ágora

ooooo great question!!!

I think Jason 'acts of service' Todd and Peter 'gift giver' Parker absolutely would do anniversaries (but it's definitely Jason who keeps track of them. Peter keeps the dates in his phone so he won't forget).

Though they'd be understated about things: I love the idea that these two men, so used to a life outside of the norm, appreciating the simplicity of a mundane life. A nice home-cooked dinner. A picnic day out of Gotham with Dog. Going to watch a movie. No grand gestures from either of them, not when their life outside the apartment is reigned by bigger-than-life personalities/disasters etc.

Jason, closet romantic that he is, keeps track of littler dates. First kiss. First time Peter laughed so hard he nearly fainted. The day he realised he was in love with Peter. Peter's learnt to just accept that days when he comes home to a foot rub/massage, or an impromptu day out, or sushi from the one trustworthy restaurant in the Diamond District, could be a 'special day', or they could just be because Jason felt like it. Asking Jason tells him nothing: the guy's tight lipped.

Peter's more likely to organise something bigger, but he plans in advance for them. Hunting for the exact out of print book he knows Jason wanted. Or a day to that museum in Metropolis Jason expressed an interest in months ago, planned right down to the path they'll take and where they'll eat afterwards. A prank on Bruce/Batman that he ropes the Batlings into helping out with.

Like the other day I read a fanfic where Jason Todd is remodeling his kitchen and is concerned about wooden countertops because what if you get raw chicken on your wooden countertop?

You think a 13 year old thinks about countertops? Think again my friend that fic was written by an Adult

because steve’s main issue with the sokovia accords is that in signing them the avengers “surrender their right to choose” and if they sign them, they will be essentially owned by the government. and steve says that the government is “run by people with agendas and agendas change.”

how does bucky killing the starks come into this? howard worked for the government. he worked for shield, and thus worked unknowingly for hydra, for years. until one day hydra decided that howard was a loose end that needed taken care of. shield’s (hydra’s) agenda changed. and when their agenda changed they sent in the winter soldier to kill howard and maria.

Peter wasn't aware of why he was there, he just knew that “Cap is wrong” and should be stopped. He didn't even want to be there! Tony forced him to, groomed him.

By being away from Tony, isolated with Sam and Bucky, and talking a lot, Peter might've realized about what all of this was about. Bucky there is important because, again, living example, and we know that Spider-Man is way stronger than a super-soldier, so what would happen if his DNA was in the government's database? The same government who are not only run by people with agendas, but also had Hydra among them?

With great power, comes great responsibility. It's Peter responsibility to not let his powers fall into the wrong hands.

“When you can do the things that I can, but you don't, and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you.” That's what he said.

Not having Spider-Man becoming Team Cap puts a damper in his character. He just follows Stark's orders, never stands against him, doesn't worry about the responsibility, of what will happen if Spider-Man is taken away from him. And worse, after when he does find out about the Accords, he... does nothing. He still looks up to Iron Man, he still wants “to be like him”. It goes against of what he said earlier in CACW, because the Accords wouldn't allow him to do a lot of shit, and bad things would happen.

But well, whatever I guess, since the Accords are never really addressed in the MCU. We are told they are playing, and later in She-Hulk iirc we see Matt saying the Accords were repealed. What?

because steve’s main issue with the sokovia accords is that in signing them the avengers “surrender their right to choose” and if they sign them, they will be essentially owned by the government. and steve says that the government is “run by people with agendas and agendas change.”

how does bucky killing the starks come into this? howard worked for the government. he worked for shield, and thus worked unknowingly for hydra, for years. until one day hydra decided that howard was a loose end that needed taken care of. shield’s (hydra’s) agenda changed. and when their agenda changed they sent in the winter soldier to kill howard and maria.

