#the essay is about migration btw

[crowleys-bentley-and-plants]

Am i gonna use the heisenberg uncertainty principle in my anthropology essay in which i need to refer back to my own discipline which happens to be the exact opposite of quantum physics? You bet i am

[drdemonprince]

hi! had a question tht i thought u might be able to help me with- ive been trying to find a therapist. ive had very little formal treatment despite often being quite mentally ill. however, ive done a lot of self-directed research on mental health/psychiatry. i think tht therapists find this (+my general psych-skeptical stance) offputting, but i find it difficult+unhelpful to lie and pretend i havent thought about my own brain a lot. do u have any advice? loved unmasking autism btw

I have an essay about much of this! Here, I just migrated it over to Substack for you so that it's free to read:

@testdevice and I also did an entire livestream on finding a therapist and grilling them on their attitudes toward neurodiversity. You can watch it here:

[postalninja]

Sleepover! What you’ve been meaning to read - either book or fic or otherwise. And also, your favorite song from the past week. What have you been listening to?

I mean, I've been meaning to read The Silmarillion for literal years now, but isn't that how everybody feels about it? LOL! I did feel it looking at me accusingly from the bookshelf this week, though, so... Also, I've had @runicmagitek's FFVI fic I'm The Darkness, You're the Starlight earmarked to read later for... *checks* a year and a half, now, and I KNOW it will be excellent because it's runic and I KNOW I will enjoy it because it's FFVI... but I'll admit, I'm intimidated by the word count. When will I *possibly* have the time to read a 200k word fic? :( (Dammit, I'm looking at the tags again, and I want to read this fic!) And, oh ho! Music! I have not a song to talk about from this past week, but a whole album - a double-album, in fact! I'm taking a science fiction class this semester, and on Tuesday we got into a bit of a tangent about music with sci-fi themes, and that's when I remembered the existence of Ayreon's The Universal Migrator. I have since listened to it through twice over and have been singing one song or another from it pretty constantly to myself. It's a progressive metal album from 2000 that is an entire space opera stuffed with lore and crammed into 20 tracks on two albums. The premise: "It is the 22nd century. I am the last of the Mars Colonists. The air supply has almost run out on this desolate Mars colony, and the food supplies from Earth have stopped arriving since the final war of 2084. I am walking through the tunnel towards our recreation machine called the Dream Sequencer. I hope it will sweeten my final days..." They then experience humanity's past in reverse order, starting from their own childhood and going back, further and further in time, until the dawn of humanity. And then, in the second half, they go even further, to the birth of the universe and experience the vastness of space and everything within it. Dude, I could write an essay about this album, it's SO COOL! (btw @silent-mysteriousguy this is a project by a Dutch musician, Arjen Lucassen, and if you're not already familiar with his stuff you should check it out!!)

So, yeah, safe to say I have been enjoying sci-fi themed prog metal this week :D

[zutaralesbian]

15 questions and 15 mutuals

I was tagged by @such-a-barbarian (love your UN btw)

This game is coming at a good time with me wanting to reintroduce myself more to tumblr with twitter dying lol. I’ll try to tag my new mutuals that migrated from twitter.

Were you named after anyone?

Yes. Unfortunately I was named after my father. His name is Daniel “Dan” and mine is Danielle. I was supposed to be Daniel jr if I’d been a boy. 😩

when was the last time you cried?

A couple weeks ago. My family is always going through a Time lately it seems.

do you have kids?

Nope. But I want to have at least one. I’m a lesbian and my partner already has three kiddos of her own, so my situation with that is a bit difficult. I’m probably going to go the sperm donor route once I’m more settled into my new career and am stable enough to have one.

do you use sarcasm a lot?

Eh. A decent amount.

whats the first thing you notice about people?

Hmmm…probably their eyes

what’s your eye color?

Light blue. Some people see them as grey

scary movies or happy endings?

