when an unmasked tobey!spidey passes out after stopping that train and the passengers catch him before he can fall, the silent collective oath that they won't reveal his identity evident on their faces as they find out he's just a kid before the little boy can even say the promise out loud
when andrew!spidey takes off his mask as he saves that kid hanging from the bridge, saying look i'm just a normal guy. and later in the movie when it looks like he can't make it, that kids dad takes to the cranes to help him the rest of the way to save the city
when spidey is just peter parker — just a kid, just a normal guy —who loves protecting new york. and when new york protects him back when he needs it the most. yeah.
[id; a set of tumblr tags from b-atiful.
i watched no way home recently. havent see any other mcu stuff in years. i think the plot of peter parker being revealed sucked i didn't like it. it didn't make sense for new york to be like. i fucking hate spiderman. YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBOURHOOD SPIDERMAN. but mcu peter never has been a friendly neighbourhood anything. he was picked up by stark and he fought gods and aliens and died twice. he's barely done *anything* for new york. no wonder they don't love him. no wonder they don't protect him. in every other spiderman story spiderman just *is* new york. he's the heart of the city. he protects them and they protect him. jjj is really one of the only firm people standing against him. and he has his completely valid reasons. masked vigilantes are fucked up and he's really hardened. spiderman frustrates him. but we see in i think the tobey films that he doesn't really want him *dead*. where in this movie jjj is played up for a cheap alex jones bit that won't be funny in 5 years and it irks me. because as funny as infowars jjj is like. he's not a character anymore. he's not a person. i think it's lame man. end id/]
I still haven't watched No Way Home (I'm getting to it, I just need to get up the energy, but I'm thoroughly spoiled) but the Alex Jones J Jonah Jameson thing really bothers me because the thing is, even with his anti-Spider-Man crusade, in the comics JJJ has usually, with a few exceptions, been portrayed as a good journalist. JJJ cares about the facts and he cares about the people and when he goes too far in his crusade, he is either held accountable by outside forces (usually Robbie, who is conveniently missing from the MCU's narrative despite MCU Spider-Man's surface level commitment to diversity) or ultimately by JJJ himself.
"I love this newspaper. I won't see its journalistic integrity questioned because of my mistake -- so I'm stepping down as editor in chief." (ASM #250-251)
Jonah can be out of touch, and he's very clearly a product of a different generation, but he's a good person. And yes, Jonah hates Spider-Man, but you know who he loves! Peter Parker! This smart-mouthed kid who brought him photos no one else could get and who he's watched grow up in his newsroom! Yes, they argue and butt heads and snipe at each other, but that's their love language! Jonah really, honestly likes Peter Parker.
"I like "our star" the way he is." (ASM #377)
"What would he do without me?" (ASM #800)
But of course in the MCU, Peter has had no need, at least in the canon that has been established, for a job, so he doesn't need to go to the Bugle and he doesn't need to sell pictures of himself because that's too old-fashioned probably. So you lose this connection between Peter, the stubborn young New Yorker, and Jonah, the old news goat, and that push and pull of Jonah hating Spider-Man but still being a good person who does, in his own gruff way, sincerely care about Peter. It's a very New York story between these two specific characters who belong to this specific landscape! And now even if with the end of No Way Home they bring that forward in the future, they've already painted Jonah as this Alex Jones type character who hawks fake news and snake oil and who would throw a teenager under the bus instead of trying to get to the heart of the real story. So you can't ever recapture that genuine dynamic between the two of them, because the audience has already had their expectations colored. And I just hate that because I think the original relationship, and you see an echo of it in the Raimi movies, is so sincere and so funny and it's a dynamic you don't get to see every day, and I think the MCU is less for eschewing it and for eschewing the notion of Jonah as a complicated person but a good journalist who cares about the truth. And for what? Like the above says: for a joke that won't even be funny in five years.