Alright! I saw it, I hated it, and 2 months and 7000 words later, I’ve finally laid out my reasons why. I dallied on this for a couple of reasons – one, because I hate it, and I don’t really want to think about it anymore, and two because I don’t actually enjoy being a killjoy that much, except of course on twitter, that beautiful sea of 140 character negativity. But a couple of people seemed interested in my thoughts, and here they are. One thing I want to note is that I talk about advertising and what we’re being sold in this movie a lot; my dad was in advertising (and in fact for a large chunk of my childhood he worked in advertising for Disney) so I was raised to pick apart what I’m being sold at any point in time. (My friend’s dad was a musical buff and she used to get quizzed on those; my dad would ask me what every commercial was actually selling me from the age of like four up.) Also like, as a general rule, I hate fun. But I tried to at least be funny while I was hating fun.

The Amazing Spider-man #33 (1963-1998) / Spider-man: homecoming (2017)

I had a bad time watching Spider-Man: Homecoming. It’s a movie I really, really, really dislike. Someone once told me they don’t think they’d ever disliked anything like I disliked Spider-Man: Homecoming, and that’s a fair statement. However, this scene was the straw that broke the camel’s back. This scene was the point where I started daydreaming about the theater catching on fire so I wouldn’t have to finish watching the movie. I want to outline three ultimately connected reasons why I think this scene is total bullshit and an incredible disrespect not only to the original comic it comes from, but to the legacy and integrity of Spider-Man as a character on the whole.

1) The removal of context and de-personalization of the scene. This isn’t, as it commonly gets reduced to, and which Homecoming further doubledowned on, a generic overcoming the odds scene. In the original scene in Amazing Spider-Man #33, if Peter should perish, it’s not just his life that would be forfeit. It’s not the lives of countless strangers who wouldn’t have Spider-Man to save them from future peril. He’s not thinking of that. He’s thinking of one person. What the above panels and what many others have left out when discussing this scene is that he has to escape from the crushing rubble or Aunt May will die.

He overcomes the rubble for her. This is a scene about a child’s love for his parent, specifically his mother figure, and that child becoming a man. This is the Bar Mitzvah of Spider-Man scenes; it’s no coincidence it takes place in the comics just as he’s entering college. This is, in its own way, a graduation scene, this is the full realization of what with great powers comes great responsibility means (a phrase and concept conspicuously missing from Spider-Man: Homecoming, which I’ll get to in a minute). “Come on, Peter, come on, Spider-Man” may have sounded inspirational at first, but it is a far, far cry away from “I must prove worthy of that strength or else I don’t deserve it.” 

Instead, in Homecoming, a movie that effectively shoved May’s emotional role in his life off a cliff to make room for a new and invented desire for the all important Male Role Model Figure, RDJ’s face Mufasas into an oil puddle and that’s the end of that. There are very few characters in fiction, and very few who are as popular as Spider-Man, who entirely eschew the concept of the male role model, and who grow and learn because of their love for their mother specifically. And then Homecoming came along and said, “Well, geez, how are we supposed to sell action figures of that?”

2) The importance of the mask. Look at the gifs above, and then the panels they’re contrasted against. Leaving aside the specific monologue, which, yes, I agree, would not easily naturally fit itself into a movie, although the dialogue they replaced it with is lacking any sort of character or originality in the extreme – what’s the biggest difference? 

The biggest difference is that Tom Holland’s Spider-Man has his mask removed. His face is bare.

Taschen’s Little Book of the Amazing Spider-Man contains a great piece of commentary about Amazing Spider-Man #33: 

“In this four page sequence Steve Ditko orchestrated a tour-de-force, showcasing his ability to maintain tension, maximize drama, and move the reader through each panel with the precision of a master cinematographer. Spider-Man’s body language tells the tale, moving from unrelenting despair to grim determination – all without facial expressions.”

