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vibesaresimplyatrocious · 2 years

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if Peter and Matt end up together in your fic, why did you decide to include MJ? What purpose is there to bring in the Black canon love interest just to prove that the non canon white guy is the fated and best choice? It would be bad enough to use any MJ but using the MJ from the MCU as a plot point for the two white guys to get together isn’t just misogyny but misogynoir. Please remove the spideychelle tag from your fic. Some of us don’t want to see a Black woman pushed aside for a white guy.

I'm assuming that you've read or at least seen chewing coffee based on the fact that that was the only fic i tagged their relationship in, and i'm gonna try to answer this in the best faith I can. If you haven't read chewing coffee, I'd recommend you'd read it if you're interested in continuing with this universe, and it will clear up a lot of misconceptions.

That being said, I find your comment interesting because I've spent over 400 pages in chewing coffee laboriously trying to dismantle the exact tropes and tendencies you're referencing. once you include hand-spun silk, where i started addressing this exact phenomenon in, that number hits around 600 pages. I'm not exaggerating. The document is so big now that it crashes my computer, and a huge amount of it has been devoted towards making sure exactly what you're referencing never happens in my fic.

To be clear, what you're talking about--it happens. A lot. And it's shitty. People are right to be upset about it happening. You are right to be upset about this happening. But i was extremely conscious about it when I wrote this fic and worked hard to never so much as imply the same was happening here, because it is wrong and it should not happen.

If you haven't read it and are just reacting to the tagging on the fic--I fully get it. This sort of thing happens a lot, and people are right to be wary. I've included an explanation of exactly how MJ and Peter's relationship was calculated and executed, and if you want to read the fic for yourself first and cast your own judgments, feel free. But I will not be removing the tag, because I did not do what you're accusing me of, and I am incredibly proud of the relationship between Peter and MJ in this fic.

I'm actually more proud of Peter and MJ's relationship in jumble sale chic than anything I have ever written. Like, period. And I'm really fucking proud of a lot of the other things i've written. their relationship is complex, nuanced, and tells the story of two incredibly messy and traumatized people working hard every single day to be a better person for each other. they are enormously in love and will be until the day they die. their relationship is the central one in this fic, and it is made clear from beginning until end that anything peter has with matt does not diminish that fact. MJ is legit my favorite character in this fic, becuase she's such an amazing, messy, complex, lovable character, and i worked hard to treat her with respect.

Below the line, I'm going to spell out the steps i took to make certain that MJ and Peter's love would never be shelved in favor of Peter 's and Matt's, but I want to be clear, it's not a defense. I don't think I need one. I put a lot of intent into what I did and I think the work speaks for itself.

For anyone not caught up, spoilers below the line.

First off, MJ is not and never will be pushed aside for Matt. As of chewing coffee, Peter and MJ are experimenting with extremely committed consensual polyamory. Like, they get back together chapter one, chapter two they establish that they want to try out being open. I spent multiple chapters discussing why they decided to be open, why they thought it was the best choice for them, and how it does not lessen the love they feel for each other. Being open was MJ's request, to make her feel more comfortable, and it was made through explicit discussion and multiple scenes where they set boundaries and negotiated what they were comfortable with, all of which can be revisited at any time if either of them decide that their current system is not working. I wanted their relationship to be as healthy and considerate of each other as possible, because I truly believe that they have the kind of love that lasts forever.

It's also made clear in an enormous number of scenes that MJ is the love of Peter's life, and that is never changing. any love interest she is pitted against will lose. He says that he loves her more than anything to her face. He can't have an internal monologue without talking about how much he loves her. Incidentally, he says it to the face of Matt, the other love interest in this fic. They're talking about marriage, and how Peter and MJ will probably never try for it. It is explicitly stated to be because neither of them really believe in marriage, and they don't need an institution to confirm what they have. peter explicitly says during this "we'll be together until the end of the fucking word."

And I made it clear that Matt knew that and respected it. I went to lengths to never have matt and MJ at odds. the second Matt finds out that Peter got back with MJ, when the rut is literal days in the rearview and matt is viscerally in love with peter? he says it's good. he says how great MJ and Peter are together. There is never a single second where he thinks he'd win in a bullshit fight against MJ for peter's affections.

MJ, for her part, is the number one person trying to get Matt and Peter together. at no point is she uncomfortable with them being a thing. She has no interest in being a part of their thing, because matt is a mess and she has standards, except for, you know, that one time she asked to watch if they ever decided to have a fully consensual and non-heat or rut related encore of adult fun. but she's comfortable with them being more than friends. She's comfortable with them having sex, being in love, and having their own independent relationship. She knows how much they mean to each other, and she has never once thought it lessened what she meant to peter. She's entirely secure in what she has with peter.

