Hellz Yeah, Mr and Mrs. Spider-Man — Tom, I understand your point. For many characters...

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hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger

Anonymous asked:

Tom, I understand your point. For many characters this makes sense and is true. However, for Spider-Man in particular, his history and particular set of circumstances inform us he has failed unless his marriage is restored. OMD showed Peter lose his marital union with true love with Mephisto as the victor. He wanted their marriage and he got it. And Peter and MJ lost. Since then they have failed to recover from this. The narrative dictates that success is to get that back.

brevoortformspring answered:

I don’t think that I can agree with that, especially after so much time has passed. You are invested in this situation and this relationship because you were there when Peter and MJ were married and when this split happened. But the readers who have come into the fold since then are not (and, in fact, these days many of them seem more interested in re-establishing the Peter/Gwen relationship, thanks to the last two Spidey movies.) The point being that most Spidey fans haven’t been standing around for the past 8 years or so unable to move forwards. Some have–and if you can’t deal with the situation in Spider-Man, if it’s not to your liking, it’s completely reasonable to walk away. But you’re talking about solving a problem here that isn’t truly a problem, to any but a shrinking few.

hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger

a)      Not that many readers have come to the fold since then as evidenced by the dwindling sales numbers and the over reliance upon variants to bulk up the sales

b)      Preeeeeetty sure you created at least a few people who had investment in a married Spider-Man when you did an entire goddam event about that in 2015 which was the most successful Secret Wars event because there were so many people who wanted to see a married Spider-Man

c)       “So much time has passed so now Spider-Man hasn’t lost” ?????? 8 years of him having lost doesn’t = he’s won. It’s just been 9 years in which he’s a chump and a moral sell out.

d)      The asker wasn’t referring to fan responses they were talking about the internal logic of the narrative

e)      Yeah there are more Gwen shippers around now than before…but again by Marvel’s own actions in PR and the sales/critical responses it’s incredibly obvious that the readership of the comics are not primarily made up of Gwen shippers but MJ ones. People were massively invested in MJ and concerned about her in 2013 in the wake of the 2012 movie. The internet exploded in 2014 after ASM 2 when Renew Your Vows was announced and exploded again when MJ was announced in Iron Man. But most of the comic book fans want Peter to date Gwen? Okay because as we all know the movie fans always stick around so they make up the majority of the readership (hint: no they do not a few just linger and more power to them).

f)       Dude, that’s literally been what the overwhelming majority of the fandom have done. Many fans did move forward by dropping the series and everyone else left was mostly comprised of people who couldn’t kick the habit and continued reading begrudgingly. They didn’t move forward they’ve been sticking it out hoping you’d fix the mess you created. Again, hence the massive response you got to Renew Your Vows AND Superior #2 when you teased that something was going to happen involving Mary Jane. Seems rather weird that you get big enough responses whenever you use Mary Jane even though ‘most of the readership has moved on’

g)      Hypothetically even if we were to say that sure those who see this as a problem are in the minority, that isn’t really the point. The question was about the NARRATIVE issues not the way fans want things. It’s NARRATIVELY a debilitating problem for One More Day to have NOT been fixed because it morally compromises Spider-Man and Mary Jane and means he’s lost in a massive, massive way that he’s not even aware of let alone been given the chance to fix. This is besides how it blew up continuity and, oh yeah, rendered his love life utterly redundant.

When your car has a big ugly dent that means it doesn’t work properly you shouldn’t just ignore the damn thing because it still gets out of the driveway and the passangers don’t care.

But what would one expect from the man who thinks Spider-Man was about ‘youth’ *rolls eyes*

Spider-Man Marvel Marvel Comics Peter Parker mjwatsonedit gwen stacy Superior Spider-Man spider-man: renew your vows renew your vows Amazing Spider-Man: renew your vows the amazing spider-man: renew your vows Mephisto One More Day mary jane watson Mary Jane Watson Parker secret wars Secret Wars 2015 tom brevoort

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georgettekaplan

Putting this on Tumblr because I don’t want to do one of those twenty-tweet long threads on Twitter.

I think there are two kinds of writing: autonomous and improvisational.

Autonomous is your classic novel writing. The author makes up a setting, characters, worldbuilding, optimizing all of it for the plot he intends to tell. If he’s writing a mystery, he makes the main character a detective. He doesn’t have the main character be a dogwalker who becomes a detective for some reason, unless that serves the plot.

Improvisational is almost as classic, because it’s taking a preexisting story and adding to it. The lines already exist, you’re coloring inside them. If you’re writing a Star Trek episode, assuming the series isn’t a reboot (and even kinda if it is), you’re not going to be defining what a Romulan is, or a Klingon, or a Vulcan. If you introduce a Vulcan character, they’ll generally act logically and without emotion. If you want to write a mystery and your story is a sequel to TOS, you have to justify why Kirk or another of the main characters is acting as a detective.

