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  1. #1756
    Extraordinary Member Lukmendes's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by spidergwen View Post
    People are exhausting, because a gay or even bisexual Peter Parker would have been amazing, but I highly doubt Marvel would ever make that happen. They like to act like allies to the LGBT community, but they're not, not really. Fans are just as bad for freaking out, if not worse, for just fighting against a headcanon he's a MLM.
    To be fair, changing a character for the sake of changing them is gonna be controversial since Spidey is stabilished as clearly straight for all of those years. Could it work to make such a change? Sure thing, execution is far more important than the quality of the idea, but the problem is making such a change in the character itself to begin with, they should just make new characters, or at least, make such a change in a character who makes sense.

  2. #1757
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lukmendes View Post
    To be fair, changing a character for the sake of changing them is gonna be controversial since Spidey is stabilished as clearly straight for all of those years. Could it work to make such a change? Sure thing, execution is far more important than the quality of the idea, but the problem is making such a change in the character itself to begin with, they should just make new characters, or at least, make such a change in a character who makes sense.
    Yep. Bi/Gay/Asexual characters are all good, but retconning someone already set in stone is gonna lead to backlash. Remember this?



    Yeah...making this even stupider is they coulda just made him bisexual, but no he has to be gay and ignore years of female love interests as denial and beards. Peter's dating history is so set in stone that even making him bi would likely lead to complaints. Spider-Gwen's easier since we have no clue where she falls under. We know she's attracted to men, but so was 65-MJ and she ended up with Glory. The Gwen Goblin from Ghost Spider issues was implied to be in a relationship with her Mary Jane and there was a Secret Wars variant of the two that were pretty blatantly a couple, so more hints for GweMJ:


  3. #1758
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lukmendes View Post
    To be fair, changing a character for the sake of changing them is gonna be controversial since Spidey is stabilished as clearly straight for all of those years. Could it work to make such a change? Sure thing, execution is far more important than the quality of the idea, but the problem is making such a change in the character itself to begin with, they should just make new characters, or at least, make such a change in a character who makes sense.
    You can re-interpret Superman and especially Batman as being gay or bisexual. The reasons are both are icons and for most of their history in comics, one-dimensional characters. But you simply can't do that with mainline canon Spider-Man simply because he was always a more complex, shaded, and layered character right from the start and defined in clear ways from the outset. I said elsewhere that Peter is the most heterosexual character in comics. He's always been relationship-crazy and it's always been with girls. His most significant emotional bonds have always been with girls, and his male friends are never as close to him as his girlfriends/lovers/wife is. Peter has always directed most of his attention and focus towards girls, and girls are drawn to Peter.

    It's sill possible to interpret Miles as being bisexual or gay OTOH. And yeah, Spider-Gwen definitely.

    It is however supremely weird for there to be so few LGBT characters in Spider-Man. I mean Spider-Man is in New York and for most of his history was associated with newsmedia, with campus, and a kind of outsider world...which means that there should be many avenues for LGBT characters in the story. Stonewall for instance happened in the late 60s, and that was very much in Spider-Man's neck of woods but that wasn't acknowledged in that era and very little after that.

    As for existing characters who could be interpreted as gay. I actually think Harry Osborn in the canon could be seen as being a pretty heavily repressed and in closet gay man. Which does make sense for his background and family history and so on.
    Last edited by Revolutionary_Jack; 12-29-2018 at 08:03 AM.

  4. #1759
    Extraordinary Member Lukmendes's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by eratas123 View Post
    Yep. Bi/Gay/Asexual characters are all good, but retconning someone already set in stone is gonna lead to backlash. Remember this?



    Yeah...making this even stupider is they coulda just made him bisexual, but no he has to be gay and ignore years of female love interests as denial and beards.
    This one's an extreme example, because while the idea itself is already bad, the execution is even worse, like much, much worse, because it's not Bobby himself finding out he's gay, it's Jean, completely violating his privacy by reading his mind, and telling him that he's gay, and when Bobby tries to say "I was in relationships with women!" she replies with "But they all failed, so ur gay", and that's said like she's right, because apparently having relationships that end badly means that you're gay in Bendis-land.