There is legitimately one time that Matt and MJ could even somewhat be considered at odds in this fic. MJ gets with an ex, because they're open and that's completely okay, immediately tells peter that she got with her ex as per their arrangement, which is a stipulation she requested, which is immediately followed with a scene establishing how much they love each other and how devoted they are towards each other. Matt, meanwhile, did not know they were open at that point, and he finds out on account of super senses that MJ had sex with Kate Bishop, her ex, when she just got back with peter. and what does the "rival" love interest do when he has 100% certainty in the fact that the person dating the man he's half in love with had sex with someone else?

he decides that he needs to get her side of the story, because he doesn't want to jump to conclusions or think the worst of her. less than 24 hours later, at legitmately the first opportunity he has, he's trying to track her down to talk to her about it. He explicitly states that he never wanted to think the worst of her, he just had the information he had and knew he needed to do something. And he further states that if she had cheated, he just wanted to make sure that she came clean and started fixing it, because he's a giant fuck up with relationships and he knows that the best thing you can do in a fuck up is come clean and try to fix things. he could never stay silent, peter's one of his best friends, but he also could never try to sabotage MJ. He knew what they meant to each other, and he wanted to help limit the damage as much as he could.

So when he knew that there was a chance that MJ was cheating on the guy that he was in the middle of being heartbroken over, he never once tried to use it to leverage her out of the way and him into a relationship with peter. because every single person that Peter and MJ know, know that their love is everything to them.

I also just devoted a lot of work into making MJ her own independent, well-rounded character, and to making sure her relationship with peter is never taken for granted or shelved.

I worked hard to give her her own core, distinct character traits and voice. I tied them into her life experiences. I crafted her motivations and decisions directly in line with who she is as a person, and she has her own agency that directly shapes the plot. I hate it when the love interest's entire presence is only to be a love interest to the protagonist. She's funny, and messy, and dynamic, and she's such a fun and cool person in this fic. I legitimately love her more than any other character. she's hilarious and ridiculous and so fucking smart and competent.

Her and Peter's relationship is depicted in almost every chapter and I tried to make it entirely distinct and nuanced from his relationship with matt. They've been in love for almost ten years. That's a long time to learn each other. There's a lot of small, little mannerisms I sprinkled in throughout that tried to show how long they've been fighting for and negotiating this relationship. there's a scene where Peter and MJ are arguing about her doing something that he thinks is dangerous. While they're arguing, he is tying her shoes for her to leave to do the exact thing he doesn't want her to do. and i did that to show that they've worked hard on their relationship. They respect each other as intelligent, independent people who can make their own decisions. they know that the other will always have a voice in the decisions that they make, but they also know that neither of them will ever steamroll the other.

They have so many cute moments where they do acts of love for each other. They love so much about each other--all of their silly, messy bits. They have breakfast together. they tease each other. they indulge each other for each other's Nonsense. they have an encyclopedic knowledge of each other's quirks. they cannot go a chapter without someone announcing how in love they are with the other. it has been over four hundred pages of them being in forever love.

I had explicit meta discussions of the exact phenomenon you're describing? In chapter 5 of hand-spun silk, there is a multi-paragraph discussion about how female, biracial romantic partners are pushed aside in favor of white counterparts. and it's discussed in terms of how unjust it is, and how MJ is the person he'll be in love with forever. i am never going to pretend that what you're saying does not happen, because it happens to an extreme degree. you are 100% right to be upset about it. but this entire fic has been an meticulous dismantling of it, so I'm not exactly sure why you're here right now.

It's especially interesting in light of the fact that MJ is the dominate love interest in this fic. Like--yes, 100%, peter and matt are getting together in this fic, i feel like that was fairly explicit. surprise, it's happening people, the fic where I tagged them as getting together is about them getting together.

he has barely been there.

now, to be clear, that's not in answer to this phenomenon. I am grinding many axes with this fic. As I feel everyone knows already, this is an ABO fic. Peter is, effectively, the "female" counterpart in the relationship as the omega. i hate it when female stories only circle around the love interest. Peter has around four different plots going on that do not involve matt, because he has a life apart from matt and he can handle his own shit, so like. it felt forced to include matt in every scene, he really didn't need to be there. In contrast, MJ has had a big role in pretty much every single arc of this fic. because she's a foundational part of peter's life. They've been in love for 10 goddamn years. they live together. they are in an active, open, romantic and sexual relationship with each other, and a three-way QPR relationship with Ned, which is treated with its own dignity, discussion, and respect. At the start of action, he and matt have been friends for half that time, and they have barely spent any time so much as contemplating anything more.

Legitimately, the only relationship thing that MJ and Peter haven't done in this fic is have sex. And like, spoilers, that's gonna happen in this fic. It's fully coming. it's just that peter has spent twenty seven chapters trying to handle a medical condition that causes him extreme discomfort at all moments, and i could not think of a single goddamn reason why someone would ever want to have sex like that.

