Spider-Man’s Brand New Ruining Of Jean Grey

So it appears that Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a huge hit. The box office for the latest live-action Spidey flick in the MCU is doing so good, it’s already shown up both of DC’s “super” movies by having the superhero be a hero, and one you’d want to emulate. Not because of the powers. Spider-Man has a whole group of people who share his powers, some of whom aren’t clones of Peter Parker or born of Venom’s symbiote, and once all of Manhattan had spider powers. On the spider side (not to be confused with Spidercide) There is nothing but praise from this movie because people are so happy to have a heroic superhero, and previously just happy to get Marvel’s flagship character in the MCU, that all adaptation errors have been forgiven it. So a win for storytelling, but a loss for proper adaptation if you’re a comic fan.

Also taking a loss? The mutants. Possibly.

While Peter’s journey has been getting mostly thumbs up, the treatment of–I guess isn’t a secret anymore, even though it wasn’t a well kept one–Jean Grey follows a disturbing trend that follows Scarlet Witch lately in both comics and especially the MCU: if you have trauma and present as female you’re allowed to do all the horrible things you want in order to achieve a goal of regaining your family. In Jean’s case it’s trying to get back her sister, and she’ll kill any innocent she can use to get her back or stop Spider-Man from stopping her. Even I know that’s against Jean Grey’s character and I have little interest in the X-side of the Marvel universe.

So imagine someone like JesterBell, who loves the might mutants, and how upset she was that Jean was such a horrible person, which could be a foreshadowing (my cousin’s in trouble again) of what’s to come once the MCU absorbs all over media continuities into it’s solo universe, DC Crisis style? Well, you don’t have to imagine because she took to a 40+ minute video to go over everything wrong with Jean Grey and Wanda Maximoff in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and why, as an X-Men fan, she would rather Marvel Studios and Kevin Feige, with or without Sony, NOT make an X-Men film if this is what she’s going against. I have some bonus thoughts, but let’s let the expert make her case first.

Marvelites, answer one question for this DC guy before we get into things: Isn’t Damage Control supposed to be a clean-up crew who handles post super battles in New York City? (Marvel Comics was based there pre-internet and all the writers all lived in New York or Connecticut so that’s what they knew. Though that’s changing.) I ask because I only know them from an advertisement of their possibly fun miniseries and the occasional mention. They’re basically what the Sony/MCU version of the Vulture was doing in Homecoming, not some SHIELD-esque shadow organization using science to their own possibly evil ends. That sounds more like AIM, the Advanced Idea Mechanics. Why not just use AIM?

Because Marvel Studios hasn’t been Marvel Studios since Disney bought it. See also Lucasfilm. They think not knowing the source material is a badge of honor. For an adaptation. So why bother?

It stands out how little they pay attention to the source material when JesterBell breaks out the comic background. Jean’s powers developed when her best friend was hit by a car and died, but here she is murdering people by having them walk into traffic or fall off a building. And these are the innocent people. She’s not hunting the guilty. Jean in the comics has tried to be nice to the Hulk in the rare moments I’ve seen them in the same story, but here she’s forcing Bruce into his worst nightmare when she could just mind control one of the should-have-been-AIM-or Hydra agents into helping her escape. If I read the footage correctly she’s controlling people from an apartment. Unless they have some anti-psionic shielding in that place, it should be super easy.

So what we have is akin to Wanda Maximoff going around the multiverse and killing heroes, only without the possession thing. (Which I’m sure fan-choice Reed Richards wouldn’t care about when he’s being turned into spaghetti in favor of fan-non-choice Reed in another continuity being super important to the upcoming Marvel team-up movie.) Wanda also gets defended for trying to bring back two kids that never existed, like in the comics that also ruined Wanda as a character, after holding a town hostage without the Darkhold to be blamed. I wonder how much PTSD that town has? But it’s okay if a woman does it. Wonder Woman can take a man’s virginity while his body is being possessed by her dead boyfriend due to the movie McGuffin and it’s perfectly okay. Now imagine a man doing this for any reason, including love or family? Pragmata couldn’t escape a man bonding with a surrogate daughter and he literally did nothing wrong in the game’s story that I’ve ever heard about, so you can imagine what mind controlling people to die would get him.

JesterBell also brought up all the times Jean has been mind controlled to do horrible things and act out of character in the comics by everyone from other mutants to cosmic beings. This one doesn’t need the Phoenix Force to be evil. Sony/MCU Jean Grey comes off as Mirror Universe Jean Grey at this point, and if that is going to be the directions the movies take with them, it’s another bad comic idea taken instead of a good one. Remember the whole Nature Girl incident, where she murdered a Las Vegas store owner because someone else lost a plastic shopping bag in the ocean? Check your geography. It’s like blaming Honda for an intentional hit-and-run murder. The story said she was in the right for that and every other atrocity she committed in that story, including taking over a cop’s police dog, and if you know anything about K9 cop training that’s horrible.

Then again, people still joke that young Jean used her mental powers to turn young Bobby Drake gay during a time travel incident, altering adult Iceman in the present. In one of the lamest comic pages in comic history, I might add, and not for the cringy implication. Half the page is Jean shrugging before telling Bobby he’s gay across six panels.

You know who they should have used? Emma Frost. On the good guys side these days she started out as a villain who didn’t mind using her mental powers and her sex appeal to manipulate, control, or attack her enemies. This sounds more like the stuff early Emma would have done, with a character arc of redemption also making sense given where the former White Queen is today. And yet, director Destin Daniel Cretton didn’t do his homework, claiming after I set this for posting that he was the one who asked for Jean Grey. You chose the wrong telepath, and now you’ve prejudiced X-Fans against the MCU version of their favorite characters, given what Marvel Studios and Sony both have done to the Marvel heroes.

I’m starting to be ready to just join the crowd who sees Avengers: Endgame as the end of the MCU because it’s the last pre-Disney movie, and it’s been falling apart since. The Spider-Man stuff is good from all the deep reviews I’ve heard, though it’s a bad adaptation thanks to Sony’s paranoia that is the MCU deal with Disney and Marvel Studios produced a bad movie they didn’t want the iconography damaged. Instead these movies have been better received than Matt Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man films and Rami’s third movie, which had Venom forced on it by Marvel (though I have my own notes on both film series), and I’ve seen reviewers say Peter’s outfit in Brand New Day is the most accurate live-action Spider-Man costume ever. (Does that include the TV series with Nicholas Hammond, who was left out of No Way Home?) It’s why I dropped out after Homecoming, the lack of being Spider-Man’s world, like with My Adventures With Superman and how it approaches Clark Kent.

Are we getting morally ambiguous X-Men? If so we aren’t getting moral X-Men, and thus we aren’t getting superhero X-Men. We’re getting Chronicle instead, and there’s a reason I avoided that movie, too.