All without facial expressions being the key here. The emotion in the original scene is so strong you don’t need to see his face. I find the animation of the mask in Homecoming and, yes, in Spider-Man PS4 too, to be cheating, to be entirely honest. The blankness of Spider-Man’s mask should offer a challenge: are you a strong enough storyteller to carry your piece using a lead who spends a lot of time anonymous, mysterious, faceless? By removing the mask in this scene, it betrays a lack of faith in the audience. In Homecoming, we have to see the tears, the sweat, the strain to capture the terror, the literal and figurative weight of this scene. I have no feelings on Tom Holland’s acting, specifically; I’ve seen him in two movies, one where I liked his performance a lot (Captain America: Civil War) and one where I loathed his performance more than I’ve ever loathed a performance before (Spider-Man: Homecoming). So I cast no aspersions to his greater career when I say that either Tom Holland wasn’t a strong enough character actor to portray the sheer emotion required in this scene through the mask, or the people who made this movie simply decided that he wasn’t. 

3) Power and responsibility: a theme.

Look, we’re tired of responsibility. I get it. No one wants to be responsible. It’s much easier to crack jokes about Spider-Man’s iconic motto – “with great power comes great responsibility!” – than to actually consider what that responsibility means, and furthermore to hold others, let alone yourself, accountable for it. Gee, how corny, how tired. The MCU itself would rather make these jokes; every wisecrack reference to the famous line in Jessica Jones made me want to reach for the whisky, too. I think it’s a big part of why we as an audience and as creators continually shove Peter Parker back into the nursery, making him as young and bumblingly innocent as possible; the more adult he is, the more responsibility he shoulders, as a man, as the son of a woman who grows older each year, as a lover, a husband, yes, as a father. And that’s only his personal responsibilities, the responsibilities of any normal man. Those then have to be weighed against the responsibility thrust upon him by an accident of fate, by a spider’s bite. His responsibility to New York. His responsibility to justice. His responsibility to millions of people whose names he will never even know. What do you owe an entire world or a single stranger, when you can do what he can do?

“So much responsibility. It’s not fair.” – Spectacular Spider-Man v2 #14

So we remove the responsibility. We rely on relatability instead. We water it down. Homecoming is littered with irresponsibility, both small and large, both in the story and in the storytelling. Homecoming eschews responsibility to the story and the character (and to the viewer) in favor of advertisements: the Audi commercial, the bank Spider-Man attempts to save at the beginning being a real life partner of Marvel studios. Drones, talking weaponized suits with lady voices ala Alexa or Siri, ATMs and Audi ads, oh my. 

And no Uncle Ben. We’re tired of Uncle Ben. We don’t want to have to watch him die on screen a whole third time. We’re tired of a message that Uncle Ben has now become synonymous with (but which originally he never even spoke): with great power comes great responsibility. In all things, always.

But then there’s this scene. This scene doesn’t work without the Uncle Ben origin story, a piece of Spider-Man mythos Homecoming dismisses with a flippant remark that it would “put a damper” on the piece, as if the story of a young man who loses a beloved family member to gun violence wouldn’t be more relatable to audiences in 2017. As if anyone would ever make a Batman piece and go “it would really put a damper on this if his parents were dead.” (If you don’t want to do a Spider-Man origin story, don’t do an origin story. But then don’t go digging around the high school years – there’s a whopping entire 780+ issues of the Amazing Spider-Man title alone that take place after he graduates; stop mining the setting of the first 28.) This scene is a bookend, because Peter had the power to stop the robber who ultimately killed Uncle Ben and he didn’t use that power responsibly. To quote from Taschen’s brief but excellent commentary on Amazing Spider-Man #33 again:

“This was Ditko’s coming-of-age moment for Spider-Man. As an adult, Peter Parker shook away the guilt over his Uncle Ben’s death – “lifted the weight” as it were – and would move forward by saving the life of his aunt. The teenage hero, now an adult, had to accept the responsibility of his actions.”

