Hellz Yeah, Mr and Mrs. Spider-Man — In the meantime the filler relationships pop in...

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hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger

Anonymous asked:

In the meantime the filler relationships pop in and out of Peter's life and leaving little impact. Why focus on relationship issues with characters with so little fan investmet or interest? Why not tell stories where drama has the most impact, with the characters fans care most for? I can't believe in any of them. I feel like rooting against them from the start. The "drama" from these relationships just doesn't work. How can it if you can't get behind them from the beginning?

brevoortformspring answered:

It’s funny, because I’m sure that you would have said the same thing about Mary Jane when she was first introduced. “How can we possibly invest in this relationship with a new girl when we know that Betty Brant is Peter Parker’s one and only true love?”

Stories happen. Things change–that’s the nature of stories.

hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger

That’s rubbish.

The nature of stories is to tell a narrative. It flows the changes mean something they aren’t just there for the sake of it.

And the situation with MJ and Betty is such an idiotic comparison.

Betty had been around for less than 30 issues and was his FIRST and only love girlfriend. We hadn’t explored the character’s love life all that much by that point and he was still young enough in the narrative that it was realistically justified for him to have more than one girlfriend as most people have. This is besides the fact that Betty was a terrible love interest for Peter in the first place.

The situation is a Hell of a lot different when MJ had been his love interest from 1974-1979, then 1984-1987 and then his wife from 1987-2007. By that point it’s like asking people to invest in a Superman girlfriend who isn’t Lois Lane. 

Knock, knock McFly they are not going to. 

But more than that MJ was actually a better character AND a better love interest narratively for Peter than Ditko era Betty Brant ever was. Peter was also a damn adult by the time of OMD and had a plethora of love interests several of whom we HAD invested in BECAUSE we believed that their relationships might go somewhere and because at the time again he was young enough to justify dating around. But he’d gone through that stage of life where he’d dated a lot of people and we’d eventually found the right person for him in MJ, both in terms of she was a good match for him realistically and also from a creative point of view pairing them up would result in conflict and good stories.

What you have given us since OMD is basically asking us to exchange a relationship a lot of time, character development and emotional investment had gone into for the sake of investing in novelty for the sake of novelty with little of substance and what little there is not being so good that it justifies what we exchanged to get it.

At the end of the day rotating his love interests is nothing more than creative bankruptcy and laziness on your part because you can generate cheap drama and novelty with little effort by switching out his girlfriends. Much harder to make the characters themselves interesting and their relationship meaningful.

And Mr. Brevoort should refrain from presuming what someone would or wouldn’t have said about a story from the 1960s or any other decade. Especially since, you know, when MJ was introduced she got a really big positive response.

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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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