Spider-Man General Discussion

I'm kind of ambivalent about Jonah, in that I really like the more sympathetic and nuanced takes on him, but if he's a stand-in for Alex Jones, then I really don't want him to be a sympathetic character at all, since Jones is a completely terrible person, and I'm happy with him just appearing in that characterization in a cameo.

If we want to play that game, Peter Parker created Venom and Carnage by bringing the symbiote to earth from Battleworld, that's more people than even Norman Osborn killed. Create Your Own Villain doesn't change who the heroes or villains are.

And in any case, people seem to forget this. But read ASM #25. The Spider-Slayers are Peter's creation as much as Jameson's.

Peter needed photos of Spidey and he needed money. But it was a lean weak. So when he went to the Bugle, he found Jameson kicking Smythe out of the office with his offer of robots, so Peter convinced Flat-Top to hire Smythe and sicc robots on Spider-Man just so Peter could hustle photos to sell to Jameson. Oh and Peter also told Jameson to operate the robots so his face showed up on the monitor. So the Spider-Slayers and their body count, including Marla Jameson, are also Peter's doing.

To be fair, Ps 4 Jameson also drew parallels to Alex Jones, but he's still Jameson at his core. and frankly one of the best Jameson portrayals ever, thanks Darin De Paul.

@Bocaj, Jameson at least didn't kill anyone with the Spider-Slayers. Jameson has disclosed his involvement with Scorpion, he had to be blackmailed, but Jameson confessed with an editorial instead of caving in.

Edit: Jameson accepts full responsibility for what happened to Marla instead of blaming Spider-Man.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Jul 25th 2019 at 11:11:30 AM

I’ll gladly rake Peter over the coals for giving an alien abandonment issues or for all the fraud he engages in

But he actually tried to stop his mistakes from claiming lives and Jameson keeps merrily on his way for decades

Jameson’s editorials radicalized Smythe and if he listened to some punk kid who told him to fund murder robots then that’s still on his own head

Jameson bears far more responsibility for Scorpion, the Spider Slayers, not to mention the Human Fly than Peter does for Venom and Carnage. The latter was a killer before he even got a symbiote.

It also never ceases to amaze me how many people swallow Beck and Toomes' bullshit that Tony and Tony alone is responsible for their crimes. Draco in Leather Pants at its finest.

This meme about Jameson creating villains is like Ditko-Peter being a school shooter blatantly out of context. The fact is in the L-D run, there was a lot of satire, exaggeration, and dark humor. Jameson creating Scorpion was Played for Laughs since the big punchline at the end when Spider-Man saves Jameson and Betty at the Bugle from Scorpion has Jameson reluctantly rooting for Spider-Man, and Jameson totally comments on the irony of it.

If we want to hold Jameson by that, then fine. But let's be consistent. Let's also insist that Peter be the creep who harassed Johnny Storm's girlfriend in ASM #8, Peter be a general d—k who picks fights (and in the case of the Spider-Slayers, gaslighted Jameson into supporting a villain for entirely selfish reasons). Gwen Stacy should also be remembered for being a stuck-up Alpha Bitch. It was World of Jerkass in the L-D era. The only exception was Aunt May.

The fact is that the noble and more anti-heroic Jameson, the good journalist (as written by Roger Stern and Bendis) is an equally valid take and also more durable, more interesting and long-lasting. Because at the end of the day, the whole purpose of Jameson is to remind people that not everyone who dislikes Spider-Man is going to be a villain, just like Flash reminds Peter that not everyone who likes Spider-Man is going to be a friend. If you say he's a bad guy or so on, then you have dodged one of the main moral complexities of the entire series.

I don't accept Beck's excuse about Tony, maybe it's because Iron Man was haphazardly forced into Mysterio's backstory.

I’m fine with thinking Peter is a dick and a creep because sometimes he is and he has a bad tendency towards self absorption and also he gave an alien abandonment issues

Maybe it was because it was so petty. He seemed to care more that Tony gave his invention a dumb name and used it for therapy instead of weaponizing it

And then he was fired for being ‘unstable’ when by all appearances he was very much unstable

Edited by Bocaj on Jul 25th 2019 at 2:22:49 PM

Why would you take anything Mysterio says as the truth?

Tony Stark stealing Beck's technology and not crediting him is the truth. In Civil War he passed it off as his own technology and creation.