Definitely happy endings. I’m a chicken so I very seldom watch horror. I’ve been meaning to get more into the genre after I braved the Fear Street trilogy for the lesbians in it, but it’ll probably never be my fave.

any special talents?

Hmmm….I’m super good at writing professional stuff like letters and essays. I used to BS my essays in high school all the time and always got good grades on them anyway lol. I’m better with my words on paper than I am in person lmao

where were you born?

Portland Oregon, USA

what are your hobbies?

Once in a blue moon I’ll write

have any pets?

Yep. I’m currently in a household with two cats and a dog

what sports do you play/have you played?

Me and sports? Lmao. Non-existent combo. When I was a kid I loved playing tether ball at recess but that’s about it.

how tall are you?

About 5’3

favorite subject in school?

English all the way!!! Writing and reading!! I also occasionally liked science depending on the specific subject. Biology was cool.

dream job?

In a world where I was born rich I would have loved to have gone into the creative arts. There was a period where I really wanted to write for television specifically. But because I wasn’t born into a wealthy family, I had to go for something more financially substantial. I eventually chose nursing. Right now I’m being trained to work as an LPN in a urology clinic. And I do like the field and helping people, even if it wasn’t necessarily my dream job.

I tag: @tridentarius @anniejanuarygf @dollsome-does-tumblr @whaticameherefor @mrs-n-uzumaki @whaticameherefor @draco-domesticus @girl-with-the-dragon-age-tattoo @azurempyreal @sonyarebecchi @melroesplace @darthdarcyy @tectonicduck @scorias @patrooclus @milkymickeyway @sweetsinginglittleredbird

[firespirited]

Thinking again about how I got into video essays in the first place: I'd been through hundreds of Annihilation reviews, probably 30+ of them long-form posts/videos and most of them just recapping (some did bother to recap Alex Garland's other work or recap all of Stalker too LMAO) ... then Acolytes of horror's Nathan went for the jugular and Folding Ideas' Dan comes along and goes hey maybe the point isn't to find clear answers. Both of those videos are 20 minutes long btw.

At that point I was following 4 commentators/essayists: Yhara Zayd, Princess Weekes, Strucci movies and Tee Noir - often using the media they were reviewing as the catalyst to go watch the media then hear their review - Absolutely not seeking out video reviews after I'd watched/read something because text based reviews made it easier to scan for actual analysis.

aaand that's when it clicked that actual critics had migrated to youtube as they weren't getting hired by journalism/magazine outlets and they'd get paid far better for videos than blog posts.

So there's this goldilocks time for media criticism: by 2018-2019, sticking "name of media + recap" into a search engine would get a bunch of CEO catch-all sites using bad word transposition to steal someone's recap but the rot hadn't fully hit youtube with "the TTS wiki plot playing over clips" spam so you could better sort through the junk a little... but within 2 and a half years, i'm back to *not* searching for reviews on youtube because everyone and their dog will give you a more or less disguised summary and I'm quite happy to wait however many years it takes an actual critic to get to media that made me think.

(To be quite honest, at this point, I search tumblr.com for text posts because for 9 "piss poor", there's at least 1 nugget of gold by people who actually would have enjoyed literature class if it wasn't dominated by boring media or constrained by needing to pass exams in a certain way.)

>video claiming to be essay/history on a topic

>ask them if its analysis or summary

>they dont understand

>pull out detailed chart explaining what's analyzing the ideas and motives behind a text and what is just presenting information without thinking about it

>"it's a good video, ma'am"

>watch it

>summary

[caparrucia]

🎯🥰📈

🎯 Have any of your readers accurately guessed major plot points? Care to share which?

Yes! A couple times! Notable ones were:

People 100% clocked in the fact Cor was going to propose to Nyx, in the sun is out, the day is new.

People were also immediately suspicious of the role Giratina was going to play, as soon as I introduced her in i've battled hard with the face in the mirror, though I do think the Spectrier red herring threw most of them off the scent until Cynthia showed up the second to last chapter.

