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elucidatedlucy) wrote2018-12-22 10:02 pm
elucidatedlucy) wrote2018-12-22 10:02 pm
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Admiring the Dead and the Necessity of Necromancy - Comics Edition
My parents were big Marvel fans. From when I was born in the early 90s, to the name I was given, to the names my sibling was given, it reflected throughout their lives. My room was filled with hundreds of issues of comics in long white boxes, special plastic coatings to protect them. Marvel was what they grew up with. For my dad, a kid who born in the 50s, Spider-Man was everything.
I didn't grow up reading comics. I grew up hearing about comics. I grew up on the cartoons and the poorly thought out movies of the late 90s and early 2000s. My heroes were Kitty Pride and Nightcrawler after the cartoons. I didn't know about the context. But my parents would tell me all about it, to avoid damage to the collectibles in my room. So despite only having cartoons and movies, I learned about Gwen Stacy.
My parents liked Gwen Stacy more than Mary Jane Watson. Not that MJ was bad, in their eyes. But I liked her more, too. I liked the blond college student with a genius to match Peter's better than the red-head that I only ever saw being saved in the movies. I liked the idea of the scientific genius who was going to school for herself. I liked the image I created of her in my head at 10 years old - a smart-ass who wanted to help people so much she pulled herself thin. I don't know how true that is. I never read the comics. My parents lost all the copies they'd collected. Wikipedia tells me that she was smart and the daughter of a police chief and little else, considered so boring by her creators that they wanted to kill her off.
Ten years old, I grow up with the image of the woman I've created and look up to as a woman who always dies.
It's not that much different from my own reality, awkwardly non-binary but always looking up to women who are battered and destroyed. It is a familiar hurt over the years. People argue the worth of her death - her fridging. It's a sign of its times, the first of its kind, so rare and monumental to comics. No one imagined they could ever be so serious. Because only the death of a woman can show how serious something is. Because someone has to be sacrificed before your medium could be considered more than childish.
I am a teenager and I do not accept Gwen Stacy's death. But I live with it, much as her own clones do, repeated frozen in a time before her demise by people obsessed with her image and not her interiority.
I am 19 when the Garfield Spiderman movie comes out. This time - I get to see Gwen Stacy. It's rare for her to be acknowledged. After all, how does an average children's cartoon include a woman who exists solely to die? It's easy to have the quick death of an older family member. Harder to see the snap of a college student's neck. They can't just show young girls what they think of them so easily. It would be too easy to fight against. Too easy to demand better. It's exciting, in a way. It feels like a smidgeon of justice to have her live to the end of a movie.
I'm 21 when the sequel comes out.
Decades have passed since it was originally decreed that Gwen Stacy is the one who died. Gwen Stacy is the one who does not survive. Gwen Stacy is the first love, pure, unreachable, lost. I wait for them to subvert it. I expect them to break the chain.
Gwen Stacy dies again. Full of promise and a future, she dies, and yet again casts my own future bleak, myself a promising failure on the verge of death. It's not good enough that women deserve better. It's not enough that it was a shitty writing decision. They fit to the bill of only the worst elements of Spider-Man and kill my interest in their vision.
I don't read comics. Maybe that's my own fault. Because of that, I miss a new one that comes out. Until this year.
Miles Morales, I know. I know of the messy writing of his comics that disappointed people, but I believed in his potential. And then Spider-verse comes and proves all of it in two wonderful hours. It shows the person Spider-Man can be, full of personality and love and coming from his own neighborhood, a black-latino kid with everything to prove and his own fight to win. But it did more than that right.
Gwen Stacy is a smart drummer with a background in dance and a dead best friend. She's also a Spider-Woman. Here she is. After decades of death. After dying in every goddamn Peter's universe. Being the background of misery to someone else's love-life. Gwen Stacy is alive and the hero of her own story and I break down crying. She's not only the hero of her own story. She deals with the image of a thousand Peters who lived and a thousand Gwens who died, after having to see her own Peter die. She sees the Peters who lived and thrived because they got bitten instead, leaving Gwen as the one who could not be saved. These Peters who will never know she feels it was her fault they died in her own universe, how they were jealous and sad that they couldn't be the hero.
Couldn't be Special like her.
It's fucked up that even when Gwen lives, she gets to see the pieces of how her own death was apparently required for another person's happiness and success. Even as he mourned her loss.
But isn't that our narrative too? The people who grew up with stories of the girl so smart and nice, she couldn't be allowed to live. The girl who had to harden herself to the world to deal with her own grief. Growing up with the knowledge that the people we want to be can't be. And yet - here we have Miles, insisting that she has a place in his universe and every other too. Saying she can be friends with him - that it's not her fault - that she has a place in this world, and so does he.