Beck being a terrorist and so on is irrelevant, because as a movie made by Disney/Marvel it's basically giving a message saying, "Walt and Stan were right to screw over the Nine Old Men, Steve, and Jack because they would be terrorists". It's basically absolving and condoning a corporation stealing the work and credit of a creator and giving him nothing. The stuff about Mysterio being a criminal is irrelevant. It's basically in the same melodramatic logic that demonized poor people as villains for centuries, and also minorities. I mean Shylock has good sympathetic reasons but he also wants that guy's pound of flesh right. We don't say that Shylock shouldn't be sympathetic in a modern context, so the same applies here.

In Homecoming, I felt they did the right thing in balancing Toomes with believable and sympathetic motivations and so on. I do have issues and so on but it was little in the end. But here that part felt offensive and also unnecessary. Because Mysterio didn't have that motivation in 616. Vulture as per Roger Stern was screwed over by a business partner in 616, making that partner some rando we weren't supposed to sympathize with into Tony Stark (who is supposed to be a hero) was weird because Tony doesn't get comeuppance or called out for that. But Mysterio didn't have that.

Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on Jul 25th 2019 at 11:31:11 AM

“Tony Stark stealing Beck's technology and not crediting him is the truth. In Civil War he passed it off as his own technology and creation.”

I don’t think that’s true

He talks about how much it cost and calls it “his little therapeutic experiment” but doesn’t actually say he invented it. And since Beck didn’t intend for it to be used for therapy, Tony funding it for that purpose does make it an experiment of his although that’s misleading

Funnily enough he also admits that the acronym is not great

Edited by Bocaj on Jul 25th 2019 at 2:32:14 PM

Why is it not true? Tony Stark in Civil War showed that technology and then said it's a billion dollar therapy session and people in the audience and the film implied he made it. You can pull Exact Words but even then omitting the name of the guy who created that is in real-life, a d—k move that real people have used to downplay and diminish the contributions of collaborators.

Now Far From Home states that it was Beck who made it and it states that clearly. That part is definitely true.

Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on Jul 25th 2019 at 11:32:57 AM

The context of the scene was definitely talking about how he funded it since he immediately follows it up by throwing more money at things

If he was trying to sell the technology and ommited Beck’s name that would be one thing but he’s not. He’s using it as an example of pie in the sky projects he’s willing to fund while BARF goes back into the closet because it “failed”

Edited by Bocaj on Jul 25th 2019 at 2:36:00 PM

I mean, I guess he was using BARF as an example of how he planned to fund a lot of experiments.

But I can get why people would think the worst of Tony: he makes it incredibly easy. He tries, he tries to be good, to do good, even when he was selfish and carelessly selling his weapons to the military, but Tony has dug himself a hole so deep when it comes to his reputation that people thinking the absolute worst of him is his permanent status quo.

I doubt even death and saving the entire universe at the cost of his life fixed that.

I want to give Tony the benefit of the doubt cause I found it odd he's steal tech from someone else in the first place, but even with another plausible explanation, it's damned hard to do so.

Literally nobody before Far From Home believed that Tony didn't make that technology.

And in either case even then, you can say that Tony is being legal and not saying something outright libelous while giving the general impression he made it. That also happens all the time. The reason I am saying this is that this is entirely realistic and in keeping with how corporations behave and have behaved to diminish the work of collaborators. I am not saying this to defend Far From Home's Mysterio, I am saying this because it's the truth.

If you have problems with Mysterio being seen as a good guy and Tony as the bad guy, I agree. But that's how the movie shows. And again, Tony Stark being a talented inventor doesn't mean he's above stealing credit. Talented people have screwed over fellow talented creators. To give an example Alfred Hitchcock said in interviews that Saul Bass just did the titles and a few storyboards for Psycho, and Hitchcock said that he didn't use the storyboards. In actual fact, Bass designed and storyboarded the entire shower sequence. Likewise, Stan Lee is a talented man who has consistently diminished and downplayed Kirby and Ditko's contribution, often in the same way of ommitting and Exact Words. Hitchcock and Stan Lee are talented people, far moreso than Bob Kane, and maybe they treated Bass, Kirby, Ditko better than Kane did Bill Finger, but I don't think it's right to make excuses for talented people doing bad things.

Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on Jul 25th 2019 at 11:42:34 AM

Movie Tony is forever making up for old mistakes by making brave horrible new ones

Yup.

Even in death, he's still causing trouble.

The good news is I'm pretty sure that now that he's dead, the amount of new mistakes he can make will reduce.

I give it a few centuries before he finally runs out.

I mean it's easy to see Tony/Beck in Far From Home as an allegory for Lee and Ditko.