Bonus round, though, for the pseudoanon (I guess? They signed their anon comments, but they didn't seem to have an AO3 account) person who reached the first half of the Crown Tundra shenanigans and was very happy to see that Leon had not done "anything reckless or stupid", and I had to sit on my hands and very politely word around that because... well. See the chapter that comes immediately AFTER that. I consider that a good guess!

🥰 How do you feel about reader interaction? Are you open to receiving questions about your fics?

I love reader interactions! I love comments and questions and I make a point to try and answer comments in AO3. I don't mind chatting with people in good faith about stuff, though I'm very self-conscious about my older fic and have trouble talking about because I don't want to dismiss people who like it, but also I want to curl up into a little ball and die a little when I remember it exists.

That's 100% a me problem, btw, because my brain is a dick and there's a nebulous, can't quite pin down the logic for it, boundary past which all my old fic is profoundly embarrassing and bad and awful, and if I look at it too long I'll get the urge to delete it and rewrite it because it's so BAD, can't you see this is so old I didn't know how to punctuate shit properly? It's awful, bad, no good and it shouldn't exist!

I recognize this is 100% my problem and I try my best to not make it someone else's problem. I will not be rude if people want to talk about my older work, because I understand that I've been doing this for 24 whole years now, and a story can be meaningful to you, if it's the right words at the right time, the "quality" of the writing is irrelevant. And I'm forever humbled when people tell me they liked my stories and they found value in them. I would feel like a monster if I ever make someone feel bad for liking them, just because my brain is a dipshit about things.

So yeah, 100% hit me up if you like my work and want to talk about it or have questions or want me to go spelunking in depth about worldbuilding or the writing choices or the more technical aspect of writing. I'm here for it.

Just bear in mind if it's about something older than a toddler, I'm going to take a lot of breaks and flush and hide under my shirt because I'm flattered genuinely, but also dying because I've gotten so much better, I promise, I swear I learned how to punctuate quotation marks now!

📈 How many fics do you have?

A lot of them! I mean, I have to. I have an 8.3M word count as of December 2021. That's M as in Millions, yes. That's the number of words I've written since 1998. Fiction only, no one needs to word count every dipshit thought in my head I insist on writing a fucking essay about. But yeah, that's a lot of words! And that's a lot of stories.

I used to keep a scrupulous record of my writing, at least from 2003 onwards, in my different LJs, but then LJ did... y'know, that, and while I migrated everything into DW, I chose to keep it private. A personal record, if you will.

English is not my first language, and a lot of my early writing is genuinely an attempt to learn the language better. Most of the first ten years of my writing presence online revolved around me writing off prompts, where the prompts were worlds picked at random from a dictionary, and my attempts to use them in a story to make sense of them. That's how I learned to write English, honestly. Just, every day a random word and then a tiny ficbit of whatever my favorite piece of media was at the time. Favorites I remember to this day are "phalange" which I will always prefer to "phalanx" and I wrote a small Alien inspired ficlet about, and "concussive" that I wrote a Beyblade fic about.

I have a lot of fic. I've been writing a ficlet a day since 1998. Some of it is just a couple sentences, some of it is thousands of words long. Back in 2006, before the enormous depressive spiral, I used to write a solid 15K a day. Then I became a blob and went down to maybe 40 words a day. But I still kept writing. And then I got out of the depression hole enough to be a person again, back in 2018-ish, in great part to the cowriting I did with a friend and all the editing and socializing she bullied me into until I sort of became a person again. These days I do anywhere between 2000 and 5000 words a day, on a good day. I have a job and five pets to look after, so I can't just write.

Today you can find 121 fics I've written, in AO3. The rest of the archive is either in my backups or on DW, made private. Actual fics, that I'd cared to share with others, were about 500, on top of the AO3 ones. My daily writing exercises are far, far more numerous and distinct from the actual fic I write to post/share with people. I'm currently on entry 8134, on that. I was curious and went looking and while I've missed some days, I'm still pretty on track! (The earliest date of my writing journal/exercises is June 10th, 1998.)