Well @zawarudio , while he isn’t particularly religious and will participate in Christian celebrations like Christmas, I wouldn’t go as far as to call him Christian. In fact I would go as far as to outright say he’s Jewish

We can start with his constant use of yiddish

Which we can follow up with him participating in the Shavout as well as being shown wearing a Kippa. Which certainly implies more than just a vague familiarity with Judaism

Not to mention that his creator (Stan Lee) was Jewish, and Spiderman is supposed to be the superhero most appliable to Stan Lee himself.

And we can finish with the very direct and definitive answer given by one of Spidermans comic book writers Brian Michael Bendis

https://traincat.tumblr.com/post/181255248754/can-you-make-a-post-about-peter-parker-being

On the use of Yiddish in Spider-Man specifically and how he deploys it beyond just the occasional word: https://traincat.tumblr.com/post/616689611937300480/kinda-random-but-do-you-have-any-panels-of-peter

This is definitely a topic that I have a lot of thoughts on, though unfortunately I’m not aware of that many outside articles on the topic, which is a shame because I think the fact that it has to be addressed at all is very, very telling. @karenpages has a very good meta post about Spider-Man: Homecoming in general that heavily touches on the movie’s economics here that I highly recommend.

I think there’s one thing we have to be very clear on, though: the MCU didn’t want Spider-Man to be poor, because it wanted to make a fun movie, and being poor isn’t fun. I’m not being facetious, and I’m not trying to be edgy by hating on the popular and current Spider-Man film adaptation; if you look at the film, this is literally what’s going on. You cannot, in good faith, argue that MCU Spider-Man honestly experiences financial difficulties in the finished film. I know there’s a deleted scene involving unpaid bills, and I appreciate that, but the point is that scene was deleted, and it is not in the final product. MCU Peter Parker, unlike basically every other version of the character, doesn’t need to have a job. He doesn’t need to work for the Bugle to support himself and his aunt. This too is related to the erasure of Peter Parker’s Jewish coding and history -- he’s just an ordinary, relatable kid in the MCU, and for the MCU that means he’s not Jewish and he’s definitely not poor, because that wouldn’t be very relatable, would it, regardless of the fact that far more people are in bad financial situations than the opposite. In 616 comics canon, during Peter’s teen years, Aunt May is too frail or in too ill health to work. Peter explicitly has to get a job in order to support his family. He even laments the fact that Medicare doesn’t cover enough of the costs for her healthcare, which, if we’re going to talk about relatable content, if you’re not independently wealthy and you have had an ill relative, I’m sure you can understand the stress involved there. In 616, there’s absolutely no denying that Peter is aware of the stress of being poor, and that he feels deeply not just for himself and for his family but for complete strangers who are also facing financial hard times. He’s very empathetic, the way only someone who has experienced these kinds of hardships can be:

Amazing Spider-Man #50 -- it is depressing how long ago this comic was published and how, when you look at it, very little has changed.

Spider-Man: Homecoming’s ad for Marvel’s partner, Synchrony Bank -- spot the difference. Not only is using Spider-Man to advertise savings accounts totally out of touch with the material when one of the things Spider-Man as a hero is most famous for is living paycheck to paycheck like an ordinary schmuck, but it’s totally glossing over the fact that in comics canon Peter knows that banks are not the ordinary person’s friend. In Marvel Fanfare #42, for example, he blackmails a bank manager with said manager’s sexual affair in order to make sure he apologizes and gives a single mother her job as a teller back after she’s fired because she won’t respond to said manager’s sexual advances. This is the Spider-Man we deserve and that we need. When talking about superheroes and the economic climate, it’s important to address the fact that superheroes shouldn’t only care about beating up the big bad guy of the picture. If they don’t honestly care about the disenfranchised, they aren’t super -- and that’s always what has made Spider-Man special, because he comes from a background where he uniquely suited to understand the plight of those in need. He defends people in apartment buildings where the landlords are trying to push them out so they can raise the rents and gentrify the neighborhood. He saves victims from muggers. These are ordinary people, without great financial means. He’s angry -- justifiably -- at the abuse of the elderly, at neglected children, at people who prey on the victims of society. He doesn’t whine because he wanted to spend time with his crush on a fancy European school vacation. 

