Spiderman 2

[Huntsman Spider]

The Arkham games and Arkham Knight specifically, as much as I love them, have the same problem as most Post-Crisis comics that portray Batman as fascist-lite. That's why Morrison's Batman is the best take on the character in years because it returned Batman to his heroic roots.

Spider-Man in general doesn't have this problem, and neither does Insomniac's version. There are some peripheral things in the first game that are problematic and that wouldn't have been included if the game came out today, but hey, the same is true of most art.

Also, Sable International in the first game was clearly meant to be a metaphor for 21st century cops. They're very militarized, answer only to Norman Osborn, lock up peaceful protesters, and almost shot Miles Morales for no reason. And Spider-Man consistently has to fight them, make jokes at their expense about how fascist they are, and free the innocent people they lock up and harass on the streets. Stuff like that was conveniently ignored and never brought up by all the sensationalist media writers that called the first game "pro-cop".

It could be argued, if one wanted to go there, that Sable International's involvement in the first Insomniac Spider-Man was more to provide an "acceptable" valve for critiques of modern law enforcement in America without indicting actual police departments, even fictionalized representations thereof, by name. That said, as a private military contractor functioning in the capacity of law enforcement, separate from and circumventing if not superseding local (and maybe state) police, it gave me the impression of foreshadowing Spider-Man 2099, where megacorporations like Alchemax effectively if not literally ran the world and all functions of the state, including policing and law enforcement, had been ceded to private subsidiaries of those same megacorps. On that note, a Spider-Man 2099 spinoff game by Insomniac would be great, too.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

It could be argued, if one wanted to go there, that Sable International's involvement in the first Insomniac Spider-Man was more to provide an "acceptable" valve for critiques of modern law enforcement in America without indicting actual police departments, even fictionalized representations thereof, by name. That said, as a private military contractor functioning in the capacity of law enforcement, separate from and circumventing if not superseding local (and maybe state) police, it gave me the impression of foreshadowing Spider-Man 2099, where megacorporations like Alchemax effectively if not literally ran the world and all functions of the state, including policing and law enforcement, had been ceded to private subsidiaries of those same megacorps. On that note, a Spider-Man 2099 spinoff game by Insomniac would be great, too.

I think so too. Smart writers will find ways to do social commentary via fictional valves, and Insomniac's first game was no exception. The same goes for the Spider-Man 2099 comics. There is no way Peter David could have gotten away with all the politics in that book had Alchemax been real. (Ironically though, I also feel David's 90's run on Spider-Man 2099 is more relevant now than it was back then, to the point that you can almost get away with telling Miguel O'Hara's story in present-day 616).

[Revolutionary_Jack]

The Arkham games and Arkham Knight specifically, as much as I love them, have the same problem as most Post-Crisis comics that portray Batman as fascist-lite. That's why Morrison's Batman is the best take on the character in years because it returned Batman to his heroic roots.

Morrison said that his run had Batman do high-voltage international adventure a la James Bond because he felt that any other version was Batman going out at night and beating up poor people.

The Arkham games where you spend most of the time playing a jacked-up over-advantaged guy wearing million dollar suits and tech, beating up mooks dressed in rags really sells that across. They are fun games, technically well-done and aesthetically beautiful but if not for the twisty stories and the overall tragic characterization of Batman being self-destructive, driving away everyone around him, and ultimately losing at the end of AK, the games would definitely be full-on fascist.

Also, Sable International in the first game was clearly meant to be a metaphor for 21st century cops. They're very militarized, answer only to Norman Osborn, lock up peaceful protesters, and almost shot Miles Morales for no reason. And Spider-Man consistently has to fight them, make jokes at their expense about how fascist they are, and free the innocent people they lock up and harass on the streets. Stuff like that was conveniently ignored and never brought up by all the sensationalist media writers that called the first game "pro-cop".

That's valid. In response, one can argue that the game had to have a foreign Eastern European PMC do that rather than show NYPD on Osborn's payroll becoming excessive. So one can see that as a dodge. After all in the 2000 Activision Game, which had Spider-Man framed by Mysterio at the start you had an entire sequence where NYPD chases and hunts down Spider-Man across the city skyline, so in some respects it's less radical than earlier games.

And it's also not fair to call it "sensationalist media writers". It was the writers at Deadspin who made that criticism most eloquently:
https://deadspin.com/they-turned-spi...cks-1828944087

Deadspin was an online magazine that was colorful and irreverent and they often did challenging sports coverage and pop-culture stuff. In 2019 the entire staff up and resigned when their corporate owners told them to avoid politics. So it would be unfair to characterize them as 'sensationalized media' because they talked the talk back in 2018 (before the Floyd protests when copaganda wasn't mainstream) and walked the walk in 2019 (when they quit their jobs which probably didn't pay a great deal and was rent money they needed).

