https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqGs09OiyEQ

Let’s debunk this.

Whenever some dipshit talks about MJ not having enough ‘to do’ specifically in relation to her PS4 career it boils down to this.

MJ didn’t do anything in the comics directly related to Peter’s role as Spider-Man.

Which is asinine because the story of Spider-Man isn’t about Peter being a superhero!

It’s about the life of this guy who HAPPENS to be a superhero and exploring how those two sides of his life impact upon one another.

You know the whole great power/great responsibility thing?

Yeah you can basically translate that more linearly to “This character is about juggling the responsibilities normal people deal with against the responsibility of being a hero’

THAT is the damn point.

For example, literally every Aunt May sceanario from the Steve Ditko run.

Oh no, Aunt May is sick Peter has to get medicine for her. He can earn money as Spider-Man to do that but oh no that means he won’t be home to look after her and he’s so worried about her that it might impact how he fights.

Or.

Oh no, Aunt May is sick Peter has to cut out on this crime in progress to go help her!

I’m not saying Aunt May’s character was handled the best back then by any means. But people did adore how she was used in the JMS run where she was you know…also not directly involved in his superhero life.

Fuck even Alfred isn’t REALLY directly involved in Batman’s life but people still love him.* Same for Ganke Lee in Miles Morales stories.

The book is about Peter’s life not specifically his life as a superhero, but everything.

His job, his friendships, his romantic life, his financial straits, everything.

And they impact upon and get impacted by his life as a hero.

At which point Mary Jane doesn’t need  to directly interact with that side of his life because she’s already ‘doing stuff’ by interacting with the Peter Parker side of his life.

Her role works great in a video game because in a video game you aren’t going to play a character who has to study or has to pay the rent or has a mini-game about managing his anxieties and neuroses. Everything revolves and feeds back into what he does in the context of being a superhero which is where you don’t just spend over half the story (like in most Spider-Man yarns) but where you spend the overwhelming majority of the time because that is the whole point.

For many people Peter’s superheroics in the comics isn’t  the point or at best it is only half  the point.

People often say Spidey has the best supporting cast ever and that’s true but that’s a weird goddam statement to make if you define a good supporting cast member as someone who directly contributes in some way to his role as Spider-Man. Because Flash, Harry, Gwen, MJ, Liz, Aunt May, Betty Brant and everyone who wasn’t Jameson, George Stacy, Jean DeWolff or Felicia didn’t do that! 

And yet we were still invested whenever Flash became an alcoholic, or Liz got pregnant, or Harry and MJ’s relationship hit the rocks, or Jameson got engaged or Betty left her husband or whatever.

Why?

Because we cared about these characters because Peter cared about them and we cared about Peter because we were reading it for his LIFE over all not his superhero side of it.

MJ thus would’ve been doing enough by just interacting with Peter via normal life soap opera and human drama. Was it always handled great? No. but the fix for that isn’t giving her something that directly taps into his job as a superhero.

Let’s move on to the rest of the quote.

Being a journalist embodies her with a lot of wit and drive.

Why the fuck does this specific profession innately give people who work that profession these personality traits? That’s not how life works.

More poignantly it presumes that MJ in the comics didn’t have any wit.

And certainly no drive.

And how about that whole ‘bombshell party girl isn’t the romantic ideal it once was’ huh?

Um….what?

First of all a ‘romantic ideal’ is rather subjective. Some people (for the sake of argument let us presume for a moment heterosexual men) want a party girl. Some people would prefer more of a chilled out person. Some guys want a bombshell but other guys might be physically attracted to girls who are more amazonian in their appearance. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Second of all, even by modern stereotypical standards (again from a heterosexual male POV) classic Mary Jane is still absolutely within the ‘romantic ideal’.

Third of all MJ was presented as not  being the romantic ideal when she was introduced in the 1960s. She was played as a foil for Gwen Stacy with Peter (shallowly as young people are want to do) finding her party girl personality a major turn off.

Fourth of all this statement speaks to the absolute ignorance of the author (and many fans) who seem to weirdly think MJ was a party girl when she debuted and then stayed exactly like that until she married Spider-Man.

