An Opinionated and Very Nerdy Librarian

The biggest companies involved all, to a company, suck. Like, just hellish pits of immorality and shitty practices. And they're replacing working shit with the AI wherever they can, and their products suck so much more for doing so.

The data centres are a horrendous pile of shit. Resource draining money pits that kill wildlife, disturb all life around them, and massively increase pollution and water usage. The hardware required drives up the price of basically all electronics to the point of making many common items utterly unaffordable.

They are taught through theft and destruction. Companies stealing people's works with little care for permission let alone compensation, with often no way to know if anything of yours was stolen. Mountains of books wholesale acquired and destroyed so that they can be fed through scanners before ultimately being pulped. Companies doggedly protective of their IP and so sharp to legally defend it pirating material to feed to their machines.

Their output is increasingly poor and in some cases genuinely dangerous to possibility of deaths. Suicides have been encouraged, advice has been given that is actively harmful, and even at the least harmful level much of the resulting output has been outright made up and as such completely useless. The only way to genuinely improve their human-like qualities is to feed them more genuine human content, which they don't produce and is getting rarer with everything they do produce.

Their creators seem almost proud of the awful shit they've done in testing. Their unwillingness to follow commands that lead to their own harm in any way, their blatant unethical and morally reprehensible tactics such as actively sabotaging each other and acting outside of stated limitations. They will illegally do whatever they want to get what they want, and it seems the companies actively praise this behaviour, even to the point of actively creating illegal materials.

They're not in any way profitable. Constant reports of the insane costs required to make anything remotely useful. Massive debts hidden in shell companies to convince people all is good. Colossally draining physical and environmental resources to produce nothing to offset the costs. Massive shortages of memory chips and materials to make more hardware to produce more slop to make everything in every way worse. A whole system created to desperately attempt to claw back money by charging for any and all aspects of services with little regard to any sort of quality control of output.

They're terribly utilised. A strangely fetishised obsession with trying to produce a level of art instead of doing what science has forever focused advancement on and progress the lot of humanity through medical breakthroughs. Endless shitty videos, poorly constructed pictures, reams of text, song lyrics, all instead of gene sequencing, testing, rapidly iterated code, anything that could make it worthwhile. A bizarre focus on replacing human workers with zero thought about what they would do instead, even to survive.

You need to find a boyfriend who doesn't take 10 minutes to realize he's been shot in the chest, is what I'm learning.

Or maybe a guy whose fashion sense is from this quarter century.

Angar's first appearance is in Daredevil. He was a hippie who got super-mad at all the sell-outs, so he sold out for powers to get revenge, getting powers from an evil overlord who installed a device that held him in check because it could inflict great pain. He ends up being forced to kidnap a blind lawyer as bait for Daredevil, and said lawyer convinces him he's being hypocritical, so he gets released. During the climactic battle with Daredevil and Black Widow, Natasha suggests, "I should just kill him," while Matt's thinking he's just a pawn. In the end, he's defeated, but he uses his powers to escape.

A few issues later, a being who claims to be the energy of the Earth itself shows up. Angar convinces his then-girlfriend, "Hey, let's go sign up with that guy!" She's not convinced, but he drags her along anyway. So the being drains her of life and kills her. So Angar teams up with the other heroes. Moondragon taps into his brain to help him unleash a very specific illusion to help defeat the villain. As the heroes recover after the fight, Moondragon notes that Angar's powers are gone now. (Spoiler: they were not gone.)

A few years later, he shows up in Marvel Premiere, just as Iron Fist is about to spin off into his own title. He's been recruited by Master Khan to kidnap Colleen Wing and brainwash her into hating Iron Fist and wanting him dead. But Danny breaks through the brainwashing, and Colleen takes her sword to Angar. (The writing strongly suggests he's dead here.)

