi.)

[beyondthefringe]

Some heroes work with "special family." Tony Stark, for instance, because Howard Stark was already basically Howard Hughes. But I'm still not fond of Nathaniel Richards being a time travelling adventurer in his own regard.

But if we learned that Steve Rogers' father was a super-spy or maybe a patriotic hero in WW1, that would be at odds with his own depiction as an everyman representative of (a certain segment) of the American population. (And shut up, the idea that there was a Revolutionary War ancestor of Steve Rogers who was ALSO named Steve Rogers and dressed up like a Colonial version of him should be stricken from the record... poppycock!)

If a hero already comes from a legacy family, that's one thing... easier by far to create them with nearly a century of comic books to work with. But just like learning that Thomas Wayne was a "Batman" before Bruce ever got the notion to fight crime... (

Some characters just work better on a conceptual level if they're not bogged down with extra bits and pieces of continuity baggage.

[full_metal_ox]

[scorntx]

Well, there's NUU Spidey, whose parents were apparently alive until he was fifteen.

(though they're kind of a huge blank spot right now. But they probably weren't SHIELD agents.)


If we want to get super-technical, Princess Petra was raised by her birth mother.
(Unless, in true Disney homage there's a Mother Gothel thing going on there.)

[zylly]

I’m glad to see I’m not the only person who hates the spy thing. If I had my way, they’d have been teachers (one of them a science teacher, of course. Possibly preferably Mary) who died in a mundane car accident.