[Huntsman Spider]

I think so too. Smart writers will find ways to do social commentary via fictional valves, and Insomniac's first game was no exception. The same goes for the Spider-Man 2099 comics. There is no way Peter David could have gotten away with all the politics in that book had Alchemax been real. (Ironically though, I also feel David's 90's run on Spider-Man 2099 is more relevant now than it was back then, to the point that you can almost get away with telling Miguel O'Hara's story in present-day 616).

Agreed, especially since Alchemax was founded in the more recent present-day timeline of the Spider-Man comics (I'd say roughly two years ago in-universe, as it was eight years ago in real life that the present-day, Earth-616 Alchemax made its debut) and has since been a major player with symbiote-related plots, not to mention that a lot of the forewarnings of corporate control and cooptation of so much of human society and culture as per cyberpunk's heyday seem to be on their way to coming true in real life, if they haven't already.

Morrison said that his run had Batman do high-voltage international adventure a la James Bond because he felt that any other version was Batman going out at night and beating up poor people.

The Arkham games where you spend most of the time playing a jacked-up over-advantaged guy wearing million dollar suits and tech, beating up mooks dressed in rags really sells that across. They are fun games, technically well-done and aesthetically beautiful but if not for the twisty stories and the overall tragic characterization of Batman being self-destructive, driving away everyone around him, and ultimately losing at the end of AK, the games would definitely be full-on fascist.



That's valid. In response, one can argue that the game had to have a foreign Eastern European PMC do that rather than show NYPD on Osborn's payroll becoming excessive. So one can see that as a dodge. After all in the 2000 Activision Game, which had Spider-Man framed by Mysterio at the start you had an entire sequence where NYPD chases and hunts down Spider-Man across the city skyline, so in some respects it's less radical than earlier games.

And it's also not fair to call it "sensationalist media writers". It was the writers at Deadspin who made that criticism most eloquently:
https://deadspin.com/they-turned-spi...cks-1828944087

Deadspin was an online magazine that was colorful and irreverent and they often did challenging sports coverage and pop-culture stuff. In 2019 the entire staff up and resigned when their corporate owners told them to avoid politics. So it would be unfair to characterize them as 'sensationalized media' because they talked the talk back in 2018 (before the Floyd protests when copaganda wasn't mainstream) and walked the walk in 2019 (when they quit their jobs which probably didn't pay a great deal and was rent money they needed).

Thanks for the article link. Having read it myself once or twice before, it was very interesting and enlightening. As for Osborn hiring an Eastern European PMC to do the dirty work for him that the NYPD wouldn't . . . a good point there, too, and my argument as well, that it was a way to critique hyper-militarized contemporary policing without accusing the NYPD itself, even if technically a fictionalized representation.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

That's valid. In response, one can argue that the game had to have a foreign Eastern European PMC do that rather than show NYPD on Osborn's payroll becoming excessive. So one can see that as a dodge. After all in the 2000 Activision Game, which had Spider-Man framed by Mysterio at the start you had an entire sequence where NYPD chases and hunts down Spider-Man across the city skyline, so in some respects it's less radical than earlier games.

They did show the NYPD on Fisk's payroll. As for Sable International, it can be counter-argued that Sable herself is only the founder and not the end all be all of the entity. The entity itself is an international contractor that anyone can hire, and rich Americans like Osborn own the most money, they are also most likely to hire them. The Sable guards themselves furthermore all have American accents and were likely born and raised in America. Plus they have to directly answer to Osborn as per their contract (which Sable specified) and Sable herself can't do anything about them even after she pulled out. Overall, I don't think there's much of a subtext there that police brutality is "foreign" and therefore un-American.

By contrast, the cops in the first Spider-Man game were genuinely convinced of the framing by someone as competent as Mysterio. Chase scenes like that would happen in one form or another even in a world where there aren't systemic issues with the police.

And it's also not fair to call it "sensationalist media writers". It was the writers at Deadspin who made that criticism most eloquently:
https://deadspin.com/they-turned-spi...cks-1828944087

Deadspin was an online magazine that was colorful and irreverent and they often did challenging sports coverage and pop-culture stuff. In 2019 the entire staff up and resigned when their corporate owners told them to avoid politics. So it would be unfair to characterize them as 'sensationalized media' because they talked the talk back in 2018 (before the Floyd protests when copaganda wasn't mainstream) and walked the walk in 2019 (when they quit their jobs which probably didn't pay a great deal and was rent money they needed).