We grow up being told we can't be the hero. It's nice to have something that tells us we can make those narratives for each other against the world.
I didn't grow up reading comics. I grew up hearing about comics. I grew up on the cartoons and the poorly thought out movies of the late 90s and early 2000s. My heroes were Kitty Pride and Nightcrawler after the cartoons. I didn't know about the context. But my parents would tell me all about it, to avoid damage to the collectibles in my room. So despite only having cartoons and movies, I learned about Gwen Stacy.
My parents liked Gwen Stacy more than Mary Jane Watson. Not that MJ was bad, in their eyes. But I liked her more, too. I liked the blond college student with a genius to match Peter's better than the red-head that I only ever saw being saved in the movies. I liked the idea of the scientific genius who was going to school for herself. I liked the image I created of her in my head at 10 years old - a smart-ass who wanted to help people so much she pulled herself thin. I don't know how true that is. I never read the comics. My parents lost all the copies they'd collected. Wikipedia tells me that she was smart and the daughter of a police chief and little else, considered so boring by her creators that they wanted to kill her off.
Ten years old, I grow up with the image of the woman I've created and look up to as a woman who always dies.
It's not that much different from my own reality, awkwardly non-binary but always looking up to women who are battered and destroyed. It is a familiar hurt over the years. People argue the worth of her death - her fridging. It's a sign of its times, the first of its kind, so rare and monumental to comics. No one imagined they could ever be so serious. Because only the death of a woman can show how serious something is. Because someone has to be sacrificed before your medium could be considered more than childish.
I am a teenager and I do not accept Gwen Stacy's death. But I live with it, much as her own clones do, repeated frozen in a time before her demise by people obsessed with her image and not her interiority.
I am 19 when the Garfield Spiderman movie comes out. This time - I get to see Gwen Stacy. It's rare for her to be acknowledged. After all, how does an average children's cartoon include a woman who exists solely to die? It's easy to have the quick death of an older family member. Harder to see the snap of a college student's neck. They can't just show young girls what they think of them so easily. It would be too easy to fight against. Too easy to demand better. It's exciting, in a way. It feels like a smidgeon of justice to have her live to the end of a movie.
I'm 21 when the sequel comes out.
Decades have passed since it was originally decreed that Gwen Stacy is the one who died. Gwen Stacy is the one who does not survive. Gwen Stacy is the first love, pure, unreachable, lost. I wait for them to subvert it. I expect them to break the chain.
Gwen Stacy dies again. Full of promise and a future, she dies, and yet again casts my own future bleak, myself a promising failure on the verge of death. It's not good enough that women deserve better. It's not enough that it was a shitty writing decision. They fit to the bill of only the worst elements of Spider-Man and kill my interest in their vision.
I don't read comics. Maybe that's my own fault. Because of that, I miss a new one that comes out. Until this year.
Miles Morales, I know. I know of the messy writing of his comics that disappointed people, but I believed in his potential. And then Spider-verse comes and proves all of it in two wonderful hours. It shows the person Spider-Man can be, full of personality and love and coming from his own neighborhood, a black-latino kid with everything to prove and his own fight to win. But it did more than that right.
Gwen Stacy is a smart drummer with a background in dance and a dead best friend. She's also a Spider-Woman. Here she is. After decades of death. After dying in every goddamn Peter's universe. Being the background of misery to someone else's love-life. Gwen Stacy is alive and the hero of her own story and I break down crying. She's not only the hero of her own story. She deals with the image of a thousand Peters who lived and a thousand Gwens who died, after having to see her own Peter die. She sees the Peters who lived and thrived because they got bitten instead, leaving Gwen as the one who could not be saved. These Peters who will never know she feels it was her fault they died in her own universe, how they were jealous and sad that they couldn't be the hero.
Couldn't be Special like her.
It's fucked up that even when Gwen lives, she gets to see the pieces of how her own death was apparently required for another person's happiness and success. Even as he mourned her loss.
But isn't that our narrative too? The people who grew up with stories of the girl so smart and nice, she couldn't be allowed to live. The girl who had to harden herself to the world to deal with her own grief. Growing up with the knowledge that the people we want to be can't be. And yet - here we have Miles, insisting that she has a place in his universe and every other too. Saying she can be friends with him - that it's not her fault - that she has a place in this world, and so does he.
We grow up being told we can't be the hero. It's nice to have something that tells us we can make those narratives for each other against the world.
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