The MCU’s Spider-Man, on the other hand, eschews the idea that Peter Parker is poor, and it does this in a very subtle but very simple and powerful way that I’m going to outline, because this is very easy to miss. That’s the point of it. They wanted to do away with the notion that Peter Parker is poor -- because that’s so depressing, nobody wants to think about poverty in their fun summer movie -- while being careful not to do it so blatantly that their erasure was noticed by their greater audience. It’s not as simple as moving Peter to a mansion, or having him throw around hundred dollar bills. No, the way you know MCU Peter isn’t poor is very simple, and it goes by very fast. I’ve said this before, but the way the MCU employs the concept of fun within their Spider-Man franchise is dangerous in terms of what it allows them to erase all with barely any fan reaction at all, because of course we all want to have fun, don’t we? If anything, those among us in more troubled financial situations are more desperate to have fun than most, because we see so little of it compared to the stress. Those in good financial situations are less likely to notice entirely because the notion simply never occurs to them; they exist in a place of financial comfort and a good portion of them don’t question that reality. They may be aware of the alternative, but it’s not pertinent to them, because they don’t experience it personally. Everything is different when it’s personal.

Now I’ve always been very clear about my belief that the MCU didn’t do wrong by Spider-Man right off the bat; in his first appearance within the MCU’s continuity in Captain America: Civil War, he appears to live in quite a nice and modernly furnished apartment (as opposed to his more traditional childhood home in a freestanding house in Forest Hills, Queens, usually somewhat old fashionedly furnished to reflect the Parker family’s current lack of finances and the age of both Ben and May, a setting that was dismissed by Homecoming’s screenwriters are “old fashioned”), but the MCU’s sets in general tend to be lacking in the department of personal character. Basically, every room looks like an IKEA show room. I mean, they put a cross in the room of Wanda Maximoff, the daughter of Magneto, one of the most famous Jewish characters of all time. To say the MCU’s set design is both lacking and careless is to say that grass is green. It’s hard to fault the Parker apartment for this specifically when everything looks like a magazine layout or a Macy’s showroom. In CACW, Peter dumpster dives for tech and has created, albeit shabbily compared to the more advanced wardrobes of the other heroes, his own costume. Everything is as we would expect of Peter Parker in the moment, being a bright and creative young man who is good at problem solving and creating his own tech with limited resources. Spider-Man: Homecoming near immediately changes that with about one line.

Early on in Spider-Man: Homecoming, Peter loses his backpack by carelessly tossing it on the ground, a scene that completely broke the suspension of belief for me. I find it hard to believe any inner city kid -- especially one we’re expected to believe is a genius -- would toss their belongings on the ground in public, walk away, and still expect them to be there when they get back. It’s especially grating when, in comics, Peter regularly does leave his belongings outside -- webbed up out of sight and out of reach. Surely no child who is aware of their family’s financial struggles would treat their personal belongings with such a lack of care, additionally. Sure enough, when MCU Peter returns to the scene of the backpack drop, his stuff is gone. Shocker. When he confesses this to Aunt May, she doesn’t express concern over how they’ll replace the bag or the contents wherein -- something that, depending on how many textbooks or how much school equipment was within, could be very expensive -- instead simply saying they can replace it, no problem, it’s just like all the other backpacks he’s lost, revealing that this isn’t the first time and that this is not an issue for them because they can afford to continually replace things due to his carelessness. The MCU Parkers aren’t poor. I cannot stress this enough. They aren’t poor because they movie has not portrayed them as such. They do not have financial troubles. They may not be billionaires, but the movie treats them as safely comfortable. Peter is not expected to be financially responsible or even to have the kind of common sense that prevents you from leaving your backpack on the street lest it be stolen. He feels no responsibility to provide financially, a total opposite to 616 Peter, who supported both himself and May with his job at the Daily Bugle. 

