If the ending of Spider-Man 2 didn’t make it clear enough, narrative director Ben Arfmann 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:confirmed in an interview that Miles Morales will be Insomniac’s “main” Spider-Man going forward. ‘Fans’ have been debating this decision, with a very vocal group expressing their outrage that the SJWs at Insomniac would sideline the Peter Parker for a woke Spider-Man, or whatever.
Look, I don’t want to get pulled into a debate with people who don’t like a video game character based on the color of his skin. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the characters or their history or either one’s worthiness to be t🍌he main Spﷺider-Man, I know tha𝕴t. But I will say this: as a Peter Parker fan, I don’t have a particularly strong attachment to this iteration. I think centering Miles is narratively justified in the story Insomniac is telling, but more than that, I justꦅ don’t think this version of Peter Parker was all that interesting to begin with.
Spider-Man can be anyone. After all, that’s what Into the Spider-Verse is all about. Bu🍸t even the idea of who Peter Parker is is going to be different from person to person. To my generation, Christopher Daniel Barnes established who Spider-Man is in the ‘90s cartoon, and I’ll never be able to completely remove his interpretation of the character from who Peter Parker ⛎ought to be.
It's Surprising Just How Much Is Missing From Spider-Man 2
Spider-Man 2 is bigger and better than the ori𒁃ginal in many ways, but there's also a lot of features missing.
Barnes’ Spider-Man is the quintesse✅ntial quipster. A light-hearted hero that loves being Spider-Man and always plays it cool. He struggles to balance his real life with his hero duties, of course, and he understands that with great power comes great responsibility, but he has a certain unflappability that makes him so endearing. He never lets ‘em see him sweat, and I think that’s an important quality for Peter to have.
As I got into comics, those are some of the qualities that resonated with me. I associate Peter with tenacity in the face of hardship, and growing up I tried to emulate that when I was facing my own struggles. His ability to hold joy and dismay simulta✤neously, and his resistance to the harsh realities of life, have always inspired me, and always been the thing I appreciate most about Peter Parker. This might be a hot take, but Chris Pine’s brief turn as Peter in Into the Spider-Verse is one of my favorites, because he so perfectly captures the honor, the pleasure, and the responsibility of being Spider-Man.
I promise this isn’t about to turn into some kind of ‘not my Spider-Man’ rant, but I just never💎 got those feelings from Insomniac’sℱ Peter. I enjoy his character arc in both games, especially in Spider-Man 2. The ‘you can’t save everyone’ storyline has been done to death, but Insomniac did a great job representing the despair that comes from failing the people you love. I don’t have a problem with the performance either, I think Yuri Lowenthal was exactly who that character was written to be. I just don’t think this Peter represented what I love about Spider-Man.
It’s interesting that Spider-Man 2 is a story about Peter losing🐟 control to the Symbiote, because it feels like this Peter is just getting swept along by the plot through his entire journey. His character is reacti𒁏ve; he exists merely to counterpoint all of the people around him and the choices they make. And while he makes big sacrifices and does plenty of hero stuff, I never got a strong sense of who this Peter was, or what combination of lived experience and personality traits made him this way.
The problem is, as is often the case with Spider-Man stories, too much of our understanding of the character is predicated on already knowing lots of things about Spider-Man. It’s not that we need an origin story every time, but Insomniac lets our past experience with Spider-Man do far too much of the heavy lifting, wit🍒hout giving this Peter enough of his own development. Plot happens, and Peter is changed, but we’re not given enough of a starting point to ever connect with him.
It doesn't help that Peter's face changed between the original and the sequel.
When Spider-Pine meets Miles (sorry, back to him), you immediately recognize the kind of confident, fatherly mentor he’s going to be to him. Miles instead gets Peter B. Parker, a Peter who can barely even take care of himself, and that juxtaposition is what drives both of their character arcs. What kind of mentor is Insomniac’s Peter to Miles? Compared to Spider-Verse, there’s not much there. He is literally Miles’ teacher at the start of the game, but after the opening sequence this plot thr🌠ead, and any chance of Peter’s tutorly deveꦇlopment, is thrown out.
The same goes for his relationship with MJ. Their conflict, and why he gives up being Spider-Man, is that he is neglectful and self-centered while she becomes resentful. What we don’t get to see is why MJ even wants to be with this guy. We know because we know who Peter is from other Spider-Man stories, but these games never spend the time to make their relationship feel belie🍌vable.
Insomniac’s Peter is an archetypal Peter. The platonic Peter Parker that does all the Spider-Man things and has all the Spider-Man problems. I like Spider-Man, but I need more than that to connect with a character. I need specifics, and Mile🐠s has them. The Peter in my mind has the self-possession of Barnes and Pine (last one I promise), but I also admire the candor of Tobey Maguire’s version, the charm of Andrew Garfield’s, and even the affability of Tom Holland’s. I don’t know who this Spider-Man is, so I don’t care that Insomniac has put him in semi-retirement.