    Peter's dating history is so set in stone that even making him bi would likely lead to complaints. Spider-Gwen's easier since we have no clue where she falls under. We know she's attracted to men, but so was 65-MJ and she ended up with Glory. The Gwen Goblin from Ghost Spider issues was implied to be in a relationship with her Mary Jane and there was a Secret Wars variant of the two that were pretty blatantly a couple, so more hints for GweMJ:

    Yeah, from what I've seen of Gwen, she's more pointed towards being straight, but that isn't set in stone, specialy with her being a teenager, so she could be unsure of what she's really into, so even being lesbian could work with a proper explanation.

    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    You can re-interpret Superman and especially Batman as being gay or bisexual. The reasons are both are icons and for most of their history in comics, one-dimensional characters. But you simply can't do that with mainline canon Spider-Man simply because he was always a more complex, shaded, and layered character right from the start and defined in clear ways from the outset. I said elsewhere that Peter is the most heterosexual character in comics. He's always been relationship-crazy and it's always been with girls. His most significant emotional bonds have always been with girls, and his male friends are never as close to him as his girlfriends/lovers/wife is. Peter has always directed most of his attention and focus towards girls, and girls are drawn to Peter.
    Batman, while he's straight, I can see re-interpretations making him gay and working well, mostly because his sexuality is such a small part of his character, he's more about his struggles with being Batman than relationships, Supes I can see him working as at most bisexual, while Supes isn't always in a relationship or trying to be in one like Spidey can be, he's still always attracted towards women, even if it's few, and the romance he had with Lana and then Lois, and some few other women, was always a significant part of the character as there were stories made around them.

  5. #1760
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lukmendes View Post
    ...Supes I can see him working as at most bisexual, while Supes isn't always in a relationship or trying to be in one like Spidey can be, he's still always attracted towards women, even if it's few, and the romance he had with Lana and then Lois, and some few other women, was always a significant part of the character as there were stories made around them.
    The thing is for most of the Silver Age, Superman was never actually in a relationship. I mean the comics at the time weren't always serialized, so you'd have multiple issues where Superman marries Lois and for that to be a joke that gets undone and so on. Lana Lang was a clone of Lois created for the Superboy comics, and Young Clark was I think in a relationship with her...which is weird because he never got there with Lois. Heck Superman not being in a relationship and so on led to that famous "Man of Steel, Women of Kleenex" article which says that Superman being an alien meant he couldn't have sex. That changed in the Bronze Age, and then Post-Crisis, you had a new imagining and version. And then Lois and Clark had a legitimate relationship then for the first time.

    It's often lost how much Spider-Man influenced and inspired the later direction of Batman and Superman. I mean everyone says that Goblin is a Joker knock-off...but then Goblin learned Peter's identity, killed Gwen Stacy at a time when Joker was still a Silver Age goofball and this is some 15 years before The Killing Joke and the death of Jason Todd. By that time you had many Spider-man comics that had moved well past this. And it's always been my contention, that Superman and Lois' relationship Post-Crisis would not have been possible without the example of Spider-Man and MJ. MJ had established in 1983 she had known Peter was Spider-Man all along, and that wasn't reversed or amnesia'd away. Then they got married all of a sudden and Marvel had claim to the first major superhero wedding, an honor that by all rights should have been Superman's and Lois' but they got upstaged for all time (the Superman Wedding Album that came out in 1996 didn't have as much an impact, and is not as good a story as the Wedding Annual). Like Batman in 1977 during the Strange Apparitions story falls in love with Silver St. Cloud, starts a real relationship with her, with the first hints ever that Bruce Wayne was in a sexual relationship (when again that was part of Peter and MJ's since ASM #149 in 1975), but Bruce struggles with telling her, whether she likes Bruce Wayne or Batman and so on...all of that is again making Bruce a version of Peter Parker.

