#And straight abducted her from her family a decade prior

[soundwave-is-true]

If you leave the town with no other option because the law wasn’t working there comes a point where people resort to extreme measures.

news reporting on murders is always like ‘the victim was described by the people who knew them as polite and funny’ like yeah i fucking bet they did what else are they gonna say. breaking news local man stabbed 1000 times to death, grieving friends and family described the deceased to reporters as ‘a bit of a cunt’, ‘mean and bad’ and ‘just generally kind of annoying, you know?’

[hellzyeahwebwielingessays]

The Not-So-Amazing Mary Jane Part 18: MJ is lying to Peter but it definitely couldn’t be for his own sake

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This is something of a tangent on the last post, where I discussed why MJ would know better than to lie to Peter. However an angle I didn’t cover was the idea that she might be lying in order to protect Peter and his life interests in some way. Well today we’re going to tackle that very question.

This counterargument stems from the fact that MJ (obviously) wouldn’t want to see Peter come to harm and wouldn’t want to harm his chances in making more of his life. After all, Peter (circa AMJ #1) had only recently begun attending college again.

Informing him about Mysterio would likely prompt Peter to ride out to L.A. immediately and potentially jeopardise his academic career.

But this just doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny.

In part 16 I spoke a length about how MJ values the greater good above even her marriage to Peter. I demonstrated that since she values her marriage over her career it therefore means she values the greater good above her career.

Using the same logic it’s pretty obvious to deduce that MJ also values the greater good above Peter’s academic career.

In ASM #303 (covered in part 16) MJ was prepared to jeopardise or potentially give up her successful modelling career for the sake of her marriage. This was owed to Peter being offered a promising new job in Kansas. 

However Peter turned the job down out of consideration for MJ and instead decided to go back to college (as he is in ASM v5) so he could get a job in NYC. Mary Jane doesn’t even try to protest against this.

I’m by no means suggesting MJ is being selfish here, but it does demonstrate that the value she places upon Peter’s career prospects (which his college education is an extension of) has it’s limits. She clearly values her marriage more than that in addition to her own career.

So if MJ’s priorities place Peter’s career below their marriage and their marriage below the greater good, by extension it means she actually doesn’t value Peter’s education above the greater good.

And so she wouldn’t avoid alerting Peter to the existence of potentially dangerous criminals simply because she doesn’t want to screw up his academic chances.

But if you want even more proof, remember ASM #286? MJ ultimately decides the risk to Peter’s life wasn’t as important as the innocent lives that could be saved. Are we seriously going to suggest MJ believes Peter’s career options are more important than his literal life?

Of course not. And let’s not forget that Peter has gone back to school four  time by this point. I am unfamiliar with the American college education system, but that suggests to me that there is no limit on the number of times someone can stop and start their academic career. So even if MJ reluctantly has to kill Peter’s current chances in college, she knows that he could simply restart again. She also knows Peter would want it that way too.

Not to mention MJ could be honest with Peter without  risking him riding down to L.A. to save the day.

Peter knows he can trust Mary Jane. She doesn’t have the ability to get him to agree with anything she wants. But nor is Peter going to be immovable on any topic that entails MJ somehow being in a dangerous situation. In Marvel Knights: Spider-Man #2 Peter is insistent that MJ leave New York in order for her to evade whomever had abducted Aunt May.

Whilst she reluctantly left, she soon returned despite what Peter wanted and continued to stick around in spite of him wanting her to leave again.

However he didn’t press the point a second time even though the situation hadn’t changed. There are various reasons as to why but the point is that Peter was able to accept that it was a reasonable decision even though he disliked it.

Later in ASM #536 following the public unveiling of his identity and his turning against the Super Human Registration Act, the Parker family find themselves on the run. Peter wants MJ and May to get as far away from him as possible, arguing it’d be safer and more efficient for him to operate on his own. Peter is however convinced by May and MJ’s arguments to the contrary.

Both examples demonstrate MJ being honest with Peter of being in direct danger but of her also convincing him to allow her to remain in that situation. Now for sure we could argue that these outcomes were ultimately the lesser of two evils from Peter’s POV. That what MJ wanted was actually ultimately safer over all.

However if somehow MJ had a solid argument for why her sticking around on the film set served the greater good or was ultimately better for her it’s far from impossible that Peter could be convinced to stay in NYC. Just spit balling here but she could argue that something very fishy is going on, Beck already tried something large scale recently and singling MJ out could mean he knows Peter’s identity As a result sending him to jail could risk exposing his identity and by extension endangering his friends and family. If MJ sticks around and Peter keeps a distance it puts her into a position to investigate and see what he knows.

