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Tweak says, "Bufugee! Atibitiba!"

cyberghostface (cyberghostface) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-11-05 13:44:00

Entry tags:

char: hebe/marvel, char: spider-man/peter parker, creator: fred van lente, creator: greg pak, creator: rodney buchemi, title: incredible hercules

Yet another jab to the fans of the Spider-Marriage from the "Brain Trust"...
...only this time it's from Hercules' "Assault on New Olympus" story.

This was written by Fred Van Lente, who I hopefully don't have to introduce given his history here.

Honestly. On one hand, the attitude is just, "Get over it!" and the on the other hand they like throwing salt on the wound with these little jabs to the fans.

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	seriousfic 2009-11-05 07:22 pm UTC (link)
	I don't think anyone's ever actually said, but the "well, Gwen and Peter were on break at the time" idea always seemed like a fan-wank to me. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

jaybee3
2009-11-05 07:54 pm UTC (link)

In any case we're expected to believe after holding off the man she loved for so long she would so easily surrender her virginity and put out to her friend Harry's middle-aged dad because she felt sorry for him (and according to Queseda was attracted to his animal magnetism or some phoney mumbo jumbo that we never saw). Peter never got beyond second base even after she came back from having the kids (despite the fact she supposedly wanted him to her help her raise them eventually). But then I still like to pretend that story never existed. And I still prefer MJ over Gwen anyway.

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	seriousfic 2009-11-05 08:04 pm UTC (link)
	And after all that, his deepest darkest desire is to be married to Gwen instead of Mary-Jane. Lovely, House of M. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	va1tyr 2009-11-05 08:37 pm UTC (link)
	That's not entirely fair... it also means Tony didn't want to be an Avenger, which doesn't seem right. More likely, those outcomes are a result of an early event having turned out differently - Tony's father surviving, Gwen surviving. I mean, once Peter remembers the real world, he seems pretty broken up about it. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	kamino_neko 2009-11-05 10:17 pm UTC (link)
	Which would work, if it wasn't explicitly stated that Wanda gave all the heroes their greatest desires in the HoM world. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	va1tyr 2009-11-05 10:18 pm UTC (link)
	Yes, but if Peter's greatest desire was that Gwen hadn't died when she fell off the bridge, the alternate timeline would play out? (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	kamino_neko 2009-11-05 10:26 pm UTC (link)
	But it wasn't 'change one thing and let everything else play out as it will' it was 'give them what they wanted' - if he wanted to be with MJ, he'd have been with her, even if Gwen were still alive. It's not like Wanda was restricted by anything other than making a more-or-less coherent universe out of this batch of desires. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	va1tyr 2009-11-05 10:29 pm UTC (link)
	So Steve wanted to be alone, widowed and shunned by most of mainstream society? That seems pretty unlikely to me. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

kamino_neko
2009-11-05 10:49 pm UTC (link)

He wanted to live an ordinary life where he wasn't frozen in the ice in the 1940s.

He got that. In the end he outlived his wife, but he still got to spend decades with her instead of having her think he was dead, and thus losing her from his life.

He couldn't not be shunned by mainstream society, because that would create an inconsistency in the universe, because he's not a mutant and non-mutants are treated like mutants are in the original history.

She gave Wolverine his memories of his REAL history. That is completely inconsistent with 'make a change, let things play out' - but fits exactly in 'give them what they want'.

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va1tyr
2009-11-05 10:54 pm UTC (link)

Why wouldn't Steve want his wife to have lived as long as he did? It wasn't ridiculously old age. I haven't read the House of M Cap tie-ins, but I'm told his life was pretty sad at that point. Surely it would make more sense if his greatest desire was to have not been frozen, and then his life played out?

And Wolverine's desire wasn't for a specific incident to be changed, it was for something about himself to be different.

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kamino_neko
2009-11-05 11:12 pm UTC (link)

I haven't read the House of M Cap tie-ins, but I'm told his life was pretty sad at that point.

