Hey, why is Zendaya in this thread? I thought people agreed her character is distinct from Mary Jane, well, more or less.
"So you've come to the end now alive but dead inside."
Well, that's certainly a caption.
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Well, in Homecoming, her character being MJ was a spoiler - she was originally announced only as Michelle. Now that it's known she's meant to be MJ, they're embracing it, hence the use of the "Face it tiger" phrase there, and dying her hair red. They should do some sort of gag where she needs a fake name for some reason... and calls herself Mary Jane Watson.
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Maybe they can produce an in-story reason and have her "real name" be Mary Jane Watson. You know she's a runaway from an abusive father, and she wanted to change her name so that he couldn't track her because of the internet (which wasn't there in the '60s) and use child services to bring her back (more active today). Also she wanted to avoid "marijuana jokes".
I never had issues with Zendaya, I wished they called her Mary Jane from the start. To me it's a little cowardly to reimagine an iconic character and not have that reimagined character have that name.
My only issue is Tom Holland. He has no romantic chops and chemistry. So it'll all be all on her.
My issue with Zendaya is that I could totally believe her as Mary Jane but that's not the character they have her playing and they wouldn't even let her use the bloody name for the sake of a "surprise" that nobody really seemed that wowed by.
That image of her in London is picture-perfect Mary Jane but so far that doesn't seem to be what we're getting in the movies.
Well, it seems like Zendaya is a fan of Classic MJ: https://twitter.com/Zendaya/status/1140581675212128256
It's annoying that the film-makers are making her the "anti-MJ" when she fits and in all probability wants to play Classic MJ.
I think people need to be careful in throwing phrases like that around. Zendaya's Michelle Jones in Homecoming is quite similar to MJ in High School, which we were told and shown in Tom Defalco's ASM#259. MJ met Peter when she was in college so her high school phase was something others had to imagine. In #259, MJ in high school was a class clown and a loner, and that's very close to Michelle Jones there.
Michelle Jones has an activist streak, well MJ in the comics brought Peter to take interest in the plight of undocumented immigrants, and she also supported Aunt May's elder rights activism in Len Wein's run, even helping design signs. In non-canon but 616-adjacent Spidey Super Stories (the one with Thanoscopter) she led a feminist march. And Michelle Jones is more joyful than Kirsten Dunst's MJ not that that's an issue, Tobey's Peter was just as much of a sad-sack and Tom Holland's Peter more peppy than him.
Mary Jane was the best female character that Stan Lee ever created and wrote, and some of Spider-Man's best writers (Conway, Stern, Defalco, JMD, JMS, Matt Fraction, Bendis) have developed her personality and added in layers, so there's a lot of material and room to interpret and reinterpret her.
I kind of doubt they looked to DeFalco's work when it came to writing Michelle. I think if they had intended her to be more overtly Mary Jane they probably would have gone with a depiction that was more in-line with what people expect or usually imagine the character as.