MCU Spider-Man is the worse Spider-Man. Not because Tom Holland is a bad actor or anything— it’s purely because they took the defining trait of his character- a person from the impoverished part of NYC trying to balance life between his work, his school, and his superhero work, while having to figure everything out on his own- and made Tony Stark, a billionaire, his mentor who gives him all the technology he could ever want. The nuance of his character is gone when you strip his original context away.

I don't agree, actually. I think you have to tell different stories and talk about different things, but I think that the crux of his story remains, and that taking different approaches to that story keeps it interesting and relevant.

Much the same way that I really don't need another iteration of seeing Uncle Ben die on-screen bc I've seen it a hundred times, I think that like... I'm really interested in seeing what happens next with Peter because like...

... yeah, Tony gave him everything he could want, and I don't just mean money or tech. Peter had no father figure in his life anymore, and Tony gave him that. Peter wanted for opportunity, and Tony gave him that. Peter wanted adult guidance, and Tony gave him that...

And then he died.

I don't agree that what makes Peter interesting is solely and only the fact that he's literally a working-class hero - I think he's also (as Into the Spider-Verse shows us VERY clearly, there's a whole scene about this!) a meditation on grief, on how you manage to keep going, on how to save the world for everyone else when your world has ended. I think he's a meditation on guilt and teshuvah, on owning your responsibility (hey, I think there's a tagline in that idea, someone should look into that), on making good when you've fucked up...

And I think that MCU Peter addresses those concepts in a really interesting way. I think we see blue-collar Peter in everything that happens in Far From Home, big time.

When you're not used to having money or power and having to struggle for it, when the money, the power, the resources come to you, especially all of a sudden, you literally don't know what to do. Resource scarcity changes your brain, makes it harder to plan long-term, to see anything but survival. And when we receive things that we don't feel we've earned, especially when our lives have been resource scarcity and struggle to survive, the imposter syndrome kicks in so hard.

And that? That makes people easy to manipulate. It makes them easy to take advantage of, especially if they're also grieving the loss of a father figure and you make yourself into a substitute.

None of the other MCU characters would have reacted to the events of Far From Home the way that Peter did. None of them would have had that aching insecurity, that feeling that they just don't deserve this, in the same way that Peter did. (Maybe Scott Lang when he was younger, but Scott is an adult and not vulnerable the same way Peter is.)

These are different questions than I think get asked in the kind of Spider-Man movies the person above likes, but that doesn't mean they're not Good Spider-Man Questions, or that the part of Peter they're talking about is gone. It's a reframing of those same issues and questions, but none of those questions can be asked without the core of who Peter is staying the same.

What questions? Well...

• What happens when you've lived your life trying to fix your guilt over one father figure dying painfully in front of you and then another father figure dies painfully in front of you?
• What happens - what really happens - when you have all the resources you could want, but the adults you trusted to help you manage that go away and you have literally no concept of what to do next because this is just fantasy levels of money for you, this isn't real money, what are you even doing?
• For that matter, what happens when you really wanted to play with the big kids, and then you get to, but half of the big kids are gone now and you're the big kid now actually but you have no idea how to be a superhero, not really?
• What happens when the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man when the neighborhood he's responsible for becomes the size of the planet because he has planet-level powers and resources and with great power...
• And so much more tbh

Like I'm not saying you have to like MCU Spidey, but I think it's really wrong to say that the core of what makes his character interesting is not there. None of the plot lines in the MCU Spidey movies can work without Peter carrying all of that baggage and coming from where he comes from. And like... I mean, I get it, I want my heroes to be from my background too, but I ... like, at one point like 15y ago I went from making $25k a year to like $75k suddenly, by just lucking in to a job that was terrible but paid a lot of money. I'd never had that kind of money in my life, and it was scary and overwhelming and I didn't know what to do.

And so here I am watching Peter go "aaaaa this is too much" and I'm like bro, fucking mood.

I think I wouldn't have liked it if he'd just been fine with it all, but he isn't. He's terrified and sad and he doesn't actually want all that, he wants his father figure back, he wants to live up to the legacy of the man who died to save the whole universe. He struggles the way he does bc he's uniquely Peter, placed in a different situation than we've seen on-screen before, but one that addresses him very directly and shows how different he is from the rest of the Avengers.

Anyway, I love the MCU's Peter Parker, fight me in a Joann parking lot.

Reblogging for “Anyway, I love the MCU's Peter Parker, fight me in a Joann parking lot.”

A man in a truck once started shouting rude shit at me in a Joann Fabrics parking lot bc I'm sure he saw me as someone who he could make cry and make his dick hard or whatever.

He got someone slapping their chest, screaming at him to get out of his truck and get his ass beat by a cripple, if he was such a big man.

So yeah, I've actually challenged someone to a fight in a Joann parking lot. :)