She didn’t. Her party girl personality had even been reigned in by the time she began dating Peter in the 1970s.

Fifth of all why the fuck is ‘updating’ MJ from party girl going to naturally land on journalist?

Finally let’s tackle the bullshit model and damsel thing.

This mentality needs to fuck off and die ASAP.

MJ was not placed in a damsel-in-distress role any more frequently than most recurring superhero love interests. 

Defining that as her role, as her ‘job’ practically is bullshit, insulting and an erasure of her whole goddam character.

Being a damsel-in-distress isn’t an act of negative penalization upon your character, wherein you can be awesome outside of that instance in the story but it doesn’t matter because you were made into a damsel in distress.

I mean FFS NOBODY treats male characters this way in spite of the uncountable times Robin, Jimmy Olsen, Commissioner Gordon, Harry Osborn, J. Jonah Jameson, Flash Thompson or whoever have been in need of rescue by Superman, Batman or Spider-Man!

I can understand criticising using a female character like that but it’s nevertheless a BAD thing to treat it like it erases and boils down a female character to nothing but that merely because it happened.**

And then there is the modelling thing.

Jesus Christ do I hate the modelling thing.

Not only is MJ’s jobs in wider media NOT as a model, not only was that NOT her first job, not her job for over a decade and never her most noteworthy job…it’s just fucked up. 

It dismisses rel life people with that job as shallow or less worthy and it defines a female character specifically through her looks. 

And real talk MJ being a model is LESS relevant to her character than Peter being a photographer is. Photography isn’t even one of Peter’s passions, science is, science actually speaks to who he is as a person. Photography is just a means to an end. So being a photographer is not important to who peter is as a character and MJ being a model is even LESS important to her character.

And yet people like define her entire character through that job. I dunno if that’s sexist for reasons I talked about above or messed up because it defines her purely through her job when real people are more than the job they do.*** Either way it’s fucked up.

And as a fan it just grinds my gears because the ONLY reason MJ being a model is talked about as much as it is or appeared as much as it has in the comics is BECAUSE writers and fans keep throwing the term around in relation to MJ.

It’s a shitty self fulfilling prophecy

*And Batman unlike Spider-Man actually does  prioritize his costume life over his superhero one.

**And not for nothing the video plays clips from the Raimi movies when talking about her being a damsel in distress (specifically a moment where she was substituting for Gwen Stacy) because of course it does. Because everyone knows judging a comic book character by their comic book versions would be stupid and Dunst MJ is everything comic book MJ was.

***Someone who works as a janitor isn’t less worthy as a person or wholesale defined through that job, they have a life and personality beyond that.

What I think is so interesting about MJ’s relationship with her father, and something that is true in many real life analogous situations, is that her feelings about him are not black and white.

It isn’t a case of she was abused by him, saw his abuse of her sister and mother, and just hated him, never wanting to see him again.

She explained that even after he moved far away from her and clearly didn’t give a damn, she still tried to write him.

She understood her sister (who was abused worse than her) wanting to help her Dad, even if it meant committing a crime, and felt tempted to go along with it herself. 

And years later, even after gaining what seemed like closure when she chose her sister over him and sent him to jail, she still sought him out to try and settle things, indicating she didn’t have complete closure or peace of mind regarding their relationship.

Typically in stories like this, imo especially when they centre upon female characters, the dynamic is either that the abused child hates the parent or else is still desperate for love from them.

MJ and Phillip’s relationship, despite showing up explicitly in literally less than 10 issues across 35 years, brilliantly paints things more grey.

MJ does resent her father. She is angry with him. She does on some level hate him. And not for nothing, the person she fell in love with is nothing like him to the point of being almost a Bizarro version of him.*

And yet she also demonstrates a desire, possibly even a need, to connect with him, to have something positive between them. Or in other words a part of her genuinely wants her father to love her.

Mary Jane having incredibly conflicted feelings over a man she has a deep emotional connection to? Where have I seen that before…

I’m not saying this is necessarily healthy even if it did work out in the end. Although nor am I saying MJ is like fundamentally broken inside or has deep seated issues that makes her attraction to Peter creepy or toxic.

I’m just saying it’s an interesting piece of characterization and incredibly realistic.