You know what my favourite thing about Into the Spider Verse is?
Marvel have spent over a decade insisting that Peter Parker’s character has to be “Kept Young” to have any appeal, and have gone out of their way to enforce the idea of “Spider-man is about youth” in both comics and adapted media.
They had his marriage to Mary Jane undone via deal with Mephisto, because supposedly having him married made him unrelatable to the target audience but having him be a divorcee would age him too much, so this was somehow their best option despite… you know, the whole thing spitting in the face of everything Peter’s character is supposed to be about.
Pretty much the majority of Spider-man media since the Raimi movies ended has featured Peter as a High-schooler and a teenager. Every cartoon that’s been made since Spectacular has kept him in High-school, in Avengers EMH he was only about 18 at most, in the Amazing Spider-man movies he only graduated High School in the second movie and then that series got abruptly cut short, and the MCU has basically cemented him as “The teenaged Avengers fanboy” character, with an entire trilogy planned to focus on Peter in high school.
It’s really only in video games that we’ve gotten a version of Peter that isn’t a teenager in the last decade outside of the comics, with the comics themselves making a point to mentally regress Peter to the chagrin of many long-time fans.
Marvel have been insistent that “Young, teenaged Peter Parker” Should be the default and that it’s where the character is at his most iconic and appealing…
And then Spider-Verse gave us Peter B Parker, a version of Peter who’s in his late 30′s and going through a mid-life crisis, has stubble and a beer belly, is a mentor figure to a new teenaged superhero, and has a character arc that concludes with him deciding to reconcile with his ex-wife after deciding he wants to be a father even knowing the risks involved…
And everybody LOVES this version.
Over 3000 notes and counting.
… Crying out loud, how long is this thing going to keep making the rounds?
At least another 30k, I hope. Because this is the thing that Marvel and others need to realize- heroes grow. Heroes change. Keeping it stuck to one small slice of a person’s lifetime is BORING AS FUCK to all but a smaller subset. Let heroes get old. Let them die. Let them change. Let new ones take up their mantles.
ruinedchildhood
