LogFAQs > #882145683

Becoming the character is just false character development. You're not moving the character toward the finish line. You're setting them back and moving them toward the starting line. They don't grow as a character.

Mary Jane shouldn't be a tomboy who becomes a princess. She should start out with goals of being a model and then realize that she'd rather go into chemistry than make a career out of being objectified. She should be rescued a time or two by Spider-Man, then strike a would-be abductor in the face with a lead pipe when someone again tries to make her the damsel in distress. She should start off as the woman that Peter wants to be with just because she's hot, but then he matures as a person when he realizes that's only the tip of the iceberg of who she is.


Instead of any of that, she's one of my least favorite tropes in all cinema: the beautiful loser. You take someone who could be a model, give them intentionally bad hair and bad clothing -- and it helps if they wear glasses because then they can have that oh so fashionable bottle cap look -- and then you have them suddenly start dressing like the actor rather than the character. Britney Spears took her beetle eye goggles off and now she's suddenly the hottest girl in school. BULL SHIT.


I'd rather they just make her a straight non-adaptation of the character and leave her as the deadpan friend. Or, better yet, cut out the fucking line, "My friends call me MJ." She doesn't have to be Mary Jane. She's not Mary Jane and she can't become what she didn't start out as. You can't make this character into Mary Jane Watson anymore than you could have Peter Parker develop into Bruce Wayne.