Even today, many people make excuses for Stan Lee downplaying Ditko's contributions by bringing him being an objectivist, and Stan saving the work from his politics and other BS without evidence and so on. All of that is just to make their fanboyism of Stan Lee uncomplicated and without gray areas.

Bring up Stark stealing Beck's work, and it's about how Beck is unstable (because we all Tony Stark is a "very stable genius"), and how Beck's later actions proved Tony right. And again that's exactly the same as how people denigrated Ditko over the decades. Ditko went on to do Mr. A and so on, so that justified Lee diminishing his work and so on. And you know as Blake Bell's biography revealed, it was Stan Lee who recommended Ditko to read Ayn Rand's works, because Lee liked them too. So it was Stan Lee who put Ditko in that vat of acid anyway.

In all honesty, it's an angle they shouldn't have brought up anyway.

The whole "villain is angry at Tony" got old a good while ago. Better start thinking of new motivations, because it's kind of a blah blah blah thing now.

No, Tony was also very unstable

Pepper wasn’t willing to fire him though. So it goes.

And I figure Tony is able to cause a few more years of trouble just as his will shakes out and people who always intended to get revenge on him but never got around to it sigh and get up to vengeance the scraps

Beck is the very definition of an unreliable narrator. Anyone who watched Civil War will see Tony never claims credit for tbe BARF technology. And considering Mysterio's crimes include attempted murder of two teenagers, it's safe to say Stark was right to let him go.

People love the idea of Tony being responsible for all the misery and suffering in the MCU, regardless of if that actually matches what is shown in the story.

No Tony isn't perfect, but his instability is rooted in actual trauma and betrayal as opposed to being an entitled prima dona.

Edited by windleopard on Jul 25th 2019 at 11:55:04 AM

It's okay to make Tony Stark problematic but actually bring that to a head. You can't have Spider-Man spend two movies having his life screwed over as a result of Tony Stark's actions and then have the movies still see Tony as The Paragon that Spider-Man will always fall short of. And also, do it in a way that makes it feel like unintended consequences. Like in Iron Man 3, Tony was a jerk to Killian yeah but it was basically ordinary jerkishness, not excessive and malicious. Blaming Tony for Killian becoming a psycho would be wrong because Killian's reaction is Disproportionate Retribution. In Homecoming, Tony and Department of Damage Control both accidentally screw over Toomes. Tony isn't entirely responsible there because again DODC are the government and you can't fault Tony for thinking that the government will do stuff like compensate people for seizure of eminent domain and other stuff.

Those feel believable and even understandable. Now in Far From Home, Tony steals credit for the work of another inventor. I am sorry, that is scumbag behavior. It's inexcusable and excessive and I am shocked Feige and others didn't nix that. And again it's also unsatisfying because it goes nowhere.

IN hero's journey terms, Stark is the mentor, Peter is the hero. The thing is the hero is expected to surpass the mentor. That's how it works. Usually they do it by showing that the mentor made mistakes or errors in judgments that the hero will improve on. Obi-Wan lied to Luke about Vader (Certain Point of View claptrap aside) and Luke surpassed Obi-Wan by redeeming Vader. For brand politics and mascot reasons, and simply because Tom Holland isn't as big a star or salaried as RDJ, he cannot surpass Tony Stark in the MCU. So it becomes frustrating because you have to have Peter definitively reject or move away or come to a head with Tony Warts and All.

Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on Jul 25th 2019 at 12:02:05 PM

Yeah. It's great isn't it?

Don't ruin my fun dammit!

It's my job.

I don't know why people think that they are seeing a different movie than others did. I agree that the Create Your Own Villain stuff with Tony is excessive and overused in the movies but that's not the same as saying the movies don't use it.

Tony was blamed for Wanda and Quicksilver becoming villains in Age of Ultron because of weapons he sold to Sokovian factions. He also takes credit and responsibility for Ultron and is taken to task by fellow Avengers many times in that film. Homecoming credits him as being unintentionally responsible for Vulture, and Far From Home states that he stole credit for Beck's invention.

The movies show this repeatedly, multiple times, and coming away thinking Tony is responsible is a valid and accurate response to these movies. And in any case in Far From Home, it's not just Beck, it's also a lot of other Stark employees, including that box-with-scraps guy who are anti-Stark and so on. I don't think those guys would follow Beck (who after all wouldn't have control over any technology and stuff without them) if he wasn't correct about Stark stealing credit. Dramatically and emotionally, the movies give us no reason to doubt this. I find it interesting that people are so willing to condemn Jameson "for making villains" (which he has apologized and taken responsibility for) but are giving Tony a pass.