
Streaming Wars is a weekly opinion column by IGN’s Streaming Editor, Amelia Emberwing. Check out the last entry: A Ted Lasso Return Is Coming: The Show Doesn’t Need to Change, Just Grow.
Marvel television has always played with the nuance of villainy, from the recent Magneto arc in X-Men ‘97 that translated after 62 years of character evolution to the small screen to Scarlet Witch accidentally holding an entire town hostage in her grief. I’ve long argued that if Wanda had been met with an ounce of empathy or care from her fellow Avengers after her myriad of devastating losses that her descent into villainy in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness may have never happened. Recently, a scene in the new Disney+ animated series Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man continues to drive home that empathy from our heroes is as important as superpowers and fisticuffs.
That scene takes place in the show’s first episode as young Peter goes through the motions to understand his powers and get in his groove as a young hero. Spider-Man captures a thief who stole some cash from a local pizza joint, but when he returns the cash with the robber in tow, he asks the owner of the shop to cut the woman some slack after she explains that she just lost her job and had been having a terrible time and simply panicked when she saw the money on the counter.
While the scene was little more than a fleeting moment in the episode, it really struck me. It felt like Peter Parker’s very own “Superman saving kittens from trees” moment. So, when I had the opportunity to sit down with Marvel TV head Brad Winderbaum, I had to bring it up.
“I think to me, that moment really points to something fundamental about Peter's character, that he's the type of person who is willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, is willing to give people second chances, who believes in redemption,” Winderbaum explains.
The scene may be short, but it’s actually integral to setting up who this Peter Parker is going to be, what kind of hero he’s going to become, and how that hero is going to be challenged in Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.
“It's important, I think, that that's established early because that is exactly what's going to be challenged by Norman [Osborn] as his mentor over the course of the season,” Winderbaum says. “What [head writer] Jeff [Trammell] is so good at, and one of the reasons why he's the great storyteller that he is, is that he really finds ways to establish these characters in a way so that they can be challenged, so that that thing at their core is going to be chipped away at, and that there's real emotional tension around the hope and fear of, ‘Will they be tarnished? Will they be ruined? Will the thing that makes them good survive this world?’”
Winderbaum’s last question takes me back to Wanda and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’s nameless thief. Though we know nothing about the woman from the animated series beyond what she shared while sobbing outside of the shop, we know exactly how Wanda became tarnished, how her spirit was ruined, and how the thing that made her good ultimately became her downfall.
On the face of things, it sounds silly to compare an Avenger’s arc to a throwaway character meant to only be a footnote in another hero’s journey. But, when you look at Wanda and this woman with broad strokes, they are both people who just had enough bad days and so little support that, in a moment of weakness, they made a bad decision, the implications of which had the power to ruin their whole lives.
The difference is, of course, that Wanda Maximoff is the most powerful being on Earth and not a single soul was there for her after her tragedies (though, credit where it’s due, Monica Rambeau did briefly try in Westview). In the case of the thief, no realities were in danger, but the kindness of a kid hero may have changed her future. It’s impossible not to feel hope when we see a hero we’ve spent our lives with choose kindness over cruelty in the wake of someone else’s mistake.
Inevitably, the conversation with Winderbaum shifted to hope in and outside of the MCU.
“Stan [Lee] called Marvel the mirror that you hold up to the world outside your window,” he says. “And there's something that genre storytelling does that realistic fiction can't do, which is that it takes you out of reality. It takes you into something fantastic. And that separation allows you to hold up that mirror, allows you to work in a world of metaphor. That's something that the show does very, very well, and I think is very inherent to Marvel.”
He’s right, of course, that Marvel — television, film, comics, whathaveyou — has inspired hope even in the most dire of times by depicting real events through a fantastical lens, including, sometimes, as propaganda during wartime. (Remember, propaganda isn’t always used for political ill.) What I love about Marvel’s television arm, though, is that in telling long-form stories, they have more opportunity for nuance and character development than the films. Wanda’s story wasn’t mishandled in Multiverse of Madness; it made perfect sense. The problem was that there simply wasn’t enough time in the film to explore the depth of her downfall.
In the context of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, it doesn’t matter that Peter Parker is never going to go full darkside. What matters is that the big moments — his transformation, the big boss battles, etc — marry with the small as the challenges keep coming Pete’s way. The thief, for some, may just be a throwaway character during a fleeting montage of Spider-Man’s heroism. However, to me the moment represents Marvel’s recent commitment to exploring what makes a person truly “bad” and whether single moments can define their entire person.
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