  6. #1761
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    The issue comes with getting fans to buy it. If you make X character gay or bi when they've only ever shown attraction to the opposite sex it's gonna lead to a lot of questions. You have some leeway if the character shows ambiguous signs or at least doesn't out and out reject the possibility of a same sex romance, but if they do the 'character was always closeted' excuse can only go so far. Miles wouldn't be viable since he explicitly denies being attracted to men and even gets annoyed when Ultimate Katie Bishop and his dad implied he was into Ganke.

    Spider-Gwen gets leeway cause she never really shows signs that she's against it, similar to 65-MJ. During 65-MJ's focus issue she (awkwardly) met up with an ex boyfriend, indicating she's straight, but because she never shows any signs of being against the idea of a same sex romance the writer could put her in a relationship with Glory with no fuss. Peter, iirc, generally isn't very touchy feely with men as he is with women. There was even an issue where he roomed with Johnny Storm and while Johnny seemed mostly cool hanging around in nothing but an apron and undies, Peter looked pretty put off.

  7. #1762
    Extraordinary Member Lukmendes's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    The thing is for most of the Silver Age, Superman was never actually in a relationship. I mean the comics at the time weren't always serialized, so you'd have multiple issues where Superman marries Lois and for that to be a joke that gets undone and so on. Lana Lang was a clone of Lois created for the Superboy comics, and Young Clark was I think in a relationship with her...which is weird because he never got there with Lois. Heck Superman not being in a relationship and so on led to that famous "Man of Steel, Women of Kleenex" article which says that Superman being an alien meant he couldn't have sex. That changed in the Bronze Age, and then Post-Crisis, you had a new imagining and version. And then Lois and Clark had a legitimate relationship then for the first time.
    Being in a relationship isn't the only thing to define someone's sexuality, I do remember seeing Supes being upset once or twice at the possibility of Lois being with someone else (Think one of them was with Bizarro lol), so while it took him way too long to get in a relationship with Lois, the mutual attraction was there and it was important, them taking that long to get in the relationship undermines that but not so drasticaly to the point Supes being attracted to women is something that can just be removed in a re-interpretation.

    It's often lost how much Spider-Man influenced and inspired the later direction of Batman and Superman. I mean everyone says that Goblin is a Joker knock-off...but then Goblin learned Peter's identity, killed Gwen Stacy at a time when Joker was still a Silver Age goofball and this is some 15 years before The Killing Joke and the death of Jason Todd. By that time you had many Spider-man comics that had moved well past this. And it's always been my contention, that Superman and Lois' relationship Post-Crisis would not have been possible without the example of Spider-Man and MJ. MJ had established in 1983 she had known Peter was Spider-Man all along, and that wasn't reversed or amnesia'd away. Then they got married all of a sudden and Marvel had claim to the first major superhero wedding, an honor that by all rights should have been Superman's and Lois' but they got upstaged for all time (the Superman Wedding Album that came out in 1996 didn't have as much an impact, and is not as good a story as the Wedding Annual). Like Batman in 1977 during the Strange Apparitions story falls in love with Silver St. Cloud, starts a real relationship with her, with the first hints ever that Bruce Wayne was in a sexual relationship (when again that was part of Peter and MJ's since ASM #149 in 1975), but Bruce struggles with telling her, whether she likes Bruce Wayne or Batman and so on...all of that is again making Bruce a version of Peter Parker.
    Yep, for better and worse, Spider-Man is a huge influence in the route comic books took, specialy in humanizing DC characters, again, for better and worse lol.

    I'll say that Green Goblin started more or less as kind of a Joker clone with how goofy he was with ridiculous plans, but moved past that relatively quickly as of ASM#39 (Which was like, the 5th time he showed up?), so he became his own thing, ironicaly, when he returned he kinda lost his own identity since he was taking more from Kingsley (Being a mastermind who can manipulate people and a dangerous enemy to fight), so Norman is both his own thing and a rip off lol.