[calliettes-posts]

Okay so my guesses for where S7 might be headed assuming that Ismail will be the main are as follows.

How to navigate questioning your gender / gender expression especially given the circumstance that the German language is very binary. Basically just gender ✨ (maybe also how it does /doesn’t interweave with sexuality). Weaving in the communities / informations that exist online might also be a great topic to explore

Furthermore I think the whole being a person with a Turkish background in Germany (I think that’s confirmed canon right?) could be very interesting to explore. Especially also maybe highlighting the the difference of you’re perceived by others (as foreigner basically) vs the fact that Ismail might have never been to Turkey and was born and raised in Germany. Generational disparities between parent and child generation might also be a way to go. Simply having a multi faceted view of a character with a Turkish background living in Germany, that doesn’t relate to a migration story (as in trauma centered) or serve comedic purpose, would be quite important in terms representation me thinks (hope it’s kinda clear what I mean)

Or also just maybe Ismail kind of distancing themselves from Constantin, especially due to Kieu My as well as Zoe (and therefore Finn) now probably also being more affiliated with the cashqueens. So moving on and how to deal with changing a changing friendship landscape could be interesting. Personally I would also be quite fond of a story line that would show Ismail not really being attached to any certain friend group as such (not being able to mend the bonds wiht the cashqueens just yet but also no more instas). A character kinda being not exactly friendless but having to navigate going their own way outside of a group could be interesting as well, especially if connected to kinda loosing your social safety net if that makes sense

Well this was a lot but you kinda asked for it so, hope you don’t mind :) wishing you a lovely day!

I don't mind at all!! And yeah ,I agree, I would find it very interesting to see how druck will handle the topic of gender expression, especially like you said, since the German language is so gendered, it would be really nice to see their take on this, and if and how they'll introduce gender neutral pronouns. As for the migration topic, yesss I don't want to see any trauma about it, I really liked how druck approached fatous and kieu mys ethnic backgrounds, while their backgrounds weren't their whole personality, it wasn't erased, but highlighted through specific actions, like the facetiming, fatous traditional dress in ep9, kieu my and fatou talking about their experiences as children of immigrants, and as an immigrant child myself I could relate to both of them in that aspect (I think I also made about 7282 essays about that lol), so I think druck will be able to handle that aspect of ismails character appropriately, I trust them in that aspect. As for the friendships, I really hope they cut off constantin for good at the end of the season, I can also see druck making ismail floating around in between different friend groups, but still feeling lonely, i mean, they asked a lot about that topic in the survey (I'm still waiting for the answers btw) so I can see ismail being very lonely . I also hope they apologise to ava for their bullying, and that we'll learn more about it, without having to see ava suffer, I really hope that

I hope you have a lovely day too!!!

[catilinas]

tagged by @subsequentibis​ approximately last century, thank You!

1. how has your day been?

Extremely Good! it got to like 20 whole degrees today and the sun was OUT i spent literally all day reading in the garden experiencing WARMTH! seasonal depression who!!! the forget-me-nots are flowering!!! yes!!!

2. what was the last thing that made you smile?

my cat (gus) decided he needed to sit in the sink, And Then he migrated to the drying rack, where he was very interested in the knife holder

3. what’s keeping you entertained these days?

uhhhhhh i watched hornblower to like. switch off my brain and do something that Wasn’t thinking about classics (i failed and related it to classics Anyway btw) and now i am Rewatching hornblower but this time thinking about (oh you know) R*ne G*rard’s M*metic Th*ory,

4. if you are in some kind of quarantine/self isolation, is there anything you’d like to achieve in this time?

everything may have gone to shit but i still have five essays to write and then exams!!! i am Going to Not Fuck Them Up. And Maybe I Will Even Have Fun Doing Them! at least two of the essays are Extremely Sexy (one is on the supernatural in lucan and another is on geography in the aeneid but i’m gonna make it about mimesis) and bcs of how the online exams are gonna work i can and WILL subject my fave lecturer to a translation In Dactylic Hexameter. sucks that the thing im most hyped about is exams though :/ maybe i should finally learn to unicycle

5. post a selfie! (if you’re comfortable with that).

it is now the season of wearing fun hats and then getting sunburnt anyway

6. last but not least: send this to some mutuals to keep the game going.

