The Four Color Media Monitor

Bleeding Cool wrote about the affair Dr. Octopus looks to be having with Mary Jane Watson in his mind-switch with Peter Parker, and how Doc Ock is potentially committing rape by doing this disguised as Peter. They say:

But there is something else regarding Amazing Spider-Man #700 and Avenging Spider-Man #15.1 that many may have missed. Doctor Octopus gets his lesson, his Uncle Ben moment, his Road To Damascus revelation and decides to change. To be a different man, a better man, the hero he could have been but never was.

Superior Spider-Man #1 looks to be, in many ways, a tale of redemption. Someone trying to change and be a better man. Knowing what he knows now, experiencing what he has now experienced, will he choose to decline what is being offered to him?

It makes very little difference whether he allegedly goes straight or goes back to being crooked. If he has sex with Mary Jane in the body of Peter yet keeps his mind-switch a secret, he is in a way committing rape, even in sci-fi terms. So I don't think many folks are missing anything. Otto Octavius is hardly learning a lesson at all. But if he does, why doesn't he try to reverse the harm he caused to Peter, and help restore his mind to his own body? While that may happen somewhere down the road - one that's bound to be very long, alas - it won't be enough to redeem the damage they've already piled on Spidey more than a decade ago. Some "better man" Doc Ock is, and some "redemption" journey he's taking there. This is only bound to end up the literary equivalent of a drug hallucination. It's shameful that BC is dismissing how the fanfiction-like approach to writing here only does more harm than good.

Those offended by the direction Marvel's forcing on Spider-Man are not missing anything at all. They've come, seen, and rightly recognize this as a tasteless exercise in futility that leads nowhere.

Labels: dreadful writers, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, Spider-Man, women of marvel