anastasiapullingteeth asked: Do you think Peter Parker also falls into this missremembered thing? I've seen plenty of people saying he's this happy go lucky guy even though he's not like that in the comics
Oh yeah, definitely, though I think Peter’s a bit of a reverse of Johnny in this regard; Johnny gets oversexed to attempt to make him an easier character to understand, whereas Peter gets undersexed, partly, I think, to sell him as a cinnamon roll. (One thing that’s hard to deny when you read Spider-Man comics is that this is a character who really likes women.) But Peter is a much more popular character than Johnny. Johnny was maybe more popular than Peter for like a hot two minutes in the early 60s. And the bigger a character is, not even in a fandom sense but in a pop culture sense, the easier it is to accentuate or to invent aspects of their personality and then have them stick. I mean, I feel like everyone feels like they know Spider-Man, because he’s Spider-Man! He’s insanely popular! I know I felt like this and then because of that I totally accepted the soft Peter fanon of my day (I don’t know how far back you would have had to go in fandom to escape it, but my gut feeling would be pre-Raimi) and when you’re getting into a character, you’re probably seeing the popular posts first, and the popular posts with Spider-Man comics are usually quippy, goofy panels posted without context or sources, like so:
(From a oneshot called The Many Loves of Spider-Man, by the way!) And I mean, it’s a funny sequence, with or without context, and you don’t really need to know anything about Spider-Man to get it, so of course it goes around.
But that’s just one tiny piece of a huge canon, that also includes stuff like this:
So if those panels above gets 100k notes and this Peter beating the Kingpin in a humiliation/intimidation/vengeance power move in Amazing Spider-Man #542 gets, let’s be generous, somewhere between 30 to 100 notes, even though these are both the same character, people start to associate him with a funny gag and not with beating the hell out of the Kingpin, because that’s what’s being seen. And if he’s funny, he must be funny all the time, in this specific way, he can’t have a dark or a serious or an angry side, because that doesn’t fit with the snapshot image of this character. Apply as needed to any other side of his personality beyond “quippy.” And I’m not saying any one person believes this, I’m just saying that’s how the myth evolves. It’s just how things spread. And like, if it was just misinformed fan opinion that Peter Parker in comics is a sweet cinnamon roll who would rather die than hurt anyone, like, fine. But we’re living in an age where fandom is more widespread and more visible than ever before, and the people creating new content for this character can see those posts and go, okay, so that’s what people want, with the expectation that if you give people what they want, they will then give you money buying it, and now I’m grumpy about Spider-Man all the time because he’s being written more and more soft and his banter has totally lost its edge and you know sometimes you just want to read about him shirtless and beating people up.
tl;dr yeah I would say fandom misremembering a character en masse does apply to Peter as well as Johnny, it just applies to Peter in very different ways than Johnny.
