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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
Two important things to note:
- Brian Michael Bendis, the author of Ultimate Spider-Man, doesn't really like the symbiotes very much. So he made them very different. In his universe, they're basically a sentient cure for cancer cloned from Peter's dad that went horribly wrong. His Carnage doesn't even have a host; it's just pure cancer-cure goo.
- Bendis killed off Gwen for no other reason than because she died in the 616, then immediately regretted it and spoke about how he felt like it was a complete waste of a good character. So he used the Carnage cancer glop as an awkward, kinda forced way to write her back to life.
It was weird. Something about how, like, the Carnage glop had imprinted Gwen genetically when it killed her, causing it to congeal into a Gwen clone or some shit.
edited 19th Mar '17 10:48:25 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.@Tobias Drake: Wait, so Ultimate Carnage.....became a clone of Gwen? Or was it just Carnage but it looked Gwen sometimes?
edited 19th Mar '17 10:58:07 AM by higherbrainpattern
IIRC, it became a clone of Gwen who has the superpower to turn into Carnage, and then shortly after that, Venom sucked out the Carnage glop and turned her into just a normal clone of Gwen.
Like I said, it was really forced.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Basically. It had absorbed her and her mind and "essence" or whatever survived inside of the symbiote.
Back when it first happened it was genuinely shocking and executed well. This is before Stuffed into the Fridge was as pervasive in comics as it ultimately ended up being, so the the trope hadn't yet been branded as tired and misogynistic.
edited 19th Mar '17 11:06:16 AM by comicwriter
There are multiple ways to examine it:
- It hadn't really been done before, the original Death of Gwen Stacy was shocking while now the character is halfway expected to die out of tradition.
- It was a moment when the hero completely and utterly failed to save the girl, it wasn't a matter of being too late to stop it.
- The girl was in danger because the villain was trying to specifically target the hero, it wasn't pure happenstance or the girl just happened to be nearby for use as leverage.
- The circumstances made it unclear if she was already dead before the fight or if Spider-Man's very attempt to rescue her is what killed her.
- It caused a ripple effect in Spider-Man stories and they stuck to their guns for a long time.
The reason ASM 2 failed was because the entire goblin fight happened after they resolve the Electro fight, giving us Ending Fatigue. The actual depiction of the event was also really drawn out and dramatic, while also not giving us the ambiguity of "Was she alive when she was falling?" And the aftermath was truncated to a Time Skip in the epilogue, giving us further Ending Fatigue while also distracting us with the Rhino fight.
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Not really. It's not something that comes up often given how in the scope of all movies, resurrection is pretty rare. However, people like Harrison Ford usually make the same request. An actor is focused on creating a characters arc and having it end definitively. You can't do that if the story just goes on forever.
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Because it was the first. A superhero failed to save someone, someone vital to them. It completely rewrote the stakes in a medium where everyone knew that nothing would ever happen to the good guys. Also, it's the fact that Spider-Man killed her by misusing his powers.
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most responses I see say the opposite - Electro should a been cut, and let us just have a movie about Harry's fear of his own mortality destroying his relationship with Peter, and the death of Gwen.
I also still say showing her be still alive made it better. The expression in her eyes really adds to it in a way ambiguity would have just taken away from.
Well, I'll add my voice to those saying that I would have preferred they keep the focus on Electro and the Rhino to yet another adaptation of the Osbornes. Maybe it was too early for Gwen to die, maybe not— Peter just got her father killed in the previous movie, and the second movie was too rushed for Gwen's death to have the full impact it needed. Maybe you need a Goblin to kill Gwen, I'm not convinced, but if so, then having Harry suddenly reunite with Peter, watch his dad die, mutate and go crazy, and then kill Gwen Stacy— that's too much for one movie. The franchise hadn't earned that.
edited 19th Mar '17 1:51:22 PM by Unsung
In 1973, no one expected Spider-Man's girlfriend to die, but since then, death has become Gwen Stacy's defining character trait. At this point, Gwen not dying would be more unexpected.