I don’t know how much that idea holds up to scrutiny as I came up with it off the top of my head but it certainly makes a lot more sense than Mary Jane just straight up lying to Peter.

Even if hypothetically Peter just could never accept MJ being surrounded by criminals, she could simply promise him she would contact her various super hero associates. Or in fact ask him to do that on her behalf.

That’s not me suggesting MJ be passive or allow a man to sort out her problems for her either.

It’d be a strategic and diplomatic use of both her intimate knowledge of Peter’s psychology and her famous people skills. Having Peter on some level  take an active role in helping/protecting her would make him feel in control in some way. Make him feel like he is living up to his responsibilities as a hero and as a partner and thus alleviate his urges to ride down and intervene personally.

Nowadays Peter isn’t opposed to this level of trust in his super hero friends. Even ignoring his years as an Avenger (which included living with them alongside MJ and May), Peter has called upon these people in the very recent past.

Throughout in Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man volume 2 Peter called upon the aid of his super hero associates to help him during various crises. These included the Doctor Strange, Iron Man, the Human Torch and the wider Fantastic Four.

Another example can be found during the ‘Absolute Carnage’ event, which definitely occurred after MJ left for L.A. We know this because in ASM v5 #29 and issues #30-31 were tie-ins to the event.* The Avengers in fact appear briefly in issue #30.

In Absolute Carnage #2 Venom/Eddie Brock suggests that they call upon the help of the Avengers to deal with Carnage’s impending rampage. Peter asserts that it’s best if he do that.

He is shown doing exactly that in Absolute Carnage: Avengers #1 where he teams up with Captain America, Wolverine and Ben Grimm.

Additionally this team contacts Hawkeye on the West Coast to deal with Carnage’s minions over in San Francisco.

It’s important to note that Hawkeye was on the West Coast because he was a part of the West Coast branch of the Avengers. Their headquarters specifically being…in Los Angeles…where Mary Jane is making her movie.

Granted, it’s not the same part  of Los Angeles because MJ is in Hollywood and the West Coast Avengers HQ is in Venice Boulevard. And a quick Google search reveals that to travel between the two locations on foot it’d take…under three hours…Yeah…

Basically nowadays Peter is absolutely not going to be opposed to calling upon the aid of other heroes to help him directly or indirectly so asking them to show up and lookout for the woman he loves wouldn’t be out of character. Especially when one considers that Hawkeye alone is probably out of Mysterio’s league considering the threats he’s survived. But Mary Jane’s personal friends Iron Man and Ironheart? Unless Beck specifically prepared for them he would be unlikely to get away, let alone hurt them.

Now look I’m not suggesting we apply every single facet of the Marvel Universe into our analyses because that’d be ridiculous. Every Spider-Man or related story would fall apart because he could simply resolve his problems by calling other heroes. It’s part of the suspension of disbelief that Spidey is the only person available to deal with whatever crisis is at hand.**

But these are all very recent stories that, happened in the main Spider-Man titles; or tie-ins directly to those titles. In the Avengers’ case they were his teammates for over a decade and were for a time outright his supporting cast. Mary Jane was a major supporting character in the solo titles of two separate Avengers characters and that fact was acknowledged within ASM itself.

Is the idea of calling upon these characters really not fair game in this hypothetical scenario of ours?

I’d say no.

Regardless the fact remains that in AM #1 Mary Jane cannot be lying to Peter for his own sake and has no other justifiable reason either. She would know better than to do that.

Next time we take a look at MJ’s skills and whether they actually could protect her and others from Mysterio or not.

*It’s not entirely clear when the events of AMJ #1 happen in relation to ASM v5 #30-31. They must happen after ASM v5 #29 and AMj #1 was published the very same day as ASM v5 #32; being referenced in that same issue.

To me this implies that AMJ #1 slots in just prior to ASM v5 #32, but in fairness it could occur just after ASM v5 #29.

However, the events from the story I’m discussing were published before AMJ #1. They would also happen so close to it no matter what that Peter’s characterization in the former is still a fair source to cite.

**Although it should be noted that it has often been common practice for Spider-Man stories to directly address exactly why other heroes aren’t available to help Spidey. A great example would be ASM #361, Peter’s first encounter with Carnage, where the F4 and Avengers are occupied forcing Peter to call upon the aid of Venom.

