InsaneJournal

So, okay, once again, as he did with Mary Jane, Peter is behaving like a character whose maturity has regressed to a state much younger than the mid-20s grown man that he's supposed to be, by acting like an adolescent virgin around a woman with whom he already had a long, and eventually deep and mutually respectful, relationship, but, hey, that's par for the course with NuSpidey, right?

After all, he hasn't exercised the slightest shred of either forethought or follow-up consideration in anything that he's done since the start of "Brand New Day," so why change that pattern of absolute failure now?

Besides, as Kelly attempts to emphasize here, it was the heat of the moment, so it's certainly not like he was being calculating about this or anything ... well, except for that "she promised not to look" line, which reads a little weird in the context of them supposedly acting out of spontaneous passion, but surely Kelly didn't mean it the way that it came across there ...



... Except that, holy shit, Kelly really did mean it that way.

Let's break down this dialogue:

NuSpidey: "Last night, did you keep the lights off like you promised? Did you look at my face?"
NuBlack Cat: "Eww. Absolutely not."

Everybody, including Kelly, keeps casting NuSpidey and NuBlack Cat's one-night stand as the result of unplanned, uncontrollable desire, but the problem is that this interpretation of it can't really be reconciled with Peter being premeditated enough to demand that Felicia not look at his face while they had sex, and while we're on the subject, HOLY SHIT, HE ACTUALLY TOLD HER NOT TO LOOK AT HIS FACE WHILE HE FUCKED HER, HOW INCREDIBLY CREEPY AND DEHUMANIZING IS THAT???

Technically, under the current status quo, there's nothing inherently wrong with Peter and Felicia having a romantic relationship now, and as someone who's had more than a few "friends with benefits" and casual fuck-buddies myself, I wouldn't even mind if they treated their flings simply as means of blowing off steam, with the understanding that they wouldn't have any expectations of mutual exclusivity to one another.

Except that, before everyone's memories of Peter's secret identity were blind-spotted, Peter and Felicia had become close friends who genuinely cared for one another's feelings and welfare, to the point that Felicia had started to develop an attraction to Peter even when he wasn't wearing the mask, and if Joe Quesada can be taken at his word that "everything but the marriage still happened," then Peter still remembers all of this, and yet, for reasons that remain unexplained, Peter still goes out of his way to prevent Felicia from remembering any of this, all of which she has a right to know (as well as the mental and emotional ability to deal with), even though he feels morally obligated to make sure that the goddamn NUAVENGERS, including MOCKINGBIRD and RONIN, all know his secret identity.

As it stands, this is not a case of "friends with benefits," as Kelly claimed, or even casual fuck-buddies, because even such relatively less-committed relationships still involve those friends (or "buddies") possessing some basic level of regard for one another as people, whereas Peter and Felicia seem to treat one another entirely transactionally here - she doesn't want to know anything about him as a person, and for all his Nice Guy wangsting in his narrative captions, the fact that he felt free to order her not to look at his face while he was FUCKING her makes it clear that he doesn't give a shit about anything other than her vagina, and that the woman herself is merely a hurdle to him, that makes it slightly more complicated for him to obtain what's between her legs.

Not that this should be any surprise, given that the NuSpidey "brain trust," and Marvel as a whole, see women exclusively as a) obstacles to be overcome and b) prizes to be won, in equal measure.

Of all the non-Mary Jane romantic partners that Peter could have had, in the wake of "One More Day," Felicia was the one whom I actually wouldn't have minded seeing him hook up with, if only her character hadn't been regressed and stripped of as much maturity as that of Peter himself, which is why I'm now calling her NuBlack Cat, just as Peter has been NuSpidey ever since the start of "Brand New Day."

Congratulations, Marvel! You just ruined yet ANOTHER character, to the point that even KEVIN SMITH'S writing of her now looks slightly less awful by comparison (which, considering what a festering pile of fail he produced, in the form of Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do, is like managing to make an even worse movie than Uwe Boll).