@ouidius​ @euryalus​ @i-am-a-hog​ @catullan​ @bacchaenal​ go wild If You Like!

[mrsspidermanmaryjanewatsonparker]

Let’s debunk this shit.

First off...why should we, on the topic of Spider-Man, actually place stock by the guy who has in the past argued Sins Past is as, if not more, bad than One More Day when anyone with an ounce of knowledge of how writing craft works would realize this is abjectly false. As a story the flaws in Sins Past amount to it inserting something into the past that doesn’t fit at all. One More Day by contrast not only does this but needs to violently ignore 45 yrs of established characterization to even function and even then it fails since it needs to contradict its own narrative.

  Oh and you know MovieBob is the guy who said ‘That Spec cartoon wasn’t as good as people make it out to be. People like it more for what it could be than what it was.’...WTF was he even watching.

 But let’s dive into some more specifics of Bob’s argument.

 “OMD ‘needed’ to happen.”

 This is objectively untrue.

 Let’s give the benefit of the doubt and say what Bob meant wasn’t so much that Spider-Man needed to make a deal with the Devil but rather it was necessary to get rid of Spider-Man’s marriage.

 I can’t bring myself to do a 3000 word essay on why the latter alone is idiotic, sexist, myopic and utterly false but here is a cliffnotes version.

 There are 2 fundamental problems with Bob’s line of thinking.

 The 1st is that to end the marriage you needed to outright alter Spider-Man’s history via a soft DC style continuity reboot thus creating in a literal sense an alternate universe version of Spider-Man who’d just never been married in the first place.

 Put simply Spider-Man’s marital status could’ve been ended in universe through numerous methods that avoided that. He could’ve gotten divorced. The US government as some kind of petty revenge upon Spider-Man turning on the Registration Act could’ve legally annulled his marriage along with certain other legal aspects of his life. There could’ve been a reveal that due to a legal loophole nobody realized at the time technically speaking Peter and MJ had never been married in the first place despite believing they were.

 None of this would’ve fixed the most egregious contrivance of OMD and OMIT, that by simply never having been married magically this = Peter and MJ would break up. You still need to justify THAT separately which OMD didn’t even attempt to do. OMD in isolation erases their marriage but it doesn’t explain or justify why doing this would mean they are now no longer in a relationship. OMIT tried and miserably failed to do that because once again it required the abject ignoring of decades of established (and logical) characterization.

  But what should we expect from the guy who in another video once said Superman would be a jerk if he married Lois Lane because of the stress and dangers it’d expose her to, specifically comparing it to real life people who’s jobs offer comparable examples. ‘Superman would never put Lois Lane through that’ said Bob (though I am paraphrasing I admit.

  Why?

  If REAL people do that then why WOULDN’T Superman OR Spider-Man do so?

 It’s a line of thought which amounts to Bob saying those people shouldn’t have marital relationships. And that is gross.

 The 2nd problem with Bob’s ‘it needed to happen’ assertion is the notion that CREATIVELY it was necessary for the health of Spider-Man.

 Let’s ignore how creatively (and financially) Superman has been on the up and up since 2016 when he got his marriage BACK.

 Instead let’s consider for a moment...why?

 Why CREATIVLY does Spider-Man need to not be married to work? Why does he need to be single for his long term creative/financial health?

 There is no answer because the truth is he isn’t. Spider-Man’s love life is relevant only in so far as the series follows his life and not being asexual romance is a part of that. At which point if you are arguing for his long term creative health he needs to be able to swap out the women he’s going to be romantically/sexually involved with why then does that not also apply to literally every other character connected to every other part of his life?