P.S. For some additional food for thought check out ASM #291. In the issue a Spider Slayer robot was on the loose but Peter reluctantly left it to the authorities because a crying Mary Jane called him up and asked for his help.

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[minderrific]

I love this song, which plays only a few times over the course of EarthBound—it’s commonly called Paula’s Theme in the soundtrack because it plays only during moments when your fate crosses hers by way of Paula needing you to rescue her, first from the Happy Happyists and then Monotoli.

It’s a beautiful arrangement, but what I truly both love and obsess about about in this Paula-specific theme is that it’s a straight remix of the Easter (Youngtown, in the English localization) theme music from the first MOTHER:

For some background: Easter is a town that, as Ninten and his party, you visit only to find the entire place bereft of adults, who have been taken by Giegue’s (Giygas’s) forces up to Holy Loly Mountain / Mt. Itoi for purposes unknown. The children left behind are in various states of fear, confusion, bravado, and feigning one while betraying the other. And the song of their wintry town is one of few truly standout tracks in the original MOTHER, for I think a good reason in that it both managed to be such a good 8-bit tune full of emotional resonance and that it was placed in the one area of the game where the helplessness of the Earth’s situation is at the forefront of the player’s mind, in a town full of kids even younger than the protagonists that are trying to survive in a world that’s stopped making sense without their parents.

Since I finished MOTHER, and started playing Earthbound and Twoson for the first time, I’ll confess I’ve been wondering near-obsessively what reason there is that Paula’s most or second-most iconic track in the game is based on that particular track from the previous game. What connection does she have either thematically or canonically to Easter (or Youngtown, again, if you’ve played the localized translation).

The easy answer is that it’s just a good song and the remix makes it softer and more full of hope to reflect Paula’s melancholy faith that you will come and save her despite her dire situation, as opposed to the more panicked staccato in the 8-bit version from MOTHER where you visit the town of Easter in the middle of your journey and have nothing to provide in the way of relief or assistance to the children there except by moving forward to the end. (This is unlike every other town you’ve visited prior to that point in MOTHER, where your actions have a direct positive impact on the town(s) you were directed to along your journey. In Easter, all you can do is take stock of the situation, take what plot tokens and resources you need, and move on, leaving the children again to fend for themselves so that you can go on to hopefully save their parents among the remainder of Earth.)

Now…if you want to delve a bit deeper than the convenience of a nice tune, or even the thematic connection between lost children that ties Paula to the prequel town of Easter, and into some headcanon territory with me for a moment. Suspend disbelief and suppose, for a moment, that as I’ve suspected since finishing MOTHER and have solidified into fanon theory after Mother 3, that America of 1980s MOTHER and Eagleland in 1990s EarthBound are indeed the same country under a different name. And different leadership, naturally; speaking to some unknown but important upheaval within the last decade that the player doesn’t and wouldn’t know the details of, yet doesn’t feel impossible considering the tells of how different both games are in the societal sense to the versions of “America” they represented along with some rather worrying tells of instability all-around.

If that’s too much of a reach, then scale it back and imagine that America and Eagleland at least exist in the same world, perhaps on the same continent.

If Eagleland, the setting of EarthBound isn’t so far removed from the setting of the first MOTHER, could it be possible that young Paula Jones herself was born or raised in the town of Easter? …I mean, probably not, realistically, but I have to say: the immediacy with which the idea hit me and then stuck with me somehow gives me a sense that there’s a meaningful resonance to the idea of tying EarthBound in this small, but significant way back to its prequel.

Especially since one understated bit of canon lore from MOTHER is that often, it is the children, or even grandchildren or great-grandchildren, of the miscellaneous adults abducted by Giegue’s / Giygas’s people for unknown purposes, who are the ultimate inheritors of PSI in a new generation. It’s true of Ninten, and Ana, and at least one other baby from the town of Easter. Hell, perhaps one or two of the preschoolers in Polestar preschool are among the same category for that matter, like that one with the mind of an adult whose eerie personality is not explained. PSI apparently occurs in children this way for reasons that canon still hasn’t explained.

If nothing else, it’s a fun theory to toy around with that Paula hasn’t lived in Twoson all her life, even if she’d be certainly too young to remember an incident some ten-odd years ago where her mother and father disappeared and came back to find their little girl perfectly safe and sound (perhaps their first clue to the family mantra that ‘God is with her’).