🚨 SPOILER WARNING OF BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS 🚨
STOP READING, POindexter.
Seriously.
If you have not seen Spider-Man: Brand New Day and intend to enter the theater pure, innocent, and unviolated by knowledge…
GET THE FUCK OUT.
There are spoilers below.
BIG ONES.
FAIR WARNING:
---
JEAN GREY IS A FUCKING VILLAIN IN SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY
Sooo…
Apparently we're doing this again.
Jean Grey is traumatized.
Her sister was taken.
Her sister was experimented on.
Jean is angry.
Jean wants revenge.
Got it.
Terrible.
Sympathetic.
Now explain to me what the fuck that has to do with the innocent people Jean mind-fucks along the way.
Because I watched the movie too.
And apparently telepathically hijacking another human being, turning their body into your personal Uber, and sending people into situations where they can DIE is now filed under:
"She's hurting."
Oh.
Well shit.
Case dismissed.
Everybody go home.
Jean has trauma.
Apparently the dead guy should've considered that before getting in the way of her character development.
That man she sends walking into traffic?
HIT.
BY.
A.
FUCKING.
CAR.
The movie can play whatever sympathetic music it wants afterward.
My brother in Christ looked pretty goddamn dead to me.
You don't get to turn somebody's cerebral cortex into a PlayStation controller and then receive the "misunderstood little flower" discount because your childhood sucked.
That's not how morality works.
Trauma explains behavior.
It does not magically turn victims into traffic cones.
And then I remembered John Walker.
HAHAHAHA.
OH, MARVEL.
You magnificent moral slot machine.
John Walker kills an actual terrorist after watching his best friend get murdered?
VILLAIN.
MONSTER.
LOOK WHAT HE DID TO THE SHIELD.
The symbolism!
The corruption!
The horror!
Jean Grey commandeers innocent human bodies with fucking TELEPATHY, throws civilians into mortal danger, leaves collateral damage behind her while pursuing personal revenge…
"She's complicated."
GTFOH.
One guy kills an enemy combatant in a rage and we're supposed to contemplate the death of Captain America's moral legacy.
Jean turns unwilling civilians into meat puppets and suddenly we're doing trauma-informed villainy.
Pick a fucking calculator.
Because the moral arithmetic isn't mathing.
And before somebody adjusts their glasses and starts typing:
"Actually, Jean's sister…"
I KNOW.
That's why I called her sympathetic.
Sympathetic villains are still villains.
Magneto survived Auschwitz.
Still can't murder innocent humans.
Killmonger watched injustice consume his people.
Still can't start a global bloodbath.
Wanda lost damn near everybody she ever loved.
Still can't enslave an entire town.
And Jean Grey doesn't get a vagina-shaped exemption from cause and effect.
Peter practically coddling her makes it worse.
Peter Parker is supposed to be the patron saint of:
YOUR PAIN DOES NOT GIVE YOU PERMISSION TO HURT OTHER PEOPLE.
That is practically the fucking Spider-Man thesis statement.
His entire life is trauma.
Parents gone.
Uncle murdered.
Friends killed.
Aunt killed.
Girlfriend forgot he exists.
The universe has been kicking Peter Parker directly in the balls since approximately puberty.
And what does he do?
He puts the mask back on and saves people.
That's WHY Spider-Man works.
Pain isn't his permission slip.
It's his responsibility.
So when Jean's pain starts producing innocent casualties, Peter can understand her without pretending she's merely a wounded puppy who accidentally knocked over the garbage.
No.
She's dangerous.
She's violating the most intimate boundary another human being possesses:
THEIR OWN FUCKING MIND.
Think about how horrifying that actually is.
Your arms aren't yours.
Your legs aren't yours.
Your voice isn't yours.
Your decisions aren't yours.
Some telepath is driving your body while you're trapped somewhere inside watching.
That's horror-movie shit.
Do that to innocent people and I don't care how sad your flashback was.
You're the villain today.
Maybe Jean becomes a hero later.
Good.
Give her redemption.
Make her earn it.
That's what redemption IS.
But you cannot redeem somebody while simultaneously insisting they didn't really do anything requiring redemption.
Trauma is context.
Not absolution.
A tragic backstory can explain why you became the monster.
It doesn't resurrect the people you stepped on while becoming one.
Jean Grey may eventually become an X-Man.
Fine.
But in Spider-Man: Brand New Day?
Put the sad violin down.
She's a fucking villain.
And the corpse in the street doesn't give a shit about her character arc.
More crimes against selective reasoning:
https://linktr.ee/ObeyMyCadence
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