And I call this improvisational because, as with improv, you can’t or (usually) shouldn’t say “No” to what’s gone before you in continuity. You have to say “yes, and.”

This is complicated by the fact, in the chain of continuity, there will always be weak links. No long-running story can eternally get top-tier writers doing top-tier work. Eventually, someone’s going to drop a deuce on the living room floor and you have to clean it up–saying “No,” to return to the prior metaphor–before you once again have people walking around the living room, socializing and having a good time.

So in the X-Men comics, if someone writes morally gray antihero Magneto as pimping out a seven-year-old girl or something indefensible like that, you can’t go back to treating him as a sympathetic sorta villain… you have to reroute the story and explain that actually that was a hoax, or he was being mind-controlled, or it was an imposter, or something. Then you can get back to writing Magneto as an antihero without people thinking “wait, why are the X-Men being nice to him, he’s a fucking child pimp!”

The problem here being that these deuces on the living room floor are different to everyone’s eyes. There are people unfortunately employed by Marvel who think that Spider-Man and Mary Jane being married is worse than, well, at least twenty things I could list that are totally in continuity, and has to be undone before they can get back to writing Peter having an endless string of meaningless relationships that will never go anywhere because he made a deal with the Devil to get rid of the LAST relationship that went anywhere.

So, that’s the problem there. You don’t want writers to come onboard and suddenly throw out something like “Peter and Mary Jane love each other” or “Iron Man isn’t a fascist,” but you do want them to throw out the bits about sympathetic characters being child pimps. This makes things complicated.

georgettekaplan

The reason I bring this up is because there’s a secret, third way of writing. It’s kind of vaguely situated between autonomous and improvisational. Spoiler alert: it’s fanfic writing.

In fanfic writing, like improvisational, you’re generally not creating an original world. Even if you’re writing an AU, you’re riffing off preexisting characters, relationships, and so on. But it’s not really improv–because of its unofficial, self-indulgent nature (not a bad thing), fanfic is all about going “No” to canon.

A lot of the time, no one is even making an effort to stay aligned with continuity. Which is understandable when you have a LOT of source material or source material that is gradually revealing its secrets (Better Call Saul, for instance, doesn’t reveal what becomes of Kim Wexler during the Breaking Bad timeframe until the last few episodes of the final season).

But, still, you’re getting a story that is supposedly of a piece with other stories, but doesn’t ‘play well with others.’ It might feature characters being different races than they are in canon. They might be gender-swapped. They’re almost certainly a different sexuality than they are officially, having a romance with someone that canonically they’re just friends with (or, you know, hate and want to murder).

Whole swathes of canon might be ignored just because it puts the writer in a bad mood. Characters who the writer doesn’t know well might be simplified or ignored. And there are a lot of common fandom tropes and characterizations and cliches that are ‘imported’ into a story’s canon basically just because the fanficcer likes them, when they have the next to no relation to the actual source material. Stuff like Kylo Ren and General Hux having angry UST instead of just hating each other.

Again, not a bad thing, or at least an understandably bad thing that’s easy for people to ignore… until those fanfic writters start growing up and going pro and getting to actually, officially work with the characters they played around like dolls when they were kids.

And this kind of fans running the asylum is nothing new. I’m absolutely sure there are Legion of Superheroes fans that started writing the comics in the seventies and doing a bunch of dumb shit with it just because. But I feel there’s a marked difference now between the widespread acceptance of fanfiction, the mass commodification of shipping, companies desperately trying to appeal to the social justice generation, and so forth.

Whereas before, you could reasonably expect a fan-pro to be heavily invested in a story’s canon and want to add to it like a brick being put into a wall, now you have fan-pros who will tear the wall down willy-nilly because they see no reason not to get rid of all the bricks they don’t like (or even that are neutral, but not ‘their’ bricks) and put in a bunch of bricks they do like. Hell, a lot of these ‘fans’ don’t even like the wall in the first place. They just want to put in their bricks because they like these particular bricks and they think every wall should have them.

Anyway, that’s why I think fanfiction has ruined mass media, because we have a generation of writers who aren’t good enough to come up with compelling original work, but they also aren’t disciplined enough to add to preexisting work in a way that respects what came before. They’re lazy and they’re self-righteous and they resent any criticism as poorly disguised bigotry.

Not me, of course. I listen to my criticism and thoughtfully rework my writing accordingly. But a lot of people who aren’t me just suck and won’t do research to save their lives.

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