The first articles on it were all from sensationalist sources or semi-sentationalist sources at best, like Kotaku. There's some exceptions but I don't think it's a stretch that a lot of it was sensationalized.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

The first articles on it were all from sensationalist sources or semi-sentationalist sources at best, like Kotaku. There's some exceptions but I don't think it's a stretch that a lot of it was sensationalized.

Deadspin wrote the major point that turned people's heads and that set the ball rolling. Kotaku did sensationalize but it's kotaku, what d'you expect?

And you know the article is not totally critical of Spider-Man just pointing out that he's supposed to be an underdog but here he's palling around with cops:

"What this new game does is put Spider-Man up on a perch where he doesn’t belong. He’s no longer performing heroic deeds out of just the goodness of his heart, but also for the purpose of solidifying the existing power structure’s grip on the city. Again, this is how the first few hours of the game works, and maybe there is a forthcoming plot twist in which Spider-Man realizes that he no longer wants to be an agent of the state. All I know is that it kind of sucks to play a game in which Spider-Man, in the process of beating up some drug dealers, taunts them by yelling, “If you just got real jobs you wouldn’t have to work so hard at being criminals!"

Truth be told this is a part of Spider-Man that always fluctuates over the years. Since there were pro-cop elements in the Lee-Ditko run and also the Lee-Romita run but also the contrary in many cases.

Conway had Spider-Man take up the plight of undocumented immigrants in his Tarantula stories and the DLC of the third part has an entire mission where Peter/MJ do a side-mission helping an undocumented immigrant get citizenship. That's cool but it's also DLC (which generally speaking given that it has expectations built in about not reaching an audience as big as the main game allows you to take some swings).

[Huntsman Spider]

Deadspin wrote the major point that turned people's heads and that set the ball rolling. Kotaku did sensationalize but it's kotaku, what d'you expect?

And you know the article is not totally critical of Spider-Man just pointing out that he's supposed to be an underdog but here he's palling around with cops:

"What this new game does is put Spider-Man up on a perch where he doesn’t belong. He’s no longer performing heroic deeds out of just the goodness of his heart, but also for the purpose of solidifying the existing power structure’s grip on the city. Again, this is how the first few hours of the game works, and maybe there is a forthcoming plot twist in which Spider-Man realizes that he no longer wants to be an agent of the state. All I know is that it kind of sucks to play a game in which Spider-Man, in the process of beating up some drug dealers, taunts them by yelling, “If you just got real jobs you wouldn’t have to work so hard at being criminals!"

Truth be told this is a part of Spider-Man that always fluctuates over the years. Since there were pro-cop elements in the Lee-Ditko run and also the Lee-Romita run but also the contrary in many cases.

Conway had Spider-Man take up the plight of undocumented immigrants in his Tarantula stories and the DLC of the third part has an entire mission where Peter/MJ do a side-mission helping an undocumented immigrant get citizenship. That's cool but it's also DLC (which generally speaking given that it has expectations built in about not reaching an audience as big as the main game allows you to take some swings).

Conway also did a more recent story with the same topic in the Amazing Spider-Man: Going Big one-shot back in 2019, if I recall right. That said, on the subject of how chummy Spider-Man should or shouldn't be with the NYPD, it might be telling that the Miles Morales spinoff had the citizens of Harlem contacting Miles's Spider-Man more directly via a communications app instead.

[Frontier]

1) The latter is DLC and not the main game. The fact is only a smaller subset play the DLC compared to the main campaign across all video game releases. So DLC in general tends to have less corporate and less status-quo stuff (not always but in general).

2) Even in the DLC, Yuri Watanabe's brutality happens when she quits the force, which implies that the normal NYPD can be trusted or won't accept such stuff. So it's a bit of a wash.

But I think in the case of the game people saw it as a direct continuation of the story.

Yuri was still with the force when she shot Hammerhead in the head and that was when she got suspended. I don't think it was an issue that the normal NYPD being more trusting but Spidey and his general morality contrasted with how far Yuri was willing to go.

Morrison said that his run had Batman do high-voltage international adventure a la James Bond because he felt that any other version was Batman going out at night and beating up poor people.

That was definitely not how Paul Dini was writing him in the 'Tec run following alongside Morrison.

The Arkham games where you spend most of the time playing a jacked-up over-advantaged guy wearing million dollar suits and tech, beating up mooks dressed in rags really sells that across. They are fun games, technically well-done and aesthetically beautiful but if not for the twisty stories and the overall tragic characterization of Batman being self-destructive, driving away everyone around him, and ultimately losing at the end of AK, the games would definitely be full-on fascist.

