The Door Of Peter And Mary Jane

I’m going to keep bringing it up until Marvel stops screwing it up and no, an alternate reality isn’t enough. You still have the main reality featuring a deal with the figurative devil undoing a marriage that people support just because the Spider-Writers prefer…

Speaking of things I won’t get over. You know what’s funny? Stan Lee created Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch as the offspring of superheroes and someone changed it. Stan Lee created Gwen Stacy as Peter’s love interest and someone changed it. And yet it’s the former they keep trying to restore. Even the Maximoff’s origins haven’t returned to the Whizzer and Miss America as their parents even though Marvel Studios wants to swipe them from the mutant wing that Fox won’t release the rights to. And yet since her cameo in an alternate universe episode of the 90s Spider-Man cartoon it’s become impossible to escape the woman! Now alternate media tries to turn Gwen into something closer to Peter on the geek scale, which oddly was done for MJ in the Ultimate Universe. The Spider-Writers, and some other superhero writers, are so against superhero marriages, or just so infatuated with Gwen Frickin’ Stacy that I can’t escape her.

I didn’t grow up with Gwen as Peter’s love interest. Heck, the first love interest I saw was Starfire (and an ill-fated romance with a girl from the future) and later a rival newspaper photographer on the live-action series. But since I started really following the comics, Gwen Stacy was some girl a one-shot villain named Carrion rambled on about and Peter was either involved with Black Cat or Mary Jane. I don’t have a nostalgic tie to MJ, but as this video from NerdSync shows, neither did Stan Lee, and even he couldn’t stop the marriage that was destined to happen. And the part a simple doorway plays in that.

Catch more NerdSync on their YouTube channel.

To be fair, I’m part of that camp where the relationship the fans want isn’t necessarily the right one because there was no intention and nothing pointing to it. However, this may be a case of a character fighting her creator. As a writer you can find that often the characters are so sharp and “real” in your mind that they take over the story. It’s as if they’ve come to life and told you what they wanted. I saw a video recently where they quoted an interview with Garfield creator Jim Davis, in which Davis said he’d come up with a scenario and “Garfield” would tell him what he would do in that situation. A friend of mine ended up changing a character’s gender in a book she was writing because the way that character was created mutated as he/she was being created, so she had to go back and rework a lot of what she had already written. It’s just how things work out.

Apparently, despite Stan creating Gwen to be the love interest and using Mary Jane to bring them together, it looks like “Mary Jane Watson” was having none of that. She learns Peter’s origin by accident and doesn’t tell him for a long time. Aunt May and MJ’s aunt, Anna Watson, keep pushing for them to go out. MJ had her own demons to face, due to her fractured relationship with her father, but once she got past that, she became Mrs. Peter Parker, the only character who could love a man like Peter and accept his alter-ego as Spider-Man rather than one or the other. For example, there are those that say Gwen couldn’t accept Spider-Man, especially after he was (as usual) wrongly accused of causing the death of her father. The aforementioned Black Cat had no interest in a “normal” persona like Peter but was fascinated by the world of Spider-Man’s persona. She even said “I love you Spider-Man” despite knowing Peter was Spidey and him not wearing the mask at the time when he proclaimed his love for Felicia, the woman behind the mask. You may remember the multi-part article on Spidey Kicks Butt where he went over all of Peter’s many love interests up to that point and proved none of them would accept both of his identities…except for our favorite redhead.

There is so much evidence that these two belong together that the only reason the Spider-Writers hate her isn’t even because of Gwen, although at least some of them may be nostalgic for her and her tragic death. They just want to be the one to tell the story of Peter’s romance with some girl and how it will end badly because they think that’s all his relationships should be, a misunderstanding of the “Parker luck” and they show they really don’t understand the “everyman” appeal of Peter since he’s now a tech billionaire, even though Peter was more into chemistry (despite numerous scientific interests). He was closer to the Peter Parker intended when he was a schoolteacher than he is now. Peter deserves better than he gets these days, and he used to have it.

Her name was Mary Jane Watson-Parker.