”She’s pawning her jewelry! She must be desperate for money! But she doesn’t want me to know! She doesn’t want me to worry!” -- Amazing Spider-Man #1. As in, literally the second appearance of the character after Amazing Fantasy #15. This is not incidental stuff, this is not in the background; financial worries were baked into the character at his very inception and at his core. It’s like if you created a version of Batman who kept all his investigative tools in a storage rental he paid by the month and the plot frequently centered on him worrying about how he was going to make the rent.

(Amazing Spider-Man #24)

“The way you supported [May] and yourself throughout high school by selling pictures to the Bugle. We’re so proud.” “Someone had to.” - Amazing Spider-Man #377

Previous movie adaptations of Spider-Man have never before left this aspect of the Parkers out. In the Raimi movies obviously Aunt May and Uncle Ben are quite a bit older than Peter as they are in the comics, and you can tell from the films that money is an issue. Peter works menial jobs such as pizza delivery in able to make money. In The Amazing Spider-Man series, the financial worries are directly addressed in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which makes it clear that Peter is working for the Bugle and that he is contributing to the household finances:

May’s plot in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is very rooted in the financial aspect of their identities -- here she’s hiding from Peter that she’s started taking nursing classes, explicitly stated later that it’s so she can pay for him to go to college (”I have to take nursing classes with 22 year old kids so I can pay for you to go college”) because she doesn’t want him to worry. Spider-Man: Homecoming’s screenwriters were very disrespectful to this version of May -- and I would say the character of May in general -- saying that their version is a professional, she’s not “waiting at home for Peter to bring the eggs.” Except we don’t know what MCU May does for a living. It’s not important, because the MCU doesn’t view May herself as important. She clearly does something, but is it interior design? Is it investment management? Is it a whole lot of tax fraud? It’s never made clear. The Webb movies, on the other hand, tell us exactly what May does: she works as a waitress. She is taking classes to be a nurse. This information about May is viewed as being worthy of being in the movie itself, because it takes her seriously as a character and as an influence in Peter’s life. It doesn’t gloss over the financial troubles she faces.

Let me be very clear in my beliefs that you cannot tell a valid Spider-Man story if you do not at the very least address the fact that the Parkers are not economically well off and go into Peter’s social standing because of that fact. By having him jet set with his whole class -- really? a whole class of kids from Queens? on a whole ass European vacation to multiple countries? I 100% have a harder time believing this than I do a radioactive spider-bite -- or by removing the need for him to make his own costume because everything is provided by billionaires or above government agencies. The fact that J Jonah Jameson will be appearing in Far From Home when this Peter has no relationship with him and no need (and for Peter in comics and most adaptations it very much is a need) for a job at the Bugle is highly suspect -- JJJ doesn’t mean anything without his relationship with Peter and with Spider-Man. Without them, he’s just a “bring me pictures of Spider-Man” meme. There’s no story. There’s no meaning. There’s no connection. It’s an empty appearance without that push and pull between the characters -- and without realizing that Jameson is a rich man, albeit a self-made one, and Peter is quite commonly his broke employee.

Amazing Spider-Man #99, where Peter is lobbying for a salary because he plans to ask Gwen to marry him and he wants to be able to support her financially. In 616 canon, Peter wants to provide and Peter wants to protect, and one way he’s able to protect is by providing. He’s very aware of the value of money. He’s not naive about that in the least because he knows exactly what it’s like to not have money. To erase that from the character is to lessen him, but the MCU doesn’t care about the character. It doesn’t care about the values put forward by Spider-Man as a story. It certainly doesn’t care about responsibility.

(from the spider-man/daredevil comic)

(spectacular spider-man 1976 #110)

i dont think zdarsky's dd run is good but he gave us the whole "the best of us. a good man. just naive." line and just for that i can never hate him.

Mary Jane decides to stay with a grieving Peter after the death of Gwen. This powerful bottom strip wasn't in the original layout:

For @peterfelweek Day 6 - Alternative Universes!