Keep A Sunrise In Your Heart

ive been listening to thursday a lot recently. omg i wanna go to their concert so bad

Basically, what it comes down to is that the MCU Spider-Man movies don't really know what to do with Peter's supporting cast or personal life or... Or the very concept of Peter Parker as a human person outside of being Spider-Man.

Homecoming was probably the most Peter Parker that an MCU film has featured on account of its mission statement of keeping Peter grounded.

But then Far From Home took him away from his setting and supporting cast to send Spider-Man globetrotting with S.H.I.E.L.D. and Mysterio. It still found excuses to bring his class along with him, though, so he could get into Peter-like shenanigans in these strange locales and start a relationship with MJ.

Nonetheless, May and Ned were reduced to recurring gags.

And then No Way Home pretty much kicked Peter to the curb. From the moment Doc Ock arrives on the film, it is 100% a Spider-Man movie. MJ and Ned are paired up to wander around being Spider-Man's sidekicks for a bit, May's killed off, and ultimately the very concept of Peter Parker is deleted from the universe.

Which then brings us to BND, whose central thesis is that Peter Parker is an integral part of who Spider-Man is and that Spidey needs to be feeding his Peterness too. It reconnects Peter with MJ and Ned, and ends with the promise of a restoration of Peter's identity outside of work.

But. LIke.

What does that even look like? Who even is Peter Parker at this point?

Peter has no day job. He never went to college. He's apparently independently wealthy enough to afford multiple years of housing and supercomputers and shit without an income; No idea where that money came from.

He doesn't have Aunt May. He doesn't have the Daily Bugle or Horizon Labs or anything. He doesn't have Midtown High anymore. He's never really been established to have any sort of dreams or aspirations besides "be Spider-Man" or alternatively "get that cute girl to be my girlfriend".

Flash sometimes exists for like one or two scenes of a movie.

It feels like we started Homecoming with a notional idea of Peter Parker and then spent the next three films subtracting elements from him. What is there left to build from?

If the idea at the end of BND is that Peter's going to take more time to be Peter then Spider-Man 5 is going to have its work cut out for it figuring out who Peter Parker even is. Who he can even be in the corner he's been written into.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the Peter elements of Spider-Man 5 are just going to be spent on "get that cute girl to be my girlfriend", since they left that "MJ has a boyfriend now" plot thread dangling. Maybe it'll be about rekindling his relationship with MJ. Or maybe Black Cat will be in it and it'll be about how she's all wrong for him and then it'll be about rekindling his relationship with MJ.

I do not buy for one second that the MCU actually intends to leave Peter and MJ split up. I thought before BND that we were going to have to spend a movie painstakingly watching them get back together, and now I've increased that estimation to two movies of painstaking Will They/Won't They shipping of a couple that already did and it was already fine before they fucked with it.

But also. Like.

I hope it's not just Ned and MJ. Because Peter needs, like, an actual life. Even if he's going to have to build it from scratch because the films have burned all of his bridges to the iconic Peter Parker stuff.

It does have those kinds of villains, mind. But it doesn't have those supporting casts and status quos and relatable life lessons for the human side of the superhero. This is because the MCU tends to treat its heroes as full-time heroes.

It's just that this is more noticeable with Spider-Man because. Like. We expect Iron Man to always be Iron Man when he's onscreen, even if he's not in the suit. We expect Captain America to be Captain America and to deal with Captain America type problems, not regular people problems. We expect Thor to always have his Thor face on and always be doing Thor things.

But we expect Spider-Man to have a rich, robust life as Peter Parker. We expect to see him doing Peter things just as much if not moreso than Spider-Man things, and for Spider-Man to be a tool to facilitate Peter.

Part of it is an issue of managing time. Comic Books pivoting to a writing for the trade model means that there's less room in each issue to focus on building a civilian supporting cast, and creators increasingly pivot towards having the heroes interact with other heroes instead of civilians (There's a very good post by Maxwell Grant on Tumblr that discusses how this has lead to Amanda Waller losing her complexity and becoming a one note villain)

With TV shows, the pivot towards shorter seasons has left less room for playing around in a status Quo. Seasons have to be serialized, episodes have to push that serial narrative forward, and there's no room for the civilian Superhero divide. The Supporting Cast has to just be the supporting cast, for both sides of the hero.

Which have some upsides to. ironically, given your fers about MJs future, this trend has contributed to a lessening of will they won't theys in movies. Outing the Superhero to their love interest eliminates the missed meeting drama that was prevalent in Superhero stories for decades.

The Love Triangle between Clark Kent, Superman, and Lois Lane used to be a core element of Superman stories, and I can't remember the last adaptation where Lois was still in the dark by the end of the first installment. And while I feel Superman as a character is harmed by the lack of Dichotomy between his two identities, Lois figuring things out is a better look for her.

Which gets at another big difference, a desire for the Supporting cast to carry it's own weight in the story. In the old days, a Supporting cast was there to cause problems for the hero. They would drive social situations that put the hero in conflict with his duty, they would try to uncover the heroe's identity making them take greater efforts to hide. They would be endangered to make the latest villain's scheme have more stakes.