    It's honestly depressing that what set Spider-Man apart is how his stories had consequences, not everything since more often than not we had something happening that was undone after a while, but we got stuff that was significant enough to matter, and for many years that just, stopped... At the very least we're getting something like that again thanks to Zdarsky with JJ knowing Spidey's secret identity, and being more supportive of Spidey, hopefuly that sticks without ruining JJ's character (As Spencer is using JJ currently and is keeping him loud, arrogant, who doesn't want to admit he was ever a problem, so he's still JJ who changed his views for justified reasons).

  8. #1763
    Extraordinary Member Lukmendes's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by eratas123 View Post
    The issue comes with getting fans to buy it. If you make X character gay or bi when they've only ever shown attraction to the opposite sex it's gonna lead to a lot of questions. You have some leeway if the character shows ambiguous signs or at least doesn't out and out reject the possibility of a same sex romance, but if they do the 'character was always closeted' excuse can only go so far. Miles wouldn't be viable since he explicitly denies being attracted to men and even gets annoyed when Ultimate Katie Bishop and his dad implied he was into Ganke.

    Spider-Gwen gets leeway cause she never really shows signs that she's against it, similar to 65-MJ. During 65-MJ's focus issue she (awkwardly) met up with an ex boyfriend, indicating she's straight, but because she never shows any signs of being against the idea of a same sex romance the writer could put her in a relationship with Glory with no fuss. Peter, iirc, generally isn't very touchy feely with men as he is with women. There was even an issue where he roomed with Johnny Storm and while Johnny seemed mostly cool hanging around in nothing but an apron and undies, Peter looked pretty put off.
    I think the issue you're talking about is FF#17, and as far as I remember, Peter didn't react to Johnny being naked with just an apron, the issue was more about how much of a terrible roommate Johnny is (He asked Reed to make the closet into a portal to the negative zone... For some reason), though I do remember one PI era issue with Peter going to his bed and finding a naked Johnny in his room, which both reacted with understandable anger lol.

  9. #1764
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lukmendes View Post
    I'll say that Green Goblin started more or less as kind of a Joker clone with how goofy he was with ridiculous plans,
    I disagree. Green Goblin never got caught in the Ditko era. Every other Spidey bad guy went to jail. Every Batman and Superman villain likewise. Yet, Green Goblin tussled and kept escaping justice. Until Bendis' Pulse written in 2003, the Green Goblin went the longest time without going to jail for any major bad guy. Kingpin went to jail. Octopus several times, Luthor even in post-crisis went to jail, Dr. Doom was deposed a few times which is not exactly jail but at least some setback and loss of face...but Norman always evaded justice. So Green Goblin was always an original and dangerous enemy. And pretty unique one.

    Basically from 1962-1992, Spider-man was on the realistic side in terms of serialization. Stories had consequences. Status-quo shifts and character development was maintained and preserved from one era to another. Those were the norms. No retcons, no claims that 20 years of continuity didn't happen, no people coming back from the dead...Then the Clone Saga single-handedly destroyed that forever. The Clone Saga damaged Spider-Man and tainted it permanently. Then you had a brief recovery and then OMD put it forever beyond the point of no return. Marvel used to say they operated under the illusion of change. Well now there's no illusion. There is never going to be change, ever.

  10. #1765
    Extraordinary Member Lukmendes's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    I disagree. Green Goblin never got caught in the Ditko era. Every other Spidey bad guy went to jail. Every Batman and Superman villain likewise. Yet, Green Goblin tussled and kept escaping justice. Until Bendis' Pulse written in 2003, the Green Goblin went the longest time without going to jail for any major bad guy. Kingpin went to jail. Octopus several times, Luthor even in post-crisis went to jail, Dr. Doom was deposed a few times which is not exactly jail but at least some setback and loss of face...but Norman always evaded justice. So Green Goblin was always an original and dangerous enemy. And pretty unique one.
    I meant with how he acted and with how goofy he was, being caught or not isn't the point, it's his attitude, and again, that was gonne pretty quick by ASM#39, and he went on to become more of his thing after that until the resurrection, which he started to "borrow" some traits from other characters.

