#fun fact: in like 99% of spider-man adaptations captain stacy's first name is george.

[dw-flagler]

okay, so:

back in the 70s, Spider-Man's Clone Saga was a thing. A lot happened, but the long and short of it was this: Gwen Stacy was killed by the green goblin in Amazing Spider-Man 121. A while later, she seemingly comes back to life. This is revealed to be a plot of the supervillain The Jackal, who created clones of peter and gwen because he could just do that. Peter fights the clone, one of them dies, and they assume that the surviving peter is the original. There's another clone saga, which was widely panned, but the important thing for my post here is Ultimate Spider-Man (2000-2009).

We have to establish a couple things first, though. So in USM issue 31, Gwen Stacy's dad, John Stacy, is killed by a spider-man impersonator (for honestly some really stupid reasons but whatever), and Gwen is formally adopted by May, moving in with her and Peter in issue 32.

Now, shortly after this, the venom saga happens. It differs from most versions in that the symbiotes, in the ultimate universe, are not aliens, but instead human-made living organisms. They were made by Edward Brock Sr. and Richard Parker, and peter's parents are killed because Richard refuses to make the suits weapons. Eddie Brock Jr. (Peter's childhood friend, current college student, and pedophile) recreates one of the symbiotes, and eventually it bonds with Eddie to become Venom in issue 37.

Anyway, some other stuff happens, and then in Issue 57, Gwen finds out that Peter is Spider-Man. She confronts him in Issue 59, and eventually decides she's cool with him being spider-man. She calls him her "super hero little brother" in a conversation with Mary Jane.

Later, in issue 60, Curt Conners, the guy whose lab Eddie was working in, takes a sample of Peter's blood, and, working with a guy named Ben Reilly, creates another symbiote, Carnage.

Carnage, a symbiote cloned from peter, breaks out of the lab, killing a bunch of people, including Gwen, in issue 62. Peter, furious at this, tracks down the Carnage symbiote (which never actually has a host in this universe) and throws it in a fire, killing it. Later, in Issue 64, that other guy, Ben Reilly, steals a sample of the Carnage symbiote from Connors' lab, for unknown purposes.

Cut to issue 97, the start of Ultimate's Clone Saga. So Peter encounters this supervillain called the scorpion, who turns out to be a clone of him. He also encounters Jessica Drew(!), who is also a clone of him. Then, after jessica whooped his ass, he sees Gwen, who has miraculously come back to life!

So, the particular details of the ultimate clone saga aren't important for this post, but I'll describe them in brief anyway. The clones, including Scorpion, Jessica, and the others who i'm not mentioning, were made by Otto Octavius and Ben Reilly together, working to recreate Spider-Man for the CIA. Ben, as he already had a failed attempt to clone spider-man just sitting in his pocket or something, decided to do some fucky stuff to the carnage sample he had on him. He tries to recreate the full Carnage, but it doesn't work quite right, and it ends up kind of becoming Gwen Stacy. It's still carnage, but it's also her.

Anyway, Peter and Jessica beat the hell out of Doc Ock, who was responsible for this, all the clones other than Jessica and Gwen die, Peter gets back together with Mary Jane and breaks up with Kitty Pryde (who he was dating at the time), everything goes back to normal. More or less. Eventually, carnage Gwen gets attacked by Eddie "Pedophile" Brock and he steals her symbiote (despite the fact that she is a symbiote) and becomes Venom again, and she is completely normal now.

Anyway, by Vol. 2 Issue 1 (about 30 issues later), we're in a new status-quo. The important part is this: Peter has broken up with Mary Jane (again) off screen, and is now dating Gwen Stacy for some reason.

So, as I have exhaustively laid out, peter is, in fact, dating his own clone.

What's even weirder about this is that a few issues later, in Vol. 2 Issue 9, Johnny Storm (who was there during the whole clone saga but I guess he wasn't paying attention) goes and kisses Jessica Drew, who is also a clone of peter, and peter finds this extremely gross.

I don't really have a moral or anything to this. I just sort of recognized that gwen is technically a clone of peter and felt like i had to explain this to someone.