No more so than any other octogenarian non-mutant.

And Wolverine's desire wasn't for a specific incident to be changed, it was for something about himself to be different.

And the only reason to do it the way she did was because she was giving him EXACTLY what he wanted.

If it was just 'change something and let things play out' he'd have been given his general wish ('I want to know my past') without creating a window to undo the universe.

But that's not what she was doing - she was giving everyone who was there exactly what they wanted. So she let Wolverine remember his REAL history, instead of creating a new history and letting him remember that.

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	va1tyr 2009-11-05 11:16 pm UTC (link)
	I'm sorry, I don't think we're going to agree on this - I don't believe Peter would rather have been married to Gwen, I don't believe Tony would rather not have been an Avenger, and I don't believe Steve wanted to be alone and shunned. (Reply to this) (Parent)

fredneil.livejournal.com
2009-11-06 12:27 am UTC (link)

Wanting to machine gun Mary Jane and Aunt May would be a dark desire. Wanting to marry Gwen, not so much.

I think his actual deepest desire was to have saved Uncle Ben and Gwen. Marrying Gwen is just the way things would have worked out if they hadn't died. Actually, if his deepest desire is just to have saved Ben, that probably would have been enough of a change that Gwen wouldn't have died.

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cyberghostface
2009-11-05 08:23 pm UTC (link)

In any case we're expected to believe after holding off the man she loved for so long she would so easily surrender her virginity and put out to her friend Harry's middle-aged dad because she felt sorry for him

That's not exactly true, in either case.

At the time she and Norman presumably had sex, Gwen wasn't officially dating Harry and was in fact pissed at Peter and never wanted to see him after he hit Captain Stacy. Captain Stacy was brainwashed by the Winkler device at the time, but Gwen didn't know that. She also feels betrayed when Peter takes the photos showing the brainwashed Stacy commiting criminal acts. And to further complicate things, when she and her father were kidnapped, it was Norman who helped save the day.

This article explains where the two were at at that point in their relationship by the time she and Norman had sex.

http://www.spideykicksbutt.com/GreenwithEvil/DeFloweringGwen.html

And there's nothing to indicate that she was necessarily a virgin either, especially given how she was in her early appearances.

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	cyberghostface 2009-11-05 08:25 pm UTC (link)
	Gwen wasn't officially dating Harry *oops, I meant she wasn't officially dating Peter at the time. I think she might have been dating Harry actually. (Reply to this) (Parent)

jaybee3
2009-11-05 09:04 pm UTC (link)

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cyberghostface
2009-11-05 09:11 pm UTC (link)

That article also admits the author "did all kinds of twisting and rationalizing and ignoring certain things in order to make my theories fit with the continuity as originally established" and even he can't explain away the timeline of "Sins Past" glopfest.

Well, yeah, when discussing when she was pregnant and had the babies, but the rationalization as to when and why she would have sex with Norman was based on specific events from the comics, and not just pulling it out of his ass. It's not too much of a reach to fit Gwen's dalliance with Norman into the events listed.

For the record, I'm not a huge fan of the storyline either, but my problems are with how it convolutes canon as opposed to it ruining the characters of Gwen and Norman (and I thought the age-accelerated twins as supervillains bit wasn't handled that well). Personally, I thought American Son did more damage to Norm's character than this.

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jaybee3
2009-11-05 10:21 pm UTC (link)

But if Gwen was willing to have sex with Norman under such flimsy reasoning (she was attracted to him, father figure, moment of weakness, etc.) why is there no evidence (and the book don't even seem to hint at it) that she ever let Peter get that close to her. Even by the timeline the author of the article is using to shoe-horn the story into previously established Spidey stories, Gwen realized her mistake with Peter and got back together almost immediately (as if giving her virginity just a minute ago to Normie never happened - and yes I do believe she was a virgin based on various things the Marvel/Joe Q have stated about the storyline) and apparently she was able to go to Europe, have kids, come back without looking any different at all, act like everything was "normal" with Peter (and in the original 1960s story that's how she acted) as if the Norman thing never happened and then still claim to love Peter (who she apparently never let get as far sexually as she let Norman).