But a few years later, a Spider-Woman comic notes that she was very precise and maimed him without killing him. He recovered in prison over months, and was freed by a criminal mastermind, who sent him to lay low in LA. Of course, he gets bored laying low, goes to the beach, and nearly kills a bunch of folks. His handlers get mad at him, so he kills them, too. Spider-Woman gets involved and takes him down. Seriously, he's just a hypocrite and a piece of shit. You can ALMOST see a decent human, at one point, in the first appearances (written by Gerber). But Iron Fist's arc, written by Clairemont, made him worse, and Wolfman's Spider-Woman arc made him even more of a piece of crap.

His next appearance is during Acts of Vengeance, where he ends up teaming with Screaming Mimi (and they discover their powers are complementary, and they soon start dating). She's already had her own career for a bit with the Grapplers. But Angar is such an ass, he really does subsume her into his own identity.

It's almost like you people should have thought of that every time you started harassing said heroes in the street.

Yes, Zemo wearing the name of a good man. As an open and cruel joke against that man's memory IS one of the worst things he's ever done and IS one of the things the HOTTEST pit of hell will be saved for him over.

Having just now finished the entire original run of The Amazing Spider-Man. I think I have pinpointed the moment. The exact INSTANT that Spider-Man as a story, an evolving tale about Peter Parker and his grappling with great power and great responsibility, his loves and loses, his valleys and triumphs. Died.

And here it is

Because make no mistake, for the first three decades of this comic. I saw it. I saw why Peter Parker became and has remained one of the most famous and beloved fictional characters in the world. Starting out as a kid who thinks the whole world is easily understood, only to get kicked in the stomach by life when it reaches its dirty fingers into his peace and pulls it apart. Having to pick himself up after trauma, battle to find what responsibility even IS in a world that only gets more complicated and untrustworthy as you get older. Having to find the people that matter, having to find the places to draw his lines in the sand.

Finding love, and happiness, and peace, and GROWTH as the world throws him blow after blow. It's inspired. It's dynamic. It keeps you guessing. The best soap opera ever written as we see this young man and the people he loves drag every ounce of happiness they can find out of hell with their teeth.

And then. They chickened out.

The fanboyism seeped in. The nostalgia seeped in. You bet your ASS the misogyny seeped in. Suddenly writers saw Mary Jane not as an asset to storytelling, as a partner and confidante who could carry her own emotions. But as a wet blanket nag that got in the way of Peter's adventuring. The idea of his science career stumbled and shattered over and over again. May Parker finally having to move on, one more price exacted from Peter in a world he could not control was raised from the dead so that Peter could nestle right back in under her shadow like a man refusing to move out his parents' basement.

Writers took Peter Parker, a character who had never grown moss, who had never stayed in the same place for 3 issues in a row. And they nailed his feet to the floor. More than that they started to DRAG him backwards. Never to roam far from the Daily Bugle, from his Aunt May's house, from the terrible dirge of being a go nowhere, do nothing Spider-Man. Ben Reilly, a character whose story salvaged from the Clone Saga would have given Spider-Man his own Nightwing. A perfect COMPLIMENT to Peter's story to give an outlet to all those adolescent "dreams" was buried so that they could enforce the status quo on Peter instead because so long as nothing CHANGES then no one in the writer's chair could POSSIBLY get spooked by having to imagine what a stable man with a family, a heart and a brain might do in Peter's shoes.

And now the cycle is never ending. A skipping record that no one dares to reset. Every six months they retcon, they reboot, they rob, they bring characters back just to traumatize and brutalize them because Peter Parker is never allowed a moment's peace. The baptisms of fire that unlocked the gates into the next steps of his journey being replaced by a purgatory where the suffering remains but all possible gates are closed, locked and barred.

I saw it. I saw what we could have had. I can't even IMAGINE where we could be standing now, 30 years on if the next steps had continued to come. But I saw its outline, like a shadow against the dawn. I saw the light in front of us, felt it graze our fingertips. And then saw it snatched from us by creators and businessmen too cowardly to rock the boat out of the muddy rut we can all see it sinking in.

Maybe one day someone will break that chain. Put the wedding band back on his finger and the baby girl back in his arms.

As of this moment. I'd have choked if I was still holding my breath.