 It doesn’t.

 It’s a bullshit argument born of an ignorant lack of questioning. It’s born of “Well it’s got to be this way because it’s always been this way and it’s worked that way.” Ignoring how it doesn’t and how you know...Marvel comics itself exists off the back of saying “Maybe it doesn’t have to just be this way. I don’t like that way in fact, I like the idea of trying it this other way.”

 Spider-Man being single keeps Spider-Man stunted and in a state of doomed to failure. It literally renders his love life redundant because every reader (and this applied before 1987 when he got married, but applies a thousand times more now) knows his romances will never amount to anything and that they are glorified Bond girls. And I’ll be honest the substance (such as there is) in the Bond movies NEVER lies with the Bond girls with the sole exceptions of those few movies where they tease you with the idea that he has deeper feelings for them.

 Then you have the fact that marriage as a part of most people’s lives and a responsibility is outright tailor made for the character who’s core concept is entwined around the interconnected idea of responsibility and being a (relatively) normal person. It’s not different to him graduating from High school or moving out of Aunt May’s house or getting a job.

 But let’s look at the franchise in the wake of OMD creatively and financially has it been doing better than before?

 LOL NOPE!

 In 2016 we had the Power Play arc. This arc was THE Spider-Man event of the year. It tied into the previous Spider event of 2015, Renew Your Vows by introducing the incredibly powerful villain Regent who’s powers were that he had the powers of EVERY other hero virtually and in RYV took over all of NYC following killing the X-Men and Avengers on his own. It guest starred fan favourite Miles Morales, the first substantial appearance of the character in Amazing Spider-Man since his migration into the 616 universe. It also guest starred lead character of the MCU and (then) Marvel comics poster boy Iron Man fresh from his hyped up run under Bendis, the biggest name in comics of the previous 20 years. It also teased the appearance of the newest team of Avengers, a brand that has been huge since 2012 for obvious reasons. Oh and it featured the return of another fan favourite Mary Jane who was once more being used to tease the possibility of her and Spider-Man’s romantic reunion which had been a surefire way of raising hype for a story since 2008 onwards. Oh and it was clearly a tie-in to the international blockbuster and critically acclaimed movie, Captain America: Civil War.

 And of course you had much promotion from the Marvel hype machine, Dan Slott interviews and the usual variant cover artificial sales inflation gimmick that had become common to Marvel.

 Safe to say that this story was a big, big deal and sure to sell well right?

 Well....it actually sold less than a barely promoted, run-of-the-mill ASM arc from 2005 by J. Michael Straczynski that featured in the first issue Tony Stark sitting on a chair sans armour and beyond that no guest stars....oh and there were no variant covers....and btw Spider-Man was married in it

  . ...Oh....

  But hey what about some OTHER Spider-Man stories since OMD. Haven’t THEY been creatively enriching?

 I mean we had classics like:

 The Lizard ruins the interesting humanizing aspects of his character when he becomes a cannibalistic monster who eats his own son and maybe rapes someone

 Black Cat’s characterization gets flushed down the toilet so she can be an indulgent juvenile sexual fantasy for Joe Kelly who believes Spider-Man is fundamentally a man child Black Cat’s characterization gets shot to shit again by her ripping off Catwoman by becoming a gangster, something she has never held aspiration for before and seems to want to get involved in now for no reason at all beyond being angry that Spider-Man imprisoned her and exposed her identity that wasn’t even secret in the first place

 Dan Slott who likes Doc Ock more than he likes Peter Parker decides to say screw it and make Doc Ock Spider-Man thus invalidating the entire reason he was hired, which is to write about Peter Parker. He proceeds to make Doc Ock a villain sue and cause readers to wonder if he’s this smart and this dangerous he lost so many times in the past at all? Also he tries to rape Mary Jane in issue 2 and then succeeds in maybe raping Spider-Man himself in the same issue and definitely succeeds in raping the only dwarf character in Spider-Man’s canon.