Let's face it, despite what some - few - would say this is NOT a story that deepens Gwen's character. It does not make her slut, I'm not saying that but it does nothing but make her either stupid or (in her dealings with the man she supposedly loved and wanted to raise Osborne's kids with but not enough to have even a one-night stand with like she did Normie or to even tell him anything about it) a dishonest hypocrite.

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(Anonymous)
2009-11-05 10:39 pm UTC (link)

Most people seem to ignore the fact that Sins Past damaged MJ's character worse than it did Gwen's- why didn't she tell Peter about the kids? Especially after she found out what Norman was?
Quesada didn't specifically want it in continuity. JMS's idea was that Mephisto altered history so that Gwen never became pregnant,as a result Norman never killed her, Norman never faked his own death and Harry never died. This would have caused readers and editors a thousand headaches as they tried to figure out what was in continuity, so Quesada shot it down.

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cyberghostface
2009-11-05 10:44 pm UTC (link)

Again, from the Spideykicksbutt article:

Literally the day after Mary Jane finds out this information about Gwen and Norman's relationship - both of them are dead (well, Norman wasn't, but no one knew that for years), and Peter is, as MJ stated, "half-mad with grief." Harry is totally messed up and in light of his father's "death," needs his friends, including Peter, more than ever. It served NO CONCEIVABLE GOOD PURPOSE to tell Peter the truth at this time. Again, you have the situation where the principals in the relationship were both believed to be dead, and you have the emotionally fragile son of one of the principals just barely hanging onto his sanity. And as Mary Jane's and Peter's relationship became more serious, MJ could very well have believed that if she disclosed this information to Peter, he would interpret it as her trying to make herself look better by denigrating Gwen’s character. And when Harry was first released from institutionalization in Amazing Spider-Man #151, there was no point in potentially poisoning their friendship with Harry by disclosing his father's indiscretion. MJ may very well have believed that in Norman’s absence, Peter would resent Harry and take out his anger and frustration at the situation on him.

O.K. - so what about after Harry died - and there was no sense in protecting him any more or worrying about his and Peter’s friendship? Well, right after Harry's death, you had Peter's parents apparently returning from the dead, Maximum Carnage, the Clone Saga, and the apparent death of their own child. What time would have been a good time to reveal Gwen's tryst with Norman to Peter? Over breakfast one morning – “oh by the way, Gwen slept with Norman and had two kids.” When Norman resurfaced with a flourish in Spectacular Spider-Man #250 and tormented Peter a little, Spider-Man burst into Norman's townhouse and savagely beat him, all in front of Norman's security cameras. So does MJ tell him "oh, by the way Peter, Norman also fathered two children by Gwen." Frankly, she might have been afraid that Peter would have truly killed Norman Osborn after finding this out. And then it would all have been over. Peter and Spider-Man, as well as her own life, would have been finished. Of course, wouldn’t she have figured that Peter would rather find this out from her, as opposed to Norman Osborn dropping it on him by surprise? Perhaps she should have considered this – because she has to know that Peter is going to wonder for a very long time what other secrets Mary Jane may be keeping from him (but as I’ve said before, I actually like this development because it provides genuine tension to the marriage instead of “oh I’m so sick of Peter being Spider-Man,” or the “WE’RE TOO YOUNG!” bullshit we were force fed during the reboot).

http://www.spideykicksbutt.com/GreenwithEvil/DeFloweringGwen.html

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	fredneil.livejournal.com 2009-11-06 12:33 am UTC (link)
	That article might be exceptionally good fanwank, but it's still fanwank, not canon. (Reply to this) (Parent)

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