Spoiler alert: don’t read unless you have either seen the movie or just don’t care…
As a young kid who grew up reading and loving Spider-Man, I have immensely enjoyed living in an age where technology allows these fictional heroes to come to life on the big screen without looking absolutely ridiculous. It has been a mostly positive experience, though as an avid purist of the original storyline, there are things about each of the movie series’ I just didn’t care for. Web shooting directly from the wrist. Young Aunt May. Changes to how the event happened, including how certain villains got their powers, and so on. But, given that movies often change up original writing the stories are based on, I learned to accept it. I’ve enjoyed the new Spider-Man character, but have to admit I am not overly thrilled with the now required DEI casting that makes MJ a multi-cultural non-redhead who is a brainiac on par with the genius Peter Parker. I have nothing against multi-cultural female brainiacs. But that wasn’t the MJ from Spider-Man. And while the storyline works fine, it’s just not Spider-Man.
So, Marvel found a way to explain away all these things in a clever and admittedly entertaining way – the Multiverse. Presumably, the real Spider-Man of the old comics hasn’t actually been on the big screen yet because there are deviations – some big, some small – from the Spidey of the comics. And I guess that’s OK, because there are really just an infinite number of Spideys out there and the three different movies are representations of three of those. If you count the cartoon about the Multiverse, it is four, I guess. Actually… more than four because we have a Spider pig, a Gwen Spidey-woman, and so on.
So, I guess the good news is the recent movie pulls the previous shows together and basically explains the differences away in a way that we now can all just accept and forget all about the original storyline. In a way, this works well and it was really pretty cool to bring them all together in this movie, working together, and solving the problem of the villains crossing the streams of the different universes within the multiverse. But in another way, this saddens me because I know how the minds of the people in Hollywood work and my expectation of future Marvel story lines is entirely pessimistic. The seeds of my pessimism have been sown already in Marvel’s willingness to embrace the very progressive wokism that is destroying everything in society that it touches.
I read a story last week about how Marissa Tormei lobbied to have Aunt May be a lesbian. But fear not… there wasn’t going to be an in-your-face, on-screen lesbian romp. It was just going to be some subtle thing that gave the implication. Because, you know, I guess that’s ground-breaking and extremely important. Except it isn’t. Maybe it was once a cutting edge, “courageous” statement to make for those who felt it important to mainstream gayness but that time was a decade or two ago. The move to make everything in the universe gay is no longer unique, it’s simply tired and forced. It’s an eye-rolling, progressive, woke yawner of a proposal that even the writers of Spidey must have determined was ridiculously stupid with no upside. But the very fact that such a lame idea was discussed, or that she felt compelled to share it as if it was something worthy of consideration speaks to how little all those involved with the Marvel movies actually care about sticking to anything rational, traditional or historically sensible within the Marvel Universe. Presumably, these breaks with tradition were already promoted – and in some cases already done – before the consideration of the Multiverse as the explanation of the differences came into being.
Now that we have this Multiverse thing thrown out as the explanation to everything that we don’t like about this character difference or that story line difference, get ready for the flood gates to open. What is a legitimately dumb proposal today upending the character roles in the Marvel Universe will get new attention. Because, just like progressivism in the world today, anything goes. In reality we’ve reached a point where if you think something is true today, then it’s not only true but everyone must acknowledge and accept it as true. If that is the case in the real world, just imagine the reckless abandon with which the fictional realm will go after everything previously understood about the characters we’ve grown to love with the Multi-verse in play.
In the new Multi-verse, surely there is a gay Spider-Man somewhere, and by God we had better find him. MJ will be Michael James, and Aunt May will transition to becoming Uncle Ben, living her best life as Peter’s Uncle in order to assuage the guilt of Ben’s death. Get ready for every perverse deviation from all traditional morality, family structure, sexual attraction, gender ideology, and all other normalcy and it will all just be waved off as “we’re really not rewriting Spider-Man at all. That one Peter Parker still exists in that backwards universe where men are men and women are women. We’re just telling a story about the new, better progressive Spider-Man, because this story needs to be told!”
I suppose I could be wrong. We’ll see.
Catholic Diatribes 