Most of those thugs are stuck in prison uniforms because they're incarcerated and have to make do with limited resources to look like the villain they're allied with.

In Arkham Origins he was fighting a lot of guys in suits or tactical gear.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

Deadspin wrote the major point that turned people's heads and that set the ball rolling. Kotaku did sensationalize but it's kotaku, what d'you expect?

And you know the article is not totally critical of Spider-Man just pointing out that he's supposed to be an underdog but here he's palling around with cops:

"What this new game does is put Spider-Man up on a perch where he doesn’t belong. He’s no longer performing heroic deeds out of just the goodness of his heart, but also for the purpose of solidifying the existing power structure’s grip on the city. Again, this is how the first few hours of the game works, and maybe there is a forthcoming plot twist in which Spider-Man realizes that he no longer wants to be an agent of the state. All I know is that it kind of sucks to play a game in which Spider-Man, in the process of beating up some drug dealers, taunts them by yelling, “If you just got real jobs you wouldn’t have to work so hard at being criminals!"

Truth be told this is a part of Spider-Man that always fluctuates over the years. Since there were pro-cop elements in the Lee-Ditko run and also the Lee-Romita run but also the contrary in many cases.

Conway had Spider-Man take up the plight of undocumented immigrants in his Tarantula stories and the DLC of the third part has an entire mission where Peter/MJ do a side-mission helping an undocumented immigrant get citizenship. That's cool but it's also DLC (which generally speaking given that it has expectations built in about not reaching an audience as big as the main game allows you to take some swings).

That line about the criminals and real jobs bugged me, as did the line about how drugs are his least favorite crime.

I do consider the paragraph you're quoting to be part-sensationalist and an exaggeration, particularly the parts about Spider-Man "solidifying the existing power structure's grip on the city" and "wants to be an agent of the state". Whatever one thinks of the problematic elements in the first game, and yes there are some genuine ones in it, the reality is that Insomniac's Spider-Man does not work with the police - he works with Yuri and the cops working under Yuri (Aaron Davis), which is only a fraction of the police. The rest of the game references how antagonistic Spider-Man's relationship with the police force as a whole really is, with Peter saying things like "Hope the cops don't blame this one on me" whenever he stops a crime. The difference doesn't sound significant but it is because it changes the context, and it allows for the player to enjoy the game knowing that all the good cops they see in the game are the exceptions and not the norm.

Deadspin's standard for being pro-cop being simply working with police officers is actually a really low bar for being pro-cop. Socialist YouTuber ThoughtSlime critiqued this argument in one of his videos on Batman... If simply working with certain police officers makes someone pro-status quo or pro-cop, a lot of people in real life such as social workers and humanitarians would all count as pro-cop or fascist. Therefore simply working with a police officer or police unit the way Spider-Man does with Yuri or the way Batman does with Gordon is not enough to qualify them as problematic. (Batman admittedly often comes across as more of a defender of the status quo than Spider-Man does but the reasons for that have nothing to do with his relationship to Gordon, it's everything else that can make him come off that way).

Deadspin also ignores the context that this is an experienced Spider-Man who's been around for 8 years and knows who to trust and when he should/shouldn't use people in the system to his advantage. If a high school Spider-Man was that trusting of Yuri then it would be a lot more problematic.

[Agent Z]

Morrison said that his run had Batman do high-voltage international adventure a la James Bond because he felt that any other version was Batman going out at night and beating up poor people.

The Arkham games where you spend most of the time playing a jacked-up over-advantaged guy wearing million dollar suits and tech, beating up mooks dressed in rags really sells that across. They are fun games, technically well-done and aesthetically beautiful but if not for the twisty stories and the overall tragic characterization of Batman being self-destructive, driving away everyone around him, and ultimately losing at the end of AK, the games would definitely be full-on fascist.



That's valid. In response, one can argue that the game had to have a foreign Eastern European PMC do that rather than show NYPD on Osborn's payroll becoming excessive. So one can see that as a dodge. After all in the 2000 Activision Game, which had Spider-Man framed by Mysterio at the start you had an entire sequence where NYPD chases and hunts down Spider-Man across the city skyline, so in some respects it's less radical than earlier games.

And it's also not fair to call it "sensationalist media writers". It was the writers at Deadspin who made that criticism most eloquently:
https://deadspin.com/they-turned-spi...cks-1828944087

Deadspin was an online magazine that was colorful and irreverent and they often did challenging sports coverage and pop-culture stuff. In 2019 the entire staff up and resigned when their corporate owners told them to avoid politics. So it would be unfair to characterize them as 'sensationalized media' because they talked the talk back in 2018 (before the Floyd protests when copaganda wasn't mainstream) and walked the walk in 2019 (when they quit their jobs which probably didn't pay a great deal and was rent money they needed).