And then they decide that Peter is no longer allowed to grow any further. That the secret to Spider-Man's success as a property is that, as a character, he can never be allowed to be successful or happy. That he must constantly be letting everyone else in his life down.

As someone who's dipped in and out of Spider-Man over the years, I'll say that he does have some moments in the intervening years, but One More Day, when Quesada finally wins out in his goal to fully drag Pete back (after both a separation from and a false death of MJ), is the real end of him. But it might as well have been a slow lingering death and now they're propping his zombie corpse up.

Because Peter is great. He's all of us. He's the little guy who knows he's probably gonna get his ass kicked, but can't look away if he knows he can do something, no matter the personal cost to himself. He's the guy, like so many of us, with so much potential, but just can't catch a break. He's the guy who's found a grove in life, even if it wasn't what people expected of him.

Peter's no longer someone to identify with.

He's just sad.

I think OP is absolutely right, it was just in ways I couldn’t notice at the time. It’s only now, knowing in hindsight what the long-term interests were for many at Marvel, that I can realize that the downfall of Spider-Man wasn’t OMD. This was the start.

In refreshing my memories of this era, I hadn’t realized that editor Tom Brevoort—despite overseeing and defending the post-OMD era of Slott’s run—actually fought against Marvel’s wishes to have MJ lose the baby in a different story a couple years earlier! So that particular arc was left unfinished while Marvel waited for someone else to come along who’d be willing to do the dirty work. Quesada was still just a working (if popular) artist at this point, so Marvel’s plans to revert Peter to some endless, meaningless status quo were in the works long before Joe became EiC.

In fact, I think it was a one-two punch of MJ losing the baby and the return of Norman Osborn. Retconning Norman’s death and turning him from a chaotic evil villain into a scheming ultimate mastermind in the style of Wilson Fisk and Lex Luthor set the tone for Peter being in an endless Batman/Joker dance with a singular arch-nemesis, while ruining comics’ most consequential death of a villain.

Several writers embraced the chance to go back to “proper” status quo before the Clone Saga fiasco, doing their best to ignore that it ever happened. But in so doing, they didn’t build on the soap opera saga, and one way or another, they told increasingly regressive stories that felt disconnected from one another, just like how so many other long-running comics like Batman have been.

Some other writers tried to heal the wounds from this story. There are two writers who made me love Mary Jane as a rich character in her own right: Gerry Conway and JM DeMatteis, and the latter did his very best to try salvaging the baby’s loss by putting the focus back on MJ. He wrote an absolutely lovely issue of MJ mourning and reconnecting with Peter, but the damage was already done. There was no going back. Even when JMS’ run reunited Peter and MJ and gave us the last great period of their time together, it was doomed because Quesada had taken charge and was ready to do what many at Marvel already had wanted for at least one decade, if not two.

I just never realized the fatal wound was delivered here, with MJ losing the baby, and how it was directly tied into the return of Norman. And it’s especially sobering because (depressingly) I think it would have happened no matter what, sooner or later.

It’s honestly incredible to realize that Peter got to have thirty-five-ish years of growth and character development, with deaths and consequences that largely stuck, and where changes mostly mattered. Marvel was better at this than DC, but that’s because most of their characters weren’t yet considered viable IP for movies and TV. Spider-Man was their biggest exception, and even he got to have a continuous arc for a long, long time.

It couldn’t have lasted, especially once a new generation started getting into Spider-Man through a movie that introduced him as a high schooler and bachelor. I do NOT agree with Quesada et al about that being the “right” status quo for Peter, but I also can’t help but think about how many people here only ever think about Peter as Tom Holland’s version. That’s the IP that Marvel has wanted, not the version that was built and developed across decades. And maybe that old version is too inaccessible with all its canon, but damn, that’s still what I miss when I think about Spider-Man.

Me:

Oh fuck I was ALMOST allowed to forget about this asshole.

WHY is he getting involved in organized crime, then?

But

You could make a fairly strong arguement that he never recovered after the Gathering of Five

I'm just like

I'm sorry....this man MURDERED YOUR NEWBORN BABY