#I’m on a side quest to get these two married in every universe incarnation and CC set that I can

[aheathen-conceivably]

First Comes Love...🎶

(1972 - A Vegas Wedding, Part 1/3 because one part isn’t enough to show off this amazing set by @surely-sims)

Part 2 / Part 3

[samleheny]

Actually DOING SOMETHING with Mary-Jane Watson.

Marvel’s Insomniac’s Sony’s Spider-Man Not The Movie The Game 2018 is out, y’all!

S’alright, innit?! Not quite up to the standards Sony exclusives have been setting this generation – it’s a bit heavy on exactly the kind of inconsequential sandbox side-questing I’d prayed we’d moved past in a post Witcher 3 world, and blame myself all I want, but me and the combat just do not like eachother – but it’s still easily the best Spider-Man game ever and then some if only for the story.

And I wanna talk about a specific aspect of its narrative - its characterisation of long time Spidey love interest Mary-Jane Watson and why it’s the best ever.

MJ is today thought of as integral to the Spider-Man mythos. Peter Parker’s one true love whom he is ultimately destined to be with (no matter how much your personal Spider-fantasy insists that Black Cat is the obviously correct decision). So if she is such an important character… then why does she suck?!

That is perhaps a product of her publication history.

Strange as it might sound to our modern ears, Mary-Jane was not conceived by Spider-Man’s writers to be anybody important. Way back in the original Amazing Spider-Man comics, MJ was a background accessory. A running gag who Aunt May would repeatedly try and set Peter up on a date with. Mary-Jane’s did even make an appearance until much later, she was just talked about.

It wasn’t until years later, in 1987, that writers very hurridly reintroduced MJ to the Spider-Man story, got her and Peter married, more-or-less as an attention-getting publicity stunt.

And it turns out weddings, however fictional, aren’t the sort of thing one should rush into.

Spider-Man’s married life as Peter Parker immediately became less interesting to read and write about and Marvel writers would spend the next twenty years trying to undo it without breaking continuity and without putting the blemish of a divorce on Peter Parker’s permanent record.

The solution they ultimately went with? Spider-Man made a bargain with Satan.

Oh, I’m not joking.

But by then an entire generation who would eventually go on to create the next batch of Spider-Man cartoons, comics, films, videogames, etc. had already grown up reading of a Spider-Man whose one true love had to be Mary-Jane Watson, so it appears she’s here to stay as a permanent fixture within Spidey lore.

What’s so wrong with that, you ask? Well, Mary-Jane is boring. Think of the Sam Raimi films, or the classic 90’s cartoon. Peter only definitively ‘get’s the girl’ right at the end, because the writers know that Mary-Jane’s role as a perpetual object of Peter’s desire doesn’t give them much to work with once she’s been obtained. And now knowing the editorial history of her character, it’s pretty obvious why – She’s not a character. She’s a background decoration of the world in which Peter Parker lives who was hastily turned into Spidey’s ultimate romance. And writers were in no hurry to have her grow into a more substantial character in her new role because they regretted getting them hitched almost immediately.

Insomniac’s new Spider-Man game too is of the opinion that there can surely be no Spider-Man without a Mary-Jane to long for. So how do they handle the character?

Well, I initially thought the timeline of this new take on Spider-Man was an odd choice. Normally you’d expect if they’re starting a new videogame series based on a pre-existing superhero they’d either start at the beginning (either with the origin story, or within the infancy of their superhero career) or at the far other end, the big sell being “This is veteran crime fighter Spidey’s toughest challenge yet!”

But Spider-Man The Game No Not That One, Or That One, Or That One starts somewhere in the middle. Peter’s been Spider-Man for eight years -hardly a veteran, but still with an established presence in New York, a rich rogue’s gallery, and with certain characters already having grown past their classic roles, eg. J. Jonah Jameson has left his newspaper, The Daily Bugle, and become the Marvel world’s answer to Alex Jones. Decrying Spider-Man as a menace on the airwaves 24/7 and branding any evidence to the contrary as fake news.

But this starting point was actually a really interesting choice, because it gave Insomniac the opportunity to give characters rich historical relationships. Case in point – Mary-Jane is introduced to us already long aware of Peter Parker’s superhero persona, and already having had a relationship with him. At first I felt robbed of a dramatic coming out of the Spider-closet scene, but that would have been too easy.

This imagining of MJ is an investigative journalist working for the Daily Bugle (itself now a more sympathetic outlet without J.J. Jameson).

Stop and think about that for a second. How do you make interesting the boring, long time love interest who exists for no other reason then to be a love interest? Give them a career! Why’d it take us so long to think of that?!

Yeah, yeah. I know. She already had a career. She was a supermodel. And how little of that did we actually hear about? How relevant was that to the events of the story? That wasn’t a role for her to play, it was just an extension of her desirability.

The firsts time we see new MJ, she’s sneaking around, sporting an impressive looking camera lens - imagery historically associated more with Peter.

What’s this? A shared interested? Just like that, these two already have more chemistry than in any previous incarnation.

This version of MJ is introduced to us crossing paths with Spider-Man investigating some villainy, but it’s because she’s pursuing a story for her paper independent of his actions. They’ve been broken up for six months.

She’s happy to see him sure, and you know they’re going to hook up again by the time the credits role, but when we meet her for the first time, she’s doing her own thing. Being a hero in her own way.

She has an involvement in the plot important enough for us to care about without being directly connected to Peter Parker. Which is good because if we’re to care about their romance, we need to care about them both as individuals first.

A journalist is a terrific choice for her, because she lives in New York City, which means her escapades are naturally likely to overlap with Spidey’s, and when they do she has a role to play in the adventuring. And that’s exactly what happens. The player is given direct control of MJ for recurring stealth segments (which in defiance of most obligatory stealth segments are not even that painful) wherein she sneaks around and uncovers secrets relevant to Spider-Man’s ongoing battle with the today’s villain, Mr. Negative. The two correspond to help each other, and as they become part of each other’s lives again, MJ puts a lot of weighty emphasis on wanting to be his “partner” as opposed to a “sidekick”.

The story Insomniac crafted is very satisfying (if a little bloated near the end, with its villain switcheroo). Rather than going the Batman Arkham route of giving us just a taste of every Batman character under the sun, they focused the narrative on a smaller cast but explored more fleshed out relationships, and the standout in my opinion is realising how little there was to Mary-Jane’s character considering the gravity often afforded to her presence in the Spider-Man universe. And so they basically had grounds to constructed an entirely new love interested for Spider-Man and call her MJ, and they did so by making her a character first, love interest second.

There’s been so much Spider-Man stuff. Too much. The media landscape is saturated with Spider-Man. Every now and then something will stick and be properly absorbed into the collective consideration for how we think about Spider-Man lore. Usually because they add something to it, while dreck like the Amazing Spider-Man films, or most of the videogames from the last decade are swiftly forgotten.

The thing I hope future creatives remember about Spider-Man 2018 Buy a Playstation 4 The Game is that this is how you make the character of Mary-Jane not feel utterly token.