Make mine Marvel.I think what puzzles me is that Gwen's death would normally fit the Stuffed in the Fridge trope, but even the page for that particular trope says it isn't really an example.
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That's pretty much exactly it. I have problems with the Raimi trilogy but they actually took the time to spread out Harry's fall from grace across three films, stupid Deus ex Machina resolution notwithstanding.
The level of Conflict Ball and Idiot Ball it took to turn Harry from Peter's BFF to his archnemesis in the span of a single movie was quite astounding.
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I think it's because traditional fridgings are done to cause pain for someone to angst, get over, and then never speak of again but in this case it caused shockwaves through the entire comic for years.
edited 19th Mar '17 1:59:39 PM by LordVatek
This song needs more love.Gwen was also around for much longer and had development as a character outside of "And then the villain killed her to piss off the hero," which is not the case for a lot of fridgings. The Trope Namer is a good example because GL's girlfriend pretty much existed just so that she could be strangled to death and stuffed into the fridge a few issues after her debut.
It seems to me that a lot of the examples in comics (and perhaps in other areas of pop culture) are deliberately attempting to ape Gwen's death, though.
Oh God! Natural light!Fridging is actually referring to a very specific scenario in which a villain kills a female character and leaves her for the hero to find in order to motivate him further to hunt the villain down. Gwen Stacy's death don' fit because the Green Goblin threw her down more to distract Spider-man, and the one who actually causes her neck to snap is Spider-man himself, consequently he mostly blames himself and not the villain.
x4 It is now, but it wasn't at the time, at least not in the same way— it's a problem because it represents a larger trend of objectifying women, not because no villain can ever kill a hero's love interest ever again. That version of Gwen, the Goblin, and Spider-Man had earned that moment— it wasn't cheaply done, it was a culmination of events and had consequences beyond that moment. Most Fridgings don't.
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I think he probably blames the Goblin as well as himself. I mean, little bit? Never mind, you said 'mostly'.
edited 19th Mar '17 2:13:23 PM by Unsung
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But thats kind of it, the stupid Deus Ex Machina really does cripple that character. Hell, even without the worlds slowest butler, all the character change comes from a mistake. Its all wholly incidental and should be cleaned up in a few seconds. Hell, it shoulda been cleared up anyway when he found out his father was a supervillain, that Spider-Man was saving New York when he killed Norman Osborne, and that when his father told him he loved him it was just a lie. In Amazing Spider-Man 2, the character change actually does follow reality - he's Peters friend, and they have some pretty genuine chemistry, but you can still tell easily that there is something off about him, that if push comes to shove he would really go down a dark path and end up doing anything to save himself. You could not see anyone coming to him and telling him just a single sentence that completely flips his character motivation 180.
And yes, the crucial element to the whole thing is that Spider-Mans webbing is what killed her. As they say, it ain't the fall that kill you, its the sudden stop at the end. Thats why I dismiss people saying the ambiguity is necessary. Instead of what killed her being the villain just trying to get a rise out of the perfect infalliable male hero, its the heroes failure that killed them.
It's still technically an example if only because the definition is rather broad, love interest killed for hero to angst over. But the original story was the culmination of a story arc, not the instigation, and Gwen was not a girlfriend he picked up in the previous story arc, but one of his most prominent supporting characters. Her death is actually rather similar to Barbara Gordon being shot or Jason Todd killed.
ASM 2 botched it primarily because Peter was already trying to keep his distance because he feared It's Not You, It's My Enemies and she responds with "I do what I want" sass. Then she gets killed by an enemy trying to just hurt the hero, proving the original fear completely correct. So he spends the movie angsting about that happening, and spends the epilogue angsting because it happened, diluting any character growth.

It's actually straight out of the comics
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edited 19th Mar '17 10:01:51 AM by comicwriter