I also just find it interesting that you seem to think the conclusion of this will be that matt is the fated and best choice, because this entire fic has been created to communicate that there is absolutely no such thing. like. the idea that there's a fated and best partner out there has been made fun of multiple times explicitly. there's a scene i've been wanting to write that's gonna show up in the next couple chapters where MJ again makes fun of that idea out loud and to someone's face. It has this is a very heavy-handed fic. I've made zero effort to be subtle here.

I'm writing ABO. I have problems with Abo. anyone who has read my abo knows i have problems with ABO. I've made multiple posts on this tumblr explicitly discussing my problems with ABO, including the fact that i don't think there is any such thing as "fated" partners, which is a big part of ABO.

ABO usually is extremely heteronormative in the sense that alphas and omegas are usually decided to be biologically the perfect partner for each other in every way. usually, there's some bullshit scent thing that means you've found your "perfect" mate.

That's insane! That's bullshit! If someone ever comes up to you on the streets and informs you that you are fated soulmates because of how you smell, you should pepper spray them and call the police.

MJ and peter's relationship was created to explicitly communicate that love follows hard work and effort. they are the product of ten years of trying, desperately, to be the kind of person who makes the other's life better. they put in an insane amount of effort to be good for the other perfect, and that's what makes them soulmates.

i'm not going to say that matt's relationship with peter plays second fiddle to MJ's, because there's no such thing. a big point of this is that their loves are not interchangeable. each are important and unique in their own way. But peter's love with MJ is more mature. It's ten years in the making, and something they've put an insane degree of work into. Peter's love with Matt, meanwhile, is in its inception. Baby steps. MJ and Peter are going to be together until the end of the fucking world because they've put in the work to have forever. Matt and Peter haven't put in any of that work, because they haven't even gotten together yet. MJ's relationship with Peter is the certain one in this fic; matt's relationship is far from it. Whether Matt and Peter stay together after they get together is going to be defined by whether they put in the same effort into this relationship that Peter and MJ have already put into building theirs.

To answer your question, I included MJ because I did not want to take the female biracial love interest and make her either a lesbian, a bitch, or dead to make way for the white male love interest, which is what fandom usually does. I'm pretty sure i've already made a post on my tumblr that explicitly states that reasoning. i wrote hand-spun silk as a writing experiment that got way out of hand. I was trying to write ABO for the first time to see if i could, knew that i wanted to just do a cut-and-dry "oh no i need sex as part of a medical condition who around could ever help me" traditional premise as my basis. peter originally wasn't even there, I just subbed him in because Matt was too angsty and traumatized to be the omega and for it to still not have rapey undertones. for reasons i've already explained in another post, i decided peter needed to be single when he decided to help matt out, which meant he couldn't be in an active relationship with MJ at the time. For the purposes of making that fic work logistically, I made it so that they had already decided to spend forever with each other, were in an extremely committed QPR with Ned, and had an on-again off-again thing romantically due to their own personal mental health reasons, and it just happened to be off again at the time of the rut. I made that decision because i did not want to brush her aside in favor of Matt, even for the purposes of what was supposed to be a very short writing experiment that i would never continue.

When i decided to continue the universe? i got MJ and Peter back together in legitimately the first scene of chapter one, and the entire fic since has been devoted to depicting their love.

And i'm gonna be frank, I did not plan for this to be polyamory in hand-spun silk. because i never planned to continue hand-spun silk. when i started hand-spun silk, i didn't even ship peter/matt--i legitimately just did it to see if i could. the original ending was the same ending that made the final cut, but both peter and matt end up walking away from it without any feelings. Matt cracks the exact same joke of "You should know that this experience has made me fall madly in love with you," and then peter calls matt an asshole and they both have a good laugh and walk away as friends. Peter goes back to be with MJ, Matt goes back to be with Foggy, and they never become anything more. but then i decided to give writing them getting together a try, because i talked myself into the ship. I decided on polyamory from the start, because eschewing MJ in favor of matt was never an option. because my explicit intent was to not push aside the female, biracial love interest in favor of a white male one. spideychelle is in this fic because this is every bit their love story as it is peter and matt's.

#chewing coffee #no hate to this anon but it is important for me to say #i know the exact phenomenon they are referring to and it's a shit one #but i spent 400 pages deconstructing it #like that is an insane amount of time and effort #once you add in hand spun silk it's at like 600 pages #i have spent literal hundreds of hours doing it #and it was in my mind legitmately from the start of handspun silk when i made them on and off again #it's not hidden either it's explicitly stated out loud that that's what i'm doing #like babe it's a core message of the fic that MJ will never be pushed aside for matt and there is no such thing as a fated partner #i don't know how much clearer i can be #jumble sale chic #hand-spun silk

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