 Spider-Man becomes like Iron Man thus invalidating the entire point of his character and reasons people like to read about him.

 A mystery surrounding the Green Goblin’s identity that turns out to be the twist that he was Norman Osborn all along meaning this was a pointless mystery the whole time.

 Ben Reilly finally comes back after 20 years but doesn’t act even a little bit like the character people knew and loved causing people to wish he’d stayed dead

  Betty Brant is physically assaulted and Spider-Man tracks down the assailant but when he finds him lets him go (thus enabling him to assault other innocent women) because Aunt May guilt tripped him by saying he was a jerk at age 15 for allowing her, a 50+ year old adult and his parental guardian, to cope with Uncle Ben’s death alone on the night of his death.

  Fan favourite Mayday Parker has her character now defined by the death of her father invalidating the entire point of her character which was the ongoing relationship between herself and her Dad

  Every spider person ever fights a bunch of one note cosmic vampires across alternate niverses who are variant action figures of another one note cosmic vampire villain. The story is utterly reparative and makes Spider-Man play second fiddle to all the other characters cramming for panel time.

 I could go on but I won’t.

 To count the creative successful and enriching Slott and the post-OMD Spider-Man stories is a far easier task than to count the ones which are for the most part mediocre-God forsakenly terrible and miss the whole point of the various characters involved (most of all you know SPIDER-MAN himself!) because the latter is the norm post-OMD.

 Tellingly both volume 1 and volume 2 of Renew Your Vows a book BUILT around the concept of a married Spider-Man have (when judged appropriately given their out of continuity status) garnered perfectly respectable sales (especially in volume 1) prior to their recent time skip (an ill advised move regardless of what the series was about) and critical acclaim. And critical acclaim from people besides Marvel/Spider-Man sycophants like CBR who have vested financial interests in positively reviewing the stories.

 In fact there is a very strong argument in favour of Slott being the single most creatively damaging Spider-Man writer in history. The list of things that need to be FIXED because of his idiocy and incompetence is vast.

 Moving on to Bob’s other points:

 “Peter and MJ being together was a dumb stunt when the did it in the first place”

 If Bob had you know READ the stories leading into the wedding he’d know

 a) That relationship and marriage was being built up since 1984 albeit with the initial intention being Peter stranded at the altar.

 b) A stunt isn’t rendered invalid merely because it is a stunt. A Stunt can make sense and with the build up the wedding had this was one such example

 “The marriage generated very few decent stories that wouldn’t have worked just as well without it”

 Here is a list of a FEW decent or above stories which in some significant way make use of the Spider marriage between 1987-2007

 Kraven’s Last Hunt

 Venom

 ASM #400

 Revenge of the Green Goblin

 A Death in the Family

 ASM volume 2 #49-50

 ASM volume 2 #51-54

 Sensational Spider-Man volume 2 #32

 Sensational Spider-Man Annual 2007, the only Eisner nominated Spider-Man story ever

 Spider-Man unlimited volume 3 #2 Story 2: Making Contributions

 Eleven Angry Men and One angry Woman

 Parallel lives

 Spider-Man: the Final Adventure

 Web of Death

 Revelations the end of the Clone Saga

  Spectacular Spider-Man #241

  Spectacular Spider-Man #242-245

 ASM vol 2 #39

  Ultimate Spider-Man Anthology book: Five Minutes

  I Heart Marvel Web of Romance #1

  Spectacular Spider-Man #199-200

  Spectacular Spider-Man #250

  The Tombstone arc

  Peter Parker Spider-Man volume 2 #14

 Marvel Knights Spider-Man #1-12

  Hmmm...it’s almost like Bob sucks at mathematics and story evaluation or something. Then again he did say there was no problem with Luke Skywalker in Last Jedi so you know...I should know better.

  Oh and btw the whole ‘those would’ve worked JUST as well without the marriage’ argument is a double edged sword since there are literally less than 20 Spider-Man stories post-OMD that WOULDN’T have worked with a married Spider-Man and only one of them is good...and only if you also take entirely in isolation of Spider-Man’s wider history. Every other story with tweaks could work AS if not MORE effectively with a married Spider-Man.