Given what the James Bond franchise has been accused of, I don't think that's any better. Especially when it comes to how Morrison handles mental illness and non-white foreigners (we are talking about a run that featured a black woman called Jezebel Jet. And people think Black Lightning's name is bad.)

As for the Spider-Man game, I found that it was yet another case of people yelling about copaganda for sensationalism and ignoring what actually happens in the game. Never mind that Spider-Man working with the police is hardly new.

[The Kid]

I honestly hated Spidey being buddy-buddy with the cops in the first game. It was probably my least favorite element of the installment and something I hope they don't bother with going forward (which I think they luckily will do based on the DLC and Miles Morales)

[Frontier]

I honestly hated Spidey being buddy-buddy with the cops in the first game. It was probably my least favorite element of the installment and something I hope they don't bother with going forward (which I think they luckily will do based on the DLC and Miles Morales)

He was only really buddy-buddy with Yuri though. Well, her and Miles' dad (who being a cop is now his thing, so you can only ignore that so much).

[Jman27]

Pretty sure spiderman would rather have the cops on his side then fight them

[Frontier]

Given what the James Bond franchise has been accused of, I don't think that's any better. Especially when it comes to how Morrison handles mental illness and non-white foreigners (we are talking about a run that featured a black woman called Jezebel Jet. And people think Black Lightning's name is bad.)

As for the Spider-Man game, I found that it was yet another case of people yelling about copaganda for sensationalism and ignoring what actually happens in the game. Never mind that Spider-Man working with the police is hardly new.

Now I suddenly understand why they're changing her name for Batwoman.

[Huntsman Spider]

That line about the criminals and real jobs bugged me, as did the line about how drugs are his least favorite crime.

I do consider the paragraph you're quoting to be part-sensationalist and an exaggeration, particularly the parts about Spider-Man "solidifying the existing power structure's grip on the city" and "wants to be an agent of the state". Whatever one thinks of the problematic elements in the first game, and yes there are some genuine ones in it, the reality is that Insomniac's Spider-Man does not work with the police - he works with Yuri and the cops working under Yuri (Aaron Davis), which is only a fraction of the police. The rest of the game references how antagonistic Spider-Man's relationship with the police force as a whole really is, with Peter saying things like "Hope the cops don't blame this one on me" whenever he stops a crime. The difference doesn't sound significant but it is because it changes the context, and it allows for the player to enjoy the game knowing that all the good cops they see in the game are the exceptions and not the norm.

Deadspin's standard for being pro-cop being simply working with police officers is actually a really low bar for being pro-cop. Socialist YouTuber ThoughtSlime critiqued this argument in one of his videos on Batman... If simply working with certain police officers makes someone pro-status quo or pro-cop, a lot of people in real life such as social workers and humanitarians would all count as pro-cop or fascist. Therefore simply working with a police officer or police unit the way Spider-Man does with Yuri or the way Batman does with Gordon is not enough to qualify them as problematic. (Batman admittedly often comes across as more of a defender of the status quo than Spider-Man does but the reasons for that have nothing to do with his relationship to Gordon, it's everything else that can make him come off that way).

Deadspin also ignores the context that this is an experienced Spider-Man who's been around for 8 years and knows who to trust and when he should/shouldn't use people in the system to his advantage. If a high school Spider-Man was that trusting of Yuri then it would be a lot more problematic.

Fair points there, although the Davis who works as a cop in the first Insomniac Spider-Man game is actually Jefferson Davis, Miles's father. His brother Aaron that you referenced is the Prowler.

Also, if we can go there for a moment, vigilantism is nowadays a more serious in real life, too, given how a lot of vigilantes there seem more prone to operating on assumptions of guilt or criminal intent that may or may not be driven by unfortunate biases than anything else. For the most part in superhero comics, particularly the likes of Spider-Man, they're reacting to real crimes in progress, happening right in front of them, as opposed to following someone around and roughing them up, if not killing them, on the presumption of criminal activity, so that particular bit of troubling subtext doesn't tend to surface as much.

He was only really buddy-buddy with Yuri though. Well, her and Miles' dad (who being a cop is now his thing, so you can only ignore that so much).

Mostly because in the Spider-Man games and (non-MCU) films, they can't really use S.H.I.E.L.D., which Jefferson worked for in both his Ultimate and 616 comic backstories, for whatever reason.