  11. #1766
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    Basically from 1962-1992, Spider-man was on the realistic side in terms of serialization. Stories had consequences. Status-quo shifts and character development was maintained and preserved from one era to another. Those were the norms. No retcons, no claims that 20 years of continuity didn't happen, no people coming back from the dead...
    Please tell me more about these alternate universe Spider-Man comics you read.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Snoop Dogg View Post
    Please tell me more about these alternate universe Spider-Man comics you read.
    Basically read the run from Ditko-Romita-Conway-Stern-DeFalco-David--DeMatteis-Michelinie. A.k.a. Spider-Man's Golden Age.

  13. #1768
    Amazing Member spidergwen's Avatar
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    Yeah, when I commented on a gay or bisexual Peter Parker it was strictly based on "headcanons" and wishes, but its nice to see how unevolved people are when it comes to LGBT characters in their entertainment media. And plenty of people realized their sexuality very late in life, look at Flash Thompson, poor baby thought he was straight his whole life when he's bisexual.

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    Quote Originally Posted by spidergwen View Post
    Yeah, when I commented on a gay or bisexual Peter Parker it was strictly based on "headcanons" and wishes, but its nice to see how unevolved people are when it comes to LGBT characters in their entertainment media. And plenty of people realized their sexuality very late in life, look at Flash Thompson, poor baby thought he was straight his whole life when he's bisexual.
    Hmm, if you identify the Venom symbiote as being male-gendered . . .
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    Quote Originally Posted by spidergwen View Post
    Yeah, when I commented on a gay or bisexual Peter Parker it was strictly based on "headcanons" and wishes, but its nice to see how unevolved people are when it comes to LGBT characters in their entertainment media. And plenty of people realized their sexuality very late in life, look at Flash Thompson, poor baby thought he was straight his whole life when he's bisexual.
    I can tell you that EIC Jim Shooter in the '80s forbade any mention of homosexuality in the comics during his entire 10 year tenure from 1978-1987. He forbade it in X-Men when Chris Claremont tried many times to incorporate that. And Spider-Man was definitely out of the question.

    Flash...yeah jock football guy, turned soldier and military veteran, had messy relationships with women, and always having some macho issues. You can totally see him as being gay and repressed. Though unfortunately him being dead kind of makes me want him to be straight because that creates a worse stereotype. For a while I have thought that you could interpret Harry Osborn more credibly as a heavily repressed homosexual or a bisexual with a preference for men. I always felt that Harry was in love with Peter in the Lee-Romita years and his hatred and dislike for Peter comes from a place of rejection. It's a fact that he has dated and married girls who were either Peter's exes, former crushes or were rebounds to him (Gwen, MJ, Liz). I mean if you read that famous scene in #122 where Harry goes into drug withdrawal and Peter walks away and Harry calls out to him...yeah on the surface it's a friend calling out for companionship, but you could also see that as an unconsummated love. Now of course eventually Harry married Liz and had a child but that marriage apparently had issues and it has an air of Liz being the "beard". And then of course his final issue Pre-OMD, "Best of Enemies" has him being personally fixated on Peter in that Joker-Batman way that you can easily read into. I am not sure if that's healthy of course. Post-OMD, Harry has this relationship and marriage to Lily Hollister and of course she cheats on him with his father...which is again obviously the other issue with him. And you know James Franco and Tobey Maguire in Raimi's movies have more chemistry than James Franco and Kirsten Dunst so I think you could see that.

    Dan Slott introduced Max Modell as a prominent gay supporting character. That's good and obviously as time passes you could add more.

    But certainly Spider-Man as a title stands out for the unusually high number of heterosexuals in the story especially given the setting. It's definitely conceived and still reflects a very Pre-Stonewall view. And even when Stonewall and other stuff happened, it was still stuck in the past. Still at the very least there aren't negative coding or LGBT stereotypes on villains, which is definitely there in a lot of Batman villains.

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