  If the argument is there should be no elements in a story that do not actively contribute to it then shit....why should Spider-Man’s SINGLE status be in a book? Why should Aunt May, Jameson or shitton else be multiple stories across the decades of Spider-Man? Hell by this logic Aunt May or Betty Brant are superfluous to ASM annual #1 which inspired part of Spider-Man 2.

   “The Spider Marriage left the franchise spinning it’s wheel for a very long time.”

 This is another lie. After Peter and MJ got married there was precious little wheel spinning. Almost immediately we jumped into ongoing stories involving Betty Brant, Joe Robertson, Peter going to school again, MJ and Peter’s finances taking a hit when MJ lost her job, Jameson being impersonated by Chameleon, Black Cat dating Flash, Peter’s parents returning and THEN you got the Clone Saga FFS.

  Following that we got Norman Osborn running the Daily Bugle followed by the true wheel spinning garbage of the Mackie/Byrne run which was bad BECAUSE they axed the marriage. Following that when JMS took over his wheel spun for maybe 5 months tops? The rest of the time he reconstructed Peter and MJ and Aunt May’s characters, thrust forward with his Spider totem storyline and then began the slow build up to OMD starting with Peter becoming and Avenger.

  There were few months were NOTHING was really happening and the number of issues where that was the case owed much more to the fact that the writers needed to pad out FOUR monthly titles each month!

 “By contrast BND and Slott’s run has been good”

 By objective writing standards this is a fallacy and Bob is offering no proof to this. He just says ‘it’s been good’. Except Bob’s word isn’t proof unto itself despite how much he must like to think so.

 “Peter and MJ are more interesting now”

  This is the proof Bob is not a...I don’t want to say he isn’t true fan. I rarely use that term. It’s more that he...isn’t an informed fan.

 Anyone who knows any legit shit about Spider-Man could tell you Spider-Man is far from more interesting now than he was prior to BND.

  Pre-OMD Spider-Man was the sum of 45 years of experiences. A 30ish average guy who’d been through Hell and a lot of battles and survived them and coped with that pain. He was a competent hero and a flawed human being who was just trying to look out for the little guy and take care of his family.

  MJ meanwhile was a woman who’d also lived through Hell but demonstrated sheer steel by surviving it in spite of having no powers to fall back on. She’d gone from a carefree party animal who was seemingly selfish, to a hero in her own right who had an endless well of inner strength.

  In contrast post-OMD Peter Parker is a man-child fuck up who illegally invades foreign nations with his giant G.I. Joe action figures whilst often playing second fiddle in his own fucking book to whatever guest stars want to steal the limelight. And he’s not believable anymore. He isn’t a grounded guy who copes with the shit thrown at him. He’s the guy who just shrugs off being killed, having his body stolen and his life upended by his enemy and then losing a year of his life.

  That isn’t more interesting unless you are arguing being a Saturday morning cartoon character is inherently more interesting than being....welll actually inherently more interesting than being a certain character Stan Lee and Steve Ditko invented in 1962.

  Which Bob plainly isn’t arguing because he’s also listing MJ as ‘more interesting’....how?

  MJ isn’t even IN the book regularly any more so HOW could she be more interesting. Worse when she WAS in the book she had 2 roles. Ship tease the fans by being Peter’s friend and confidant (i.e. something she used to do BEFORE BND) or being a blind idiot in Superior which is NOT more interesting.

 So what the fuck is he talking about?

 I don’t know WHAT he’s talking about. But when you make a statement like: ‘on balance this story that eviscerated and betrayed everything about who Spider-Man is and invalidates his motivation from now on because he sold out in the biggest way possible, was on balance worth it because we got t see Doc Ock as Spider-Man try to rape people’ I certainly from WHERE he is talking from.

  And the sun don’t shine there son.